Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is “column” the right word? Anyway, apparently I also coined the Very Specific Object nomenclature now sporadically used in the 3D printing community. Yeah, that was me. This must be how Cory Doctorow feels all the time these days.
I wasn’t going to type that many commas for the sake of brevity, but it’s 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 possible addresses. I.e. 2128. So yes, I do.
I consider 96 orders (in binary, anyway) as “multiple.” Wouldn’t you?
Almost certainly. There are only 4,294,967,296 possible IPv4 addresses, i.e. 4.3ish billion, which sounds like a lot but in computer terms really isn’t. You can scan them in parallel, and if you’re an advanced script kiddie you could even exclude ranges that you know belong to unexciting organizations like Google and Microsoft, which are probably not worth spending your time messing with.
If you had a botnet of 8,000 or so devices and employed a probably unrealistically generous timeout of 15 seconds, i.e. four attempts per minute per device, you could scan the entire IPv4 range in just a hair over 93 days and that’s before excluding any known pointless address blocks. If you only spent a second on each ping you could do it in about six days.
For the sake of argument, cybercriminals are already operating botnets with upwards of 100,000 compromised machines doing their bidding. That bidding could well be (and probably is) probing random web servers for vulnerabilities. The largest confirmed botnet was the 911 S5 which contained about 19 million devices.
In my case the pattern appears to be some manner of DDoS botnet, probably not an AI scraper. The request origins are way too widespread and none of them resolve down to anything that’s obviously datacenters or any sort of commercial enterprise. It seems to be a horde of devices in consumer IP ranges that have probably be compromised by some malware package or another, and whoever is controlling it directed it at our site for some reason. It’s possible that some bad actor is using a similar malware/bot farm arrangement to scrape for AI training, but I’d doubt it. It doesn’t fit the pattern from that sort of thing from what I’ve seen.
Anyway, my script’s been playing automated whack-a-mole with their addresses and steadily filtering them all out, and I geoblocked the countries where the largest numbers of offenders were. (“This is a bad practice!” I hear the hue and cry from specific strains of bearded louts on the Internet. That says maybe, but I don’t ship to Brazil or Singapore or India, so I don’t particularly care. If someone insists on connecting through a VPN from one of those regions for some reason, that’s their own lookout.)
They seem to have more or less run out of compromised devices to throw at our server, so now I only see one such request every few minutes rather than hundreds per second. I shudder to think how long my firewall’s block list is by now.
I have and there’s nothing noteworthy, other than tons of other retailers selling the same thing of course.
That’s because it’s numerically possible to sweep through the entire IPv4 address range fairly trivially, especially if you do it in parallel with some kind of botnet, proverbially jiggling the digital door handles of every server in the world to see if any of them happen to be unlocked.
One wonders if switching to purely IPv6 will forestall this somewhat, as the number space is multiple orders of magnitude larger. That’s only security through obscurity, though, and it’s certain the bots will still find you eventually. Plus, if you have a doman name the attackers already know where you are — they can just look up your DNS record, which is what DNS records are for.
It doesn’t quite work that way, since the URL is also the model number/SKU which comes from the manufacturer. I suppose I could write an alias for just that product but it would become rather confusing.
What I did experiment with was temporarily deleting the product altogether for a day or two. (We barely ever sell it. Maybe 1 or 2 units of it a year. This is no great loss in the name of science.) This causes our page to return a 404 when you try to request it. The bots blithely ignored this, and continued attempting to hammer that nonexistent page all the same. Puzzling.
Maybe, but I also carry literally hundreds of other products from that same brand including several that are basically identical with trivial differences, and they’re only picking on that one particular SKU.
Given I’ve never seen that actually become the case even in games with engines I had to apply configuration hacks to increase the FOV, I find all of that highly unlikely.
performance implications
That might be fine for consoles which have known performance limitations built in. But if I’m on my PC, let me make that decision. Don’t try to make it for me.
I’m glowering hard at No Man’s Sky’s permanent chromatic aberration effect applied to the top 20% of your viewport at all times, here.
They also need to be able to replenish that stock at current prices. I’ve worked retail many times in my life and arguably kinda-sorta do so now (albeit largely over the Internet) and I’ve never run any store where we did not set our pricing by replacement cost rather than original invoice cost. In my current operation there are some rare exceptions for clearance items and the like, but for the vast majority of products we sell for what it’s going to cost me to get the next one to put back on that shelf, not what it cost me for the one I’m selling you now.
I don’t have any insider insight into other companies’ operations, but I imagine a lot of other retailers work things the same way. Especially these days.
One of the latter Final Fantasies did this. I think it was 13? Despite that game’s many other rather glaring shortcomings, that part was pretty neat. I agree it should definitely be standard for most RPG and heavily story driven games.
All controls should be remappable. All means all. Not most, not some, and certainly none of this bullshit where all you can do is toggle between “XBox 360 controller layout A/XBox 360 controller layout B.” This is especially true for titles on consoles, many of which still to this very day don’t allow you to remap their controls at all.
For 3D games, field of view. Far too many developers of FPS titles in particular have Console Disease, and feel it’s somehow acceptable to lock the FOV to 70° or some absurd number. If they allow you to adjust it at all they may be feeling “generous” enough to let you go as high as 90°. That’s completely unacceptable. On my 4K monitor that’s 25" from my face, I need at least 120°. Honestly, I want to see that slider go up to 180°. That’s right, I want to be able to look at your game world like a goddamned pigeon. On that note I really have to wonder what those people with those 3840x1080 überwide monitors do most of the time, other than spending their days in never ending torment.
