The blender.org servers are experiencing a DDoS attack since last weekend
blender.orgI just had to put my small hobby OS development site behind cloudflare after 23 years without a CDN. Between occasional ip bans, mod_evasive, rate limiting, user agent blocks, etc I've been self hosting on a single box without much problem until last week.
We went from hundreds of thousands of requests per day to 5 million per day. Traffic was web scraping bots based on the obscure URLs. The URLs were valid (mediawiki history links, etc) and not attempts to hack the site. Banning IPs did not help, the traffic would move to new subnets. Mostly IPv4, some IPv6. The user agent was popular Chrome agent strings so I'm guessing it was masked puppeteer.
It was a DDoS in practice but I get the feeling it's an immature web crawler.
I think people are likely building a new generation of crawlers to feed LLMs as fast as possible.
The caching aspect of Cloudflare helped a lot. Putting specific url patterns behind Cloudflares dynamic JavaScript challenge also helped. It was surprisingly easy to setup.
And I know what some of you will say, Cloudflare is bad. I've personally been annoyed with them for making specific sites more difficult to use while on VPN. But it's not a hard choice when it's either taking your site offline or using their free tier offering.
I feel your pain, recently had something similar happen that forced a website I run behind cloudflare, there isn't much you can do when you get millions of requests in a day from tens of thousands of US IPv4 addresses that are on the residential networks you see non-malicious traffic from.
One thing that got me was seeing some of the malicious traffic originate from the same /24 as I use at home. Whatever botnet was being used certainly has good penetration of residential ISPs in the US!
My girlfriend bought some Chinese WiFi plugs from Amazon to use with Alexa. I wonder how many of these devices are doing this from time to time. Amazon has tons of generic devices that connect to your WiFi network
Why would someone want this? It seems a bit of an odd target.
Adobe and Autodesk might have a conflict of interest.
Autodesk maybe, but Adobe? I don't see anything on their product portfolio like Blender. Substance Painter maybe? But when it comes to ease of use and feature completeness, texture painting in Blender is a very rudimentary tool.
At any rate, taking down the Blender website wouldn't help them I don't think.
Adobe was corporate-level sponsor for .. wild guess, around one year maybe?
AI plugins, on twitter artists are frothing at the mouth in rage.
Maybe they got an answer at the forums they didn't like? Some political viewpoint expressed somewhere they didn't like? "For teh lulz"? Who knows. Cunts will do cunt things on account of being a cunt. Often things are complex, nuanced, multi-faceted, and hard to understand. Sometimes they're not and it's almost shockingly simple.
The world is a big place and the c word is considered offensive even when not used directed at a women.
Worth refraining for using it.
You might be being insensitive to Australian culture where its just a normal word for them.
Might be trying to force your cultural norms onto foreign countries.
As an Australian: this is about as true as the idea that we all ride kangaroos to work and live in constant fear of dropbears.
That word in Australia is just as offensive as anywhere else, and I wish people would stop perpetuating the misconception that it's fine.
It's certainly not "part of our culture" or "just a normal word", and it's a little ironic that you would call out GP for "forcing cultural norms onto foreign countries" while in the same comment spreading falsehoods about Australian cultural norms.
Hard though it may be to believe, we're generally fairly civil down here.
>That word in Australia is just as offensive as anywhere else, and I wish people would stop perpetuating the misconception that it's fine.
That is completely untrue. You may not like it, plenty of Australians don't especially upper class people, but it is nowhere near as offensive here as it is in America. In America it's a full on slur that is never socially acceptable in any context. Here at worst it's a vulgar way to say something unless it's specifically directed at a woman (if it's directed at a woman in anger it is generally treated the same as Americans treat it), and at best it is actually just a normal thing to say to your friends. "Are you cunts ready or not?" is a very normal thing for working class Australians to say to their friends, same as "This cunts not like that, leave him alone" or "Are you serious cunt? You were gonna eat them all?" or "What are you cunts up to?". It can also be said in a non-endearing way even to people who aren't women, it has a pretty similar word distribution to "mate" (not completely identical, "My cunts and me wanna buy a ticket please" makes zero sense). Mate can be a very offensive word to use in context, or a completely benign word. Cunt is similar, it just has more offensive use cases than mate does.
The first paragraph of the linked Wikipedia says “In Australia and New Zealand, it can also be a neutral or positive term when used with a positive qualifier (e.g., "He's a good cunt").”
It's a neutral or endearing term pretty much anywhere in the country outside of places with too many gated communities and golf courses. You'll find more people (maybe enough to count on one hand) feigning offence than people actually being offended.
I call my friends cunts, they call me cunt, strangers call me cunt. It's vulgar, but vulgar and offensive are two different things.
I see you made a burner account specifically for this singular comment.
However, the comment is extremely benign.
The only reason for someone to make a burner account for a benign comment is if its a person defending themselves because no one else will.
> the c word is considered offensive
Yes, that is why I used it. Seems like an appropriate way to describe these people.
this is an international forum, please check yourself before lecturing others for having different cultural norms
Is this really a good argument for casual sexism for the sake of shock value? If we're going down that road, there are plenty of racial and homophobic slurs that are culturally acceptable (and encouraged!) in other cultures.
