I believe once they IPO, they can accept lenders in all states (currently they only accept lenders in certain states).
820 karma · joined July 26, 2013
(Which is why seeing an MBA on someone's resume is an immediate "toss into the trash" signal.)
> 1. Data Plane Development Kit, which lets you skip the kernel IP stack (which takes thousands of CPU cycles to process) and do packet processing in userland taking just tens to hundreds of cycles per packet. http://dpdk.org/
I wish OS developers saw this as a problem. There is no reason kernel stacks should be so slow for tasks where all processing is done in the kernel. (For packets destined to userspace, you've got the syscall overhead to deal with.)
I recently tested the Linux network stack's PPS performance with an Intel X520 10GbE NIC. I used Debian testing, with the 3.12 kernel. My destination machine was an i7-3930K at stock speed. I wrote a simple kernel module adding an NF_IP_PRE_ROUTING hook returning NF_DROP with no processing, which would be the simplest possible code path. For a packet generator, I used another older machine with another X520, using the "pfsend" tool included with PF_RING, and the card in PF_RING DNA mode. That was easily able to saturate the link at line rate (14.8M PPS).
The result: the kernel was only able to sustain about 2.8M PPS.
I then loaded the DNA driver on the destination machine, used the included "pfcount" tool, and no packet drops - it was receiving the full 14M PPS.
I tested DPDK recently and had similar results.
I also modified the Linux ixgbe driver ixgbe_clean_rx_irq() function, and added a step in between the "fetch packets from RX ring" and "put packet in SKB and send to network stack" functions. Even when I added a bunch of useless comparisons for each packet, I was able to get ~12-13M PPS. I could get line rate by just dropping and not doing any processing.
sidenote (not included in the above post): I also tested FreeBSD. I'm just going off memory here, but it did sustain higher PPS than Linux (same hardware) but not anywhere near line rate. So netmap, PF_RING, DPDK, others are still the way to go if you want to do line rate processing.
What are the legal implications of this? Technically, this would mean this guy's employer is now employing someone in France (or Germany, Netherlands or Spain which are mentioned later). From the employee's perspective as well, they are almost certainly violating that country's laws if they're on a normal tourism visa.
Remote work seems to be an area where laws (in most or all western countries, as far as I can tell) have not kept up. In the above example, you've got a Canadian remotely working for a Canadian company, but living in a foreign country and spending his money there. Assuming he's using a tourism visa like most would be doing in this position, he's breaking the law but this kind of activity is nothing but beneficial to the foreign country, since he is spending money in the local economy, not competing in the local labor market and not drawing any welfare benefits.
Fuck the cunts with their "commitment to shareholders" at the cost of society. The subhuman imbeciles running this show deserve nothing more than to be taken into an alley and shot. The same goes for the lobbyist cunts that make it all happen, since their entire business is "enrich myself at the cost of EVERYONE else."
> Malware and sites advertising so-called "booter" services are different discussions.
There's an important distinction here. You refer to "sites advertising so-called "booter" services." However, with the kind of sites I speak of, "sites providing so-called "booter" services" would be a better description. They aren't just advertising it; enter a valid username and password, enter an IP, click the "attack" button and an attack is launched, all from that single site.
Malware, phishing, and booters have two things in common: they have far-reaching effects (that is, they affect other, unrelated/unwilling people) and they are not in any way good for the target of the effort. Malware is only good for the operator who benefits from the keylogger, showing ads, or whatever; phishing is only good for the operator who benefits from the stolen information; booters are only good for the booter operator (who profits from selling it) and for the user who paid for it to attack a target. Based on that, it's difficult for me to see the difference between the harmfulness of any of these.
In your post, the standard you applied to malware and phishing was "harmfulness" (in your opinion). I agree with that standard, and I think you'll be hard-pressed to find a single person who agrees that any of these three issues are not harmful. So, in your opinion, what makes booters less harmful than malware and phishing sites, which you are willing to take offline?
Censorship is a slippery slope, indeed. But I think it is generally accepted that _some_ basic level of what is effectively censorship, is a necessary evil for the health of the Internet. For example, malware and phishing sites, as you mentioned; spam; DDoS attacks. That's why laws exist in so many jurisdictions to prohibit all of these, and why the AUP of every single reputable ISP in existence prohibits them. This isn't uncharted territory, this isn't something new CloudFlare is just getting into - the industry standard (and legal standard) is to prohibit all of these.
DDoS attacks are illegal in most countries, including the US where CloudFlare operates. It would be reasonable for them to include something in their terms about not allowing illegal activities. Then, if it's brought to their attention via a verifiable abuse complaint, yes, they should cease providing service to that user. They are a private company and do not have the obligation to provide service to any particular person; there is no "rights" issue here.
Proactively, as in proactively monitoring and reviewing each site they provide service to, would no doubt be a huge burden and difficult or impossible, but I don't think anyone has suggested that. The only thing they need to be doing is the same as any responsible ISP, have an abuse@ mailbox (which they do), review and take the appropriate action on complaints.
