The truth about Mao and BuyVM

[Aldryic C'boas]

Yet, you did require swip for middle nodes too (at least during our "close encounter" between man (me) and animal (pony)).

At first, yes. This was updated within days, however, once we had discussed the issue further as a company.

You also had exit nodes with months of uptime you knew nothing about, so the abuse generated was 0 but that might have been because the traffic was so much strangled by the network issues.

True, but you have to keep in mind that we also have other services that we don't allow that still run for a time before I get an abuse report on them. Privacy is a major concern - we don't go on witchhunts or scan IPs to see what's running. Eventually, we did get some abuse from exit nodes (mainly spam from poorly-configured exits); but to date I still don't check our nodes to see who's running TOR. I might occasionally glance down the public list of exit nodes to see if any of our IPs pop up, but that's just minor preventative.

but relays were never an issue and you motivated their banning because people were inadvertently setting up exits or plain did it in purpose which is the same as claiming that you deny people VPSes because they might inadvertently be hacked and host child porn or might even do it willingly.

Not the same - but you're close. If someone screwed up and honestly set the exit node up by accident instead of a relay, they'd get a warning and be told to be more careful. But if someone made that same 'accident' multiple times? Yeah, we asked them to leave. Same with all unintentional abuse we get - they get two chances to fix the issue, and if they fail to do so they have to leave.

That was the kind of rhaetoric that created the problem between us. You were unreasonable and kept claiming there is no way to differentiate exits from non-exits in spite of me expaining everything and giving relevant links for pages of text. That proved bad intent and I started to look for the real problem behind all those stunts.

It didn't prove bad intent, but it did prove my ignorance of the public lists (which I now utilize). Much of my frustration came from trying to find a way to automate the procedure - and by the time I had that squared away, we'd already come to heated words. To be honest, I wish we would've been able to discuss like this then, as your knowledge would've saved me a ton of headache.

Now that the initial issue has been solved, the Tor issue and the network problem issue (I always said it is enough and the truth is already known), the only remaining ones are my ban in LET and Francisco's attacks against Prometeus and Salvatore. Any idea on how to solve those issues ?

Welp, let's start with the LET ban. I'm not sure if you'll ever believe me, but neither Fran nor myself had anything to do with that directly. At the time, Fran was actively trying to encourage me to just let it go and try to work things out with you, so I seriously doubt he even spoke with the mods about it. As for me - Joel and I were never really on good speaking terms, and the only other moderator I can think of off the top of my head was vedran. He seemed like a decent chap, but I never really spoke with him.

Now, it is very possible that whichever admin did the ban did so out of sympathy/loyalty/whatever to us. I honestly couldn't say there. Now... this is going back into tinfoil hat country, but it's worth considering - remember that this was after LEA left, and we don't know for certain if CC was already in control of the place. At that time, CC was very friendly with us (we had just opened a new location with them, after all), and we all know some of the underhanded tricks they've played. Is it possible that they were in control at the time, and banned you because you were attacking us? Might be. But I have no evidence at all, that's just a theory.

As far as Fran's "attack" on Prometeus - keep in mind that he's been biting his tongue ever since LET during all of these rants against us. I haven't seen the rest of that PM, but from what I understand he tried to work things out with you at some point. Given how often you and I lose our tempers and say things without thinking, it's pretty easy to see Fran finally losing his cool and saying something inappropriate. But I guess what that really comes down to is... it was just a PM to you, and he never went to Sal with any kind of threats/etc. Do you really think Fran was making threats, or just lost control of his tongue when things got heated?

 

[maounique]

To be honest I dont know what to think. Until then I thought Francisco is a nice guy that has to put up with you the same way Salvatore has to put up with me. When he threatened him I was stunned for a while i kpet thinking what to get out of this.

Then I remembered that he has actually the skills, the knowledge and motivation to do such a thing and I started to believe him. His reaction here to the peace offer from the injured party seemed to prove I was right.

So, honestly, why not let the man explain himself ?

 

[Aldryic C'boas]

So, honestly, why not let the man explain himself ?

He will. I've been handling most of this because Fran's actually at the DC in Vegas doing some more upgrades (we're getting some more SSD nodes prepped). He hasn't been keeping up with the forums either since he's been busy in the racks - I'll let him know you need a response from him though.

