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Back Then (tm) you didn't have to fear getting hacked all the fucking time. Shodan didn't exist, Metasploit was in its infancy, you needed to know where to look
by mschuster91 1y ago
Back Then (tm) you didn't have to fear getting hacked all the fucking time. Shodan didn't exist, Metasploit was in its infancy, you needed to know where to look to buy DDoS and even then, half the offerings were scams themselves. The biggest threat was people abusing your SMTP server.
Today? Run just a plain Apache without a domain name, just a plain old IPv4 and listen on ports 80/443. In seconds you'll get hit by a barrage of exploit attempts, scanners, god knows what. And manage to get something successful, you'll get a few emails that say "pay us X dollars in BTC and we'll leave you alone", and if not you'll get booted off the net if you don't hide behind Cloudflare.
Discovery is also not a thing any more. The old "rings" have long since passed, RSS feeds went down the drain with Google Reader (IMHO, that decision effectively killed off the blogosphere), and Google Search got completely poisoned with SEO.
The Internet has become the Wild West. Law makers have begun to notice but unfortunately they're so utterly braindead that fierce opposition to their regulation attempts is the only choice possible, so nothing happens. Rinse and repeat.
- stirfish 1y agoI have a server in my pantry hosting some stuff, including an anonymous ftp server. I get a bot that uploads fake screensavers once in a while, and one time someone on 4chan made a million empty directories in it before I turned it off for 30 minutes and they got bored. I might be naive about getting hacked, but it's been up for 5 or 6 years now and nothing bad has happened. Edit: actually closer to 12 years total now, wtf I'm aging?
- whynotminot 1y agoYeah, this was roughly my experience too when I ran a little Pi server for fun. If you check the access logs you’ll see a bunch of automated low-effort bot attempts at directory traversal and the like. But nothing serious. Generally there has to be an ROI for someone to really want to go after you.
- stirfish 1y agoI had a note on there that said something to the effect of: If you think you can hack this server, you probably can! Please don't. I've invited you into my home for tea; please don't break my dishes to show me why I should've kept them in a safe. That was my attempt from changing the roi from "wouldn't it be fun to trash this stranger's secret clubhouse" to "oh cool, that stranger is letting me just wander around this secret clubhouse"
- mschuster91 1y ago> I get a bot that uploads fake screensavers once in a while You're lucky it's that and not CSAM, a friend of mine had that happen and that took a lot of resources to properly clean up without him getting v& in the process.
- xtiansimon 1y ago> “The Internet has become the Wild West” That phrase struck me as odd. I had to reread the comment. I already associated the metaphor with the 1990s web others are lamenting as gone. They refer to the WW of content; “wild” referring to sparsely populated lands. Your WW is “wild” or diverse lawlessness, vandalism and unruly (human) behavior. I suppose both are true—were true.
- pabs3 1y agoWebrings are still a thing. Same with RSS. https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Webring https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Webring
- mschuster91 1y agoOf course the technologies still exist, but who is actually using that at scale? Chrome never supported RSS feeds to begin with, Firefox dropped support in 2018 or so. Pingbacks outside of the wordpress dot com ecosystem are disabled by pretty much everyone due to rampant spam.
- pabs3 1y agoRSS works at the scale of the individual reader, any other scale is fairly irrelevant. Browser RSS support is fairly irrelevant too; just like there are email clients outside browsers, there are RSS clients outside browsers, and some email clients are also RSS clients. Pingbacks also aren't relevant to usage of RSS by readers.