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Feedly gets hit by DDoS attack, refuses to give in to blackmail

grahamcluley.com

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Re: Feedly gets hit by DDoS attack, refuses to give in to blackmail

#51

Post by fooqux »

mwill wrote: post #3

I was just wondering why I couldn't hop on Feedly. I feel sort of bad that this is what makes me finally self host my RSS reader, since it's totally out of their control, but I've been planning on jumping ship for a while, it's just been low priority for me. Goread has been tempting me though, so I guess I'll check it out.

I'm in the same boat. Was thinking of leaving for awhile, feel kind of bad this is what pushed me off the edge.

For me, I stopped and thought about how I access my RSS feeds. I used to be a pure desktop RSS reader, and then I started using both my phone and my desktop, and since Google Reader shut down I've mostly just been using Feedly on my phone. Since I only check my feeds on one device now, I don't need to worry about syncing across platforms, which is the primary purpose of Feedly in my opinion.

If that sounds like you, and you're on Android, check out gReader. While it can integrate with Feedly and a few other services, it can also just act like a "dumb" RSS reader and just download the feed content to your phone instead of relying on a sync service. So far I'm enjoying the experience.

Re: Feedly gets hit by DDoS attack, refuses to give in to blackmail

#54

Post by jacquesm »

davidw wrote: post #39
jacquesm wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Criminals work hard to re-invest their money in the upper world. Once they successfully do that punishing them can become very hard. Free, democratic and open societies are far more vulnerable to this than dictatorships, there you are either part of the 'in-group' or you're going to be hunted. An open society makes the assumption that people play by the rules and that those that do not will be caught and can be punis…

Italy is the country where I live, but I'm not sure I'd call it "mine". If it were mine, I'd run it differently :-) I am not a citizen in any event. I think you're wrong in any event: the more open and well run a society is, the harder it is for mafias to really take root. That's why they are stronger in places like Italy than in, say, Sweden: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moral_Basis_of_a_Backward_S... And truth…

It's frustrating because Italy is one of the most beautiful countries in Europe and has many nice people living there.

Funny you should mention Sweden, they actually have quite a bit of gang activity and organized crime there. It's not as visible as the Mafia and definitely not as organized but being an 'open society' is definitely perceived as being ripe for the plucking by the not-so-nice elements in our world.

I find it favorable to compare with the other opposite: dictatorships. There you usually have very little small time crime, all the crummy criminals are caught and punished (usually very harshly). But the government is the elephant in the room in those countries, they are the real criminals.

I think that crime is somehow systemic, that it is almost impossible to have an open society without having crime in the populace and as that model shifts towards a more closed society the crime shifts with it until the majority of it is found amongst those that rule.

There simply is an element of society that will try to game any model in such a way that they maximize their pay-off while minimizing their potential exposure to hard work. Parasitic behavior. And being a parasite works, it's a good niche to be in and plenty of people that find the regular roads to riches closed to them for whatever reason figure that they're going to get theirs no matter what.

Re: Feedly gets hit by DDoS attack, refuses to give in to blackmail

#55

Post by Afforess »

planckscnst wrote: post #46
hueving wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud flare is a protection racket. Some people don't use them on principle. They are the vendor selling chastity belts to stop rape. It is in their best economic interest that these attacks continue. It's sad that to run a service now the expectation is to shovel money to another service to absorb UDP packets.

Unless you are intending to accuse Cloudflare of aiding illegal activity in order to sell services, you may want to change your statement, as this could be considered libel.

Libel is nearly impossible to act upon in the USA. Thank you, first amendment.

Re: Feedly gets hit by DDoS attack, refuses to give in to blackmail

#56

Post by claudius »

ksec wrote: post #2

Do people really get punished for it? I mean the actual ones behind those bot, not the innocent ones that had their computer hacked without knowing. If yes, how long does it normally take to get them? If At all? Weeks? Months? Years? These days DDoS seems far too easy, far too common.

Why do you think someone is innocent if they let some third party use their computer without permission? For essentially all malware that makes your computer part of a larger botnet, you have to be extremely careless to let it get on your device, not dissimilar to leaving your car unlocked when it is subsequently stolen and used in a crime (or just misused by playing kids). The latter is illegal[0], why should the former be ok?

[0] http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stvo_2013/__14.html

Re: Feedly gets hit by DDoS attack, refuses to give in to blackmail

#58

Post by dmix »

Afforess wrote: post #55
planckscnst wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you are intending to accuse Cloudflare of aiding illegal activity in order to sell services, you may want to change your statement, as this could be considered libel.

Libel is nearly impossible to act upon in the USA. Thank you, first amendment.

Has to actually cause financial or significant personal harm. Something an HN comment will likely never achieve.

Re: Feedly gets hit by DDoS attack, refuses to give in to blackmail

#60

Post by rickyc091 »

frou_dh wrote: post #52

How's this blackmail? What secret are they threatening to reveal?

Yep, from their blog.

"2:04am PST – Criminals are attacking feedly with a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). The attacker is trying to extort us money to make it stop. We refused to give in and are working with our network providers to mitigate the attack as best as we can."

http://blog.feedly.com/2014/06/11/denial-of-service-attack/?...

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