 

[Francisco]

To be honest I dont know what to think. Until then I thought Francisco is a nice guy that has to put up with you the same way Salvatore has to put up with me. When he threatened him I was stunned for a while i kpet thinking what to get out of this.

Then I remembered that he has actually the skills, the knowledge and motivation to do such a thing and I started to believe him. His reaction here to the peace offer from the injured party seemed to prove I was right.

So, honestly, why not let the man explain himself ?

Read my reply after the provision comment. You claimed it was a threat to which I said "This is no threat".

If you or Sal took it as a threat then so be it. I'm sorry you took it that way but that wasn't the intention of the comment. I could have said 'provision on XXXX' for any of your services minus iwstack and you probably would have taken it the same way (iwstack probably not since 'provision' makes more sense there).

To mpkossen, the only reason that whole PM started was because Mao brought us into the middle of the BS with UGVPS.

Personally, I took way more offense to the fact you disrupted such an important discussion to bring up 2 year old bullshit that no one cares about. You have a thread where a staff member of the very owner of that community has committed fraud and the owner probably knew about it the entire time.

"Yeah man, even though I left my wife and kids to bang some broad in Buffalo, we still cool. She 100% knows what's going on and approves of all of it. Uh huh.".

It's a well known fact that I helped with the transfer of the site, not only from Linode but from LEA to Joel. I gave advice on ways to improve it as well as passed whatever knowledge I had from LEA that KuJoe and others needed.

EDIT - Check how many times BuyVM was posted that entire year. I can think of probably 2 times that I would have requested it: DDoS filtering came online and Buffalo was rolled out. We would have been posted for any votes we won but that doesn't count against the 30 day repeating. If anything, I did my best to give to that community and took very little.

Francisco

 

[maounique]

I've been handling most of this

And this is a different Aldryic. Are you sure you are not Francisco ?

No, while I do not agree or believe everything you say as there are some contradictions this will never end if we do not compromise and is not helping any of us. The fact you are being reasonable, for the most part, and talk sense, for the most part, is enough for me to make big compromises at my end.

We have a saying, the tone makes the music when the artillery is fireing, the voice of reason and argumentation is silenced.

 

[maounique]

@Francisco: Huh ?

What are you talking about, what UGVPS ? How did I bring you there ? Might have been some poorly worded remark about LET and my ban that you took offense in ?

Please post it here and I will explain it.

May I remind you and everyone else that precisely due to poor handling of LE* vetting and unfair exposure of known crooks and multiple "blands" of same entities I left there ?

Of double standards and admins threatening people the same way it happened when BuyVM was king of the place ? Maybe not running it, though I will never be 100% convinced on that, but at least the dears of the community ?

 

[DomainBop]

I only attacked buyvm for their network problem, it's network is still average even poorer than many hosts which are consdered worse than you, Including CVPS (the last time i checked), but it is still much-much better than the disastruos analogue modem speeds of the past.

I've never used BuyVM so I can't speak about their networks speeds but CVPS oversells everything to the extreme and while you might get some CVPS nodes with good or even above average network speeds you will also get some nodes that struggle to get above dialup speeds because the bandwidth is so oversold.

These test results are from a CVPS VPS in Buffalo I canceled last September due to network problems.  The tests were taken in September 2013.

(original posting of the results was on this thread: http://lowendtalk.com/discussion/13384/chicagovps-https-billing-chicagovps-net-certificate-revoked

wget freevps.us/downloads/bench.sh -O - -o /dev/null|bash

Download speed from CacheFly: 3.95MB/s

Download speed from Coloat, Atlanta GA: 1.87MB/s

Download speed from Softlayer, Dallas, TX: 1.03MB/s

Download speed from Linode, Tokyo, JP: 331KB/s

Download speed from i3d.net, NL: 695KB/s

Download speed from Leaseweb, Haarlem, NL: 677KB/s

Download speed from Softlayer, Singapore: 240KB/s

Download speed from Softlayer, Seattle, WA: 632KB/s

Download speed from Softlayer, San Jose, CA: 745KB/s

Download speed from Softlayer, Washington, DC: 951KB/s

I/O speed : 73.6 MB/s

More test results from another CVPS VPS in Los Angeles which also suffered from abysmal network speeds.  Tests taken in July 2013. (original posting of results: http://lowendbox.com/blog/chicagovps-25year-512mb-kvm-vps-in-new-jersey-los-angeles/) .  These test results were taken after they supposedly fixed the network problem.

