> paying customers that do not attract DoS attacks
A little off topic, but I've always felt a slightly uneasy about the concept of "attracting" DDoS attacks. Sure, if you knowingly piss off a bunch of script kiddies, you're attracting attacks. But it seems that nowadays, any site that hosts user-generated content is at risk of being attacked for any random reason. And yet, a lot of people talk about "customers who attract attacks" as if those customers are to blame. It almost sounds like blaming women who wear certain types of clothes for attracting sex crime.
Of course, the fact that you didn't do anything to provoke an attack might be irrelevant when your upstream faces a choice between cutting you loose and eating hundreds of thousands of dollars. People need to do what they need to do to protect their networks. Nonetheless, I'm curious what you guys think about the concept of "attracting attacks". If you blame the victim even a little bit, does that affect your judgment about what should be done in the case of an attack?
Not all user generated content is the same. Some of it attracts more attention, some of it less. The site operators have a great deal of influence in determining what shows up. You could use HN as a pastie if you wanted. But I imagine if it started causing trouble, pg would enact measures to discourage such use.
I admire the people willing to fight the good fight, but it doesn't seem like the guy running pastie.org has any skin in the game. It's easy to decide you're going to run a laissez faire type site when you don't pay the bills.
> It almost sounds like blaming women who wear certain types of clothes for attracting sex crime.
I completely stopped reading this comment here, when you wrote this, because that was a completely off-base comparison and has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand. Worse, you probably know it; I wouldn't assume you to be stupid. And that was a mountainously stupid comment.
In hosting, there are customers that attract DoS attacks. Period. Ask anybody who does hosting. IRC servers are a canonical example and are DoS magnets. Torrent trackers are another. Pastebin sites, like Pastie, are becoming another (look who uses pastebin.com a lot: Anonymous). Hell, Facebook and Google probably takes several DoS attacks a day just by nature of being well-known.
Don't even conflate my argument with an undertone of sexism.
Sorry if my comment came across as suggesting that your argument had an "undertone of sexism". I definitely wasn't trying to say anything of the sort. It was just an analogy that popped into my mind, and I don't think it was a particularly bad analogy.
But I don't think your unwarranted indignation adds anything to the question that I was trying to ask to other HNers. Unfortunately, that question was at the end of my comment, past the point where you stopped reading.
I know this is the norm for the hosting industry, but to anyone else, not being able to host a chat server (IRC) is blaming the victim.
It is as ridiculous as banning airports because it attracts suicide bombers.
The longer hosting companies put off developing a real solution to this problem, the more DDoS attacks are going to happen because they are so effective at getting servers kicked.
A little off topic, but I've always felt a slightly uneasy about the concept of "attracting" DDoS attacks. Sure, if you knowingly piss off a bunch of script kiddies, you're attracting attacks. But it seems that nowadays, any site that hosts user-generated content is at risk of being attacked for any random reason. And yet, a lot of people talk about "customers who attract attacks" as if those customers are to blame. It almost sounds like blaming women who wear certain types of clothes for attracting sex crime.
Of course, the fact that you didn't do anything to provoke an attack might be irrelevant when your upstream faces a choice between cutting you loose and eating hundreds of thousands of dollars. People need to do what they need to do to protect their networks. Nonetheless, I'm curious what you guys think about the concept of "attracting attacks". If you blame the victim even a little bit, does that affect your judgment about what should be done in the case of an attack?