LLMs as Attack Method Against Free Software and Programming
DDoS in "hey hi" (slop) clothing, set aside Microsoft's attacks on the licence
"During the past 3 months I've noticed that gnu.org is almost entirely unusable*," a friend told me last night. "The webserver at 209.51.188.116 started returning mainly "409 Too many requests" a few months ago. Now it rarely even completes a request at all."
"Gnu.org seems to either be under permanent DDOS attack or has been configured to basically give up trying to serve content."
"There are other sites that mirror some of the content. For example, when I have e-lisp queries there are other places to look. But it seems sad that the home of Emacs is unable to deliver any man pages or help connected with the editor now."
"Does anyone know what the status of gnu.org is? Why is it behaving this way?"
I told him this was a known issue. See [ 1 2] ("How the Free Software Foundation Battles the LLM Bots" and "Our small team vs millions of bots").
To quote the article about the Free Software Foundation, quoting its staff: "Yet “We don’t use any of the so-called ‘cloud’ services,” explains another web page, “since the ‘cloud’ they typically refer to is just someone else’s computer. We do not abstract away problems with frameworks on top of Docker containers running in Kubernetes assembled by someone who tells you to directly pipe curl output into bash and install the software as root without looking at it…”"
A "use case for LLM slop finally found," I told him: "take down FREESW." █
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* Regarding GNU.org being unusable:
209.51.188.116|:443 429 Too Many Requests
This was "tested from 11 different IP addresses in Europe," he said, an "ongoing situation for approx 3 months!"