> Are incidents such as this a likely side-effect of ubiquitous, low-cost, perhaps even disposable Internet hosts?
The whole write-up is excellent. I was already impressed by the author, but the prescience of this comment... wow.
digitalsushi 7 hours ago [-]
2003, I was still young in 2003. Kinda.
In 2003, Network Address Translation (NAT) was becoming the default LAN IP management scheme, for two reasons: (1) IPv4 space was at the beginnings of its inevitable resource restrictions, and (2) the perceived security of the NAT had effectively become what people believed a firewall performed.
In those old days of the middle Internet and early web, it was still fairly common to visit an IP address (IPv4 - IPv6 was ratified but still being interoperability tested, barely a toy yet), you could visit an IP address directly without using the DNS.
Peer distribution was often a derivative of the sneakernet (carrying media around on your person), emailing long lists of popular but undiscoverable media content.
The concept of the home gateway device was young but functional. You could go to Best Buy and get a router to pair with your CPE; integration of CPEs and routers had already happened but it was still common to see them as separate devices.
Back then, traffic was a sliver of what it is now; a systems operator might have personally seen anomalous traffic, ingress and maybe even more unlikely, egress, and had the notion "that ain't right". These days we rely on incredible solutions that have existed for a long, long time to alert us, and self manage, these types of events.
While experimenting with codex this past week (old guy trying to participate but I gotta stretch out first, old), I tossed a pair of 8.8x3 inch monitors on a pi4 and told codex to 'go wild' making me a poor man's ATC kit, with a pile of html real-time gauges of everything I could think of - outer space, space station, planes, weather, home assistant temperatures, all of it.
And then at the outset I asked codex, hey, how often are you hitting these endpoints? How often do you ask the web what time sunrise is? Ah, every 900 seconds.
And so my Abe Simpson clincher, is, it's very easy for me to see how the ballast of the data on the internet is just bots, talking to bots, and how a 10 second NTP selection 2 decades ago was just the same move, before the immense scaling and false resource abundance we have today, allowed it to continue unchallenged.
joinjune 5 hours ago [-]
In 2003 it was clear we would run out of IPv4 addresses. NAT was already very common. Linksys WRT54G routers were sweeping the residential market. The blaster worm hit in 2003 and upended the way Microsoft thought of security and Internet security. They embarrassingly had to rely on Linux powered devices to do packet filtering in front of Windows Update to keep it online. Most of that news coverage seems scrubbed from the Internet. Brings back memories of using a PCMCIA Cisco Aeronet card to do war driving after watching "theBroken" featuring Kevin Rose.
Roark66 5 hours ago [-]
Surely these were Rogue Routers, not flawed ones? Hell bent on world domination, just like recent AI agents :-D
rkagerer 21 hours ago [-]
It struck me how much more useful information the graphs and diagrams here provide over their flashier counterparts you commonly see today.
The old-fashioned aesthetic almost feels like a cue what I'm looking at won't be slop.
rrdtool is still used widely today by projects like Munin, LibreNMS and Collectd.
walrus01 19 hours ago [-]
ISP operations/back-end systems perspective, there's indeed tons of RRA files out there still getting charts drawn based off them with rrdtool, but increasingly everyone is trying to store metrics in things like influxdb and draw them using grafana. Or similar. Even Cacti, a truly old and crufty thing that's been around for a long time has migrated to drawing charts as SVGs.
lloydatkinson 17 hours ago [-]
I yearn for the simplicity of rrdtool and Cacti and all that.
I despise trying to setup Grafana with its constant moving goals.
For most people though, it's a cue this is boring nerd shit. Slop works.
walrus01 21 hours ago [-]
Don't worry, I'm sure we can teach a slop generator how to emulate this style. LLMs already know how to use rrttool and mrtg! Coming soon to an Internet near you, faux-historical slop writeups.
The talk he gave at Usenix LISA was one of the best ever!
(LISA is now SRECon)
orielhaim 11 hours ago [-]
the part that still bites is the retry loop
one bad IP is recoverable
one bad IP plus polling every second until it answers turns every outage into a flood
Rendered at 19:11:16 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
In 2003, Network Address Translation (NAT) was becoming the default LAN IP management scheme, for two reasons: (1) IPv4 space was at the beginnings of its inevitable resource restrictions, and (2) the perceived security of the NAT had effectively become what people believed a firewall performed.
In those old days of the middle Internet and early web, it was still fairly common to visit an IP address (IPv4 - IPv6 was ratified but still being interoperability tested, barely a toy yet), you could visit an IP address directly without using the DNS.
Peer distribution was often a derivative of the sneakernet (carrying media around on your person), emailing long lists of popular but undiscoverable media content.
The concept of the home gateway device was young but functional. You could go to Best Buy and get a router to pair with your CPE; integration of CPEs and routers had already happened but it was still common to see them as separate devices.
Back then, traffic was a sliver of what it is now; a systems operator might have personally seen anomalous traffic, ingress and maybe even more unlikely, egress, and had the notion "that ain't right". These days we rely on incredible solutions that have existed for a long, long time to alert us, and self manage, these types of events.
While experimenting with codex this past week (old guy trying to participate but I gotta stretch out first, old), I tossed a pair of 8.8x3 inch monitors on a pi4 and told codex to 'go wild' making me a poor man's ATC kit, with a pile of html real-time gauges of everything I could think of - outer space, space station, planes, weather, home assistant temperatures, all of it.
And then at the outset I asked codex, hey, how often are you hitting these endpoints? How often do you ask the web what time sunrise is? Ah, every 900 seconds.
And so my Abe Simpson clincher, is, it's very easy for me to see how the ballast of the data on the internet is just bots, talking to bots, and how a 10 second NTP selection 2 decades ago was just the same move, before the immense scaling and false resource abundance we have today, allowed it to continue unchallenged.
The old-fashioned aesthetic almost feels like a cue what I'm looking at won't be slop.
https://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/
rrdtool is still used widely today by projects like Munin, LibreNMS and Collectd.
I despise trying to setup Grafana with its constant moving goals.
Don McMillan has a great comedy bit about charts that you can watch here btw: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYE3GtXqDV0
(LISA is now SRECon)