Counting in statistics of a massive cyber attack

Picture to People site was attacked yesterday, just like thousands of sites around the world (including many big companies sites). The host server software was deeply damaged, including the OS, so our site stopped working correctly. No harm was caused to users, except an offline P2P site.

Almost miraculously, after hours of a very hard troubleshooting, we were able to set up P2P site precariously online for a while. After that, we started working to make a real site recovery that can last days or weeks. During this time, outages can happen anytime for hours or days. Until everything is really solved, the site can apparently load, but occasionally any page can fail in any strange way.

We also need to be sure we got rid of the OS vulnerability that attackers exploited.

When P2P site gets more protected and fully functional again, we will notify on our Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Picture-to-People-105265599561619/

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After a failed crowdfunding campaign

The crowdfunding campaign to raise funds for Picture to People project ended almost two weeks ago.

I can tell this campaign was a complete fail, because it was unable to raise any relevant amount of money to keep Picture to People project online. Picture to People became too big, so it needs a big investment. If a small part of our millions of users had donated $1, the project would be safe for 2 or 3 years.

I keep facing a big list of pending problems to solve:

1. Pay for expensive servers that Picture to People demands at least for a year. If the number of users keeps increasing, we intend also to be able to make at least one server upgrade;
2. Create a pure CSS, simple, cross-browser and responsive site template suitable to Picture to People needs, with fixed and flowing parts (couldn't find one as we want);
3. Redesign and recode our interface components to be more reusable, responsive and match the new site template;
4. Completely rewrite all our Javascript pieces of code, making them more reusable, more scalable and more encapsulated;
5. Rewrite all hundreds of site pages according to the new template, new Javascripts and new interface components;
6. Fix the issue of ids collision in pages with multiple color components;
7. Create a flexible scheme for lazy media loading that is design friendly;
8. Modify content and presentation of many pages to make them faster to load.
9. Rewrite our HTTP connector (back-end) to include more features like sessions, result page generation, etc;
10. Create a more modular and extensible architecture of input and output filters to our request processing pipeline;
11. Develop an automated procedure to optimize to the extreme thousands of images used in the site;
12. Improve, extend and optimize our inter-process pipe implementation;
13. Investigate thoroughly and try to solve the problem of intermittent mysterious Apache crashes.

One thing I know for sure: I will never have again the same excitement to develop free tools for user that turned their back on me.

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