8 years ago
57
Reddit alternative Voat knocked offline by DDoS cyberattack
Censorship-free social bookmarking site Voat received huge amounts of traffic during the Reddit lockdown
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Question from the ignorant, Is there a defense one can put in place against a DDoS attack? if so, is it hard to implement? The reason I'm asking is, my first thought when I saw this post was, is it possible that snapzu could be next? It would suck to find out that we were being hit.
Just want to know if we need to just accept that one day the crosshairs will move and the storm will just have to be waited out.
Well... There's a universal truth about an attack, someone must eat it. However, if you are smart about it, you can detect the pattern of an attack and drop requests after making the minimum amount of work possible.
My former employer offered DDoS protection by putting sophisticated filters and beefy machines to soak attacks. By putting all those huge resources in common, it was possible to help everyone at once. Attacks were mitigated in seconds, it was quite beautiful to see.
I don't think anyone matches those defenses right now.
And now for the good news : this is where snapzu is hosted! :D
I'm glad to hear that :)
I doubt we are next. We really aren't in anybodies radars. We haven't pissed anybody off.
You'd be suprised how many people you can piss off by being a pleasant person.
That statement really makes me sad. Even more so because its true.
That we know of... :)
To an extent. You could have enough throughput that it's very hard for it become bottle necked through requests. But if the bot net is large enough you need the infrastructure the size of major companies like amazon and microsoft to withstand one.
Or... You could host at a datacenter that does have those resources. Snapzu does.
We'on on one of the safest places on the Internet as far as DDoS attacks are concerned.
This keeps happening, and I feel sorry for voat.
To be honest, the only reason I tried Snapzu is because Voat was offline every time I tried signing up. Can't say I regret doing so.
Lol, luckily my friends kept trying to invite me to snapzu and I never had to even look at Voat, I still wonder what the community is like over there, but I have heard numerous bad things from it.
It's the crowd that likes fatpeoplehate and coontown. You most likely have a better time here without these guys.
Voat isn't exclusively those 2 groups. They make up a higher percentage than they did on reddit because voat doesn't have hundreds of millions of accounts. Voat touts the same tenets that reddit was founded upon. Those people were railroaded off reddit under the guise of harassment for calling the ceo of imgur names. Some special interest groups wanted them gone, got their wish, and are now harassing Voat because they don't want anyone saying anything that makes them uncomfortable. That, in turn, makes those haters victims I their own right, and they scream even louder. The sjw crowd from reddit is pushing the buttons of the hate crowd to provoke a response they can use as an excuse for their actions, and the hate crowd is using the button pushing from the sjw crowd as validation for their beliefs. I wouldn't be too surprised to see this end up in court in the next couple of years.
Well, FPH was doxing people, not sure about the others. Once you start doxing you are going a few steps beyond calling people names.
They weren't doxxing anyone. They were using pictures of imgur execs that were put onine by imgur. They merely added insults to already public I formation. Calling that doxxing is akin to saying I doxxed Bill Gates by writing "4 eyes" on his Microsoft headshot.
They weren't kicked out for doxxing anyway. They were kicked out for harassing the ceo of imgur which required reddit to create a new policy to justify. I'm not defending their actions or their ideas, but reddit's reasonING and handling of the situation were petty, shady, and selective. SRS does the same things FPH did on a much larger scale, but they hide behind people's fear of being labeled any kind of -ist.
I feel like there could be a case to be made that they were infringing on the speech of other redditors. There was the case where a overweight girl posted her dress to /r/sewing, and then some "priceless" individual crossposted that girl's image to fatpeoplehate. That girl then messaged the mods asking to have the post taken down, and instead of having it taken down, the mods put her image in the sidebar of FPH to mock her. They were making it unsafe and hostile for people to try and post in their OWN subreddits and no other subreddit was trying to pull shit like that.
I'm not saying they're not assholes, they are, but if you post a picture on a site with hundreds of millions of people, you've implicitly given permission to those hundreds of millions of people to repurpose your picture. Maybe you become Ridiculously Photogenic Guy. Maybe you become Derpy Beyonce. If you put yourself in the public's eye, you have to take the bad with the good.