The key here is that in a lot of Australian culture, "cunt" is on par with "fucker" or "asshole" - there's nothing gendered about it as an insult. It's acceptable to use precisely because it's NOT sexist, racist, or otherwise any sort of slur.
Equally, we're not going to ban Spanish posters from using their word for "black", are we?
> Australian
Ireland, from a cursory check of their profile. But it doesn't invalidate your point, I don't think it's gendered their either.
> ban
Words in my mouth. I'm not advocating a ban, we're discussing whether a word is appropriate on this forum.
> their word for "black"
A bit of a stretch, considering _that_ word isn't on par with "fucker" in Spanish. So ironically, yeah, I think we would ban a Spanish poster for using it in this context?
But I concede your point that if it's not gendered, the intent isn't sexist.
I strongly disagree it's sexist, casual or otherwise. Is "dickhead" sexist? These types of insults are based on taboo (sex, blasphemy, diseases, things like that). It's completely different than some racial epithet.
You can perceive it to be sexist, but I'm fairly confident that's a minority opinion.
> I'm fairly confident that's a minority opinion.
I concede that it's regional, and I apologize for moralizing. However, I contend that in North America it's a majority opinion. "Cunt" is much more strongly gendered here.
> "dickhead"
Would you consider "whore", "slut" or "tart" sexist?
"Slut" and "whore" describe behaviour, so I'd say that's rather different. I don't know about "tart" – I can't recall ever using or encountering it, except for one film (where a guy calls guy bloke a "tart").
Look, I don't want to tell you how to perceive words because that's always a personal thing, but in huge parts of the world it's just a strong but generic insult. And in the end context and intent always matters, not words. "You dirty person of colour" is of course profoundly racists in spite of not using any racial epitaphs. It's not the words themselves that are problematic, it's the intent with which they're used. It seems pretty clear the intent of my comment was not sexist.
It’s an offence to derail the conversation here on HN. Please refrain from being sensitive.
Lol "site is experiencing a DDoS attack. Here is a link to the site for all of you to click on"
This is because of the AI plugin isn't it. Between this and Krita, a lot of artists want to "fight" back any way they can.
What's the context on this? Because what shows up in a quick search is from March[1], so this seems rather ... late? I see no particular reason/timing why it should be about that.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/3/23623473/blender-stable-di...
The Krita plugin + some AI animation of some anime pushed some artists communities over the edge. You probably won't see it on the public Internet but discord, twitter, art subreddits, etc
I see a lot of anger about krita getting a stable diffusion plugin, a choice quote here:
> Oh yes let's encourage people to download an app made by artists, for artists, not learn how to draw, and instead use a program that steals from artists, while using an art app.
Presumably the same issue is going on with blender? The Reddit thread on the site being down is mostly comments on “lol autodesk/adobe/etc must hate how good blender 4.0 is”.
I think you mean "artists". If they were really artists they wouldn't be afraid of AI.
No most real artists still enjoy having a job and the actual process of painting.
Like singers against phonographs:
https://recordinghistory.org/the-history-of-sound-recording/...
Technology marches on and menial jobs get obsoleted. That’s just the way it is, even if you enjoy being a ropemaker, basket weaver, keypunch operator or, in this case, an illustrator.
Maybe them real artists are angry you can nowadays tell the computer how shiny something is and where to put the light and it will do all the rendering for you?
Unfortunately, the documentation site is down. Is there a mirror of https://docs.blender.org/ anywhere?
They should consider using Cloudflare.
> After four days of fending off the attacks, the team decided to move the core of our website to a secure service that provides DDoS protection (such as CloudFlare). This means that www.blender.org is back!
They litterally did that :)
The "service such as CloudFlare" is CloudFlare, I just hit their CAPTCHA thing, and after checking "I am a human" 3 separate times I got through.
To solve infinite captchas or to try again later, that's the question.
Cloudflare has recently done away with captchas. Now you briefly end up on a page that runs JavaScript before automatically continuing.
And that can be controlled by your site's security level. Highest settings will show the JS page to all vistors, medium only shows it to likely bots.
And yet after disabling uBlock Origin and uMatrix entirely, it puts me in the endless loop of reloading the page again and again each time after clicking the verification button. I'm writing this from Safari just because it wouldn't work with my Firefox setup with the aforementioned plugins
I use uBlock Origin and uMatrix. In uMatrix its needed to enable cookies and javascript when the site uses some cloudflare settings (only site's cookies, not third parties). CookieAutodelete turned to be essential due this.
If even with this the site doesn't load due my restrictive browser settings, I abandon the site and I don't look back (always are sites with tons of bloatware written behind blunders and infinite JS libraries).
It might be this: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-protection-agai...
You might be interested in a plugin to toggle the fingerprint protection: https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/toggle-resist-fi...
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34952279
But yeah, Cloudflare causes problems but I think it's partly the site owners that crank the security settings and bot protection to max.
What is blender's favourite song?
"Under Pressure" by Queen.