So, today, on X, I noticed that VXDB, who consistently has been takes and breaks news
regularly posted about how Dread was down, basically.
And I pointed out that it wasn't down for me, and that's because I have a secret URL.
But for the longest time, Dread had end-game instances up, and this is what prevented
DDoS attacks from the capture.
Two Dread mirrors existed that people knew about, and you can see them here on my site.
Back when Endgame used to make you do a capture, there was a third.
This mirror was called the magic mirror.
It was something amazing that led to a magical place.
And I'm kidding, it didn't lead anywhere magical.
It led to Dread.
The only difference was when you used the magic link, you didn't have to deal with the capture.
And now that they're basically removed the captures, it's just an extra mirror that only
donors actually have.
And let's you circumvent the capture.
And during this time of Dread being down, people still bet actually posting on Dread.
Lounge is the paid member's only spot that typically has nothing going on, but now,
we can clearly see it does.
So even though it's down for everyone else, we can still browse and post.
Huggbunter actually posted another downtime announcement today.
One Reddit, which to me is kind of unfortunate and despised Reddit in general.
I'd much rather see Huggbunter on X or something.
And I have a feeling that might be happening soon, but we'll see.
In any case, the post marked the third major outage in eight months.
Previous ones were 22 days ago, four months before that and
like four months before that if I'm not mistaken.
Among the things that he actually said, some of the most important were,
we experienced a minor DOS attack earlier today.
But due to the instability of the patches we added recently,
we've experienced a crash on the servers that publish our main onion to the network.
Everything else is unaffected and premium mirror is online and stable.
Working on it, but this is likely going to be a few more hours of downtime
at a minimum, hopefully not longer.
And much worse attacks, if we're being honest, have actually happened in the past.
So it's not really any cause for like a alarm or worry.
The technical explanation though kind of raises some questions,
like how a minor DOS attack somehow crashed the servers.
You know, pushing their main onion, but premium mirrors stayed online.
I kind of wish you'd expanded on that.
But the kind of constant cat and mouse with adversaries and
the need for anonymity preserving architecture and the inability to use
standard CDNs or cloud services kind of creates compounding technical debt for them.
Every patch work around an emergency fix kind of adds another layer of complexity.
Houdbunt has been carrying this platform with bears for almost a decade,
like seven years or something.
So the human factor definitely matters here.
And he took his first break in a month and kind of the site just kind of went down
for hours before he ended up realizing the real issue, though, isn't the downtime.
The thing that's actually important here is none of this, really.
It's the upcoming huge update that Houdbunt actually mentioned in there.
And I've been hinting at this randomly in social media posts and videos.
I've been trying to tell you guys some of the updates,
but I really can't at the end of the day.
There will be some major changes that I know personally and I'm pretty excited about.
They're just like simple stupid fixes either.
They're like legit features that will actually strengthen the community.
And it's pretty crazy that these two guys for the last seven years
have basically been working on this site virtually, continually.
And the one thing that I will leak regarding this update is that the release
notes are going to be like a full page, if not multiple pages.
And this excludes bug fixes, which Shiny and Solar have found a ton of.
I mean, I have a special video about the actual features coming up in another update.
But there's a fourth URL, too, that Houdbunt told me about today
that actually shows the updates as they're done and bug fixes currently going on.
He said that the URL will display the testing version in so many words.
And I'm going to annoy him basically until he lets me film it
and speak to you guys about it and show you what some of the updates are.
I know that he said that he expects it to come out.
I think he said sometime this week, like he's going to have that sometime this week,
usually with Houdbunter, those kind of deadlines get pushed back because things happen.
And I get it because I run a one man ship here.
Like, like all my videos, all my editing, all my shooting, all the lighting,
the camera work, the recording, all that stuff I do solo.
So it's it's it's hard.
And with him, he's managing an oil tanker basically with with him
and Barris essentially and a few mods.
So it's definitely not an easy thing to be able to accomplish.
In any case, I want to make the video because it gave me an opportunity
to not only comment on, you know, the sites down.
That sucks, you know, people that didn't do it.
But to also talk about those updates that are happening.
And I know I wasn't really giving you guys too much substance there.
But the fact that we have like more than a page, right?
I mean, if you think about how many updates that would actually be, it's a lot.
And again, like there are massive features that are actually coming from this,
not these just kind of singular one off.
Well, we improved the UI and now you can pick your color or some,
you know, wings, shit like that.
And I'm not saying that's one of them because you're you always
you do night and day move down.
Anyways, anyways, the other thing I want to show you guys is like,
this is the actual store, like right here.
This is how you would go about actually doing it.
You actually see my thing right here.
And like the question is like, well, who cares?
What does it do?
And you can see here, this is a list of features that actually are available
when you do donate.
And again, just to kind of hit this point on, if you had donated,
you would have access to this.
And I like to hit on that now because it's really a great point to make.
I think that with sites like this, right,
that they're all community funded, right?
And yes, they do take, we see them take the money from Dark Hat Markets.
They advertise Dark Hat Markets, which that right there is why a hug bunch
who would get a case like the feds caught them did smoke them.
Yeah, there's a mod on there who thinks it's not illegal
and he's a moron and I have a video coming out about him
pretty soon, which I'm pretty excited about.
Well, it's going to be long.
So anyways, and I go outside to show I'm getting sidetracked.
I just wanted to shoot this quick video off.
This is actually my third time recording this because I've had
massive, massive problems for some reason with audio
and it just keeps messing with me.
I'm really hoping that this third time
it just sounds good and I can just I could put it out.
And, you know, it doesn't mess up on me.
In any case, again, I digress.
You tell it's it's late. I'm like getting sidetracked.
Thank you for watching.
And I'll see you in the next video.