Victimization has become a bullying tactic over the past 20 years. SRS are far more hostile than any other group on reddit. Those niche hate groups keep their shit in their own little subreddits where they can be ignored by normal people. SRS infects the whole site, and now they're monetizing: http://www.zazzle.com/fempire
I don't care that FPH is gone from reddit. I'm concerned with how they were ousted, and how an even worse, more vocal, more invasive group is allowed to go unchecked for doing the same things the FPH policy prohibits. Where's my safe space to disagree with radical feminism?
I'm going to have to disagree. A website can take a stand that they will not allow that kind of behavior, and that's exactly the harassment that reddit admins were saying they will not tolerate. From a philosophical standpoint, either the reddit admins prevent a certain type of speech, or they give FPH the power to prevent a certain type of speech. There's not really an in between. You have to make the judgement call of which speech you want to protect; the speech of the hated or the hateful?
I'm not really sure what you're saying there. To me, SRS and FPH are 2 sides of the same coin. FPH made said mean things and made stupid photoshops of overweight people in their own subreddit. SRS links threads to send their minions all over reddit to shout down anyone who doesn't yield to their radical ideals and derail any discussions that make them uncomfortable. They pay lip service to reddiquette in their sidebar, but they don't even bother using non-participation links. I consider that far worse than anything FPH ever did. You can't ban one without banning the other, and neither should be banned for doing something that wasn't against policy or the law when they did it. What's the next policy they'll apply retroactively to only some users?
I wasn't even talking about SRS, but what they do is not even close to the same. There are only about 70,000 subscribers and it seems like whenever some racist or overly offensive person gets disagreed with they go "Oh it's SRS again! They're brigading me!" Even when they haven't been linked to SRS. I've asked plenty of times for evidence that SRS is harrassing other users and haven't actually got anything, and they don't stick people in the sidebar. Fatpeoplehate had over 150,000 subscribers. That's twice as big. They brigaded a suicidewatch post even. People think SRS does more than it actually does because that's literally a part of their act. Whenever something happens on reddit, SRS will ALWAYS claim to be behind it, because they want to egg on the conspiracy theorists. Bottom line is you will never see a subreddit like SRS jizzing on pictures of people they don't like, or photoshopping their faces onto porn stars, so I don't get why they're the onse people complain about.
A lot of people like voat, and dislike snapzu because of censorship. It seems snapzu prohibits personal attacks and hate speech, and for some reason people don't like that. I guess they want to keep their options open, or they just don't understand the first amendment
That's currently my favorite thing about Snapzu though. I'd much rather have a clean one, than something free that I don't want to be a part of.
Some people like to say people who want that are just looking for a big hugfest. I'm not necessarily looking for a hugfest, I just don't want a stabfest.
Personally those reasons are why I regularly use both. Snapzu has great communities that stay focused on civil discourse. Voat has great communities as well, but they can be a bit more "raw", which I also want from time to time.
I've also heard lack of porn a complaint. But really you got to diversify your jerkin anyway. I think people have gotten so used to the tailored curated subreddits and tumblrs some people have forgotten how to forage for porn.
Well of course I still use Reddit for that.
It's like my bank keeps telling me, gotta diversify.
But yeah, I don't get why it has to be an all or nothing. I read through the handful of things I care to look at on Reddit about halfway through the day unless I'm super busy and dont get lunch or something.
I am glad that I did not ever join that ignorance than.
I tried Voat for awhile, it's mainly just another Reddit clone filled with people who hate Reddit. Edit: forgot to add that a lot of them are racist assholes and for some reason hate fat people too.
Voat is basically a reddit clone, so it doesn't add much to the online experience. It's a ten year old interface on a new site.
It's hard for a young site to deal with the influx of users they're receiving. I definitely prefer this site, but I can't say I don't feel bad for them. Their guys are probably working pretty hard to deal with everything that's going on and they can't catch a break.
That's unfortunate. but it's probably due to the people they are harboring there, all the FatPeopleHate, etc guys. I'm sure there's some form of vigilante justice going on and a keyboard cowboy is trying to make them suffer for it.
