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The Internet Archive is under a DDoS attack

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141–150 of 227 posts

Re: The Internet Archive is under a DDoS attack

#141
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I think there might be valid arguments to support that claim, that blog post hardly qualifies. The author runs a gambling site and while the way Cloudflare handled the situation (according to the author) could certainly be improved, they clearly were affecting other users by "tainting" shared IPs.

And yet if they ponied up the money, that issue of "tainting" shared IPs suddenly goes away. You can bet CloudFlare would graciously give the gambling site as much time as they need to bring their own IP (they went out of their way to link third party sellers of IPs with dubious provenance, after all).

[deleted]

Re: The Internet Archive is under a DDoS attack

#142
post #135
post #105

This is why I’ve gotten into the habit of maintaining my own WWW archive of sites I find interesting. Probably have around 1 TiB now, and One Of These Days I’d like to set my network up so it can serve arbitrary sites directly from local archive to revive any site I want. I have a `wget-mirror` shell function invoking wget with all the trimmings that takes care of 99% of sites. I’ll edit the full command into this co…

yes please. extra credit for anyone who shares instructions on how to inject this into every website i browse sans blocklist

Keeping a local, searchable record of all web browsing comes up every few months here, but it took me a while to find a lengthier discussion like this one from 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31848210

Re: The Internet Archive is under a DDoS attack

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have asked this a few times and never gotten an answer beyond "One day they could turn evil." What is the reason Cloudflare is an extortionist firm? I am way more concerned about Amazon than Cloudflare.

"What is the reason Cloudflare is an extortionist firm?" Because they are a publicly traded company

Nailed it. The implications are saddening.

Re: The Internet Archive is under a DDoS attack

#144
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is exactly the problem. These services are constantly at war with each other and are attacked by competitors. Cloudflare provides DDoS protection to the DDoS providers so they can keep their services online, which directly benefits Cloudflare by DDoS being a bigger problem than if they were all busy attacking each other. This is a sampling of currently available services and who they use for DDoS protection: str…

I find the idea of DDoS providers confusing. If someone tried to operate a service that can be abused easily to cause similar disruption in the physical world, the operation would be taken down quickly and the people behind it would probably end up in prison. But somehow the internet is still a lawless zone where crime is tolerated and everyone is out for themselves.

The added element of international relations makes it a far bit more tricky than any real-world equivalent. Usually these operate out of places that are not on good relations with the countries they target. Russia and China are the big ones.

Re: The Internet Archive is under a DDoS attack

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are botnets usually hosted on personal computers or servers or IoT? I'm thinking maybe archive.org can block a whole range of IPs if needed.

Resistance to that kind of simple countermeasure is exactly what distinguishes a DDoS attack from a non-distributed DoS attack. The traffic basically comes from "everywhere". Not literally every IP block and route, but widespread enough that it's difficult to separate from legitimate users without actually processing the traffic (which is what you're trying to avoid by e.g. blocking an IP range).

So compile a long list of compromised source IP's and just block those upstream?

Re: The Internet Archive is under a DDoS attack

#146
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The user you're responding to is Jason Scott of TIA.

What's the significance of that? (Googling "Jason Scott TIA" gives me "Dr Jason Scott is a Senior Research Fellow in the Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture" which doesn't explain much to me)

The Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture are well known for their work on biological models of computer security architecture.

I am shocked that any HN reader could be ignorant of this fact. Their director is a (controversial) Turing Award winner.

Re: The Internet Archive is under a DDoS attack

#147
post #137

If anyone from the archive.org team read this: love the website, by the way. You've saved so much rare content its really awesome.

would a decentralized internet archive make sense? impossible to ddos.

I'd love to work on something like this. But the internet archive themselves don't seem too interested in it I guess.

Re: The Internet Archive is under a DDoS attack

#148
post #140
post #105

This is why I’ve gotten into the habit of maintaining my own WWW archive of sites I find interesting. Probably have around 1 TiB now, and One Of These Days I’d like to set my network up so it can serve arbitrary sites directly from local archive to revive any site I want. I have a `wget-mirror` shell function invoking wget with all the trimmings that takes care of 99% of sites. I’ll edit the full command into this co…

Missed the edit window, but here's the command I use. Newlines added here for clarity. wget-mirror() { wget --mirror --convert-links --adjust-extension --page-requisites \ --no-parent --content-disposition --content-on-error \ --header="Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8" \ --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:129.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/129.0" \ --restrict…

Wow. Only 772GB. Way under 1TB. Liar!!

Re: The Internet Archive is under a DDoS attack

#149
post #105

This is why I’ve gotten into the habit of maintaining my own WWW archive of sites I find interesting. Probably have around 1 TiB now, and One Of These Days I’d like to set my network up so it can serve arbitrary sites directly from local archive to revive any site I want. I have a `wget-mirror` shell function invoking wget with all the trimmings that takes care of 99% of sites. I’ll edit the full command into this co…

how is this a solution? The Archive performs a valuable service. They're collecting wahy more of the internet than you are (I assume) so when that thing you didn't back up today is not available in 10yrs it's more likely to be on the archive.

I donate to The Archive. More people should too.

Re: The Internet Archive is under a DDoS attack

#150
post #110
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's obvious why a DDOS provider would want to use Cloudflare, but their point is that Cloudflare turns a blind eye to DDOS providers using their services. Actively helping to keep DDOS providers online while also selling DDOS mitigation isn't a good look to say the least.

Cloudflare is a data goldmine setup by people who love fedoras and newspapers. Professional DDOS providers won't use Cloudflare ever and have the skills, metal and (human) network to do everything in-house.

Yeah you're actually worse off using Cloudflare because you can't block attacker IPs anymore, once you're dependent on them to protect you, and they're not very good at protecting. I run an online service that invites hackers to DDOS the server. Cloudflare's servers would usually go down before we did. The only way we could stay online was by switching to GCS and using token buckets to blackhole IPs in the raw prerouting table, which made the hostile packets into mighty Google's problem. Thankfully they don't charge for ingress, so it was about as cheap as Cloudflare too.
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