News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Removal of Heroku free product plans by swyx on Thursday August 25, 2022 @01:12PM (#32596772)
i belatedly came to this realization that this is a common problem for all hosting (CDNs, because free bandwidth, and CI/CD, because free compute, and anything that offers free storage) companies. I call this the PCN problem - free tier hosting for anything means you eventually have to deal with Porn, Crypto, Nazis.

everyone handrolls prevention measures, i once proposed an industry council where we swap tips, but everyone views it as competitive advantage for some reason so it didnt go anywhere.

Re:Removal of Heroku free product plans by alx__ on Thursday August 25, 2022 @03:06PM (#32598473)
Only recently learned that crypto jerks will try to abuse free compute during the build step for hosting services
Re:Removal of Heroku free product plans by epolanski on Thursday August 25, 2022 @06:13PM (#32600601)
They injected miners in websites and even free CI pipelines on GitHub and similar.
Re:Removal of Heroku free product plans by shrewduser on Thursday August 25, 2022 @01:49PM (#32597345)
Porn and crypto sure, but what are nazi's using free hosting and bandwidth for?
Re:Removal of Heroku free product plans by zdragnar on Thursday August 25, 2022 @02:04PM (#32597570)
Presumably, "nazi" here is a stand-in for any form of communication not protected by free speech laws and / or is actively forbidden by government censors (or perhaps merely undesirable by social standards). Hate speech, anti-government advocacy, promotion of violence and terrorism etc will use "free" tier accounts because they want as little capability of being tracked to in-real-life people as possible.

They may or may not fully utilize the bandwidth, but they will absolutely take advantage of access to resources that don't require real identification, and that adds an extra burden of regulatory compliance on the company offering it (even if it is just hiring a few extra people to manage takedown orders, etc).

Re:Removal of Heroku free product plans by pjc50 on Thursday August 25, 2022 @03:12PM (#32598542)
Things like Kiwifarms which provide a risk of substantial reputational damage if you're seen to be supporting them. There's a campaign on Twitter to deplatform KF from Cloudflare after more SWATting incidents, for example.
Re:Removal of Heroku free product plans by brightball on Thursday August 25, 2022 @05:27PM (#32600159)
Everyday I learn about a new dark corner of the internet.
Re:Removal of Heroku free product plans by mynameishere on Saturday August 27, 2022 @04:39PM (#32622956)
You're just now learning about Twitter?
Re:Removal of Heroku free product plans by jkaplowitz on Saturday August 27, 2022 @07:01PM (#32624099)
No, "nazi" is pretty literal - Cloudflare hosted Stormfront and the Daily Stormer for a while, both of which are actually neo-Nazi. Wikipedia and Axios seem to think Cloudflare stopped hosting Stormfront in 2017, and I don't want to visit a neo-Nazi site even to determine how true this is, but stormfront.org's A records in DNS do still point to Cloudflare IPs.

[Edit: someone found an article from later in 2017 where it seems like Cloudflare resumed hosting Stormfront just over a month after it had stopped hosting it.]

Re:Removal of Heroku free product plans by collegeburner on Thursday August 25, 2022 @10:59PM (#32602881)
missed the opportunity to call it NPC which lowkey fits better :)