Bonum Certa Men Certa

DDOS Attacks and Decentralisation

Are you threatening me, Master Jedi? What are your demands? STFU; Pardon me? Stop writing; Make me



Summary: Our server, which is shared among sites, has been under persistent distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks almost every day in recent weeks, culminating in much worse attacks last night, but we're not too worried anymore

LAST night we spent 4-5 hours dealing with DDOS attacks. It was hard to identify patterns and we won't go into the details as that can help attackers (current and future). The good news is, everything is now in order and we've learned a thing or two in the process. Each attack makes us stronger in the sense that it leaves us with a broader toolset by which to counter it (and any attack like it).



"Each attack makes us stronger in the sense that it leaves us with a broader toolset by which to counter it (and any attack like it)."DDOS attacks do not really or do not necessarily exploit any weakness in underlying software. It is a brute force thing. Everything has some limits, including network, hardware, and human (operator) capacities.

Lear Meme: DDOS not working anymore; Gotta amass more Windows botnetsAt the moment, with Gemini fully working and fully mirroring our (World Wide) Web site, we ought to be more robust to downtimes. IPFS is another form of contingency. We hope that the truly clueless people running the EPO (Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos haven't the slightest clue about science; they're just trained to name-drop buzzwords!) understand that their censorship regime, whether by technical means (site-blocking) or 'legal' means (sending thugs to threaten us), is outdated and futile. We aren't claiming that the EPO has anything to do with DDOS, even though staff representatives did accuse the management (more than half a decade back) and we had evidence of some tampering back then. But for sure it's a lot more difficult to silence us nowadays, partly because the eggs have been put in several baskets and many countries.

As it turns out, it's possible to combine or chain Gemini with IPFS. For those who don't know, Gemini is gaining traction very fast (here's a video from only a few hours ago) and we appear to be the biggest Gemini capsule, which is still being expanded somewhat (tightening some loose ends).

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