Allow me to turn off the stupid pre-launch splash titles. Certainly at least after the first startup. I certainly don’t need to be told that nVidia is the way it’s meant to be played, or that your company licensed Havok, or who your publisher is, or who your publisher’s owner is, or who your publisher’s owner’s owner is, etc. Nobody cares. Usually instead you have to resort to replacing the .mkv or .bik files in the game folder with zero-byte text files or something. It’s dumb.
While we’re griping, and speaking of Console-Itis, does every PC game now need to have an unskippable message telling me that this game has auto save and urging me not to turn off my PC when the icon is being displayed? Really? Nobody’s going to do that. Tell me your game is a shitty console port without telling me your game is a shitty console port. To keep this on topic, let’s have a setting to turn that off, too, because it’s stupid. Off by default would be nice. Should there be an Idiot Mode toggle?
Granularity in subtitles. It seems too many games only have two settings: All subtitles off, or they assume you’re completely deaf. Typically I want to be able to read what characters are saying in their voice lines, but instead the developers also think I need to see the bottom third of my screen filled with [BOOM] [GUNFIRE] [JUKEBOX MUSIC] [FOOTSTEPS] [BOOM] [GUNFIRE] [BOOM] [BOOM] and so on and so forth, all the time. They should either categorize sounds and make their subtitling things individually selectable, or at least if they insist on making it a slider give it three or four levels: Off, cutscene/conversation dialog only, all spoken lines (“Cover me!” “Reloading!” “Never should have come here!” etc.), and then only the top level resulting in every single cricket and rustle of grass being captioned. Some games do manage to accomplish this. Many do not.
Oh, I thought of a good one to add to my wish list. I want every game to bring back the sound test menu. But they won’t, because every studio on Earth now wants you to spend an extra $15 for their game’s soundtrack. (As if it’s not all going to be on Youtube about twelve seconds after release anyway…)
Negative. Our solution is completely home grown. All artisinal-like, from scratch. I can’t imagine I reveal anything anyone would care about much except product specs, and our inventory and pricing really doesn’t change very frequently.
Even so, you think someone bothering to run a botnet to hound our site would distribute page loads across all of our products, right? Not just one. It’s nonsensical.
I run an ecommerce site and lately they’ve latched onto one very specific product with attempts to hammer its page and any of those branching from it for no readily identifiable reason, at the rate of several hundred times every second. I found out pretty quickly, because suddenly our view stats for that page in particular rocketed into the millions.
I had to insert a little script to IP ban these fuckers, which kicks in if I see a malformed user agent string or if you try to hit this page specifically more than 100 times. Through this I discovered that the requests are coming from hundreds of thousands of individual random IP addresses, many of which are located in Singapore, Brazil, and India, and mostly resolve down into those owned by local ISPs and cell phone carriers.
Of course they ignore your robots.txt as well. This smells like some kind of botnet thing to me.
I’ve got a Timex Expedition that I’ve had since high school. That means I bought it some time during the early Triassic. Its stainless steel backplate is held on with four Phillips screws and I have never in many decades had any problems undoing them when I need to replace the battery every six years or so. It remains resolutely waterproof. I know this because it lives outside rather frequently: at the moment I have it stuck to the gauge cluster on one of my motorcycles with Velcro.
There’s also a small chance it’s a lame train of inside jokes, or a string of Monty Python quotes you’ve seen a thousand times before.
I’ll start:
“This. Is an *Ex-*parrot!”
You can deflect leaping headcrabs this way (or block them with a held object, although this causes you to automatically drop it afterwards) but as far as I know it deals no damage to enemies.
Apparently Valve experimented with melee weapons early in development, but intentionally decided to cut them because of the perceived lack of impact and weightlessness of held items, but the main thing was that playtesters kept getting their long melee weapons snagged on stuff. Alyx notably does not allow your hands or held items to intersect with other objects, nor does it let your hands get too far away from your body’s position to prevent shenanigans. If you unexpectedly hook your crowbar on a door frame or a table or something you’ll find yourself inexplicably leashed to it after walking a couple of feet and then not be able to find your hands.
This article goes into some detail. Apparently the crowbar specifically was removed to prevent players from assuming they were Gordon Freeman, despite the constant stream of evidence to the contrary. But it doesn’t seem like too much of a leap to replace that with Alyx grabbing a random length of pipe or chunk of rebar or something from the multitudes of trashed urban environments she traverses throughout the game.
Anyway, as soon as modding support was opened up for HL:A the first things that inevitably appeared were about 4,987 mods that added the crowbar back in. So it’s an easy enough wish to fulfill, if that’s what you want.
There are several things you could do in that regard, I’m sure. Configure your services to listen only on weird ports, disable ICMP pings, jigger your scripts to return timeouts instead of error messages… Many of which might make your own life difficult, as well.
All of these are also completely counterproductive if you want your hosted service, whatever it is, to be accessible to others. Or maybe not, if you don’t. The point is, the bots don’t have to find every single web service and site with 100% accuracy. The hackers only have to get lucky once and stumble their way into e.g. someone’s unsecured web host where they can push more malware, or a pile of files they can encrypt and demand a ransom, or personal information they can steal, or content they can scrape with their dumb AI, or whatever. But they can keep on trying until the sun burns out basically for free, and you have to stay lucky and under the radar forever.
In my case just to name an example I kind of need my site to be accessible to the public at large if I want to, er, actually make any sales.