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Comment by stusmall | Hacker News Reader

Respect to them for not naming names, that's the classy move, but I wouldn't blame them if they did.

Why is it "classy" to not name names when a business (which likely holds it self out there as reputable) behaves badly, especially when it behaves in a way that costs you money? Everyone is so vague and coy. These companies are being abusive and reckless. Name and shame!

In the article, they mention that they are working with the crawling company to be reimbursed for the download costs.

Naming and shaming the company while you're trying to work with them is a real good way to not get what you want.

Naming names isn't really required. The hosts have a $5,000 bandwidth fee, but so do the consumers. There's maybe 10 companies with the financial & compute resources to let a $5,000-per-month-per-website bug run rampant before taking the harvesting service offline.

Meta/Google/Whoever may benefit from economies of scale, so they're not seeing the full $5,000 their side, but they're hitting tens of thousands of sites with that crawler.

I thought data egress is much more expensive than downloading it?

You know you can hit the data rate they were complaining about by using a residential fiber connection, right? 10 TB per day is about 1 Gigabit continuous if I’m not mistaken. There are probably millions of people that could to this if they wanted to.

There's millions of people who could do that to an individual website. There are remarkably few organisations who could do that simultaneously across the top 100,000 or so sites on the internet, which is how readthedocs has encountered this issue.

It is 100% likely a cloud provider IP range.

They are a persistent source of spam email servers, scrapers, and bot probes.

The simple reason is the operators quickly dump a host, and the next user is left wondering why their legitimate site is instantly spelunking spam ban lists.

It is the degenerative nature of cloud services... and unsurprisingly we end up often banning most parts of Digital Ocean, Amazon, Azure, Google, and Baidu.

Have a wonderful day, =3

It's the degenerative nature of assuming an IP corresponds to a user. They have not corresponded to users for over a decade. I once discovered I'm banned on my mobile phone connection from at least one app which doesn't know that CGNAT exists (a very poor assumption for mobile phone apps in particular). If you must block IPs, do it as a last resort, make it based on some observable behavior, quickly instated when that behavior occurs, and quickly uninstated when it does not.

Really depends on the use-case, but yeah the response happens in a proportional manner.

We also follow the tit-for-tat forgiveness policy to ensure old bans are given a second chance. Mostly, we want the nuisance to sometimes randomly work, as it wastes more of their time fixing bugs.

And note, if a server is compromised and persistently causing a problem... we won't hesitate to black hole an entire country along with the active Tor exit nodes and known proxies lists (the hidden feature in context cookies).

Have a great day friend, =3

Why are you ending all your messages with =3 ?

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia22092-arp-142-the-penguin...

Don't worry about it friend =3

Read that before, read it again to make sure I didn't miss anything. The lack of clarity here is disappointing and only asks more questions than it answers.

Don't worry about it friend =3

What I'm getting from this is that you hate having users almost as much as Reddit (which enshittified their website and banned all non-shit mobile apps and all search engines other than Google).

Imagine a world, where people walk into your business with a mask over their face saying horribly abusive things... while pretending they are your neighbors... And poof... they automatically vanish along with their garbage content.

They may visit again, but are less likely to mess with the platform. Note, cons never buy anything... ever... it is against their temperament.

I find it interesting several of cons on YC are upset by someone else's administrative policies. Reddit should enforce these policies too, or at least drop a country or pirate flag icon beside nasty posts...

Have a great day, and don't fear the ban hammer friend =3

What is the term “cons” you use here?

In this context, a few users are scraping YC profile information to attempt various scam/wire-fraud schemes against community members.

1. masquerading as YC associated organizations

2. attempting to extract banking information with classic 419'er tactics

3. spamming member contact routes with several phone and email Grifts

These folks appear to be operating on a 4 month cycle, and redistributing target leads to other fraudsters.

Annoying, but hardly a problem limited to YC if that is your concern.

Best of luck, =3

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