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Oct 18: FA DDOS, Conspiracies, and Donations
11 years ago
|██████████|BODY
|██████████|MIND
|██████████|SOUL
Status: This just in: Food... costs... money!
|██████████|Will To Art
█ First off I donated to FA (or Dragoneer depending on how you wish to view it). I did it through PayPal since I don't have a credit card, and I only was able to do it via that method from Dragoneer's Twitter post, since it wasn't mentioned in the FA one.
So the next question is why I donated. It's pretty simple really: A large chunk of everything you see in this gallery is owed to the existence of FA. Years ago when I was contemplating about moving my art into the direction it did there wasn't a lot of options. I was only really aware of DA, FA, VCL, and some other gallery sites that I've long forgotten about (which were smaller or had hard rules against sexual themes). So yeah it was basically me picking between three sites. Now you can say I could have looked harder for a different or better site, but frankly that was low on my priority list. I was after all struggling with if I wanted to do the kind of art that a sizable section of the population find repulsive, and hate with perhaps every fiber of their being. The kind of art that I would be forced as a default to keep hidden from people I know, and would need to be drawn and produced in private; kept secret. To this day that still remains true. I don't regret the choice mind you, but that's with 6 years of hindsight.
So I picked FA, with a lot of apprehension, anxiety, and fear; but I did my thing, and the community here were for the most part friendly, warm, and open. I've made a few friends here for the time I've spent here, and I value that. I value that far more than the amount of money I donated certainly, and a part of me wishes I could have donated more; but I'm not rich. That support and friendship allowed me to explore my interests more freely and openly than I ever had in the past, or would have ever had.
It's also because of what I built here on FA that allows me to do commissions pretty reliably when I need them. I've earned a fair bit of money by having my gallery 'live' here on FA. It's allowed me to avoid going back into the 'normal' work industry. Though don't have any strange ideas that I'm rolling in money, if I took a job flipping burgers right this moment I'd earn more money easily; I'm just thankful that I have doing art as a feasible alternative.
So I donated because FA has given me a lot, with all that I've gained donating some money was an easy choice.
I didn't donate in hopes for future improvements. I didn't donate to see code improvements. I didn't donate for hardware upgrades. I didn't even donate to see FA moved into the cloud. I donated because FA has already provided me so much. I have no problem with how FA is right now. Yes it has flaws both big and small. Yes there's better structured sites. Though despite all that, it ended up being FA that provided me the experience I've had, not those other places.
In the end, even if FA completely disappeared and was gone forever tomorrow, I would have zero regrets about donating. I have zero regrets because I'm giving money for what I've gained over the years, not for improvements to the site that may or may not ever come.
█ DDOS, what can I say? It's not like Google was brought down. People can look this stuff up. People can self-educate themselves in matters they know nothing about. Yet people happily jump head-first into issues with zero information and insight. Quite a few people talking about how FA would have fared the DDOS attack better if it was coded better, or if their servers were better. That's not how the internet, or DDOS attacks work. Again, it wouldn't be hard to Google DDOS and learn about it; but here's a metaphor for it anyways:
You want to go to a store and have to drive down a road. Let's say there's three stores, a shitty one, an okay one, and a super one; each have a road leading to each store. Now, let's introduce a bunch of protesters who really hate these stores (especially that shitty one). So these protesters all get in their cars and start driving back and forth along the roads. They send the bulk of their cars to clog up the road leading to the shitty store, making it impossible for you to go to that store (but why would you right?) It's still possible to get to the other stores but it's slow going. Though why mention the quality of the stores to begin with in this metaphor? That's the question isn't it? The quality of the stores have nothing to do with the size of the road, nor the traffic on it. If the protestors had moved all their cars to block the super store, the exact same thing happens. Sure you can do such things as open up other roads, detours, or redirect traffic; but if you throw enough cars at the system, it's still going to go down (or be severely slowed). When it comes to the internet, you don't build or manage the roads, you simply get to pick what road you want to setup shop along (or can afford).
█ The Conspiracy. If you don't know what it is, here it is in short: Dragoneer setup the donation drive hours before the DDOS attack happened; therefore, Dragoneer orchestrated the DDOS attack to gain pity donations.
