Of course they have bots... That's how you index the web.
If we took Google offline I bet there would also be a reduction in bot traffic from them too!
Indexing is also probably a low priority task, so if half their datacenter capacity is taken offline, their bot traffic probably reduces by more than 50%.
"We should be able to handle a long term net-split" was always part of my emergency plan for every service I worked on. (ie. Imagine all Comms between the Americas and the rest of the world cut for weeks)
Pretty likely to happen if there is a major war or political upheaval to require the internet be cut in two. I didn't require the service had no downtime, but that it was reasonably possible to restore service within a few hours.
Things contributing to that are you should have either live data or a backup in similar geo location to the user. Both the data and the crypto keys. Same for the code. And you should build your service simple enough that someone else who has never seen it before can deploy it and get things at least mostly working. Things like terraform are good for that - and it dramatically reduces employee training too.
> a quick fyi: in a total war everything is a valid military target
this is not true, war crimes exist and have legal definitions, even in WW2 people pushed back on some things their government decided to do, like firebombing large civilian centers
hospitals and water facilities are easy examples, which Israel is very guilty of violating in recent years
I would just like to point out that the court that prosecutes war crimes was just hit with even more sanctions from the US, with the justification that "nobody will hurt American citizens", buy the guy who indirectly ordered the bombing of the school.
Legal definitions are pretty worthless if nobody gets prosecutesd.
> this is not true, war crimes exist and have legal definitions
That is why total wars are distinguished from a normal war. The concept that "all civilian infrastructure supports the war effort" is used in a total war to justify firebombing civilians.
Dresden and Hamburg, by the UK and Americans, public outcry saw this tactic end
WW2 is arguably bad example because everyone was committing crimes against humanity, worst thing humans ever did do, and today we're doing a lot of the same things that got us there
Do you have any sources on this? Would be interesting to read that perspective. Coincidentally read an article [0] on the bombings of Hamburg 2 days ago. As far as I know it was the tactic the US and UK employed until the very end of the war. Dresden was 2-3 months before the end of the war. The bombing of Hamburg was 2 years earlier.
The "tactic" of committing war crimes? How exactly does the date make indiscriminately killing civilians more legitimate? If the bombings had targeted military installations or even civilian targets of strategic importance (which would technically still be a war crime) it would be a different story, but targeting innocent civilians in their sleep isn't really debatable.
I have no idea how you could interpret my comment to think that I'm trying legitimizing bombing civilians.
The parent said "public outcry saw this tactic end".
To my knowledge, it didn't end. That's why I asked for sources and explained how Dresden happened at the very end of the war, where they still employed the tactic, that OP said was ended because of public outcry.
>data centers are dual use technologies now and valid military targets
proclaimed by who? Even the "international order" would disagree, as Yandex Cloud wasn't providing their services to any military companies per my knowledge.
Yandex Cloud was bombed symmetrically. Ukraine made no attempt in targeting MSK-IX, which could be a real military target.
Datacenter hosts Russian bots that comment on western social media. Disrupting Russian propaganda online weakens the Russian military. A crushing defeat for Trump in the mid terms is a military boost for Ukraine.
Google and Amazon abide by US sanctions - if these are Russian firms, it’ll take much longer to get bespoke approval to pay AWS or GCP.. my org is smaller than those and we just outright banned Russian companies after Ukraine was invaded. Too much of a headache and too risky.
Aim a laser at it at a well-chosen frequency (or just use one high enough that nothing reflects it, you don't have to go that high for that), send up a couple kilowatts of power, and just wait. The cooling will not compensate and just heat the satellite to 1000 degrees or so. If needed do it for a week, a month (assuming 10W laser power isn't outright enough to destroy the solar panels or antenna or some other critical component)
Yes, I get that aiming it is pretty hard, but we've hit far smaller targets.
Eh. I would call several of the Middle-East countries that got their data centers smushed as "politically stable." They just got into bed with the wrong ally, I guess?
They are not politically stable, quite the opposite: weak states held together by single sector revenues.
Right after Ukraine war started, I started maintaining a map of next flashpoints: got a hit on Arabian peninsula + Iran, Venezuela, India/ Pakistan.
