From Newsgroup: comp.arch

On Mon, 28 Sep 2026 05:53:33 GMT, Anton Ertl wrote:

For a well-connected organization like Google, it's unusual that
they feel the strain of these web scrapers so much that they do not
service the request, but apparently it does happen ...

Occasionally my attempt at a Google search will return some kind of access-blocked page warning that “bot-like” activity has been detected coming from my IP address.

I suspect it’s a false positive triggered by my propensity for using private-browsing mode.

You’d think different Google services would respond in a uniform way,
with consistent behaviours and failure messages, but apparently not.
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From Newsgroup: comp.arch

On Sun, 27 Sep 2026 17:20:10 -0400
Joseph Seigh <[email protected]> wrote:

On 9/27/26 11:23 AM, Michael S wrote:

Today when I am trying to access Google Usenet archives most of the
time I get "429 Too Many Requests".
Is it just me or outage is widespread?
The link: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.arch

It appears to be widespread. I've noticed it for a few weeks now.
None of my bookmarked usenet links work anymore.

Today when I start from the top https://groups.google.com it works.
From here I can move to https://groups.google.com/recent
And here I can click comp.arch and it is working.
But then if I hit refresh it returns 429.
Also all attempts to use links to individual messages fail.
It looks like some very crude form of DDOS or anti-bot protection by
Google. Somehow they are trying to force an interactive usage.
It is so crude that it makes it unusable as archive. Which in recent
years after termination of Usenet posting service was its only
remaining usage.
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From Newsgroup: comp.arch

On Mon, 28 Sep 2026 15:18:36 -0400, Stefan Monnier wrote:

It also means that DDoS is now a normal everyday occurrence for any
site whatsoever. It makes a qualitative change in the sense that it
takes a professional sysadmin to manage even the most innocuous
web-server.

I don’t think having a “professional sysadmin” in charge is any
assurance against DDOS attacks. The only remedy seems to be seriously
grunty hardware acting as a filter frontend to get rid of as much of
the rubbish as possible before letting anything through to the actual content/application server.

The only people who have such hardware are the CDNs. And sometimes
even they can be overwhelmed, if the attack is big enough.
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From Newsgroup: comp.arch

Lawrence D’Oliveiro [2026-10-07 06:34:22] wrote:

On Mon, 28 Sep 2026 15:18:36 -0400, Stefan Monnier wrote:

It also means that DDoS is now a normal everyday occurrence for any
site whatsoever. It makes a qualitative change in the sense that it
takes a professional sysadmin to manage even the most innocuous
web-server.

I don’t think having a “professional sysadmin” in charge is any assurance against DDOS attacks. The only remedy seems to be seriously
grunty hardware acting as a filter frontend to get rid of as much of
the rubbish as possible before letting anything through to the actual content/application server.

AFAIK hardware won't save you: there's an actual arms race going on, and
you need wetware in there to adapt the response to the ever-evolving
forms of the incoming DDoS.

That's because the attackers work hard to make their incoming "rubbish" requests look as much as possible as the legitimate requests.

BTW, this whole arms race is not just a problem for administrators of
servers, but also for clients. More and more, you can't use `curl` or
`wget` to download PDF articles, because they get hidden behind "are
you human?" checks. Similarly the response to the arms race tends to
prevent legitimate scraping, such as when you want to maintain a mirror
for use behind a firewall, or say the Internet Archive.

Currently, the effort goes into technical means to guess which requests
are kosher, but I think it's ultimately impossible to do that without
imposing too many restrictions. I'd much prefer an approach based on governance, with ways to impose sanctions on abusers.


=== Stefan
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From Newsgroup: comp.arch

On 9/27/2026 8:23 AM, Michael S wrote:

Today when I am trying to access Google Usenet archives most of the
time I get "429 Too Many Requests".
Is it just me or outage is widespread?
The link: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.arch

Me too!!!
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