I say this as someone who runs several publicly-facing websites, and also scrapes a few others for use in my own tools: why do people care so much about bots?
WordPress with a cache can handle on the order of 1k requests per second on the cheapest VPS money can buy. An actual proper static site would likely 10x that.
Are you using lambdas or something like that to serve a blog?
Is it basically just OCD? Vulnerability protection? Old habits from a time where crawling really did impact service?
For me it's just a fun exercise to see what generalizations I can make about bots that botters can not really avoid or code around such as javascript. Yeah this blog is all precompressed static content in a ram disk. I'm sure it could handle a few hundred thousand requests per second. This is to show methods people could use on their forums, chan sites, chat servers, etc... Every option is optional and tunable. Any option people consider should be tested on a test server. People could just point and laugh if they so desired and that works for me too.
I like the idea of adding a fake cpanel subdomain for 169.254.169.254 so that script kiddies will start port-scanning their own hosting provider, which will likely get them flagged/banned.
When I first experimented with that I was not expecting anything to happen. Within a few days one person in Amazon EC2 in Germany started trying to do zone transfers for some of my domains likely to figure out which records to avoid and then they just excluded my domains entirely. All of the scanning stopped shortly thereafter. The scanning noise was literally all coming from one person despite the source IP's being all over the internet.
Oof, Germany. That's a tough place to be doing cybercrime from. If you told the police, I guarantee they can get that guy's home address. Whether they'd bother is a different story
…and not a bot… hoping not to turn off iCloud Private Relay to read, well, anything. (Maybe Google Scholar if I really needed it, the most mainstream thing I know of with a complete and effective iCloud relay ban.)
*edit: per author’s reply elsewhere, as a test site, rather a good implementation! But other webadmins, please don’t adopt all methods if you can avoid it :)
That makes sense. I block most data-centers and that would include much of Apple's data-centers. What I am doing is of course unorthodox for a blog. This is more of a test site to show what could be done. People can pick and choose which features they like for their particular use cases.
I could some day split it out into a blog and a demo site.
Oh, I assumed Archive had an automated* tool in their arsenal to overcome the blocks that would’ve affected them. Didja happen to confirm they were blocked initially?
*I think they do something manually sometimes, like logging into a The Information Pro account and mirroring popular articles. (Unless they can use a visitor’s account somehow, like with some browser extension…) And suspected without evidence maybe The Information did some watermarking to ensure they could quickly ban accounts used like that.
Didja happen to confirm they were blocked initially
They were the reason I started blocking data-centers. I wanted to see if I could block all of their addresses which turned into quite an exercise. Initially I was able to block them by blocking TCP SYN packets with an MSS of 1380 and 1300 but talking about it here was a mistake as their admin is on HN. They fixed that and made their MSS 1460 like a nominal home internet connection.
The next thing I had to block was the Russian Federation. That seems to be where the controlling nodes are, I think. That made me even more curious who they were so I just kept iterating through the blocking process. I ended up blocking a number of ASN's and all of Russia. They are all in the linked archive file in the article but I don't specifically call out the ones that are archive.is.
Most on HN think they operate on a shoe-string budget but I have my doubts. I suspect an asset of a technical arm of an intelligence agency but to what purpose and what end I have no clue. They are very clever whoever they are and certainly earned my respect. Either way I think their site is useful, I just wanted to see if I could block it.
I expect >99% of my web traffic is bots or agents and I was actually considering removing the page counter as it is pretty meaningless and makes my site look far busier than it is. I am reluctant to however do anything about it just in case it accidentally stops a genuine human reading it or downloading my books.
I just use fail2ban and it seems to do a pretty good job, but you do need to pay attention for the first couple of months, to tune it to your situation. I use one filter that is really just failregex = ^<HOST> - \S+ \[\] ".*?" 40[034], and then if that catches something I add it to another more specific list. So far I have about 80 specific regex's and it has stopped all of the traffic. I haven't had anything fallthrough to the 40[034] filter in a long time.
Of course the problem with fail2ban, and also OPs solution, is that it become a pain if you are handling things through a load balancer / proxy, since you need a way to get the real ip.
load balancer / proxy, since you need a way to get the real ip
If it is at all helpful most layer-7 load balancers have an option to enable a header that contains the real IP address, then one need only reconfigure their web daemon to log that header. It's very similar to how CDN's send the real IP in a header.
Most load balancers will silently drop the real IP address header on the ingress side to avoid exactly what you are describing. That used to be a thing around 2000 - 2001 era.
The comments can be misleading. About 2600 people thus far and a few bots have been able to view it. Sunday is the best day to see all the unusual browsers and applications people browse the web with. Weekdays tend to be more mainstream bog standard browsers. This is a good test.
Rejects me too. Not a bot and connecting directly with a "normal" old-fashioned up-to-date web browser. How will you evaluate how many humans vs bots you blocked?
