Summary: A look back at a record week with about a dozen distributed denial of service attacks (their nature varying from time to time)

OWING to Gates deposition tapes for the most part, this past week was a record week for us. At the time of writing, 7 days down the line (based on our monitoring), 875 GB of traffic got passed downstream to visitors. It's actually more than a terabyte if Tux Machines traffic gets counted as well.

"It's actually more than a terabyte if Tux Machines traffic gets counted as well."For those who wonder how we monitor this site (this past week we had about 10 DDOS incidents, which we can mitigate/tackle based on observed patterns, restricting access to parts of the site temporarily), here's what the monitoring window (tmux in Konsole) looks like:

Note that no IP addresses are shown, we've removed the Techrights part (only Tux Machines is shown), and we've occluded anything that can help a potential attacker. This site is monitored 24/7, with alerting systems set up to help us respond to incidents. The site's uptime is currently 180 days, i.e. nearly half a year. Accessibility in the uptime sense improved a lot this past Easter.

Most-read posts, in order of number of requests over the past 6 days (as a reminder, we shred all logs after 4 weeks):

/2020/10/04/rms-monitoring-mode/
/2020/10/04/www-is-crap/
/2020/10/05/linux-in-china-2020/
/2020/10/07/blackboxes-and-uboats/
/2020/10/05/microsoft-leaning-pr-strategy/
/2020/10/04/software-freedom-or-bust/
/2020/10/07/the-gnu-gnu/
/2020/10/05/bill-gates-deposition-part-5/
/2020/10/04/more-ibm-history/
/2020/10/06/git-2-29-0-rc0/
/2020/10/04/bill-gates-deposition-transcripts/
/2020/10/06/translation-of-bill-gates-deposition/
/2020/10/05/linux-5-9-reaches-rc8/
/2020/10/09/power-trips/
/2020/10/06/gmo-foundation-2/
/2020/10/04/bill-gates-deposed-despot/
/2020/10/05/vulkan-1-2-156/
/2020/10/06/bill-gates-deposition-part-6/
/2020/10/04/nanonote-1-3-0/
/2020/10/05/religion-by-figosdev/
/2020/10/06/bill-gates-profiteering/
/2020/10/07/kd-soap-1-9-1/
/2020/10/04/social-control-media-bullies/
/2020/10/06/qt-6-0-alpha/
/2020/10/04/digital-narcotics/
/2020/10/04/internet-rabid-dogs/
/2020/10/06/how-to-govern/
/2020/10/07/bill-gates-deposition-part-8/
/2020/10/08/depositions-and-transcripts/
/2020/10/07/dxvk-1-7-2/
/2020/10/04/fsf-online-party/
/2020/10/06/bill-gates-deposition-part-7/
/2020/10/08/gnome-3-38-1-released/
/2020/10/08/the-gates-jihad/
/2020/10/08/endless-os-3-8-7/
/2020/10/07/stallman-coral-anniversary-talk/
/2020/10/08/wouter-pors-on-upc/
/2020/10/09/epo-covid-19-rules/
/2020/10/07/empathy-for-provocateurs/

It's decreasing from top to bottom (3,668 for the first one). Different (unique) pages requested this past 6 days: 284,249. Number of unique visitors: 22,803. As we're using an ancient program to analyse Apache logs, it barely understands what Chrom* is and doesn't have a good understanding of 'smart' phones. Nevertheless, here's some more stuff of interest. Hourly distribution (European time):

Subject to many anomalies. ⬆