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Google Releases Project Shield To Fight Against DDoS Attacks (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Google has launched a free tool to help all media sites and and other organisations protect themselves against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. The Project Shield initiative allows websites to redirect traffic through Google's existing infrastructure, in order to keep their content online in the face of such attacks. Google will aim to work with smaller sites which do not necessarily have the money or are not fully equipped with strong enough infrastructure to the attacks. However, the Shield tool has also been made available to larger outlets, such as popular news sites and human rights platforms.
Nothing is free citizen.
Seriously, the size of some of the DDoS attempts is massive. That's a lot of bandwidth wasted, and there will be a dollar impact associated with this. What additional angle will google be targeting to make money off this?
More information for them to mine, which is what they really crave. Also this just seems like another step along the way for Google to become the internet. They don't actually like the decentralised nature of the internet so they try to crush the competition by giving away free stuff for a while with the hope of getting people dependent on that service and later charging for it. What would the likes of cloudflare have to say about this?
From the engadget/Wired article ...
"To use Project Shield, a site has to give Google visibility into who's visiting -- something likely to rankle the company's privacy critics. But Google says that it'll only keep logs for two weeks, after which the data will be stored in aggregate and used to learn more about attacks. The company also notes that the data it collects won't be used in its advertising programs."
The company also notes that the data it collects won't be used in its advertising programs. [But by using Project Shield you and your agents and seven generation of your children's children agree and that we can change the Terms and Conditions of use, in a 64 page-long document of legalise, that only 1 in 100 people will ever read and/or notice, at any time.]"
DaveyJJ