wget freevps.us/downloads/bench.sh -O - -o /dev/null|bash
CPU model : Intel® Xeon® CPU E3-1270 V2 @ 3.50GHz


Number of cores : 1


CPU frequency : 3500.017 MHz


Total amount of ram : 256 MB


Total amount of swap : 0 MB


System uptime : 1 min,


Download speed from CacheFly: 10.5MB/s


Download speed from Coloat, Atlanta GA: 1.29MB/s


Download speed from Softlayer, Dallas, TX: 1.86MB/s


Download speed from Linode, Tokyo, JP: 514KB/s


Download speed from i3d.net, NL: 392KB/s


Download speed from Leaseweb, Haarlem, NL: 391KB/s


Download speed from Softlayer, Singapore: 357KB/s


Download speed from Softlayer, Seattle, WA: 2.24MB/s


Download speed from Softlayer, San Jose, CA: 6.72MB/s


Download speed from Softlayer, Washington, DC: 912KB/s


I/O speed : 253 MB/s,

I also briefly had a CVPS VPS in Atlanta last March(?) when they first launched that location and the network was basically unusable for the first few weeks because the bandwidth was so oversold.  That problem was semi-fixed when they replaced their 100 Mbps switch with a  1Gbps switch  (Kevdam describing the problem: "We apologize for the inconvenience that CVPS Atlanta customers may have witnessed the past few days, there was a bandwidth issue with CC in Atlanta because they were awaiting a switch replacement to come in.")

 

[maounique]

Ah, yeah, well, it means I was lucky, it clearly depends on location and while I know they have many locations, only used one.

 

[Francisco]

@Francisco: Huh ?

What are you talking about, what UGVPS ? How did I bring you there ? Might have been some poorly worded remark about LET and my ban that you took offense in ?

Please post it here and I will explain it.

May I remind you and everyone else that precisely due to poor handling of LE* vetting and unfair exposure of known crooks and multiple "blands" of same entities I left there ?

Of double standards and admins threatening people the same way it happened when BuyVM was king of the place ? Maybe not running it, though I will never be 100% convinced on that, but at least the dears of the community ?

Ugh I really don't want to go diving into LET threads.

http://lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/409374/#Comment_409374

http://lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/409588/#Comment_409588

Smack dab in the middle of the UGVPS thread. You dragged us into a fight that our name was never brought up in.

Now, it's possible you forgot all this because it was a freaking MASSIVE thread and you were quite active in it.

I didn't want to reply on that thread since I knew it would work to derail it. But, you forced my hand until I pushed it off to a PM.

EDIT - I'm done at fiberhub for the night so please give me about an hour to get home and shower. I'll stay up for a bit but past 1 - 2AM (2 - 3 hours from now) i'll be heading to bed so I can get a full days work in tomorrrow.

Francisco

 

[maounique]

Yes, but while I agree I compared your rule of LET with that of CC (which I was criticizing, btw, not giving them carte blanche and in the end go even more frustrated admitting I was wrong) there was nothing which could have linked you with UGVPS. I never said you had anything to do with that, but the UGVPS thread was also about how CC is running LET, so I compared them with you.

You say you never run it fine I dont really believe that, you should have had at least a big influence, but that is just my personal opinion, what had Salvatore to do with it ? All these things happened before I ever met him from 17th of march to 2nd of april (my ban) i was simply a customer and nothing before. We have a feud since then, me and you, not you and salvatore or me and salvatore against you. He never said anything other than he cannot censor me and I am free to express my opinions as I did before working for him. You do not like that and want to punish him and me for our relation ? Fine, just dont beat around the bush and do it. If you do not do it but speak about it, then that is the definition of threat and even blackmail, you will do something that will hurt someone in order to force the injured party to accept your demands (in this case me being fired).

 

[Francisco]

Read the posts in full. Read both links incase I linked them in the wrong order. You dragged it on about bandwidth and our 128MB's getting 500GB's. It wasn't just that you were making a comment that I ran the place or not. Where does that belong *anywhere* in that discussion?

At no point did I think you were so blind/dense to think I was tied into the UGVPS garbage.

Again, it was never a threat nor was it intended to be. If you read it as such, you should have been corrected within 5 minutes. While I have audited Solus' ~2011 code, that was for not only our own protection and to reverse their encryption on root passwords. I'm sure you can poke around on WHT to find that all.