I used to log the bots too but there are so many they drown out the humans. I fully expect to block a lot of real humans as many people today use VPN's and most VPN's will egress from a data-center. Maybe it would make sense to break this out into a blog and a demo blocking site some day.
You are only helping the entrenched browser monopoly and furthering the dystopia if you attempt to block anything but "approved" user-agents. This is what people like RMS were warning us about decades ago.
Block on traffic volume and request frequency if that's causing a problem.
(And yes, I can't access the site either. No, I will not conform. But I bet anyone determined enough will still get through, just like with DRM.)
I can accept that. I've sat with RMS a few times. He's an interesting and very smart person. There are things he and I agree and disagree on. I'm sure I would never hear the end of it on this one. I'm glad he put the cancer into remission and will have many many more years.
On the topic of browsing with any kind of browser, I would be extra careful using things people have vibe coded or more specifically have not been battle hardened to protect against malicious sites. The reader apps people use I think would be especially at risk of malicious servers if they have not gone through extensive third party code reviews by penetration testers.
Or behaviour. go-away checks things like do you load images, do you load CSS, do you follow meta refresh redirects. Anubis basically checks you can run JavaScript for a few seconds.
The post content is great. I personally hate the way Cloudfare has been the „default answer“ for the bot problem because Cloudfare has become the most successful MITM attack in history. We need content like this to keep the internet alive.
The added explanations by the author in this comment thread are hilarious. You sir are a good writer.
Thankyou for the kind words. I am not for everyone which is the way I would like to keep it. I agree there need to be more alternatives to a big centralized MitM caching proxy even if they can be a bit rough around the edges like mine. There is always room for improvement if enough of us try to come up with alternatives and options.
Just a guess but that one might draw the wrong kind of attention. That may be a few steps too far. I am not even sure the offensive terms I use are enough to make AI filter me but that example feels like poking the bear.
I did not and could not downvote you as you replied to me. Only others can. I have not downvoted any comments on this thread. I appreciate all feedback.
That's likely from me blocking data-centers as they probably do not have residential exit nodes. There are a couple nftable rules that could block most VPN's as well but they also block some cellular networks so I left that out.
I can spot them but the feds are working on taking down the biggest residential proxy malware nodes. It's a game of whack-a-mole but I will let them play that game. There are some easy ways to spot some of them but I will save that for another article.
There's a special place in hell for people who block curl and wget, especially on sites with downloadable files (eg source code tgz's, media, etc.), basically anything i might need to wget on a server.
There's this weird entitlement people have in which they think that the author of a site is not allowed to choose the method by which they protect their own site because it may be inconvenient to their specific, niche, use case.
Although @Bender's unique answer is better than my obvious observation.
A guy gets sent to hell. The demons guide him into the lobby. Satan jumps out and lets out a big evil roar to no effect. Satan then glances down and sees the spot on the mans finger where there was a ring. "Oh... well you've been through worse. The break room is down the hallway to the left, mail room is upstairs to the right..." Satan just walks away.
Every step is optional of course. There are ways to make curl work on my site but I choose to add friction as some botters abuse libcurl. I doubt anyone else will do what I do. They could spoof the user-agent but most botters seem to not know how to do that despite the myth that they all do.
For what it's worth if I had a site specific to sharing code artifacts or archives I would not block curl and I would also enable native rsyncd.
I would be interested in some examples of valid traffic that they would block. For the purposes of the document I do not consider anything from a data-center to be valid traffic. People can of course skip any or all steps, experiment with one at a time on a test server as they should.
This may block schools and libraries that use content blockers. Often the internal client is left to make abuse tracking easier (or because the overworked admin didn't know they could turn it off).
Oh, well that is ok for me I suppose. I add RTA/adult headers that hopefully they also look for and block using parental controls as adult content should not be viewed in a school or library. I could add a note suggesting to skip that step if one wishes schools and libraries that may be using a proxy to view.
I think it's a great article to be fair. We need more of this cheap and quick bot blocking. The fact the solution to unwanted traffic is often "use Cloudflare" is _not_ great for the internet, and nobody really actually likes deploying or managing ModSecurity. Its a nice middleground.
VPN exits often "come from datacenters". And there are entire countries where the web can be unusable without.
If you don't have LaLiga in your country, that doesn't mean everyone is so lucky. Blanket IP range bans, in this day and age? Basically a proclamation of incompetence.
I understand your frustration. Normally a blog site would not have any or many of these measures enabled. This is more of a test site to show what could be done on any other type of site. People can pick and choose which methods to use. Some may wish to block VPNs and proxies especially on forums.
I should make an article that shows additional ways to detect VPN's, including residential.
Am I the only one that exclusively gets attacks with spoofed user agents and rotating TLS signatures? I feel like every post I see about not needing a CDN has tips that could be overcome in under an hour of scripting.
But they don't script it. Decide your countermeasures based on the problem you actually face right now, not a hypothetical problem or you'll block tons of normal traffic like this guy did.
