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Comment Pay your protection money (Score 2) 197

by Ryan Amos (#39627753) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Experience Handling DDoS Attacks On a Mid-Tier Site?

To most of the commenters: WTF? You have obviously never been involved in a DDOS attack. Here is why:

1) A typical DDOS attack in 2012 will send traffic measured in hundreds of MBPS/GBPS down your pipe. Not only is this a massive volume of traffic, but almost all of it is in the form of SYN/ACK packets (which are exponentially more difficult for your frontend servers to handle; especially when they are never followed by a FIN.) This is many orders of magnitude more difficult to deal with than what most sites are scoped for. You cannot just "handle it," we're talking about something that is often 7-8 standard deviations away from your "normal" peak traffic levels. In other words, your infrastructure cannot handle it. Because if you overbuilt your infrastructure to those levels, you are an idiot. DDoS protection services cost a fraction of what it would cost you to build a network that could handle that.
2) Your normal DDOS doesn't come from one "large user." (hence, the first D in DDoS.) It comes from thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of IP addresses, all at once. Botnets? Yeah, they are real things, and they can be really destructive. And bad people control them, and you may have fired their mother at one point. Who knows why they have it in for you, but they probably will at some point.
3) Even if your infrastructure could handle an amount of legitimate traffic equal to the volume the DDoS will produce over the span of 6-12 hours, you would then have to pay for it. I promise you, you don't want to be in that position. Most hosting providers probably won't make you pay for all of it, but they will become real interested in what you're hosting that would make someone want to DDoS you in the first place. And your boss will probably make you find a proxy solution to solve the problem; so why not be proactive about it so you can say "Yeah, those /b/tards decided to DDoS us, but I took care of it 3 months ago."

TL;DR: DDoS proxy services like CloudFlare exist for a reason: it's simply not economically feasible to overbuild your infrastructure to the point where you could survive such an attack. Pay the man, keep your site up, and ignore the punks smashing cars in the street because you have insurance, so fuck em.
Communications

FCC Publishes "White Spaces" Rules 63

Posted by timothy from the dude-white-spaces-totally-rule dept.
Stellian writes "The Federal Communications Commission adopted a Second Report and Order that establishes rules to allow new, sophisticated wireless devices to operate in broadcast television spectrum on a secondary basis at locations where that spectrum is open. It's the first time we have access to clear specifications for these devices, dubbed TVBDs — 'TV band devices' by the FCC. The published guidelines allow manufactures to create protocols and build compatible devices, which could be available in 18 Months, according to Larry Page. The full PDF text of this Second R&O is published on the FCC site."
Music

Apple Admits iPod Is From 1970s UK 358

Posted by CmdrTaco from the thats-why-mine-is-filled-with-beegees dept.
MattSparkes writes "Apple has all but admitted that a British man invented the iPod over three decades ago in the 1970s. Unfortunately, he let the patent run out. When another company tried to grab a portion of its iPod profits, though, Apple went running to him to defend them in court. In return, it looks like he's in for a share of the cash generated from the sale of 163 million iPods."

RealNetworks To Introduce a Simple DVD Copier 244

Posted by CmdrTaco from the why-must-there-always-be-drm dept.
langelgjm writes "The New York Times reports that RealNetworks will begin selling RealDVD today, a software program designed to make copying DVDs a trivial task for the average user. Unlike free alternatives, which generally require some technical knowledge and make it difficult to copy an entire DVD with extras, etc., RealDVD claims to be able to copy the entire DVD, menus and all. While sure to raise the ire of Hollywood, the program does have significant limitations: the DVDs it makes will only be playable on the computer where they were created; or, users can pay $20 per computer to play the DVDs on up to five additional computers."
Programming

The Next Browser Scripting Language Is — C? 375

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the a-home-for-all-of-that-old-code dept.
mad.frog writes to tell us that in a recent talk by Adobe's Scott Petersen he demonstrated a new toolchain that he has been working on (and soon to be open-sourced) that allows C code to be run by the Tamarin virtual machine. "The toolchain includes lots of other details, such as a custom POSIX system call API and a C multimedia library that provides access to Flash. And there's some things that Petersen had to add to Tamarin, such as a native byte array that maps directly to RAM, thereby allowing the VM's "emulation" of memory to have only a minor overhead over the real thing. The end result is the ability to run a wide variety of existing C code in Flash at acceptable speeds. Petersen demonstrated a version of Quake running in a Flash app, as well as a C-based Nintendo emulator running Zelda; both were eminently playable, and included sound effects and music."
The Internet

Pakistan YouTube Block Breaks the World 343

Posted by CmdrTaco from the oops-they-did-it-again dept.
Allen54 noted a followup to yesterday's story about Pakistan's decision to block YouTube. He notes that "The telecom company that carries most of Pakistan's traffic, PCCW, has found it necessary to shut Pakistan off from the Internet while they filter out the malicious routes that a Pakistani ISP, PieNet, announced earlier today. Evidently PieNet took this step to enforce a decree from the Pakistani government that ISP's must block access to YouTube because it was a source of blasphemous content. YouTube has announced more granular routes so that at least in the US they supercede the routes announced by PieNet. The rest of the world is still struggling."
The Internet

Hi, I Want To Meet (17.6% of) You! 372

Posted by samzenpus from the there-is-someone-for-everyone-except-you dept.
Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton wants to make online dating better. Here's how he wants to do it. "Suppose you're an entrepreneur who wants to break into the online personals business, but you face impossible odds because everybody wants to go where everybody else already is (basically, either Match.com or Yahoo Personals). Here is a suggestion that would give you an edge. In a nutshell: Each member lists the criteria for people that they are looking for. Then when people contact them, they choose whether or not to respond. After the system has been keeping track of who contacts you and who you respond to, the site lists your profile in other people's search results along with your criteria-specific response rate: "Lisa has responded to 56% of people who contacted her who meet her criteria." Read on for the rest of his thoughts.

