We went from hundreds of thousands of requests per day to 5 million per day. Traffic was web scraping bots based on the obscure URLs. The URLs were valid (mediawiki history links, etc) and not attempts to hack the site. Banning IPs did not help, the traffic would move to new subnets. Mostly IPv4, some IPv6. The user agent was popular Chrome agent strings so I'm guessing it was masked puppeteer.
It was a DDoS in practice but I get the feeling it's an immature web crawler.
I think people are likely building a new generation of crawlers to feed LLMs as fast as possible.
The caching aspect of Cloudflare helped a lot. Putting specific url patterns behind Cloudflares dynamic JavaScript challenge also helped. It was surprisingly easy to setup.
And I know what some of you will say, Cloudflare is bad. I've personally been annoyed with them for making specific sites more difficult to use while on VPN. But it's not a hard choice when it's either taking your site offline or using their free tier offering.
One thing that got me was seeing some of the malicious traffic originate from the same /24 as I use at home. Whatever botnet was being used certainly has good penetration of residential ISPs in the US!
At any rate, taking down the Blender website wouldn't help them I don't think.
Worth refraining for using it.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/3/23623473/blender-stable-di...
They litterally did that :)
And that can be controlled by your site's security level. Highest settings will show the JS page to all vistors, medium only shows it to likely bots.
"Under Pressure" by Queen.
> Oh yes let's encourage people to download an app made by artists, for artists, not learn how to draw, and instead use a program that steals from artists, while using an art app.
Presumably the same issue is going on with blender? The Reddit thread on the site being down is mostly comments on “lol autodesk/adobe/etc must hate how good blender 4.0 is”.
https://recordinghistory.org/the-history-of-sound-recording/...
Technology marches on and menial jobs get obsoleted. That’s just the way it is, even if you enjoy being a ropemaker, basket weaver, keypunch operator or, in this case, an illustrator.
If even with this the site doesn't load due my restrictive browser settings, I abandon the site and I don't look back (always are sites with tons of bloatware written behind blunders and infinite JS libraries).
You might be interested in a plugin to toggle the fingerprint protection: https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/toggle-resist-fi...
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34952279
But yeah, Cloudflare causes problems but I think it's partly the site owners that crank the security settings and bot protection to max.
Might be trying to force your cultural norms onto foreign countries.
That word in Australia is just as offensive as anywhere else, and I wish people would stop perpetuating the misconception that it's fine.
It's certainly not "part of our culture" or "just a normal word", and it's a little ironic that you would call out GP for "forcing cultural norms onto foreign countries" while in the same comment spreading falsehoods about Australian cultural norms.
Hard though it may be to believe, we're generally fairly civil down here.
That is completely untrue. You may not like it, plenty of Australians don't especially upper class people, but it is nowhere near as offensive here as it is in America. In America it's a full on slur that is never socially acceptable in any context. Here at worst it's a vulgar way to say something unless it's specifically directed at a woman (if it's directed at a woman in anger it is generally treated the same as Americans treat it), and at best it is actually just a normal thing to say to your friends. "Are you cunts ready or not?" is a very normal thing for working class Australians to say to their friends, same as "This cunts not like that, leave him alone" or "Are you serious cunt? You were gonna eat them all?" or "What are you cunts up to?". It can also be said in a non-endearing way even to people who aren't women, it has a pretty similar word distribution to "mate" (not completely identical, "My cunts and me wanna buy a ticket please" makes zero sense). Mate can be a very offensive word to use in context, or a completely benign word. Cunt is similar, it just has more offensive use cases than mate does.
I call my friends cunts, they call me cunt, strangers call me cunt. It's vulgar, but vulgar and offensive are two different things.
However, the comment is extremely benign.
The only reason for someone to make a burner account for a benign comment is if its a person defending themselves because no one else will.
Yes, that is why I used it. Seems like an appropriate way to describe these people.
Equally, we're not going to ban Spanish posters from using their word for "black", are we?
You can perceive it to be sexist, but I'm fairly confident that's a minority opinion.
Ireland, from a cursory check of their profile. But it doesn't invalidate your point, I don't think it's gendered their either.
> ban
Words in my mouth. I'm not advocating a ban, we're discussing whether a word is appropriate on this forum.
> their word for "black"
A bit of a stretch, considering _that_ word isn't on par with "fucker" in Spanish. So ironically, yeah, I think we would ban a Spanish poster for using it in this context?
But I concede your point that if it's not gendered, the intent isn't sexist.
I concede that it's regional, and I apologize for moralizing. However, I contend that in North America it's a majority opinion. "Cunt" is much more strongly gendered here.
> "dickhead"
Would you consider "whore", "slut" or "tart" sexist?
Look, I don't want to tell you how to perceive words because that's always a personal thing, but in huge parts of the world it's just a strong but generic insult. And in the end context and intent always matters, not words. "You dirty person of colour" is of course profoundly racists in spite of not using any racial epitaphs. It's not the words themselves that are problematic, it's the intent with which they're used. It seems pretty clear the intent of my comment was not sexist.