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Comment by duskwuff | Hacker News Reader

Similarly: Google Forms being used for phishing, Google Calendar invite spam... I've even heard of Google Photos being used for spam (by "sharing" photos, or by posting photos with text as the target of a spam campaign).

Spammers ruin everything.

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They truly do. And it doesn't even have to be many spammers, it only really takes one person to ruin a free service. I've had plenty of personal projects I had to shut down due to some random person who just decided to hammer my servers for no reasons. I block the IP or IP block and they get more. I put Captcha (HN always complains about it but this is why it's often needed...), and users (who pay nothing) complain that it's annoying. Running free services on the internet is truly a PITA.

If that's true then I'd expect there to be personalized and well-funded counter-measures, for tracking and prosecution coordination with local law-enforcement and court system. Considering that one service could be worth many millions, and that can be destroyed by one person, it would make sense to spend the money.

How do you plan on prosecuting random people on the other side of the world that are sending garbage from a bot net? I can't even fathom the amount of money this would take to do reliably. Even if you did manage to find the person, you need the other government to actually _do_ something about it. It seems pretty intractable to me, given the scale.

Yeah that's not going to happen unless you can convince everyone to implement a 1 world government.

Same experience here, one spammer DOSing my site, always with similar patterns. I'm already behind Cloudflare and use https://github.com/mitchellkrogza/nginx-ultimate-bad-bot-blo... but I still have to identify and block them manually, which is annoying and a waste of time. Some IP-range blocks affected users so it's not fine grained enough. I wish I could identify, expose and sue them into oblivion, but the internet is too international and anonymous for this to be feasible. I also had to limit some site functionality because of this.

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