The D&D Designers Answer Your Questions 211

Posted by Zonk from the all-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder dept.
In January we had the chance to ask the designers of Dungeons and Dragons Fourth Edition a few questions about the new version of the classic tabletop game. The Wizards of the Coast Community Manager, Mike "Gamer_Zer0" Lescault put our questions to members of the development team, including: Andrew Collins, Chris Perkins, Scott Rouse, and Sara Girard. Some of the questions weren't quite answered in as much detail as I would have liked. That said, they've given us a great opportunity to follow up on their responses. If you have a follow-up question, put it in a comment below (one question per comment please). We'll pass on five of the best, and the designers will answer your question on-camera at the Dungeons and Dragons Experience at the end of this month. We'll post the video to the site early in March. This is a great chance to put a face to some legendary designer names, and get your unanswered issues resolved. Get asking.
Networking

Comcast Cheating On Bandwidth Testing? 287

Posted by kdawson from the tuning-for-the-benchmark dept.
dynamo52 writes "I'm a freelance network admin serving mainly small business clients. Over the last few months, I have noticed that any time I run any type of bandwidth testing for clients with Comcast accounts, the results have been amazingly fast — with some connections, Speakeasy will report up to 15 Mbps down and 4 Mbps up. Of course, clients get nowhere near this performance in everyday usage. (This can be quite annoying when trying to determine whether a client needs to switch over to a T1 or if their current ISP will suffice.) Upon further investigation, it appears that Comcast is delivering this bandwidth only for a few seconds after any new request and it is immediately throttled down. Doing a download and upload test using a significantly large file (100+ MB) yields results more in line with everyday usage experience, usually about 1.2 Mbps down and about 250 Kbps up (but it varies). Is there any valid reason why Comcast would front-load transfers in this way, or is it merely an effort to prevent end-users from being able to assess their bandwidth accurately? Does anybody know of other ISPs using similar practices?"
Communications

Swearing at Work is Bleeping Good For You 421

Posted by CmdrTaco from the now-shut-the-bleep-up-you-bleeping-bleep dept.
coondoggie writes "This is the kind of news that your HR folks don't want to hear, but researchers today said letting workers swear at will in the workplace can benefit employees and employers. The study found regular use of profanity to express and reinforce solidarity among staff, enabling them to express their feelings, such as frustration, and develop social relationships, according to researchers at the University of East Anglia (UES). Researchers said their aim was to challenge leadership styles and suggest ideas for best practice. "Employees use swearing on a continuous basis, but not necessarily in a negative, abusive manner. Swearing was as a social phenomenon to reflect solidarity and enhance group cohesiveness, or as a psychological phenomenon to release stress, " the study stated." I'm sure the discussion and tags on this story will be completely G Rated ;)
Windows

Playing Music Slows Vista Network Performance? 748

Posted by kdawson from the sound-of-your-network-on-vista dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Over the months since Vista's release, there has been no doubt about the reduced level of network performance experienced compared to Windows XP. However, some users over at the 2CPU forums have discovered an unexplained connection with audio playback resulting in a cap at approximately 5%-10% of total network throughput. Whenever any audio is being sent to a sound card (even, several users report, while paused), network performance is instantly reduced. As soon as the audio is stopped, the throughput begins to climb to its expected speed. It's a tough one for users — what do you pick, sound or speed? So much for multi-tasking."
Businesses

Microsoft Buys Ad Firm for $6 Billion 167

Posted by Zonk from the a-bunch-of-people-just-got-really-quite-wealthy dept.
bain writes "The BBC is reporting that Microsoft has agreed to buy the digital marketing firm Aquantive, in what will be its biggest ever acquisition. The software giant spent almost $6 billion acquiring the agency, in its first bid to tackle the online advertising market. 'The deal is expected to be completed in the first half of 2008, subject to regulation. Microsoft said the expensive price tag was worth it to access the complementary technology of Aquantive. The firm will continue to operate from Seattle as part of Microsoft's online operations, and will help the software giant broaden the scope of services its MSN consumer internet unit can offer. Microsoft is the latest technology firm to pounce on the shrinking independent online advertising sector.'"
Microsoft

Microsoft Details FOSS Patent Breaches 576

Posted by Zonk from the just-a-little-bit-dangerous dept.
CptRevelation writes "Microsoft has released more detailed information on the patents supposedly in breach by the open-source community. Despite their accusations of infringement, they state they would rather do licensing deals instead of any legal action. 'Open-source programs step on 235 Microsoft patents, the company said. Free Linux software violates 42 patents. Graphical user interfaces, the way menus and windows look on the screen, breach 65. E-mail programs step on 15, and other programs touch 68 other patents, the company said. The patent figures were first reported by Fortune magazine. Microsoft also said Open Office, an open-source program supported in part by Sun Microsystems Inc., infringes on 45 patents. Sun declined to comment on the allegation.'"

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