Put Down the Pitchforks; Amazon Didn't Steal Your Dunning-Krugerrands | Hacker News Reader

Put Down the Pitchforks; Amazon Didn't Steal Your Dunning-Krugerrands

lastweekinaws.com

60 pointsQuinnyPig13 comments

But Amazon really did screw up here.

The attackers were able to announce more specific prefixes than Amazon was announcing itself. It was like Amazon said "give me all phone calls for the 415 area code," and the attackers said "give me all calls for 415-555-xxxx." In internet routing, the most specific always wins (down to the minimum prefix size of /24 most networks filter on).

A commonly accepted mitigation for BGP hijacking is to announce the /24's of your important assets as well as the covering prefixes. An attackers announcement of the same /24 will at worst capture _some_ of the traffic, rather than being seen as a more specific and capturing _all_ the traffic.

> In internet routing, the most specific always wins

So is this flaw Amazon's fault? I think not. Even your accepted mitigation doesn't fix the hole completely. It's still an internet problem.

> The internet is fundamentally broken in this way; bad actors can cause disruption and woe for huge numbers of people. It's a giant problem, to be sure

So, now I guess we need people to explain how blockchain can solve this problem. /s

What if I told you there is an app on the market that can solve this problem using blockchain.

But is it using smart contracts to innovate and disrupt (I’ve lost track of whether disrupting is still hot)

I think you could do a lot worse then selling it to people who fail to grasp how money works.

Did this author "coin" the term Dunning-Krugerrand? Because it's brilliant.

It's been around for several years, probably originating on bitcointalk.org, but it was/is popular on the r/buttcoin subreddit

Nope. I remember seeing it on bitcoin-talk.org circa 2010 or 2011.

I literally laughed out loud the first time I saw it, too :)

I saw it on Twitter a month or two ago, but I love it too! Great name

Even though I knew the content deserved it, I upvoted just based on the title.

Stupidity, not malice ;) https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor

Very fair.

I'm not particularly surprised that the general media hasn't grasped the nuances of BGP; I just prefer to reserve jumping on Amazon for those moments where they, y'know... deserve it.

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