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It's an interesting thing to think about, that someone can make a request to your website and you pay for it. This is not how the mail works, where someone nee
by danschumann 6y ago
It's an interesting thing to think about, that someone can make a request to your website and you pay for it.
This is not how the mail works, where someone needs to buy a stamp to spam you.
- thephyber 6y agoThis is a common pattern in (blocking i/o versus non-blocking i/o) and (sync task versus async task). The typical analogy I hear for DDoS attacks is if you own a business and a giant group of protesters drives traffic to your store, but no one is interested in buying. They create a backlog to enter the store, they crowd the isles, they pick up your inventory, and the lines and crowds scare off your legitimate visitors/customers.
- ortusdux 6y agoMy office still gets spam faxes to this day. The paper and toner only add up to a few cents a month, so it's not worth doing anything about. I knew a realtor that had a sheet of black paper with a few choice expletives written on it that they would send back to spammers. There was an art to taping it into a loop so it would continuously feed. This was a few decades ago when a the spam faxes could cost more than a stamp.
- mulmen 6y agoMy desk phone at an old job used to get dialed by a fax machine. Not fun picking that up. I redirected it to a virtual fax line and it turns out it was a local clinic faxing medical records. I faxed them back with some message about you have the wrong number but they never stopped.
- fennecfoxen 6y agoIf you really wanted to make them stop, you might find a contact for their lawyer and make HIPAA noises at them ;)
- mulmen 6y agoI considered it. That was after my time in hospital IT. Really I wanted to stop getting my eardrums blown out by a robot. Luckily I happened to be working at a phone company so changing my number just took a couple clicks.
- tjalfi 6y agoMy dad used to receive a lot of misdirected faxes. His solution was to send a return fax with disorderly handwriting begging and pleading for them to fax someone else. The other person stopped faxing him.
- mulmen 6y agoI was using a virtual fax service so a digital equivalent would have been easy. Not sure if I was creative enough to invert the colors before sending my response. Really I just wanted the noise to stop.
- mulmen 6y agoMost of my junk mail does not have stamps because the spammers drop it off in pallets at the post office and just have it delivered to everyone. The USPS is like a reverse garbage service.
- Nextgrid 6y agoIt’s because we as an industry decided to give in and submit to the cloud providers’ bullshit model of paying overpriced amounts for bandwidth while good old bare-metal providers still offer unmetered bandwidth for very reasonable prices.
- xmprt 6y agoThe question isn't about pricing. The fact that you pay for your own bandwidth and metal is a problem.
- Nextgrid 6y agoPaying for your bandwidth and metal isn't a problem per-se as long as prices are reasonable (which they are with the old-school bare-metal providers). After all, those services do cost money to provide. The problem happens when prices are extortionate (or the pricing model is predatory, ie pay per MB transferred instead of a flat rate per 1Gbps link) and relatively minor traffic translates to a major bill. This particular issue is about 80 requests/second which is a drop in the bucket on a 1Gbps link. It would be basically unnoticeable if it wasn't for the cloud providers nickel & diming their customers.
- xmprt 6y agoYou're still not getting it. I'm not arguing about whether it should be free or how much it should cost. I'm saying that when you have to pay for someone else's request, it's ripe for abuse. Instead, a system where the requester pays would be similar to how postage works in the US. Although I think it's highly unlikely that would make sense in a digital world.