Hacker News Reader

Comment by sjwright | Hacker News Reader

Is a denial-of-service tool so convenient for you?

Thats a poor argument. Literally no one gets DoS'ed by a few guys F5'ing in coordination. If your server is so poorly set up as to allow any small number of IP's to impact it in any way then you are doing it wrong.

When I was getting into nodejs a few years back I wrote DoS script to kill a site that was scraping content from one of my sites and posing it as their own. I made it just for shits n giggles in about 5 minutes and I was surprised when it actually worked, their website just went down.

DoS is and always will be easy.

That is a poor deflection of the underlying point. It's absurd to conclude that an obviously undesirable behavior -- however unlikely to pose a problem in reality -- should not even be considered let alone addressed.

It could be as simple as a modest global rate limit on repeated GET requests to the same URL. We could start with 250 msec and see how that goes.

Or it could be as simple as limiting F5 reloads to once per keydown. Let users work for their accidental DoS attacks. :-)

what's absurd is protecting the server from a vanishingly rare accident by changing the client. if you feel you need to be protected, put that protection where it belongs, on the server, where it works against more likely things as well.

It protects the end user as much as it does the server.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com