Israel and Gaza were a surprise.
Eastern flank (Finland/ Baltics/ Poland/ Romania is in a slow burn.
Still waiting for Taiwan, south china sea and Singapore/Malaysia+ Indonesia - but that will be the big one, and actually the conflict for the straits (Malaca and Sunday) may have gotten invalidated by the Iran mess.
> I would call several of the Middle-East countries that got their data centers smushed as "politically stable."
That's the lie that the US and most other Western countries have told themselves ever since the discovery of oil turned what used to be nomads herding camels and catching fish into the thriving petrostates they are today.
Most of MENA is only stable on paper, that stability being heavily dependent on oil and gas production providing giant slush funds to citizens and a horde of exploited migrant and seasonal workers providing for daily needs. That's why they all went into tourism so hard over the last two-ish decades, they know that the fossil fuel reserves are eventually going to deplete and worldwide demand collapsing with them, and that's why everyone but Iran eventually made their peace with the existence of Israel despite sometimes heavy opposition of the population, and that's why there's still barely any opposition to the US and Israel waging war against Iran, and that's why most of MENA militaries but Iran and Israel's are utterly useless as well - a capable military would be able of coup'ing away the ruling kleptocracy.
And now the MENA countries are in for a wild ride. The Mullahs are sadly far from gone, the Western world is busy weaning itself off of oil and gas following the Russian aggression against Ukraine and the price shocks related to that plus the Iran war, tourists won't come back in meaningful numbers likely for a decade if not longer.
I agree, but the way they have gone at it is about the dumbest and incompetent way to do it. A blunder of historic dimensions, I'd even say Vietnam made more sense.
These countries measure processes in decades. Their rulers are not up for election. They can go through huge (sometimes futile), multi-year projects and processes which would not survive any regime change in the west. They are willing to pay a price to assure their independence from Iranian influence - they pushed and encouraged this war in the first place.
Logic says google bots do not come disguised, but as google agents.
Or is there other information?
Now there is probably also AI agent spam from google, but not at this level I believe. Also I am not fully clear what they count as spam, I doubt they would include google in this list, so do they include yandex bots here, if they come officially?
There's also the very well known inverse phenomenon of absolutely non-google people trying to disguise their crawler as a googlebot useragent, which has been a thing since at least... 15 years now?
I am unsure what you're trying to say. But it seems like you don't understand what Bot means in general and how is it specifically defined for the metric provided in that page.
From that pages point of view, a Google bot, Yandex bot, or your uncle Tom's AI agent spam is the same, a bot.
If official yandex bots ain't included in this data here - then it means spam/scam bots come indeed from yandex servers. As they stopped working, when the yandex data center was hit.
What an interesting way to phrase things when the US is responsible for much more suffering and unrest outside of it's own borders. Including the current situation in Russia, come to think of it.
> African countries are like concentration camps? Incredibly racist attitude.
You took two separate points and twisted them to suit your bias.
We are taking immigrants from Latin American countries and deporting them not to their home countries, but to African nations as a form of punishment, allowing them to be detained by a third party government in a country where they don't speak the language and don't have access to a way back to their home nation. If we're going to deport them it should be back to their home country, not an entirely different continent.
It's really heartbreaking to see how incredibly cruel people can be online, I hope you're not like this in person.
Edit: I meant to put the ACLU link rather than the Marshall one, but keeping both
> Great links, Marshall even says how only the most far-leftists say concentration camp instead of the correct term detention center.
Can we not agree that people should not be detained in conditions in which they are being allowed to have an infected tooth develop sepsis leading to death? Is it so much of a stretch to say that if we're going to hold someone in custody, we have a responsibility to ensure that they're not being left in inhumane conditions. When did advocating humane conditions become leftist? How is it that we have such a massive number of incarcerated Americans in prisons but it's only the incarcerated immigrants that are dying at at a rate of one every six days?
> I have a simple trick to avoid being sent to a "concentration camp", I don't illegally go to the US or any otheir country.
Let's conveniently ignore the US citizens ICE rounded up and put into custody because they were the wrong color. Or the increasing number of legal immigrants who are rounded up based on their location and appearance to be sorted out later once an advocate is able to bring their documentation.
