The DDoS Attacks by Microsoft's Scam Altman and Other Slop Charlatans and Frauds is Hurting the FSF, Delinking It From Copyleft Projects
A reader has just noticed this update from widely used software of Dirk Eddelbuettel (Debian). Here's the key part:
The reader called it "a side-effect of the DDoS against the FSF's site, but the correct move anyway ... if he is hosting his own copy of the license. Otherwise, he should..."
4 months ago David Cassel reported that "LLM Bots" were crippling the sites of the Free Software Foundation. To support this finger-pointing (LLMs) he quoted the current president, Ian Kelling, extensively. Here we go:
A July 2 blog post by senior systems administrator Ian Kelling points out that the infrastructure for the Free Software Foundation “has been under attack since August 2024.”[...]
It’s a bigger challenge than it seems. The FSF tech team maintains more than 70 different web sites, services and platforms — not just for FSF and GNU projects but also for “the wider free software community” (including popular web frameworks like Drupal and MediaWiki, the KDE desktop environment and software collection, and even the classic game NetHack). “We recently counted seventy different services,” Kelling writes, “and have a dozen physical servers across two Boston-area data centers.”
[...]
But that’s not as simple as it sounds. Last December a blog post remembered that “one of the recent attacks from the last few months, required blocking more than 40,000 IP addresses from a DDoS attack.” And this month Kelling wrote “That attack continues, but we have mitigated it.” (Although in this case, “Judging from the pattern and scope, the goal was likely to take the site down and it was not an LLM crawler.”)
This impacts a lot more than access to the licences. █