Anyway, onto your next part. If you want to talk about 'harming someone else', then you're in the same boat. We've had convo's before where you've stated that you feel you're the key reason Aldryic stopped taking part in LET. While incorrect, you started your fight over here with possibly the same thought in mind.

No, He didn't leave because of you or anyone else besides me. I told him I wasn't liking where the community was going and the growing feeling that Joel was playing everyone for a damn fool was growing stronger. He agreed and backed off. The only times he has posted on there was when Kevdam "suddenly" got approved an account to try to start a fight with us as well.

Ald & I like to give our best to help communities grow (that's why I got 1200+ posts just to make sure i'm chipping in too). We were doing the same with LET but once we both had the same feeling of deception we decided to cut that off.

Others followed and now even you've done the same too. Maybe you'll go back over there if they stop doing the shit they do. Sadly, that'll stop around the time that CC stops selling to spammers.

Francisco

 

[maounique]

I only started the fighting here after you attacked me involving Prometeus and Salvatore. A couple of weeks later, that is. In this time I kept analyzing your "friendly advice" (if that was no threat, what was by your own definition ?) and kept reaching the same conclusing, that you are getting desperate and have no conservation instinct anymore. As such, needed to make the whole thing public so there will be no doubt who did it when you will.

Maybe I was wrong, but you were wrong too, so, apologise to the party which was not wrong (except that doesnt agree to force a gag on someone) and disclose the exploit doing a service to the community here.

Am I unreasonable ? If you think I am, OK, dont apologise explicitly just disclose the exploit, you should have done this before, as soon as you knew about it as a good netizen you claim to be.

That is the least you can do, if not for Salvatore, for the other people using Solus, let us see your good part again.

 

[Coastercraze]

Don't worry about him, Jack.  I remember who he is now.. the kid that got all shades of butthurt over my opinion, and despite the very clear declaration that is was my opinion alone, the kid decided to wage some kind of war against BuyVM as a whole, going as far as to invent ridiculous stories regarding the networking issues we had with EGI.  What's hilarious is, when presented with any form of truth he dislikes, he will simply fabricate new stories to believe in.

He was under some kind of impression that I had some kind of power at LET (go ask any mod ever about that, they'll laugh in your face), rather than realizing it was his own childish actions that brought any sort of repercussion down on him.  That'll never change, and we'll likely see the same cycle repeat itself here unless he finally grows up.

(me attempting to summarize - feel free to correct)

Aldryic's opinion regarding Tor along with his waiving of the banhammer on Mao (Mao thinks it was due to the networking issue posts) is why Mao is pissed off and somewhere along the line, after attacking BuyVM, Francisco said something stupid in regards to a potential SolusVM exploit at which it seemed that he was threatening said host by creating a VM on their network for what I don't know.

==================================

At any rate, sorry you got banned by Aldryic. He has his reasons for it and you have to admit, you probably went a little crazy and probably did deserve a little ban (not as long as what you've went for, but long enough to let you "cool off").

I do feel that you shouldn't have involved BuyVM or Francisco into it because of Aldryic's opinions on Tor. You need to accept the fact that Aldryic's opinion is simply his. You can't change that. Accept it and move on even if it seems wrong to you. You owe them an apology for acting the way you did. There was no reason for you to try and damage their reputation just because you disagreed with someone's opinion and how they run their business.

As for Fran, you too need to step up to the plate and apologize. Yes, he attacked your business and your staff first, but you didn't need to attack him or the company he worked for either. The comment you made was childish at best, regardless of whether or not you feel he deserved it. I'm sure it was the result of some heavyset emotions, and while I don't have all the posts in front of me, I think we can agree an apology would be ideal.

Lastly, if I'm not entirely off course, just forgive and move on. Best not to let things get to your head, let alone your egos. A simple apology can go a long way!

 

[mpkossen]

Funny that.. seeing as how you have no problems withholding an apology for a misunderstood slight.


Of course... it is harder to man up when it's to the person you're rooting against, so I don't hold that against you.

Sorry I was a bit sleepy this morning and I thought my "Thanks" would have been a good indication to you. Anyway, I appreciate your reply. My apologies for misinterpreting what you posted.

@Francisco: I don't really care who started the fight. Like I said, I'm not here to point fingers. I do care about someone who had nothing to do with this and who is about one of the nicest and most decent people in this industry getting dragged into this for no reason at all. You getting involved with Mao vs Aldryic is your own choice. Salvatore wasn't given that choice. That is why I still think you owe him an apology.