Why are you willing to be so cruel? How would you feel if this happened to someone you cared about?
>How is it that we have such a massive number of incarcerated Americans in prisons but it's only the incarcerated immigrants that are dying at at a rate of one every six days?
If you checked the numbers you would notice US prisons and jails have a lot higher mortality than ICE detention, state prison being the most dangerous with about 4x more deaths than ICE.
>Let's conveniently ignore the US citizens ICE rounded
No system is perfect and idiot agents should be fired.
>How would you feel if this happened to someone you cared about?
I've had friends kicked out of the US by ICE and we mostly laugh about it, they know if you do the crime can't really cry once you're busted. Personally I'm banned for life because I'm a convicted criminal, smoked weed and did some LSD when young.
I'm only going to bother responding to what is either an obvious bad faith argument/troll or someone who is completely deluded for the benefit of others who may have some amount of rationality and empathy left in them, as I'm sure you're going to have a "Well actually" retort for every single point I make while ignoring the increasing swell of inhumanity that they all lead to. Don't expect a followup as this is not really for you.
> You wanted silent executions where they botch up using failed lethal injections?
Executions today and throughout the existence of the internet have been "silent". We stopped making executions public events because we realized it was barbaric and celebrated violence while also being a show of force against the citizens of a nation. Public executions are something most people associate with dictatorships.
> Why this sudden sympathy for the terrorist who mercilessly murdered unarmed children and women.
I'm not advocating for sympathy for someone who committed a crime, keep your arguments on point please. I'm advocating for not making the execution of a person a public viewing event put on by the government. Two women were injured in the Fort Hood shooting, however one of the victims was pregnant, so I guess you could still try to argue "women and children", though that seems to imply the male victims were somehow worth less?
> What is this dilution of prioritising profit over human life nonsense?
If I become severely injured or ill my ability to access care to prolong my life or decrease my suffering is directly correlated with my wealth. There are plenty of countries, "third world" and otherwise, where this is simply not the case. If I lived a few hours north of where I am now I'd have universal healthcare. I had a friend who died at 22 of skin cancer because he was afraid of seeking treatment, because he knew that if it turned out to be terminal he would be leaving his family with generational debt. In the last country I visited he could have just gone to the hospital and received treatment. They viewed access to healthcare as a human right, putting the needs of people over profit. Is that country perfect, obviously not, but they've at least got that going for them.
> We kidnapped him because maduro is a dictator who profited himself and his cronies over his people and rigged the elections
Why are we the world police? Should we go "liberate" every country with an autocratic dictator? Why are we more worried about the affairs of a foreign nation and its leader than resolving the issues we have at home. The answer is oil.
> US has been savior of Jews against nazis and bombed the fascist japan regimes there by saving the world from communists who would've plunged the world to middle ages.
This statement alone is worthy of a page of retort on its own, but it's irrelevant to the point I was making, that today things are not going well here, regardless of what good we may or may not have done in the past. The America of today is not the America of yesteryear.
This phrase is so annoying. It's one millimeter up from just doing marvel movie quotes instead of typing your actual thoughts like a real live adult human.
Yandex has cloud offering, their servers are used for actual bot traffic, not just crawlers. Yandex hasn’t been only a search company for a very long time.
I've reported high-volume exploit scanners multiple times, and when expiring blocks a week later, they typically would show up & resumt with the same IP at some point.
Maybe they'd care if the account was using a stolen credit card and there was a chance they wouldn't get their money, but they definitely do not care otherwise for normal people like me. I'm sure that'd be different if it's a multinational or a country-level government body is reporting something, but I can't get those to do my bidding.
Right, because I've had such outstanding results getting in touch with actual humans from Google when reporting abusive traffic directed towards my IP ranges. Top tier attention from people who really care.
I always wondered why every single western country is subjected to a constant stream of the same simplistic and generic anti immigration comments, regardless of the country. It's as if suddenly everyone from Poland to Portugal had the same moron racist uncle flooding their social media service of choice. There is also and always a russian-backed populist far-right emergent political party posting PG-13 versions of the same posts pushed by these bots.
I wonder what kind of fluctuation we will see in these bots traffic.
