4.2 KiB
Server outage
So you might've noticed the server was gone for this entire Sunday. This is due to Contabo being a huge piece of shit
First of, a few days ago, they contacted me about my server begin DDoS'd. I was like, ok, you guys have DDoS protection so this shouldn't be an issue, right? But in the email they sent me, they told me that they temporarly removed my server from the network as it was impacting the other users.
Fuck. What kind of DDoS protection is that?
Furthermore, who the fuck DDoSes a fucking proxy search engine like that? Like what's the fucking point? And this brings me to my next point...
It's a conspiracy
You heard me right motherfuckers, there's someone out there to get me (Oooh exciting!) and they're targetting privacy frontends all over the globe. If you've been active in the privacy scene, you'll probably already know about shit like nitter, Bibliogram or even (eek) Searx. And if, like me, you used these services, you know damn fucking well that they all stopped being maintained at one point or another. Most people just assume its because the devs just stopped giving a shit, but the true reasons are far more sinister...
Oh my fucking god Will I don't care
But I do, and it's fucking terrible. Anyway. The real reasons they stopped maintaining their shit is because of the following reasons:
- Bots
Like jesus fucking christ there are so many bots. Just go visit https://4get.ca/instances and you will see at least a million bot requests at any given time, it's fucked. You'd think these bots would be just, you know, web scrapers or whatever, but the truth is that all of these bots are engineered with a very simple goal in mind: break shit. At some point early in development, I was like "ok, I'm getting hit with 20k requests each day out of nowhere, let me turn on the logs real quick". And what I found was mind fuckingly weird.
EVERY fucking request was some sort of SEO spam shit like "envato tuts wordpress blog punjabi" like who the fuck searches for this shit. And they would request the same exact page multiple times just for fun it seems. Like tell me this isn't malicious, this is a clear attempt to ratelimit my instance and block me from all engines. Why would someone do this? Is it the FBI? Or just some soyjak party faggot?
It's fun to think about, because it seems like every single privacy frontend has been dealing with something like this. There seems to be a coordinated effort to shut us down. The only reason 4get didn't yield yet is because of the captcha I made. By the way, SearxNG devs are complete retards and they think they can ratelimit a botnet with thousands of IPs, thats cute.
- Harrasment
A while back, I was shilling 4get on /g/ as one does. Shit was going fine, but then people started getting angry at me. So, as to not bring hate onto my project, I stopped the shilling. Immediately after stopping, what seems to be some sort of discord-tier raid started shitting all over the board about my website. Honestly, it was pretty hilarious to search up desuarchive and see everyone get angry at me. From there, I figured I would post my face just for the lulz and, erhm no one really made fun of me from there on out? Pretty weird, but I'm happy it's over.
Oh and, a few death threats through anon email boxes, gotta love those.
So... about that server outage?
Ah yes. The server outage. So, on the 15th of February 2024, I was hit with the first DDoS attack. Contabo put the server back online a few hours later. On the 18th, they just went "fuck it" and pulled the plug on the ethernet cable it seems. I sent them like 20 emails asking them to bring back networking but they fucking didn't, so I got fed up with their shit and moved hosting providers. Good thing I did that cause, the website would still be offline at this point. I don't know why they pulled the plug today, but I assume it's because of another DDoS attack.
I hope shit like this doesn't happen again, but, it will, so brace yourselves my niggas
EDIT: I thought I would also bundle an excerpt of the first DDoS attack, here it is. Some anon asked for it and I figured some of you people might want to look at it...
https://files.catbox.moe/h1vegv.txt
Smell you later
will