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alexforster

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DDoS at Cloudflare

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DDG is just repackaged Bing. Always has been. I remember looking into them when I was ready to job-hop many years ago, and they asked for dedication to their search engine as their foremost requirement for employment. It's the "drop-shipping" equivalent of search engines.

I'm constantly DM'd at work about how I'm able to create the "cool drawings" in my blog/wiki posts, and I enthusiastically point to excalidraw.com.

I have a background in vector illustration, which is all about creating subpixel-perfect designs. I'm also a bit of a perfectionist, which I think a lot of people here can relate to. I mention this because the reason Excalidraw really works for me is that it frees me from worrying about design. When you literally can't create something that looks "perfect", you're freed up to just sketch your idea without worrying about the visual representation.

I don't think it's responsible to replace http/1.1 with either of these protocols. They both seem like complex beasts with poorly understood corner cases and little consideration for the abuse potential.

Many of them are unintentional: a device sitting on the open internet has some vulnerability and gets exploited. Bad guy sets up a proxy on the device and uses it to click a bunch of ads using bots, or crawl Google results, or launch attacks, etc. Or, as mentioned below, they could simply be the result of misconfiguration.

Some of them are very intentional: https://www.torproject.org/

Unfortunately, this type of abuse is essentially only acted on if you either (a) cause some kind of problem for ops at the VPS company, or (b) the victim tells on you. Even then, the absolute worst thing that will happen to you is your account will be closed. There is just no way on the modern internet to investigate/prosecute these kinds of things. That's why one of our primary goals with the free Cloudflare plan is to invert the problem: make DDoS go away by making it it free to mitigate.

This is only if you have _no_ idea how to use very basic open-source tools to wreak havoc via some open proxies. The real cost of launching small-scale attacks like this is $5/month on your favorite VPS provider.

I don't understand the negative reactions here.

Gnome got Rothschild to agree to never sue another open-source project again. That's a huge concession and an outcome that's arguably better than a few invalidated patents.

There's an open Github issue where the author clarifies that his own code is BSD, and he puts the license of each file in its header.

"It’s designed to be flexible (run it anywhere Kubernetes runs)"

Is this the only supported deployment method? It's interesting if Google is OSS'ing cool projects to increase GCE/GKE marketshare.

I remember the FreeSWITCH from 10 years ago. They didn't even cut releases, you were just expected to always run at HEAD - and the whole community refused to talk to you until you showed your commit hash. I got cores constantly from all the null derefs littered throughout the code. And at this point they considered themselves a stable, production-ready project.

I tried _hard_ to make FreeSWITCH work for me in an SMB environment, but I ended up with such a bad taste from the poor QA that I eventually had to call it all a false start and go back to Asterisk.

I have never met with a female coworker alone in an office, and have never socialized with women coworkers outside of work.

Has it hurt the development of some of the women who have been my direct reports over the years? Probably, but it has also protected the women I care about the most, namely my wife and daughter, because it has prevented any kind of accusations from getting traction.

Jesus. You're aware that you could get yourself and your employer sued for admitting this, aren't you?

Yes, remarkably, and despite carefully avoiding any sexual talk of any sort at work for over thirty years now, I have been falsely accused of sexual harassment a handful of times over the years, but nothing has ever stuck. I think it is, in large part, because I have been so careful.

If you need the Billy Graham rule, then I am entirely sure the accusations against you had more merit than you'd care to admit.