WordPress with a cache can handle on the order of 1k requests per second on the cheapest VPS money can buy. An actual proper static site would likely 10x that.
Are you using lambdas or something like that to serve a blog?
Is it basically just OCD? Vulnerability protection? Old habits from a time where crawling really did impact service?
https://i.ibb.co/vCDH79d0/IMG-0303.png
…and not a bot… hoping not to turn off iCloud Private Relay to read, well, anything. (Maybe Google Scholar if I really needed it, the most mainstream thing I know of with a complete and effective iCloud relay ban.)
*edit: per author’s reply elsewhere, as a test site, rather a good implementation! But other webadmins, please don’t adopt all methods if you can avoid it :)
I could some day split it out into a blog and a demo site.
*I think they do something manually sometimes, like logging into a The Information Pro account and mirroring popular articles. (Unless they can use a visitor’s account somehow, like with some browser extension…) And suspected without evidence maybe The Information did some watermarking to ensure they could quickly ban accounts used like that.
And thank you!
They were the reason I started blocking data-centers. I wanted to see if I could block all of their addresses which turned into quite an exercise. Initially I was able to block them by blocking TCP SYN packets with an MSS of 1380 and 1300 but talking about it here was a mistake as their admin is on HN. They fixed that and made their MSS 1460 like a nominal home internet connection.
The next thing I had to block was the Russian Federation. That seems to be where the controlling nodes are, I think. That made me even more curious who they were so I just kept iterating through the blocking process. I ended up blocking a number of ASN's and all of Russia. They are all in the linked archive file in the article but I don't specifically call out the ones that are archive.is.
Most on HN think they operate on a shoe-string budget but I have my doubts. I suspect an asset of a technical arm of an intelligence agency but to what purpose and what end I have no clue. They are very clever whoever they are and certainly earned my respect. Either way I think their site is useful, I just wanted to see if I could block it.
Nice, I will have to take a look at some point.
Nothing to read, nothing to see, I move along. (Yikes, the modern web sucks!)
People can see a few headers here [2]
[1] - https://caniuse.com/?search=sec-fetch-mode
[2] - https://nochan.net/.env
If it is at all helpful most layer-7 load balancers have an option to enable a header that contains the real IP address, then one need only reconfigure their web daemon to log that header. It's very similar to how CDN's send the real IP in a header.
Block on traffic volume and request frequency if that's causing a problem.
(And yes, I can't access the site either. No, I will not conform. But I bet anyone determined enough will still get through, just like with DRM.)
On the topic of browsing with any kind of browser, I would be extra careful using things people have vibe coded or more specifically have not been battle hardened to protect against malicious sites. The reader apps people use I think would be especially at risk of malicious servers if they have not gone through extensive third party code reviews by penetration testers.
The added explanations by the author in this comment thread are hilarious. You sir are a good writer.
Exactly! Like any ecosystem, the internet needs variability in order to be healthy and survive long term.
Monocultures are not healthy.
But there are some fun things to read there in any case.
"ai" ...
response length 68
edit:
>"I can not see votes or karma and do not require social validation. "
>proceeds to downvote
classic
Actual bad actors rent residential-classified connections. Good bots don't.
Although @Bender's unique answer is better than my obvious observation.
Every step is optional of course. There are ways to make curl work on my site but I choose to add friction as some botters abuse libcurl. I doubt anyone else will do what I do. They could spoof the user-agent but most botters seem to not know how to do that despite the myth that they all do.
For what it's worth if I had a site specific to sharing code artifacts or archives I would not block curl and I would also enable native rsyncd.
> if ($http_x_forwarded_for) {....
This may block schools and libraries that use content blockers. Often the internal client is left to make abuse tracking easier (or because the overworked admin didn't know they could turn it off).
Oh, well that is ok for me I suppose. I add RTA/adult headers that hopefully they also look for and block using parental controls as adult content should not be viewed in a school or library. I could add a note suggesting to skip that step if one wishes schools and libraries that may be using a proxy to view.
I think it's a great article to be fair. We need more of this cheap and quick bot blocking. The fact the solution to unwanted traffic is often "use Cloudflare" is _not_ great for the internet, and nobody really actually likes deploying or managing ModSecurity. Its a nice middleground.
If you don't have LaLiga in your country, that doesn't mean everyone is so lucky. Blanket IP range bans, in this day and age? Basically a proclamation of incompetence.
I disagree. If I'm getting problematic traffic from even a few of your IPs and they're in a DC/VPS range, I'm blocking it and moving on with my day.
But I suppose none of my clients services typically ever need to be accessible from such countries anyway.
Permanently blocking every IP that some random guy didn't label as residential: bad
I understand your frustration. Normally a blog site would not have any or many of these measures enabled. This is more of a test site to show what could be done on any other type of site. People can pick and choose which methods to use. Some may wish to block VPNs and proxies especially on forums.
I should make an article that shows additional ways to detect VPN's, including residential.