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Comment by halJordan | Hacker News Reader

It's inappropriate to usurp the language of cyberattacks just to denigrate certain traffic. It might be true that this category of traffic is too voluminous to handle at their current capability, resulting in bad service.

However cyberattacks, especially distributed ones, require intentionality and they require coordination.

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There is an obvious coordination - all those requests come from different IP ranges, but rarely hit the same pages.

The intentionality is not as clear, but I think "willful bypassing of protection site owner put up" counts for something? If a local store has "a free gift per household" ad, and someone is trying to get multiple free gifts by presenting fake addresses, this would be at least fraud. Similarly, if a scraping service rotates IP addresses and user agents to prevent blocks, it should be fraud as well, and maybe "unintentional cyber-attack" if server has trouble or falls over.

I can't speak to LWN, but from what I've seen this is a bot that crawls the site, generates search terms and "deeper" crawling techniques using AI, and then makes another set of requests.

This would be generating topical queries to add search for, e.g.,

  https://lwn.net/Search/DoTextSearch?query=io_uring+Linux+release+syscall

Again -- they don't say specifically what the traffic is doing, and this is just an example, but in this scenario DDOS is probably closer to accurate.

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