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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by eitland on Saturday January 08, 2022 @04:42PM (#29856623)
> but what's stopping me from running x,000's of little scripts on a x,000 different VPS's (or a botnet, if I'm a bit evil)

Price. You have to be seriously dedicated or have serious economic muscles to pull this off.

Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by yccs27 on Saturday January 08, 2022 @05:06PM (#29856891)
Unfortunately, you only have to compete with real users using that specific feature, and there aren't that many when measured against the power of even cheap attacks.
Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by eitland on Sunday January 09, 2022 @04:00AM (#29861621)
Then again:

1. even enabling personal blacklists would be a huge benefit to power users even if they aren't aggregated.

2. the user I replied to above suggested running n 1000 vps-es or using a criminal botnet. Both of these are significant hurdles.

Also while running n 1000 vps-es isn't a significant hurdle in todays clouds if it is a one time job, it at least becomes expensive if the blacklists are generated based on active users at random times around the clock forcing would-be abusers to not only fire up their vps-es, running a couple of queries and shut them down but also to keep them running around the clock, or rather in 8 hour shifts to not trigger abuse detection.