There is an entire movement in Sicily dedicated to highlighting and frequenting businesses that refuse to pay protection money, because in the past, paying was the norm.

http://www.addiopizzo.org/

Since that's not the kind of society I want to live in, I'd rather stand firm behind a company that refuses to deal with criminals. If companies give in as a matter of convenience to retain customers who turn a blind eye, that will only make the criminals stronger.

Now, certainly, there are measures they can take to mitigate the problem, but with all the things to do in a business, I suppose it's the kind of thing that might not be on the front burner until it happens. There are all kinds of bad, destructive things that could happen in the world, but if you spend all your time worrying about what could happen, you won't have a viable business. It's a tricky balancing act, and I'm willing to cut some slack to someone being targeted by criminals.

If 37Signals was a bitcoin exchange, aka a known target of DDOS attacks, the mood here would be drastically different... yet we've hit a tipping point where it seems everyone is equally at risk. DDOS attacks have become a sad cost of doing business on the internet, and just because you acknowledge that fact and try to prevent yourself from being a target doesn't mean you're capitulating to the criminal enterprise.

In fact, I don't see a better way of sticking it to the thugs than responding with "Hahaha, do your worst. We'd love to see if the money we're paying X COMPANY is worth it." And then you get to write a totally different blog post, one where you get to brag about your excellent foresight and how you have proven to your customers that the money they pay you buys a top-notch service.

you're seriously comparing handing in a term paper late to being targeted for extortion by an international crime syndicate?

of course handing in a term paper late is unexcusable - it's just a fucking essay and there's no reason why it should be late because you probably had weeks to do it.

waking up to find your entire network infrastructure under siege (and anything ELSE you put up as a contingency, because it's on the internet, remember?) is not some shit you can be "no excuses" hardcore about because this is in the real world which is complex, unlike slacking on a paper, which is very simple.

reasonable people know this, which is if you read their TOS and other SLA agreements, this is all spelled out for you. nobody wants ot hear "NO EXCUSES!" from some guy paying $50/month while gigabits worth of malicious traffic is pounding at your door.

the truth is it's YOUR business, just like basecamp is THEIR business which they are QUITE obviously in the middle of running. if you're concerned your $50 saas product is not delivering the goods, it's on YOU to find an alternative.

That's not wise, it's just being an asshole. Reasonable people understand that things happen sometimes despite our best efforts. You can spend your life railing at people getting hit by metaphorical meteors, until you're hit by one yourself, or you can take a minute to work with people, be a little flexible, and win your time "investment" back many times over in return.

And Cloudflare is hardly a panacea for DDOS attacks.

I think most Basecamp users are savvy enough to understand that there's nobody to blame except for the extortionists responsible for this attacck.

Straight up murder doesn't quite fit the situation here.

The fact that this is on a Github Gist, as opposed to a static page (like on s3), suggests an audience that would understand those subtleties.

Basecamp is actually the name of the company now, they aren't 37Signals anymore.