Its a deliberate attack being done by actors such as Elon musk. How you say? They are making the world think bots and AI automation are ok by supplying basic tools to help everybody scrape while they use technology 100x far more advanced to make everybody else's scraping pointless. They are making all Americans fight with each other and then using their huge data centers to harvest all of the data and keep users on their social media platforms. They basically use a fake Twitter account to "retweet" everybody's news or information and take it off their website into the social realm. They are delibertly sending more and more bots into the world so that they aren't noticed as much. If they didnt.. everybody would be pissed at their AI slop. People like ai meta have far advanced residential ips setup almost undetectable while all the new scraper people are easily detected but their ego and greed will not let them stop.. They are being trained to think it's ok to bot another person and steal their stuff because it's "seo" and "not illegal" "if I don't. Somebody else will" the bad actors here are Elon musk and Meta AI. There is no doubt about it. Don't be fooled by this fraud. Their setups to run their bots is easily 100000 a month... And nobody will be able to compete at that scale and expertise without just getting blocked.
They say it's 60% percent but that's not even close to the truth. In my niche the bots are now about 100 to 1. Yes. For every 1 visitor I get it's 100 automated bots using different ips.. after tracing most of them with fingerprint analysis.. the main culprits are Facebook and Elon musk. Meta is using something called "muse ai" to feed all the data from these bots and Elon musk appears to be channeling everything to x. I think that's what the X logo stands for.. the stocks and market.. everybody going down while he goes up.. the X is their plan on the economy and I just told you for fact how they are doing it.. yet all the morons who have been doing Internet work for 3 years are incapable of understanding. They just hire an Indian worker to fuel the fire
I like to study rhetoric, and appreciate folks asking for specifics. There's a lot of generalities thrown around on this forum that are highly questionable, and the only antidote I have is to request details. It's surprising how often folks resist.
A sibling comment replying to you is using a familiar tactic, which is to try to shame you for asking for specifics, while simultaneously providing none and telling you that it's obvious.
Occasionally people do provide details and I learn something, but that's not the common case, sadly.
No matter what ideology you follow, you are someone’s useful idiot, so this term is meaningless.
Russia is no more (and no less) my enemy than the US and the EU are. And as far as spreading propaganda goes, Russia is downright mediocre compared to the latter two.
Having multiple genuinely different viewpoints in a discussion isn’t evidence of “bots”, it’s the default in any community that isn’t heavily censored to silence dissent. And individuals voicing their different viewpoints isn’t “propaganda”, it’s the definition of discourse.
> Can you point to a few comments that you consider examples?
Just search for “Russia” on HN and follow threads. You’ll find lots of “what about West/Jews”, “Russia is fighting against NATO”, etc. Then open any western news outlet on YouTube and follow comments too.
The russian bots are better.. usually its conspiracy fog, attached to a valid russia opposing point that reveals them. Chinese bots are just this months CCP talking points, so can be quite easily visible if they cram some topic only china cares about into every reply.
The downvotes are because you're resisting easily-observed reality with the seemingly-rational response "Where is this 'air'? If I'm breathing it, it should be easy to point to, no?"
No. If you can't see it, and don't understand it's there, you cannot be explained to. You're someone with no palate asking how anyone else can know if a wine tastes good.
I think you're saying that it's hard to articulate why some particular comment should be judged as having come from a bot. I.e., similar to the SCOTUS opinion regarding pornography: "I know it if I see it".
Is that correct?
If so, wouldn't that still admit someone providing a specific example? The whole point of my original comment was that I knew I wasn't judging these things the same as others were.
Absence of bot traffic is secondary to the absence of nearly all Yandex traffic in general, bot or not, as a result of the datacenter being down. Which is certainly newsworthy.
Your initial submission title sounded as if Yandex DC was used as a bot attack and because they were down, bot traffic in the whole internet was substantially down.
Don't worry, now that Trump started protecting the refineries, the other data centers will be hit sooner rather than later.
All those fresh fp2 drones can't go to waste.
The only question is whats next - power plants? Water treatments? Heating somewhere up north?