Now I was going to draw what I thought about this conspiracy, but I think I can depict it via text inside a journal easy enough.:
When Dragoneer could have setup a donation drive and not be accused of masterminding the whole thing
(It will be shown in these coloured blocks █)
Before FA Existed | Before the DDOS | During the DDOS | After the DDOS | After FA is Dead
█████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████
What's that? You don't see any of the blocks coloured? Exactly.
If he had setup a donation site before FA even existed, people will claim he brought it back from the grave to cash in the DDOS. Therefore he caused the DDOS to get money.
In the current scenario, where he setup the donation a few hours before the attack, people claim he caused the DDOS attack to gain pity donations. He could have set it up a week before and people would still say he caused the DDOS to get extra donations.
If it was setup during the DDOS people would again claim that he was taking advantage of the situation, or that he caused the DDOS himself giving him a perfect opportunity to start a donation drive.
If it was setup after the DDOS none of the above lines of 'logic' have changed. People would just say he's taking advantage of the attack to get pity donations.
Even if FA was dead years from now, Dragoneer would be accused of deliberately causing the death of FA to get pity donations, conspiracy!
█ In the end Dragoneer isn't FA, and FA isn't Dragoneer. He just happens to be it's Stewart for the time being. Whether you think he's a good or a bad one; FA is here, it's up, it's running, so for me it's a pass. When it comes down to it, I stick around here because the people are nice; not because the site is nice.
█ EDIT: So it seems the funding/donation thing was taken down. I'm sure that won't be fuel for the conspiracists. /sarcasm.
EDIT 2: Upon thinking on it for a few minutes, if you have a dozen people who hate FA, (or think the whole donation is a scam) reporting the thing as fraudulent, I guess GoFundMe would err on the side of caution and take the thing down. Guess will see what happens, but I refer you all to a previous submission of mine: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/9986713/
EDIT 3: Despite the fundraiser being taken down, they get to keep the money. Just hope they'll be able to get the donator info back somehow for the donation perks.
Though again, I'm sure it's all part of the 'master-plan' to not have to spend money on those donation perks. /sarcasm
EDIT 4: And they're working on getting donation information recollected.
EDIT 5: GoFundMe reinstated the account, so access to the donation information was available once again.
|██████████|MIND
|██████████|SOUL
Status: This just in: Food... costs... money!
|██████████|Will To Art
█ First off I donated to FA (or Dragoneer depending on how you wish to view it). I did it through PayPal since I don't have a credit card, and I only was able to do it via that method from Dragoneer's Twitter post, since it wasn't mentioned in the FA one.
So the next question is why I donated. It's pretty simple really: A large chunk of everything you see in this gallery is owed to the existence of FA. Years ago when I was contemplating about moving my art into the direction it did there wasn't a lot of options. I was only really aware of DA, FA, VCL, and some other gallery sites that I've long forgotten about (which were smaller or had hard rules against sexual themes). So yeah it was basically me picking between three sites. Now you can say I could have looked harder for a different or better site, but frankly that was low on my priority list. I was after all struggling with if I wanted to do the kind of art that a sizable section of the population find repulsive, and hate with perhaps every fiber of their being. The kind of art that I would be forced as a default to keep hidden from people I know, and would need to be drawn and produced in private; kept secret. To this day that still remains true. I don't regret the choice mind you, but that's with 6 years of hindsight.
So I picked FA, with a lot of apprehension, anxiety, and fear; but I did my thing, and the community here were for the most part friendly, warm, and open. I've made a few friends here for the time I've spent here, and I value that. I value that far more than the amount of money I donated certainly, and a part of me wishes I could have donated more; but I'm not rich. That support and friendship allowed me to explore my interests more freely and openly than I ever had in the past, or would have ever had.
It's also because of what I built here on FA that allows me to do commissions pretty reliably when I need them. I've earned a fair bit of money by having my gallery 'live' here on FA. It's allowed me to avoid going back into the 'normal' work industry. Though don't have any strange ideas that I'm rolling in money, if I took a job flipping burgers right this moment I'd earn more money easily; I'm just thankful that I have doing art as a feasible alternative.
