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The internet is no longer a safe haven

(brainbaking.com)
253 points akyuu | 1 comments | 16 Nov 25 13:12 UTC | HN request time: 0.203s | source
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embedding-shape ◴[16 Nov 25 15:56 UTC] No.45945999[source]▶
> The internet is no longer a safe haven for software hobbyists

Maybe I've just had bad luck, but since I started hosting my own websites back around 2005 or so, my servers have always been attacked basically from the moment they come online. Even more so when you attach any sort of DNS name to it, especially when you use TLS and the certificates, guessing because they end up in a big index that is easily accessible (the "transparency logs"). Once you start sharing your website, it again triggers an avalanche of bad traffic, and the final boss is when you piss of some organization and (I'm assuming) they hire some bad actor to try to make you offline.

Dealing with crawlers, bot nets, automation gone wrong, pissed of humans and so on have been almost a yearly thing for me since I started deploying stuff to the public internet. But again, maybe I've had bad luck? Hosted stuff across wide range of providers, and seems to happen across all of them.

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1. 1vuio0pswjnm7 ◴[17 Nov 25 16:45 UTC] No.45955317[source]▶
"Even more so when you attach any sort of DNS name to it, especially when you use TLS and the certificates, guessing because they end up in a big index that is easily accessible (the "transparency logs")."

I have accessed websites that do not use ICANN DNS nor TLS, sometimes on ports other than common ones like 80, 443, etc.

The term "website" to me means an IP address from which an operator publishes hypertext (HTML) and responds to HTTP requests

But others might define "website" differently

On home network for experimentation I create own TLDs in custom root.zone and use non-TLS per packet encryption to serve HTML over UDP instead of TCP

The blog post refers to "safe haven"

Usually "safe haven" means there is something that one is seeking protection from

It is not clear from the blog post what the author believes "the internet" was previously a safe haven from

Not to mention the www != the internet

It's possible the broader internet, including many "unused" ports between 0-65536, could be a "safe haven" from the web what with "AI bots"