The HTTP traffic from Yandex is down to ~ 0 % after the third strike, after the first two strikes already degraded it. I wonder how this looks like at the network level because their search page still serves, but presumably their crawler is inactive now
Edit: Here is some more info, they do have availability issues as is to be expected
> Because three of its primary facilities were knocked offline within four days, Yandex’s failover mechanisms broke down[1][8].
> Outages have cascaded across Yandex Go (taxis), Yandex Pay, food delivery, smart home platforms, internal logistics, and third-party corporate services hosted on Yandex Cloud[2][7]. Problems have spilled into neighboring countries using these systems (Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Serbia)[2][7].
Edit 2: Here is the Yandex Cloud status page, their GCP/AWS equivalent. The entire compute core is offline, and even worse, Cloud Backup
I don't know how useful it will be as a case study since an HA/Ops person in (let's say, the US, Canada, AU, western european countries) has access to do things like buy hypervisor capacity or colocation in just about any location. I could go buy colo in Brussels or Panama City or San Diego or Edmonton or Melbourne tomorrow by contacting the right people.
The Russians are much more restricted from doing anything geographically outside of their own borders (for very well justified sanctions reasons), so their limitations are not the same as an HA person in almost any other country. Maybe some Iranian HA/Ops people will be comparing notes with them.
Sometimes there exist data or processing residence requirements that bind you to a specific region (e.g. EU-only). Also, „all AZs in this region no longer exist“ is not on everyone‘s bingo card, this is a good reminder why multi-AZ deployment in the same region may be not enough.
For data center guys this is definitely a case study, because drone attacks are probably on the threat list for everyone now, for various reasons, including domestic terrorism and hybrid warfare. If you want to defend your investment, time to think what covers you from the air.
It heavily depends on "what kind of DC". A lot of current DCs are not really well protected against a lot of known threats - and that's just a design tradeoff.
High value data is already protected a bit better (or at least should be - the usual trend, management gets lazy when nothing blows up). I'm old enough to have sat in the meetings for "so, apparently a plane crashing into one or more of our locations is a viable risk now" - and a DC hardened for "somebody tries to land a 747 on that thing" should also survive a small drone with a bit of explosives.
While for the younger ones the "we lose several availability zones within days" is a new thing now - it really isn't. We were planning for that back then as well, just that we didn't call it "availability zone" or "cloud" yet.
It's an open question at what point we'll start seeing small fiesty startups that want to sell you a privately owned air defense system for your datacenter roof. The tech to do it is probably far ahead of the regulatory regime to own and operate autonomous small radar+SAM batteries.
It will require some involvement of state, but it is plausible, that critical infrastructure will be required to have this covered and certain big, licensed private contractors may be able to operate air defense systems on such sites (do you smell the money and lobbying effort?).
Also this may influence the design of such data centers. A drone that a paramilitary group can build is not very sophisticated and won’t carry big payloads. Put an outer concrete shell or some better passive defense, and maybe that will be enough.
As a result of some of my work only slightly related to telecom/internet infrastructure, I happened to get on the marketing lists for about six different Chinese companies that will gladly sell you a full size Shahed-136 clone complete with 2 stroke petrol motor. I wouldn't say that small paramilitaries being only able to fly a 5-10kg max size quadcopter with a munition on it into a datacenter is the limit of possible future capabilities. These things are cheaply made in fiberglass molds and look to be dead simple. They're already showing demo videos of them flying around with very low cost ardupilot capable flight controllers.
They even advertise the airframe and motor packages on Instagram....
Yes, spend 10-100x more on 24x7 IT support for it, fiber from two different providers and take care of physical security of the server room. And when there‘s fire, you still need a cloud backup.
It was clearly meant as an example of the ease of a non-russian company buying geographically-distributed services in the global marketplace, not "I could go buy this with a few docusign signatures and SWIFT wire transfers tomorrow". I am not in the market for colo in Panama City or Melbourne. I don't think it's a bad thing that the russians are hampered by many limitations but whatever lessons their HA people are learning these days are probably very specific to a sanctioned Russia.
Unironically yes, if you're just a typical B2B SaaS who doesn't have "datacenter getting hit by a literal missile" in your threat model, this coupled with offsite backups is probably the logical DR plan for that scenario.
I don't think there is much you can do about being targeted by a military, simply because of how unique the attack vector is.