So I donated because FA has given me a lot, with all that I've gained donating some money was an easy choice.
I didn't donate in hopes for future improvements. I didn't donate to see code improvements. I didn't donate for hardware upgrades. I didn't even donate to see FA moved into the cloud. I donated because FA has already provided me so much. I have no problem with how FA is right now. Yes it has flaws both big and small. Yes there's better structured sites. Though despite all that, it ended up being FA that provided me the experience I've had, not those other places.
In the end, even if FA completely disappeared and was gone forever tomorrow, I would have zero regrets about donating. I have zero regrets because I'm giving money for what I've gained over the years, not for improvements to the site that may or may not ever come.
█ DDOS, what can I say? It's not like Google was brought down. People can look this stuff up. People can self-educate themselves in matters they know nothing about. Yet people happily jump head-first into issues with zero information and insight. Quite a few people talking about how FA would have fared the DDOS attack better if it was coded better, or if their servers were better. That's not how the internet, or DDOS attacks work. Again, it wouldn't be hard to Google DDOS and learn about it; but here's a metaphor for it anyways:
You want to go to a store and have to drive down a road. Let's say there's three stores, a shitty one, an okay one, and a super one; each have a road leading to each store. Now, let's introduce a bunch of protesters who really hate these stores (especially that shitty one). So these protesters all get in their cars and start driving back and forth along the roads. They send the bulk of their cars to clog up the road leading to the shitty store, making it impossible for you to go to that store (but why would you right?) It's still possible to get to the other stores but it's slow going. Though why mention the quality of the stores to begin with in this metaphor? That's the question isn't it? The quality of the stores have nothing to do with the size of the road, nor the traffic on it. If the protestors had moved all their cars to block the super store, the exact same thing happens. Sure you can do such things as open up other roads, detours, or redirect traffic; but if you throw enough cars at the system, it's still going to go down (or be severely slowed). When it comes to the internet, you don't build or manage the roads, you simply get to pick what road you want to setup shop along (or can afford).
█ The Conspiracy. If you don't know what it is, here it is in short: Dragoneer setup the donation drive hours before the DDOS attack happened; therefore, Dragoneer orchestrated the DDOS attack to gain pity donations.
Now I was going to draw what I thought about this conspiracy, but I think I can depict it via text inside a journal easy enough.:
When Dragoneer could have setup a donation drive and not be accused of masterminding the whole thing
(It will be shown in these coloured blocks █)
Before FA Existed | Before the DDOS | During the DDOS | After the DDOS | After FA is Dead
█████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████
What's that? You don't see any of the blocks coloured? Exactly.
If he had setup a donation site before FA even existed, people will claim he brought it back from the grave to cash in the DDOS. Therefore he caused the DDOS to get money.
In the current scenario, where he setup the donation a few hours before the attack, people claim he caused the DDOS attack to gain pity donations. He could have set it up a week before and people would still say he caused the DDOS to get extra donations.
If it was setup during the DDOS people would again claim that he was taking advantage of the situation, or that he caused the DDOS himself giving him a perfect opportunity to start a donation drive.
If it was setup after the DDOS none of the above lines of 'logic' have changed. People would just say he's taking advantage of the attack to get pity donations.
Even if FA was dead years from now, Dragoneer would be accused of deliberately causing the death of FA to get pity donations, conspiracy!
█ In the end Dragoneer isn't FA, and FA isn't Dragoneer. He just happens to be it's Stewart for the time being. Whether you think he's a good or a bad one; FA is here, it's up, it's running, so for me it's a pass. When it comes down to it, I stick around here because the people are nice; not because the site is nice.
█ EDIT: So it seems the funding/donation thing was taken down. I'm sure that won't be fuel for the conspiracists. /sarcasm.
EDIT 2: Upon thinking on it for a few minutes, if you have a dozen people who hate FA, (or think the whole donation is a scam) reporting the thing as fraudulent, I guess GoFundMe would err on the side of caution and take the thing down. Guess will see what happens, but I refer you all to a previous submission of mine: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/9986713/
EDIT 3: Despite the fundraiser being taken down, they get to keep the money. Just hope they'll be able to get the donator info back somehow for the donation perks.
