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Comment by ddtaylor | Hacker News Reader

Did they actually run the DDoS via a script or was this a case of inserting a link and many users clicked it? They are substantially different IMO

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624740 has the earliest writeup that I know of. It was running it via a script and intentionally using cache busting techniques to try to increase load on the hosted wordpress infrastructure.

Thank you this is exactly the information I was looking for.

"You found the smoking gun!"

> It was running

It still is, uBlocks default lists are killing the script now but if it's allowed to load then it still tries to hammer the other blog.

Ah good to know. My pi-hole actually was blocking the blog itself since the ublock site list made its way into one of the blocklists I use. But I've been just avoiding links as much as possible because I didn't want to contribute.

Given the site is hosted on wordpress.com, who don't charge for bandwidth, it seems to have been completely ineffective.

The speculation that I saw was that they'd try to get Wordpress.com to boot him off for being a burden on the overall infrastructure.

As if Wordpress.com was that dumb...

Are you kidding, it's wordpress

Mullenweg is dumb, but he seems like the kind of dumb that would try to launch his own attack on archive.today rather than remove the site.

(For those who don't know, he's currently trying to destroy one of the largest WP hosting providers with a bunch of lawsuits)

AT answered why the DDoS and why it is still active https://lj.rossia.org/users/archive_today/2478.html

This is an impressively unhinged take. I still have no idea what the person is trying to achieve. And I'm sad we're likely going to lose that resource in the future.

People are now also talking about the weirdo trying to dox him instead of just the operator of the website, doesn’t seem like an unreasonable goal.

We're taking about both now, at least one a week it seems. Without the DDoS, we'd mostly forget about the blog. I didn't even know about the blog until the DDoS started.

I understand being mad but no, unfortunately, despite me knowing humans are human and they get angry at times, this response does still leave a bitter taste in the mouth and many people will perceive it that way. Changing the content of the archived pages is the worst thing they've done honestly. The "3 Hz DDoS" is funny perhaps but then if it's so harmless, then why even bother? But regardless, tampering with the archives, that is, tainting the content that people appreciate you for won't sit well with people.

I don't know, I feel like everyone loses here.

Seems like they just Streisand Effect themselves and amplify the message of the "attacker"

they silently ran the DDoS script on their captcha page (which is frequently shown to visitors, even when simply viewing and not archiving a new page)

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