Hacking is smart but happens through software, so if you have hardware (i.e. physical) barriers, that stops the hacking.
Natural disasters happen physically but they are dumb, so if you have software redundancy (i.e. by copying the data to multiple locations), that stops them from destroying everything.
A military is both physical AND smart. They can target multiple locations at once and destroy whole buildings.
Yandex is a part of Russia's military. Just the same as Google, MS, Amazon etc. provide services for the US military. Google et al. are probably in the critical path of defence for most European countries as well, insane though that is.
Not defending Yandex here, but I think their military involvement might be as accidental as of an American farmer whose beef landed in the cantina of aircraft carrier. Government and military procurement in Russia is its own universe, with strong players having specific IT expertise and capable of building DCs and tech. Assuming that everywhere in the world it’s the same as in America is wrong. Consumer tech companies aren’t operating this way usually, it is the scale of American Big Tech that allows them to compete with traditional contractors.
In general it’s the price of working with government, also see AWS Bahrain. I wonder if their insurance actually pays out because those are not officially wars there so hopefully they could recover some what from the insurance.
AWS plays both sides in that conflict since they're also a supplier for Israel. Presumably the aggressive side got them more profit than the defensive side cost them.
A very naive take from someone who clearly lives in a place where people have real choices, economic freedom, freedom of movement, and a government that protects them. "Just shut it down, bro" risks destroying your livelihood and leaving your family financially stranded, and yourself incarcerated or sent to the war zone. And it's not like Yandex develops weapons of mass destruction, you probably assume it's a collaboration even if Yandex simply hosts the Defense Ministry's websites. No sane parent will put their family at risk for this kind of stuff. "I'm going against the government for abstract ethical reasons" is something very few people/countries can afford.
And you can't shut it down anyway. The government will just nationalize it and keep it running. As long as you're the one in charge, you can at least throw a few hidden obstacles in the way, like dragging out legal processes.
No, a pretty informed take from someone who had family members that once upon a time made some very tough choices because they thought it was the right thing to do.
You can pretend at being ethical and moral as long as there is no price to pay, but when the time comes that it matters there will always be a price tag. Whether you are prepared to pay or not is what defines whether you are ethical or just pretending.
Company execs make decisions, employees make decisions, everybody carries a part.
Is it just me, or didn't we just see a single company cause a bit of a dustup when they refused to provide certain services to a military that wanted to bomb another country?
If it doesn't sound like something in the control of a single individual company, perhaps you have something distorting your hearing.
The pattern is quite interesting. I think I have seen this account in another thread today. They post pro-Russia comments, get downvoted and then delete their comment again.
There must be at least 10 or 20 of these, I point them out to the mods but some of them - for instance our good friend 'drysine' - are alive and well even after months of spouting their junk. It is really annoying.
You can learn to quickly diversify availability (or at least data safety) beyond the region of conflict when a kinetic war breaks out. The moment “kinetic sanctions” became the strategy, the risk to data centres should have been self-evident. And if it wasn’t immediately obvious, it should have been blindingly so when targeting expanded from oil refineries to Wildberries warehouses.
Wildberries warehouses were filled with flammable items boxed up in cardboard, packed for maximum efficiency and no wasted space. They were tinderboxes.
A datacenter is filled with server racks that wouldn’t burn as readily as cardboard. The fire videos I see of this datacenter don’t look as good as the Wildberries videos.
That said, I wish the Russian people good luck with booking their taxis and Yandex employees luck with finding RAM.
I don‘t think you can build a new data center in such a short time frame that passed since attacks on WB, definitely not when you can source hardware only from the black market.
I’m not describing what Yandex should do, but rather what their customers should do. Whether that means diversifying to eastern Russia, or China, or Belarus, I don’t know what options exist.
I feel like this isn't even a particularly new thing. I worked at a medium-sized SaaS company and we did disaster recovery drills for moving our stack from eu-west-1 to eu-central-1 in case something catastrophic happened in Ireland. If you want HA, you kinda have to assume that any single country in the world can have some kind of a crippling disaster. Unfortunately for Yandex's clients, Yandex only has regions in two countries, and not that many regions either.