I know you don't like this fued against BuyVM and Mao going on about this. It's logical you want it to stop. I don't blame you. But again, Salvatore has had nothing to do with this.

 

[Aldryic C'boas]

Aldryic's opinion regarding Tor along with his waiving of the banhammer

At any rate, sorry you got banned by Aldryic.

I never banned anyone. Never at WHT, LET, or here have I had (or will I have) the power to do so.

 

[maounique]

@Coastercraze: It was not his opinion on Tor, it was his opinion on Tor operators that was an issue. Nobody likes to be called such with no proof (I proved he knows nothing about the subject or almost nothing, just propaganda and he admits it).

However, things changed, we have more information now and the subject is closed. I was merely bringing up a ban from the past to stop CC from making the same mistake, it is not like that ban solved anything, on the contrary, created a lot of problems for everyone not to mention bad blood.

Stifling opposition and free speech is not going to benefit anyone not LET, not CC, not the truth. I hope they will understand that and certain nioises from there show they are at least contemplating the idea.

It was meant as an example of how a mod/business owner/admin/whatever should not behave.

The only remaining issue now is the exploit that must be disclosed. I think that, while Francisco worked hard to go away from Solus and make own panel which should bring him a competitive advantage, it is not right to use the exploits he knows against his competitors. These kinds of things breed paranoia, if you check the timing of localhost.re disclosures, it coincides perfectly with the big fanfare around stallion 2. Nobody would have thought of that before Francisco came out waging the exploit threat against a competitor.

Now I am sure that is not the case, but, as you can see these actions do not bring peace in the field but are likely to create more bad blood where the old one was almost done.

In the end, things are as they are. I now work for Prometeus (which I didnt when i was banned), Francisco or anyone else I think wont be able to threaten or blackmail salvatore into kicking me, I have no time nor energy to continue to chase BuyVM as Aldryic seems a different person unlikely to start the name-calling campaigns of the past.

I also admit I went a bit too far, initially I didnt plan to involve BuyVM but the nature of the proof was such that I had to prove they have bad network in order to complete the demonstration that their claims against Tor Operators are false with a different motivation than just righteousness and defense against child abusers, drug-dealers and terrorists.

This was a long string of mistakes on all sides. I am sorry for my part, I am sure Aldryic also wishes he would have handled it differently at least this is how I see it now. He even said it n the open.

It was, indeed, a lot of ego, nobody can deny that, but it is over. Almost.

 

[Francisco]

There is no exploit, though! Any exploits or problem points got patched a long time ago. Read again what I wrote: "This is no threat". As I said, if they "read" it as that, that's their fault.

You need to understand something here, "blackhat" all comes off as crazy crap that I can't wrap my head around. Sure, some basic eval($_POST['ohshit']) or things like Solus' exec($_POST['thisissafe'])? That's dumb shit that is entirely on them.

I'm not smart enough to think up a way to abuse CURL + PHP's bootup timings to bruteforce how fields are encoded and sent in a request.

I long ago went to war with Solus over their shit but most people assumed I was full of shit.

I'm sure there's still quirks in Solus but I've not bothered decub'ing their code since we last used them.

Again, if you want to say that I used this imaginary exploit on Prom then you need to first inform the authorities.

I'm not going to let you go on a roundabout on this trying to sucker an apology for something that doesn't exist (in my hands at least), nor ever did since earlier this year.

Francisco

 

[maounique]

OK there is no exploit then how would you provision yourself a VM on "our" solusvm ? I am just curious do you have an admin account ? Do you have one in whmcs or hostbill to send commands to solus ? I am really curious how can this be done without an exploit, in such a way that can leave me jobless.

Aldryic could be right, it should be an ETL problem (second language was french, I am old enough to catch the last wave).

 

[Francisco]

OK there is no exploit then how would you provision yourself a VM on "our" solusvm ?

....Order a service off your WHMCS? It's 3 minutes of work to place an order w/ paypal.

I am just curious do you have an admin account ? Do you have one in whmcs or hostbill to send commands to solus ? I am really curious how can this be done without an exploit, in such a way that can leave me jobless.

Aldryic could be right, it should be an ETL problem (second language was french, I am old enough to catch the last wave).

ETL? I'm not sure if that's supposed to be LET or if you mean "ESL" (English Second Language).

 

[scv]

Maybe English Third Language?