They don't do that, but continue to sell their DDoS protection service (beyond the free tier), so they are indeed a racketeering operation.
I agree with this.
> Re-reading your comment, I'm not sure, but are you saying that CF are at the former end of the policy spectrum? That's regrettable.
Somewhat. As of my last experience with them (which was like a year ago), they will accept abuse complaints for booters. If you can prove to them the site is a booter, by providing documentation on the site itself (not hackforums or anywhere else where it's being advertised, which is understandable as it's basically hearsay, though a bit difficult) indicating the site offers a DDoS service, they will provide the abuse@ email of the hosting company. They will tell you to have the abuse@ people contact them directly for further details. This is the only action they will take.
But my opinion is they should, upon confirming the site is a booter, terminate their service to the site. It would also be nice if they would continue to provide the host details, in addition, so the reporter can contact the actual host and have the site taken down from there as well.
> Also, any argument you make about CloudFlare could also be made about Google: I see http://quantumbooter.net as the second link and http://top10booters.com/ as the fifth link at https://www.google.com/search?q=booter+services
Very good point, thank you for mentioning.
The difference I see is that CloudFlare actively provides a service to them, while Google is merely maintaining a keyword-based search listing for them. That being said, I can see both sides of this one.
My views on the legitimacy (rather, lack thereof) of booters: they are a service that serves absolutely no legitimate purpose. The sole purpose is to perform an illegal act against another person. I know a bunch of them are sold on hackforums as "stressers," i.e. "stress test your own server," but that also isn't a legitimate purpose - I can see no case where one would want to stress test their own services with some UDP or SYN flood over the Internet. Such a thing would only be done over a private network using your own packet generator.
In more detail:
- These DDoS-for-hire services being referred to are called "booters," "stressers," or similarly retarded names. For a low fee (I think the average is probably around $10, but you can check yourself), one can buy access to one, where they're able to launch an attack for a period of time (the exact period depends on the booter, and some even charge more for longer attacks; 5-10 minutes at a time is probably around average now) by logging into a website, entering the IP/host, and clicking the "attack" button. That is, no skill. Check places like hackforums yourself and you'll find tons of these. Usually the booters are using Ecatel boxes (generally paid for by the booter owner) because they allow spoofing (which is another topic entirely), some use rooted boxes as well.
- These are very common in gaming, because any 12-year-old with access to mommy's credit card can get their hands on one. That's where the "booter" name comes from; the original meaning was to "boot" someone off Xbox Live (residential connections are obviously really easy to knock out).
- The vast majority of these booters are behind CloudFlare to mask their true host. This serves two purposes: it discourages abuse complaints against the host and also provides the sites with DDoS protection.
- Now, this is like drugs - booter owners don't tend to be friendly with each other. As with rival drug dealers, they'll attack each other and generally try to knock out their competition.
- The only reason these booters are able to operate is because of CloudFlare eliminating the DDoS aspect. If CloudFlare stopped providing service to these illegal sites, they'd be forced to fend for themselves, and it would basically be a "gang war" - everyone attacking each other. Which is fine with me, as if the booter kids are attacking each other, their booters aren't able to mess with anyone else. (Let dumb kids be dumb kids.) Eventually perhaps there will be a small number of booters that come out "on the top," able to withstand attacks, but this then has the effect of eliminating most of the competition, which means the prices will rise. This is also a desired effect, because it's harder to get mommy to agree to pay $100 for something (I'm sure they lie about it) than $10.
- So why not just put your own stuff behind CloudFlare and get rid of the problem? Well, besides the whole issue of not wanting to support this racketeering scam (yes, there is a free level of CloudFlare, but certainly they want to sell you the paid ones and the higher levels can withstand different attacks), this option is only open for websites.
FYI, my position in all this is as a game server owner who has dealt with this BS enough, and I'll admit I'm certainly biased towards that side.
CloudFlare stopping support here would go a long ways towards eliminating the booter problem. It won't eliminate DDoS attacks entirely, of course, but it will eliminate a whole class of them and probably the largest class (because actual botnet owners are rarer). I agree entirely with the assessment that CloudFlare is engaging in racketeering.
So, perhaps more to your liking would be selling armed guard services to guard against a gang robbery, while simultaneously funding and supporting (but not actually participating in, i.e. not actually providing people for) said gang.
In fact, this is precisely what they've done in the past, though they'd only provide the host details rather than stopping service to a site. (I don't think they'll even go this far anymore, rather they'll give you the abuse email for the host and tell you to have the host contact them, which is ridiculous.) I've filed a few such complaints myself. In one instance, the booter site didn't provide any info about its services without registration, so I linked to the hackforums thread where it was being offered. CloudFlare declined this as sufficient proof. Luckily, I could register an account without payment, and that gave me the options to pay to launch attacks, so I sent the login details to CloudFlare and they accepted that.
DDoS wouldn't go away without booters, but many small cases like this would be significantly reduced.
Even CenturyLink (my current ISP, who happens to be the only choice here besides Comcast) is starting to piss me off lately, but what the hell am I going to do about it...