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How I attacked myself using Google and I ramped up a $1000 bandwidth bill

behind-the-enemy-lines.com

11–20 of 152 posts

Re: How I attacked myself using Google and I ramped up a $1000 bandwidth bill

#11
Scary indeed. Many thanks for the warning. I was contemplating starting to use Amazon Cloud and some Google tools but definitely will not touch any of it now. Who knows how many other traps like this are laying in wait for the unweary?

All this automation is very well but this illustrates the dangers of running stuff on other's machines of unknown complexity and out of your own control, while having to pay for whatever may happen. Not for me, thanks.

Re: How I attacked myself using Google and I ramped up a $1000 bandwidth bill

#12

Can you limit bandwidth with AWS? Also, why would the spreadsheet be calling these images every hour. Did you have the spreadsheet open? Does google do this call even when no one is viewing the spreadsheet?

You can put a robots.txt in the bucket.

Re: How I attacked myself using Google and I ramped up a $1000 bandwidth bill

#13
post #4

That such a simple thing on your part could result in such an extreme and expensive result implies something is wrong with the design of the system you're using.

I was going to post exactly the same thing. It's very lenient of him to blame himself instead of Google for this.

Re: How I attacked myself using Google and I ramped up a $1000 bandwidth bill

#14

This was an extremely interesting article. I hope Google rectifies this type of behavior. This is actually pretty scary.

This isn't Google's fault. I could get a couple machines and do the same thing if I had a list of 250 gigs of files. And I wouldn't be limited to once every hour.

Re: How I attacked myself using Google and I ramped up a $1000 bandwidth bill

#16

Can you limit bandwidth with AWS? Also, why would the spreadsheet be calling these images every hour. Did you have the spreadsheet open? Does google do this call even when no one is viewing the spreadsheet?

You can put a robots.txt in the bucket.

Which will be ignored by Feedfetcher :-)

Plus you cannot put a robots.txt at s3.amazonaws.com so if the url is accessed through the https://s3.amazonaws.com/.... url, the robots.txt will not work.

Re: How I attacked myself using Google and I ramped up a $1000 bandwidth bill

#17
This really underscores Amazon's glaring omission of a billing cutoff on Amazon web services. How hard would it be for them to let me say, cut off my services at $100/month?

This is the main reason I'd never use AWS to host anything public.

Re: How I attacked myself using Google and I ramped up a $1000 bandwidth bill

#18

Can you limit bandwidth with AWS? Also, why would the spreadsheet be calling these images every hour. Did you have the spreadsheet open? Does google do this call even when no one is viewing the spreadsheet?

You can put a robots.txt in the bucket.

No, you can't. It'd have to be at the root of http://s3.amazonaws.com/.

This is mentioned specifically in the article, in fact.

Re: How I attacked myself using Google and I ramped up a $1000 bandwidth bill

#19

Can you limit bandwidth with AWS? Also, why would the spreadsheet be calling these images every hour. Did you have the spreadsheet open? Does google do this call even when no one is viewing the spreadsheet?

You can put a robots.txt in the bucket.

The article states that (1) you can't and (2) the bot ignores it.

Re: How I attacked myself using Google and I ramped up a $1000 bandwidth bill

#20

Can you limit bandwidth with AWS? Also, why would the spreadsheet be calling these images every hour. Did you have the spreadsheet open? Does google do this call even when no one is viewing the spreadsheet?

> Can you limit bandwidth with AWS?

Not on S3, no.

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