Slashdot Mirror
Kuro5hin Forced Down By DOS
Yenya writes: "It seems that Kuro5hin is being
shut down as a result of the automated "spam" attacks in previous
three days. It is a shame that good work of Rusty and other
volunteers can be destroyed by some clueless attackers.
I hope they will not give up and try to resurrect the site
soon." Yenya was one of many who wrote about this - I personally like kuro5hin and I hope they can find a way to get things working again. Hopefully we'll get more news on it today - stayed tuned.
And very, very infuriating that the actions of one individual can take away something that has provided so much pleasure and information for so many.
If you, Mr Skript Kiddy, are reading this, beware. This is not the end of the story.
Speaking with Rusty and the gang on IRC I could feel the frustration and anger mounting since Monday.
I guess the best way of describing it is as if you provided a reading room of your *own* books, catalogued on your *own* time for people to use. And then one person came in, tore up the books, pissed on the floor and then disappeared.
It's a sickener and no mistake.
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Peter
Let's compound kuro5hin's problems with DOS attacks by posting not one, but 2 links to their site on the front page of /. That should definately help them get their bandwidth back...
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I literally just started taking a liking to the site, and was really getting into the atmosphere they had. I'm quite disappointed (yet again) that we're going to have to fight off people doing this sort of thing for fun.
One possibility is to turn off his 'Anonymous Hero' functionality for the time-being. Rusty's site has email verification for new accounts; should the spammer start manufacturing email accounts it may be easier to track him down, and even if not, you can delay the auto-verification emails to once an hour. It's also likely easier to add a 5-post a day limit to a particular account than it is to an anonymous user.
Another temporary solution would be to only allow logged-in users to post/submit as Anonymous Heros. A bit backwards, but combined with the items above, could make it easier to track down the yucksters and reduce spam in the meantime.
These temporary measures are certainly not ideal, but tough times call for tough measures. These work better on kuro5hin than they would on a bigger site like slashdot. Hopefully they will frustrate the spammers long enough that they can grow up, or at least let the site exist in a 'police-state' while they come up with more savvy protection.
Just because you're floating doesn't mean you haven't drowned. - They Might Be Giants, Dark and Metric
Its user base was much smaller than Slashdot, and as of the time the attacks started, discussion tended to be more "useful" than what we have here at Slashdot now, since it hadn't attracted the attention of most of the internet. I've been around Slashdot long enough that it reminds me of what this place used to be like in the early days (from my perspective, late 1997 - early 1998).
If you want to have an idea of what the flavor of Kuro5hin was, have a look at scoop.kuro5hin.org, the development site for the scoop engine, the back end of Kuro5hin. I assume the engine is still under development despite the shutdown, and I certainly hope it continues to be developed in the face of all this crap.
I'm not dumb enough or idealistic enough to have expected that Kuro5hin wouldn't have eventually been overrun with the same kind of gargage that Slashdot gets every day, and I don't expect that it will never happen again to sites like Slashdot or Kuro5hin again either. It's sad, but probably just a fact of life that we're just going to have to deal with idiots. Slashdot has shown that technical solutions aren't capable of solving other peoples' personal problems, even though they can seem to make them manageable. I guess the fact of the matter is that no amount of good coding (or bad coding either, for that matter) can keep a jackass from being a jackass.
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