The War on Free Software Reporters - Part I - Why Techrights Cannot be Censored (and Won't be Censored)
Microsoft remains by far the biggest culprit, every single time...
IN nearly 18 years we've suffered many DDoS attacks. As far as I can recall, the first very major DDoS attack, which forced us off of shared hosting, was in 2008 (it continued afterwards). Tracy began hosting the site - a task he'd do until 2018 when he dissolved his hosting business altogether. Tracy is still in our IRC network, even right now.
DDoS attacks generally increased the cost of hosting and complicated the "logistics".
Throughout the years we've used all sorts of tools to combat DDoS attacks. We wrote our own programs to respond to DDoS attacks (we didn't outsource the traffic), we used Varnish for caching, and we also optimised WordPress in a number of ways. Ever since we abandoned WordPress - as we had planned since 2013 - we suffered no DDoS attacks at all. It would take an enormous amount of traffic to slow down the site, perhaps as much as 1,000 requests per second (which would encumber and over-stress throughput capacities, not CPU or RAM).
As far as DDoS attacks are concerned, we're quite safe now. We hardly ever worry about load spikes.
In recent years we've been subjected to new forms of attacks: doxing and bullying (even of women and elderly people like our parents). It is vicious and utterly disgusting. Some of it is outright criminal, so we've opened several cases at the police. Some involve actual cybercrimes (cracking attempts, not just social engineering or Denial of Service).
Can we withstand those attacks? Yes, definitely! It's just unfair that the dignity of our families - i.e. people who have nothing to do with this site - is being compromised.
If only readers knew how much abuse we've been subjected to, presumably for the 'audacity' to report news about Microsoft and Free software.
In the next part we'll shed more light on some of the latest attack tactics and how we respond to the nuisance. We've already dealt with much worse abuse in the past (2009 was probably the worst; we repeatedly defended RMS from the first cancel mob that year), so we're not worried, our sole aim is to reduce time-wasting. We have many stories left to release/report on because people send us material of relevance.
This site was always difficult to suppress because it does not bother with third parties like social control media or oppressive CDNs such as Clownflare. It also runs its own IRC network, so speech policing isn't done by some arbitrary third party. █