Weekly Briefing Release 45 Jul 13 - Jul 20

WOTD extended

The current WOTD has been extended for another week.

DDoS attacks against peripheral communities

Over the past few days, there have been numerous instances where tw.2s4.me and Our World of Pixels were inaccessible during certain periods of time for most users. OWOT has somewhat been mostly unaffected.

Some misinformation has been spreading surrounding these incidents, so some clarifying details will be provided:

Our World of Pixels, uvias.com, and tw.2s4.me all run behind a server managed by Privex, a web hosting company with a primary focus on privacy and anonymity.
Our World of Text does not use Privex, but its login system (Uvias) does rely on Privex.
The CEO of Privex (named Someguy123) reports that their upstream data centers (mainly located in Netherlands and possibly Sweden) are experiencing a carpet bomb DDoS attack.
- Reportedly, every single IP address managed by Privex are individually being flooded in a DDoS attack. This has put a great strain on their upstream data center provider.
- No specific customer is known to be the main target.
- The CEO claims to not know the motive behind these attacks. No group has claimed responsibility.
- Privex relies on a third party anti-DDoS service to stop the attacks. These DDoS attacks are actively evolving to mitigate around the anti-DDoS measures.
  - This is highly concerning for Privex as they are likely being deliberately targeted, but our entire community sphere has nothing to be worried about.
Our World of Text has started using a new hosting provider in March of 2025 which has nothing to do with Privex.
We have no affiliation with Privex besides being one of their customers for a managed server. Nothing is preventing us from finding other providers or coming up with better redundancies.

Schedule transparency

The number indicates how much priority the task has for the upcoming week.

1 - OWOT moderation & security
2 - Split chat feature
3 - Non-OWOT