Though again, I'm sure it's all part of the 'master-plan' to not have to spend money on those donation perks. /sarcasm
EDIT 4: And they're working on getting donation information recollected.
EDIT 5: GoFundMe reinstated the account, so access to the donation information was available once again.
My money is on: Someone orchestrated the DDOS because FA was looking for donations.
Or if it was meant to target FA or SF individually and affected FA/SF/IB too.
Or else it was just someone/some-group being a dick - that's the most likely scenario.
My guess is some script kiddie just got their first botnet running and wanted to take it for a spin. Furaffinity is a good choice of test site: It's just high-profile enough to brag about, but not sufficiently well-funded to bring legal action if the attacker is identified. Throw in the traditional Anonymous-Furry rivalry, and it's perfect.
How I know? I'm a former Amazon employee. The timing does seem....odd. But again that's why we have conspiracy theories.
That needs to be an option for real.
Glad to see one of my favourite artists being actually intelligent. Some fresh air, compared to most of the journals I see. Thank you, good sir, for bring a good person. Keep up the awesome art.
Dragoneer wouldn't be dumb enough to DDOS Bomb FA as well as other Furry websites.. especially hours after posting a gofundme for the sites upgrading and taxes.
The simplest most reasonable explanation is "Malicious" People saw the GOFUNDME page and decided to viciously DDOS BOMB FA to make the GOFUNDME page look unbelievably suspicious to rile up the Low Information fandom folk into Glaring at NEER with eyes of death.
Now I do find the timing suspicious coupled with his tweets recently about selling stuff off for bills and two days peioe to the attack $2,000 was put on his American Express card for that Wacom Cintiq he wanted. He also made a poi t of reminding people that he makes no money off FA and is usually in debt. So from a fraud standpoint therr is motive and access to an Amazon data center can provide means. Plus the timing...
The point? Not much really. It's something those considering donating should consider and judge for themselves. Plus Endium's perspective on donating is a very good way of looking at it too. Neer does put a lot of work in managing the site and seems to do so while on the clock at Amazon. Probably not the best idea but guidelines for what to do in idle time tend to differ depending on what division you work in. I don't know exsctly what work he does during a Ddos attack but clearly he gotvety little sleep given the frequency of his tweets and postings.
So there's a few ways people can look at it. Paying it forward since the site is indeed free despite the complaints even I have about it or donate on the hopes he isn't pulling a fleecing scheme to relieve his own financial distresses. One thing to consider too is whether or not Neer would be risking federal prison by launching a ddos attack so potent it knocked out services in other facilities. In short a ddos attack is considered a form of cyberterrorism and is very much a felony at the federal level here in the US. Usually the punishment includes prison time, heafty fines and conditons that state zero access to any computer or network capable devices for x amount of years and heavy punishment if that's violated.
But ya... in the end people choose what they do with their money. Don't trust Neer? No prob. Simply don't donate. ^^
It's just a theory though but it seems as likely as any other.
Just go on with what you believe, and do your deed. In the long term it's actions that count, not words or rumors. Those go off with time.
(personally I've not donated, but that's still a personal preference)
The people that claim the fundraiser as a fraud are pieces of shit and should be whipped with barbed ends.
I don't ever want to see FA be taken out, this is the first and only furry site that I have felt comfortable in being...me. I am part of DA but it's not the most hospitable art place for what most of our community enjoys, on FA I feel so much more free and open.
So, if FA doesn't lose money from this, and if a DDOS attack is supposedly unavoidable regardless of the platform you decide to host FA on... why exactly is Dragoneer hollering for yet more money?
Oh, wait. Of course. Silly me, Dragoneer wants to fling yet more money to solve a non-existent issue yet again, because rubbing finance on it makes everybody feel like something's being done. Silly me, I should go throw my hard-earned money at a site coded back when the humanity was in its infancy, to help prevent an un-preventable event from occurring.
Is this making sense to anybody yet? Please, stop me if I'm rambling on here, but from my perspective, it seems that Mr Piche wants another iPhone Sandwich, and you lot are going to be footing the bill.
