What's up with HN?

Re:What's up with HN? by calinet6 on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @09:43AM (#5361712)

You'd be surprised. Sometimes it just happens for no reason whatsoever. One of my sites, for example, has a curse of forum spam bots from China clearly intended to spam a different site. They're using the wrong paths and everything. It's like I'm being constantly invaded by a hoard of blind dumb chickens trying to peck my eyes out by hitting their heads against a fence. It's sad, really.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's up with HN? by eli on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @10:47AM (#5362130)

I'm consistently impressed by how many bots are smart enough to crawl the web and submit forms and even evade some captchas... but are still too dumb to realize that rapidly trying to submit comment spam to my search form isn't doing anyone any good.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's up with HN? by mdaniel on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @10:40PM (#5366464)

IMHO, they fail for the same reason most software does: failure to check return values.

Assuming the happy path is the road to ruin, even for spammers.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's up with HN? by jaredsohn on Monday March 11, 2013 @10:55PM (#5359787)

and you know you're making it (not necessarily profitable, but at least getting some level of awareness) as a desktop product if it gets added to warez sites. :)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's up with HN? by pkamb on Monday March 11, 2013 @11:06PM (#5359829)

Today the Google Alert I have set up for mentions of my Mac app lit up with a new crack on a warez site. They had a full ASCII art header and everything! Put a smile on my face.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's up with HN? by bound008 on Monday March 11, 2013 @11:24PM (#5359907)

Congrats on your success!

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's up with HN? by eridius on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @12:32AM (#5360189)

What app?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's up with HN? by pkamb on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @05:17AM (#5360911)

Reddit Notifier, on the Mac App Store... or less scrupulous places, apparently, if you can't spare 3 bucks!

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/reddit-notifier/id468366517?m...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's up with HN? by uxp on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @01:20AM (#5360350)

Probably one linked in his profile?

The keyboard is a very interesting idea. There's a free version too.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's up with HN? by martinced on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @08:11AM (#5361340)

Oh the memories : )

Would put a smile on my face too but... I decided to make part of the computation on the server-side so that my desktop software cannot be cracked without rewriting what the server-side does. My desktop app only makes sense when the Internet connection is up and doesn't "phone home" too often.

If users don't like that they can GTFO.

If pirates don't like that it puts a smile on my face ; )

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's up with HN? by Gigablah on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @08:25AM (#5361387)

You work for Maxis? :)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's up with HN? by przemoc on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @08:58AM (#5361483)

Please, don't blame Maxis for EA management tier crappy ideas.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's up with HN? by engtech on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @09:29AM (#5361639)

https://twitter.com/simcity/status/310490053803646976

"Hey, this is on Maxis. EA does not force design upon us. We own it, we are working 24/7 to fix it, and we are making progress"

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's up with HN? by przemoc on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @09:40AM (#5361696)

I feel that's only PR correctness. They possibly have to claim that it's their own fault.

But well, I may be wrong, and Maxis is simply no longer the company that it used to be.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's up with HN? by borlak on Monday March 11, 2013 @11:25PM (#5359912)

A DDOS of HN is quite strange indeed. There should be some kind of ransom involved, but seeing as HN doesn't make money (I assume) from these forums, there is nothing to ransom.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's up with HN? by redthrowaway on Monday March 11, 2013 @11:36PM (#5359960)

Why would it have to be for gain? I bet there's plenty of bored people with idle small- to medium-sized botnets who'd take down a somewhat popular site just for lulz.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's up with HN? by manojlds on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @12:00AM (#5360053)

For the people doing it, the gain can be about trying out their skills, not being bored, and getting the bragging rights of having DDoSed "Hacker" News.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's up with HN? by gingerlime on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @04:53AM (#5360855)

So if they then brag about it and it get posted on HN, should it get upvoted? (not a rhetorical or cynical question, I'm really curious)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's up with HN? by pc86 on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @06:43AM (#5361080)

I'd upvote it if it was interested and they talked about how they did it (and it didn't involve LOIC).

Which is to say the blog post about it probably wouldn't be worth reading :)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's up with HN? by Zak on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @01:27AM (#5360382)

I'm inclined to suspect HN's design actually makes it fairly easy to DoS.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's up with HN? by pmelendez on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @09:12AM (#5361560)

How come? Can you explain your point a bit further?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's up with HN? by Zak on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @04:44PM (#5364746)

Sure. I didn't want to put a how-to manual in this thread on the day of the attack though.

HN has a big table of closures representing actions a user can take. Loading certain pages, such as the reply link on a comment creates more of them. They time out after a while, which will get you "unknown or expired link". Intentionally creating a few million of them ought to fill up the server's memory and would be a more effective way to to impair the server's functionality than simply requesting the home page a few billion times.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's up with HN? by snikolic on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @12:59AM (#5360280)

Someone upset that they were rejected from YC?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's up with HN? by brudgers on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @08:42AM (#5361430)

HN is a significant asset for YCombinator, and YC, presumably, makes significant money.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's up with HN? by IsTom on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @07:15AM (#5361156)

Who would you DDOS if you wanted to see if your botnet works?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's up with HN? by babuskov on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @07:16AM (#5361160)

or someone upset their comments were down-voted? :D

[ Parent | on HN ]