Anecdotally I've noticed bot-like behavior on HN down-voting posts almost immediately, before a human could have read them. This is followed, typically, by a correction over a few minutes and then regular up- (or down-) voting resumes. I can imagine that HN is subjected to quite a lot of novel attacks of this nature, and I don't think it's in anyone's interest that they broadcast the details of it. My advice: be patient and take downvotes with a big grain of salt. They may not mean what you think they mean.

I’ve noticed it too. I think there are features of some sort already on on the backend, though obviously not fool-proof.

Who the fuck cares about downvotes as long as your sincere about your opinions?

Hard to be the smuggest dude in the valley at 1% opacity. Gotta keep the points up

The mac addresses on the ethernet layer are rewritten at each hop. You would only see the mac address of the router your router is connected to, not a chain linking back to the origin.

> The DNS operator can ask his own ISP about it.

Who would then have to determine where it's coming into their network from, and go ask that ISP, who would have to do the same, ad nauseum. And all parties would have to be paying enough staff to handle that load in addition to, you know, making sure their services work.

Two problems:

- the DNS operator doesn’t care. These look like normal requests.

- if they did care, asking an ISP to packet trace ingress traffic is not trivial. At any large scale ISP there are hundreds to thousands of direct peers that could have originated that traffic.

When you get to the level of traffic that it matters to check this, you are at the point that you cannot actually check this. Just think of the amount of traffic per second, the number of source addresses, and how many people it will take for how long to research that minute worth of traffic from last month.