5 ms·
Your heart is in the right place. Freedom of information, and access to it, is a critical human right. There is, however, a possible catch. As a developer, the
by Kalium 9y ago
Your heart is in the right place. Freedom of information, and access to it, is a critical human right.
There is, however, a possible catch. As a developer, there's a sharp limit to what can be done purely in server-side software to mitigate a DDoS attack. Some classes of attack rely on particular kinds of server-side vulnerabilities, and against these your skills are very valuable! I'm sure your contributions of skill would be most welcome.
But against pure bandwidth-flooding attacks, it's more likely that writing more code is of at best marginal benefit. The state of the art for responding to these requires a big network, a lot of bandwith, and active management. Things difficult to deliver as a lone developer who cares deeply.
- drvdevd 9y agoOh I absolutely agree. Which is why I specified that it should be an open source project. And I wasn’t thinking so much server side code to protect against DDoS but orchestration scripts and test suites to help create some form of redundancy offering some level of resilience.
- richardwhiuk 9y agoThe source code is relatively uninteresting. The power of cloudflare is in having the servers.....
- Kalium 9y agorichardwhiuk completely nailed it. Orchestration scripts and test suites are of minimal value here. They already exist for pretty much every configuration you might need, and already in open source ways. Open sourcing the tools is of very little value in meeting the needs of a site like SciHub in protecting itself from DDoS attacks. What's actually needed is servers and bandwidth. Which is to say your heart is in the right place. You have the right ideas, and it's wonderful how much you care! It's just possible that the need at hand might be other than a maximal fit for your skills. I hope this conversation has been as educational for you as it has for me, and thank you for the opportunity to engage!
- softawre 9y agoJust want to say that your style of argument has me in awe. It's feels close to the patronizing line, but it's obviously not. I think you just assume the best from people and I really like that.
- Kalium 9y agoThank you. I appreciate that. Mostly I assume people mean well but suggest silly things because they're ignorant. Reading Dale Carnegie taught me that you have to tell people they're right and stroke their egos a bit before you can imply that they might have the wonderful opportunity to become more right. It's honestly exhausting to implement. It's a lot of hoops to jump through to tell someone that they don't actually understand what they're talking about. However... most people do not typically respond well to being flatly told they're wrong. Explaining how and why they are wrong does not generally improve matters, as people usually stop honestly listening as soon as they hear "You're wrong". As you say, it does run the risk of coming off as patronizing. It's hard to avoid that entirely, as different people sometimes have drastically different standards.
- pathseeker 9y ago>As you say, it does run the risk of coming off as patronizing. It's hard to avoid that entirely, as different people sometimes have drastically different standards. Definitely. I read your post as very patronizing (even though I agree with it) because you started with "Your heart is in the right place." That's just a sugar-coated way tell a child "nice try but you're extremely naive". IMO it's better to skip telling someone they are wrong like a child and skip right to the rebuttal without including any references to the parent author (an ad-hominem).
- Kalium 9y agoIn the abstract, I agree with you. In practice, I've found that a lot of people react to being treated that way in the same way they might react to being slapped. This is not always the best way to further a productive conversation.