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How I attacked myself using Google and I ramped up a $1000 bandwidth bill
91–100 of 152 posts
Re: How I attacked myself using Google and I ramped up a $1000 bandwidth bill
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
just like asking you to pay for the services you used is not a jerk move. Amazon did a nice thing, but the services were used. Asking to user to pay for those services (even if it was a mistake), would not have been a "jerk move"
Bandwidth pricing is a funny thing, in that it's only metered because it's convenient to do so. You haven't consumed any kind of finite resource by moving 1GB or 1000GB. There isn't any "use". And it makes good business sense besides. They can let the guy off and eat the probably less than a hundred or so bandwidth this guy actually cost them due to their upstream providers, get a good writeup and look better as a re…
In the end, we are talking about a finite resource, because the Internet can only handle so much data transfer at one time. One way or another, your packets have to travel over physical infrastructure which, just like your home network, has a maximum capacity. Use of this infrastructure costs money; charging by bandwidth should help prevent users from "clogging the tubes" willy-nilly because there is a cost associated with excessive use.
Re: How I attacked myself using Google and I ramped up a $1000 bandwidth bill
#93+1 For Amazon for kindly reimbursing the overage charge. -1 For Google for creating what is the biggest threat to content providers by enabling easy-to-use DDOS attacks across the entire interwebs. Seriously, is this what we have to look forward to when Google Spreadsheets, and God knows what else, become ever-more popular? Think about all the additional onerus costs that would be incurred by content providers as mor…
It's not a DDOS becuase it's not distributed and there was no denial of service. And it doesn't work "across the entire interwebs" because the Google bots are rate-limited against most websites. There are some whitelisted sites, like S3, that are not rate-limited. S3 did not go down in this "attack". In fact the app didn't even go down. So the decision not to rate-limit against S3 was sound, since there was no DDOS.
Are you saying Google isn't distributed?
In any case, it may not be a denial-of-service, but if you can find someone with an S3 bucket with large files you could maliciously cause them to rack up a huge bandwidth bill using this mechanism. I guess you could say it's a DDOM (Distributed Denial of Money).
Re: How I attacked myself using Google and I ramped up a $1000 bandwidth bill
#94+1 For Amazon for kindly reimbursing the overage charge. -1 For Google for creating what is the biggest threat to content providers by enabling easy-to-use DDOS attacks across the entire interwebs. Seriously, is this what we have to look forward to when Google Spreadsheets, and God knows what else, become ever-more popular? Think about all the additional onerus costs that would be incurred by content providers as mor…
It's not a DDOS becuase it's not distributed and there was no denial of service. And it doesn't work "across the entire interwebs" because the Google bots are rate-limited against most websites. There are some whitelisted sites, like S3, that are not rate-limited. S3 did not go down in this "attack". In fact the app didn't even go down. So the decision not to rate-limit against S3 was sound, since there was no DDOS.
Ironically, it might be DoS in the sense that it drives app maintenance costs so high that the owner could decide to, naturally, deny the service (shut down).
Otherwise, maybe it's the new type of flood attack, cost-of-service (CoS), applicable against those who use ‘invincible’ cloud infrastructure such as Amazon's.
Re: How I attacked myself using Google and I ramped up a $1000 bandwidth bill
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bandwidth pricing is a funny thing, in that it's only metered because it's convenient to do so. You haven't consumed any kind of finite resource by moving 1GB or 1000GB. There isn't any "use". And it makes good business sense besides. They can let the guy off and eat the probably less than a hundred or so bandwidth this guy actually cost them due to their upstream providers, get a good writeup and look better as a re…
In the end, we are talking about a finite resource, because the Internet can only handle so much data transfer at one time. One way or another, your packets have to travel over physical infrastructure which, just like your home network, has a maximum capacity. Use of this infrastructure costs money; charging by bandwidth should help prevent users from "clogging the tubes" willy-nilly because there is a cost associate…
Except most providers don't charge by time and demand (which would actually make sense), but by a fixed cap or fixed cost per byte. If the problem is congestion as you suggest, surely it would make more sense to charge different amounts based on time of day, length of session, etc?
Which would give Amazon more trouble? 1,000 TB spread out over a month, or 1,000 TB spread out over a day? Their current pricing model assumes both of these are equal, which they are plainly not.
Aside: Caps make the same mistake. If you have a 250GB cap, the ahem ISP charges the same whether you burn through that cap in a month or in a day.
Re: How I attacked myself using Google and I ramped up a $1000 bandwidth bill
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just as "legal" does not mean "ethical", "contractually permitted" does not mean "not a jerk move".
just like asking you to pay for the services you used is not a jerk move. Amazon did a nice thing, but the services were used. Asking to user to pay for those services (even if it was a mistake), would not have been a "jerk move"
I'd expect Amazon and Google to peer directly within US territory, one being a major byte-generator and another one being the largest byte-sucker.
So this traffic must be almost as cheap as Amazon's own intra-territory exchange. Probably that's why they were being so nice. They probably are even somewhat happy to generate some more traffic directly for Google as the ratio is usually a leverage for the network guys.
But, surely, it's still very cool of them to drop the customer's bill.
I wonder, though, how was one ever to know that Google stripped their feedfetcher of even the basics of "intellect" and allowed one single spreadsheet to generate incoming 250 gigs hourly while not being open.
So, after all it's Amazon's and Google poor designs that hammered the guy and a common business sense for Amazon to let it go for the customer and just study the case together with Google.
Re: How I attacked myself using Google and I ramped up a $1000 bandwidth bill
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course if you want to do away with any kind of built in redundancy and take over the sysadmin duties involved you can get the raw space and transfer cheaper.
I have a VPS on buyvm which includes 2TB/month for $6. Each extra TB is another $2.50. This is not a special case, you can other providers with very good pricing for data transfer. I don't understand how the difference in bandwidth pricing can be so large. I'm also certain that Amazon doesn't pay as much for bandwidth as the guy from buyvm.
buyvm is overselling their bandwidth to you. Real uplink pricing is not 2 dollars per terabyte. If you actually tried to use say 13 terabytes from a single vm, it would work eithe because of rate limmiting on your uplink or they would cut you off.
Re: How I attacked myself using Google and I ramped up a $1000 bandwidth bill
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course if you want to do away with any kind of built in redundancy and take over the sysadmin duties involved you can get the raw space and transfer cheaper.
I have a VPS on buyvm which includes 2TB/month for $6. Each extra TB is another $2.50. This is not a special case, you can other providers with very good pricing for data transfer. I don't understand how the difference in bandwidth pricing can be so large. I'm also certain that Amazon doesn't pay as much for bandwidth as the guy from buyvm.
One factor is: Amazon charges for actual bandwidth used. Most buyvm users only use a tiny fraction of what they are allowed to.
Re: How I attacked myself using Google and I ramped up a $1000 bandwidth bill
#99It's really awesome that Amazon was reasonable and refunded the charges because they were accidental. I mean, technically it was still your fault, so it would have been easy for them to be jerks about it.
They wouldn't be jerks if they asked for the charges; you still generated the traffic and they had to pay for it.
It's possible Google and Amazon have a peering arrangement so they may have paid little to nothing for the traffic.
Re: How I attacked myself using Google and I ramped up a $1000 bandwidth bill
#100I have a VPS. When i read stories like this, I think there isn't any point in going over to GAE or AWS. But lots of people do use these services, so what am I missing?