A DDoS isn't that hard these days either. You can just pay someone with a botnet to do it.
Yea, the funny thing is, there's an application for it LOIC, you can create your own botnet.
not really. DDOS is distributed. Same with the implicatons of a botnet. You need multiple exploited computers from multiple different internet locations to execute this.
Doing it yourself, out of your house wont allow you to consume more than your contracted ISP bandwidth. So you would need to exploit other machines on different networks to form a botnet.
DDOS is harder to mitigate because the connections come from thousands, if not more, public IP's using the cumulative bandwith to choke the target (assuming the target has less bandwidth available than the aggregate of the infected source machines..
However you can CONTRIBUTE to a ddos by running LOIC. Which I wouldn't recommend to most as the legalities behind knowingly doing so are dubious at best I believe.
I was on voat, then found out that it was well... hateful. So I came here.
It seems that Voat is like a marriage of Reddit and 4chan.
Me too!
I just don't get the obsession with Voat. People complained about all the hate speech on Reddit and how the community is falling apart, so they switch to an alternative that is almost exactly like the place they claimed to hate. The bonus is that all the bigots and hate mongers are already there. It's kind of like having a car you hate that always breaks down, so one day you buy a new car except it's the exact same car with a different paint job. At least Snapzu has systems in place to proactively combat abuse and hate while also rewarding users who positively contribute to the community.
I think you've got the reason backwards. People went to voat because reddit was banning hate subreddits. People who went to voat went because they wanted absolute free speech.
Well,that is because the people who are going to Voat tend to have slight sympathies(at the very least) towards those objectionable groups.
They're a lightning rod for people targeting so called "hate groups" right now. So it's no surprise that they're dealing with this sort of thing. 8chan regularly gets the same being another brash speech platform. Hopefully they can recover and continue to serve the people that want an unmoderated environment. I have no objection to them having it.
Unfortunately, the brigade of people whose feeling are hurt by the mere existence of something they disagree with do object to them having it.
Yeah, that's the unfortunate part. I just wish the DDoSs can stop eventually.
This has SRS written all over it.
Reddit is becoming more and more like that unstable ex-girlfriend/boyfriend that always threatens to hurt themselves if you ever leave, and it's getting sad. They're literally becoming the "Overly Attached Girlfriend" of websites.
This is vengeful asscunts from Reddit acting out. Voat is OK, just a little lame, but Reddit is a stinking hole these days.
They get more servers and then get DDoS'd. Those poor Voat guys just can't catch a break.
I tried it out for a bit and it just seems like Reddit Lite, so I don't really understand the big rush to switch over. I guess having a smaller Admin team and more transparent Mod logs is a plus, but overall it's seems like a big wank.
Yeah. I feel sorry for the admins and mods trying to rush to put out these fires and mitigate these attacks.
They recently switched to CloudFlare which has DDOS protection, which appears to be working well.
I kind of have to feel sorry for voat. It started as an earnest effort to create a friendly, open community promoting free speech and ended up being a place where a lot of people who abuse free speech make their home. Hopefully they'll be able to clean house a little to prevent things like this happening in the future.
I hope that what's going on with Voat won't happen here!!
The thing is voat is always offline :S
whether its being DDOSd or being incapable of handling the traffic load, the reddit migration affected them much more than us, in fact we were not affected at all.
Err... The first day after Victoria's firing, our servers got hammered by huge amounts of traffic, and needed to be taken down for maintenance for a few hours. So, I wouldn't say we were not affected at all.
ooooopsss.... XD
I didn't know xD I thought we came out of that "undamaged" but I wasn't around when that happened I was still on reddit, only moved a week or so after.
I dont know, to me it looks like a PR stunt. I think they are crying DDoS when it's actually their crappy unscaleable infrastructure kicking the bucket every time there is a larger than expected crowd. And it seems to be working.
Odd, I'm on it right now. Hasn't been down all day, or yesterday, or the day before that, or the day before that.
I'm kind of glad. It being down made me come here. Voat is basically a straight up reddit clone with giving topics more freedom in design from what I could tell.