Hacker News: alexforster

New comment by alexforster in "Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT"

alexforster — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 04:58:23 +0000

DDG is just repackaged Bing. Always has been. I remember looking into them when I was ready to job-hop many years ago, and they asked for dedication to their search engine as their foremost requirement for employment. It's the "drop-shipping" equivalent of search engines.

New comment by alexforster in "Open-source drawing tool – Excalidraw"

alexforster — Sun, 03 Dec 2023 01:52:41 +0000

I'm constantly DM'd at work about how I'm able to create the "cool drawings" in my blog/wiki posts, and I enthusiastically point to excalidraw.com.

I have a background in vector illustration, which is all about creating subpixel-perfect designs. I'm also a bit of a perfectionist, which I think a lot of people here can relate to. I mention this because the reason Excalidraw really works for me is that it frees me from worrying about design. When you literally can't create something that looks "perfect", you're freed up to just sketch your idea without worrying about the visual representation.

New comment by alexforster in "Show HN: Developed from my Prison cell: A Libcurl TUI HTTP Client in Rust."

alexforster — Sat, 11 Nov 2023 00:21:02 +0000

That post was fascinating. You are a model example of what progressive prison reform can accomplish and your story should be getting major press coverage if it hasn't already.

New comment by alexforster in "Nghttp3 1.0.0 – HTTP/3 library written in C"

alexforster — Sun, 22 Oct 2023 02:21:52 +0000

I don't think it's responsible to replace http/1.1 with either of these protocols. They both seem like complex beasts with poorly understood corner cases and little consideration for the abuse potential.

New DDoS amplification vector in the wild

alexforster — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 16:27:40 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.cloudflare.com/slp-new-ddos-amplification-vector/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35702710

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by alexforster in "Vectis IP Announces Call for Patents Essential to the Opus codec"

alexforster — Tue, 11 Oct 2022 05:31:58 +0000

> In fact, there are so many patent farms disguised as businesses I challenge you to sit, think of something, and search for a patent for it.

Nice try, Opposing Counsel.

New comment by alexforster in "You don’t want to be on Cloudflare’s naughty list"

alexforster — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 17:12:06 +0000

> It’s a MikroTik running RouterOS

https://google.com/search?q=mikrotik+botnet

These things are the absolute scourge of the internet.

New comment by alexforster in "Richard Li owns a personal top level domain"

alexforster — Mon, 05 Sep 2022 06:43:16 +0000

This is easily searchable, so... I doubt you're seriously looking, but...

> The evaluation fee is US$185,000. Applicants will be required to pay a US$5,000 deposit fee per requested application slot when registering.

https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/global-support/faqs...

New comment by alexforster in "Richard Li owns a personal top level domain"

alexforster — Mon, 05 Sep 2022 00:49:07 +0000

Give several hundred thousand dollars to ICANN.

New comment by alexforster in "Hottest May in History for Texas"

alexforster — Mon, 30 May 2022 01:24:32 +0000

CBS Austin is a Sinclair affiliate.

New comment by alexforster in "I won free load testing"

alexforster — Mon, 02 May 2022 16:09:18 +0000

Many of them are unintentional: a device sitting on the open internet has some vulnerability and gets exploited. Bad guy sets up a proxy on the device and uses it to click a bunch of ads using bots, or crawl Google results, or launch attacks, etc. Or, as mentioned below, they could simply be the result of misconfiguration.

Some of them are very intentional: https://www.torproject.org/

New comment by alexforster in "I won free load testing"

alexforster — Mon, 02 May 2022 05:04:08 +0000

Unfortunately, this type of abuse is essentially only acted on if you either (a) cause some kind of problem for ops at the VPS company, or (b) the victim tells on you. Even then, the absolute worst thing that will happen to you is your account will be closed. There is just no way on the modern internet to investigate/prosecute these kinds of things. That's why one of our primary goals with the free Cloudflare plan is to invert the problem: make DDoS go away by making it it free to mitigate.

New comment by alexforster in "I won free load testing"

alexforster — Mon, 02 May 2022 04:31:27 +0000

This is only if you have _no_ idea how to use very basic open-source tools to wreak havoc via some open proxies. The real cost of launching small-scale attacks like this is $5/month on your favorite VPS provider.

Pipefail: How a missing shell option slowed Cloudflare down

alexforster — Wed, 06 Apr 2022 15:49:52 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.cloudflare.com/pipefail-how-a-missing-shell-option-slowed-cloudflare-down/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30933549

Points: 30

# Comments: 1

New comment by alexforster in "Pipefail: A missing shell option slowed Cloudflare down"

alexforster — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 23:11:01 +0000

Author here – you are correct, I tried to golf a relatively long script down to one line, and I failed :) The post has been updated.

Pipefail: How a missing shell option slowed Cloudflare down

alexforster — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 16:09:22 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.cloudflare.com/pipefail-how-a-missing-shell-option-slowed-cloudflare-down/?hn

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30920792

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

CVE-2022-26143: TP240PhoneHome reflection/amplification DDoS attack vector

alexforster — Tue, 08 Mar 2022 17:41:46 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cve-2022-26143/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30602912

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by alexforster in "Patent case against GNOME resolved"

alexforster — Thu, 21 May 2020 12:51:09 +0000

I don't understand the negative reactions here.

Gnome got Rothschild to agree to never sue another open-source project again. That's a huge concession and an outcome that's arguably better than a few invalidated patents.

New comment by alexforster in "Is anyone using the non Pro/Air Macbook for iOS app development?"

alexforster — Thu, 21 Mar 2019 12:14:38 +0000

Care to share that adapter model?

New comment by alexforster in "Amazon Caught Selling Counterfeits of Publisher’s Computer Books–Again"

alexforster — Tue, 19 Feb 2019 15:11:06 +0000

My last two Amazon purchases ended up being counterfit, even after spending a ton of time trying to avoid counterfits. I'm still going to use my fake electric toothbrush heads and fake Apple 5W USB charger, but I'm not using Amazon anymore.