The KZ region wasn't intended for Russia's entire workload, that's a secondary region with better Central Asian access.
If what you deduct were correct, Yandex would not be telling its customers to switch to competitora like VK Cloud. They even have a "priority onboarding code" called "CloudBro" for three competitors.
I predict a great many more videos coming out of Russia of Firepoint UAVs flying into refineries and such, punctuated by background audio commentary that can be summed up as "cyka blyat"
You've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly and egregiously, such as flamewar, personal attacks, and using the site primarily for political/ideological battle, all of which will get you banned here.
*Sudden drop in Cloudflare bot traffic from AS13238 YANDEX — Yandex LLC
UPD Definition of bot traffic from Cloudflare's glossary:
>Bot vs. human traffic
>The percentage of HTTP requests classified as bot versus human, based on bot scores. Requests with a bot score between 1 and 29 are classified as likely automated (bot), while requests with a score of 30 or above are classified as likely human. For more information, refer to Bot classes.
>By default, Radar shows bot vs. human traffic for requests to HTML content. This filter is meant to represent traditional web traffic by excluding API calls, asset requests (images, scripts, fonts), and other machine-to-machine requests.
I can’t believe there are so many dumb comments in this thread.
All it shows is that crawling from Yandex search engine stopped from one Yandex data center ASN.
No one runs opinion/malicious bots from data center IPs that people mention here.
On the other hand there are plenty of datacenter located command/control systems that puppeteer vast fleets of residential proxies (and Russia is by no means the only one doing so), so it will be very telling to see what social media accounts go silent over the coming days and weeks.
> from one Yandex data center ASN
This is only one of two extant Yandex ASN, not an ASN specific to one geographic region/datacenter.
Not to get sidetracked, and not to argue against anything you've said, but how do you figure that out? For people you disagree with, do you open their profile's comments and start keyword-searching "russia" "china" "moscow" etc in hopes of finding a hit? They mentioned that city once in Jan 2024, halfway down the page and in passing. I'm just curious about how others use this site.
Different people read at different speeds, it took me about 5 seconds when skimming it. If you engage in enough discussion related to Russia online you will quickly learn to identify when inauthentic commenters suddenly show up from a previously idle account to add their 2 cents.
The person in question doesn't exhibit much of it, but one will also learn when skimming to identify certain grammar and sentence structure characteristics that can point to what is the first language of a person, even if they're writing in fluent English.
All that expertise (which requires some proper experience in the topic) even before you plug a llm to it, even few years ago they were good enough to identify unique writing styles of people across different accounts on HN.
I have seen document-analysis guides with info on how to identify the regional location of anonymous Internet commenters specifically within the US 48 states if you have a sufficiently large corpus of their text, as it relates to how they use certain regional slang, metaphors, colloquialisms, and words to describe things. Think of it as similar to how linguists have made maps showing regional variations in whether people call it "soda" or "coke" or "pop", but extended to all other common forms of North American dialect.
So cloudflare https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots?dateRange=7d shows 40% of worldwide bot traffic is from the us and <1% is from Russia. So what is this chart of traffic from russias search engine supposed to show?
Yandex is a search engine like Google is a search engine. Both are also cloud vendors. The chart of traffic from Yandex is showing that the majority of traffic was considered bot traffic, and after Ukraine's attack on its datacenter(s), that traffic has reduced substantially.
It looks like the majority of online bot traffic is coming from cloud vendor networks, which isn't surprising to me. But it makes me think that the "bot share by location" chart is more useful as a "which cloud vendor has bad bot control" chart vs. a "where is bot traffic coming from" chart.
Their latest consumer plan includes "Super Duper Bot Fight Mode", which lets you drone strike one data center in a sanctioned country of your choosing.
For additional strikes or to upgrade to ICBM-based payloads, you'll have to contact them to set up an enterprise plan.
Everyone is mentioning crawlers, but wouldn't most traffic from a datacenter's ASN usually be bots just in general given that there's not many humans there to generate human traffic?
Here's an example French hosting company which has something like 14.8% "human" traffic, (the Yandex is under 5% human) though how much of that is actual humans and not advanced things puppeteering headless browsers is another question.