Good luck with that c:
Besides, I'm not making an argument, it's simply an observation. I didn't even state what people should or shouldn't do. People get violent over professional sports (or even children's sports) yet you expect high-minded behavior from those same people. You may want them to behave better, and most people will want them to behavior; but no amount of wanting will change the reality that people will come to blows over the dumbest things. With that in mind, why would anyone expect any community to behave better? Issues will rise, and inevitably people will take sides. There's only few groups of people who can rise against the pettiness that is innate to human social behavior, and the only one that comes to mind is the scientific community; and even then there can be a lot of shadiness that happens within it.
This isn't also to mention that often it's a case of the loud minority vs the silent majority. How many people have you observed to come to your conclusions about the FA community? Just the ones that make a show of themselves? If that's the case that's not exactly an objective observation of the community on a whole is it?
The question becomes really: "Is there anything that could change your mind?" If the answer is "nope" then why even bother engaging in a conversation or a debate?
Even in your example of the person with the terminal illness I can easily construct a scenario where it is immoral to save that person. You have enough of the cure for one person, and there's two terminally ill people. The person you want to save is a murderer. Though why stop there? Let's make the other person a pedophile. What's the moral choice there? Save one, save the other? Save neither? How about both of them can have the cure, is it moral to save a murderer and a pedophile? It all depends on what line in the sand you draw in regards to the value of life, no matter how ill lived that life was.
The concept of morality is only specific to yourself. That is the greatest flaw of being 'moral'. Your actions which you deem moral can be viewed as immoral by others. So who's sense of morality is superior? Your own or the other person? Of course you're going to pick yourself as the moral person. Of course you'll side with people who have the same morals as you. So is then morality defined as whichever side has more people who think that's the correct way to do things? 2 beats 1 after all. If you're in the majority it's extremely easy to justify your morals as the proper morals. It used to be perfectly moral to own slaves and to beat women. So how valuable is 'morality' in the grand scheme of history? History is simply full of "might makes right" and people using that might to serve their own needs, and the needs of their friends and family.
In the end, what you think is the 'right' thing to do, someone else is going to think it's the 'wrong' thing to do.
I'ma just ignore it, and be glad for the work they did to get it back online. I've seen full blown servers, hell, even MMO's being fully DDOS'd. I can fully believe a website can be targeted too, especially one with a community like ours.
The staff are looking at other hosting options and security measures as we speak. I am guilty of bashing FA on occasion but honestly I believe dragoneer reacted well considering the circumstances.
For now, at least glad FA is back up.
Dunno if people remember the string of DDoS attacks that happened on gaming fronts, and MS has Azure servers which basically fell back upon to another when one went down.
By mitigating you can attempt to throw more resources at the problem temporarily and hope the DDOS goes away and back off those extra machines. It requires you to have those extra machines on hand though (or rent them from Microsoft/Amazon/whoever). But if the DDOS doesn't go away you must simply wait until it stops. You could also try to selectively block the bogus requests at a higher level, but again, a well executed DDOS will get around that.
They were able to stand up to it while attacks upon Blizzard, EA, Sony, Steam, etc could not hold up to.
Remember, each attacking machine only has a certain amount of "bandwidth" to attack, and the attacker doesn't have infinite machines at their disposal. If you're targeting multiple people at once you can either spread the attack evenly or focus more on certain people. The people who "recovered" were simply the people who weren't being focused on as much.
As to the current issue, I'm one of the Low Information Furs *raises paw*. I didn't even KNOW FA had a facebook before now. That said, it sounds like someone targeted the HOSTING SERVICE, not FA, or FURRY FANDOM in particular. We're just "collateral damage", under the umbrella of a massive DOS attack. There's no "conspiracy" against furries here.
(Now that DOS directed specifically at sofurry and ONLY sofurry a couple weeks ago...)
I really have to wonder if FA is only so "badly coded" and seems to have weak servers because it's the largest furry art site. I'll bet inkbunny or weasyl would creak at the seams too if they had the kind of traffic FA gets (IE walk a mile in a man's shoes).