Apart from the correct argument that a search engine like Yandex will have crawlers, I would not be surprised if Western AI companies also used Yandex to scrape covertly.
Nvidia tried to pay off the Russian Anna's Archive for stolen data:
It's interesting (but not surprising) that so much traffic comes from the Netherlands and Singapore despite their sizes compared to the countries at the top of this list.
While not necessarily related to bot traffic, but I was thinking that in the age of AI perhaps we'll be comparing technological development of countries based on their usage of AI per capita (similar to what we have with electricity usage per capita).
I was thinking, we should all contribute to a Yandex fund for the Ukrainian mil to help keep the level of bot activity on the rest of the internet under control!
I think this really highlights the changing face of war.
It's hard to go to war now when your enemy can just use a few small drones to take out everything your citizens care about in a single day (social media, online deliveries etc).
And these things are practically irreplaceable in a war when you're sanctioned up the wazoo. Where are you buying racks of Xeons and DDR5 RAM and Nvidia GPUs?
Slightly misleading. The filter is literally bot traffic from Yandex's AS. Of course it goes down when 3 of 5 DCs is down. But if you filter by country, there's no noticeable dip.
I'm going to be really interested how much this cleans up the internet, I mean the damage is done if you read comment sections on youtube etc, but let's see how long the BS persists.
Continue to live in your parallel universe created for you by your government.
Most people who are commenting and whose mouth you shut with your greasy laps, are simply Russians who are sick and tired of your antirussian chauvinism disguised as pursuing justice (Venezuela, Iran just the most recent examples of this "pursuing").
I am from western Europe, by the way, and can't wait for the moment you take your drones and submarines and get the hell out of here.
Modern day Russia is about the furthest possible thing from "commies". Kleptocracy? Fascism? Dictatorship? Oligarchy? Sure, some bizarro world combination of all of those. But if you want people to take your opinion seriously, try not to sound like somebody's demented grandpa by tossing around "commie" like it's 1959.
I am pretty damn sure that whatever Putin is doing these days is in no way motivated by an adherence to the Marxist-Leninist way of life.
According to orthodox Marxism, the Russian empire had not fully industrialised or created a widespread bourgeoisie. It was still largely feudal and rural, and a monarchy. Some Marxists have tried to say retroactively that the Russian Revolution was a bourgeois not a proletarian revolution as a result.
Lenin tried to paint kulaks as bourgeois en lieu of actual target, and had to modify Marxism heavily to make things fit. Stalin certainly managed to industrialise much of the USSR, so fulfilled that end. Yeltsin-Putin Russia has created an actual bourgeois state, maybe allowing a workers' revolution to take place for real next time.
Or sort of. In reality, Marx was not an infallible prophet. He did not anticipate artificial intelligence or its consequences, genetic engineering, broadcast media or a host of other things. History has not followed all of the paths he suggested.
The deranged Orange Idiot and the bloodthirsty War Criminal are the ones carrying out what you describe. The rest of "the West" wants nothing more to do with them, and is currently attempting to avoid all the knives heading for their backs.
The war crimes I alluded to were carried out for decades under the guise of democracy and human rights. And those same knives were pulled out from the backs of the countries that I listed above. "The West" just wants to continue using the knives quietly, expand their military presence, and sanction the opponents to submission and destruction. The destruction and crimes against humanity in Gaza did not start with Trump, they have been going on for decades. You just dislike that now it's so blunt, you'd rather have their water poisoned so that they die out slowly and "without all the drama".
The arms are sold(and often directly supplied) to Israel by the West. Israeli warplanes are fueled during attacks on Iran by German and NATO tankers. Israel's enemies have suffered decades of sanctions, economic strangulation, and demonization, with the intention of destroying those countries and nations - a crime beyond comprehension for the imperial foot soldiers. A foot soldier of the empire might still have a conscience, and that conscience needs soothing from time to time. So, the imperial machine declares "We condemn the cruelty" while continuing to expand its reach and devour everything in its path. The whole ME (and not only) is essentially a forward deployed ever expanding military base.
The point is that condemning a war in the ME is meaningless, because these powers do not want the war to stop, they just don't want it to be so blunt. They prefer economic strangulation, sanctions and demonization, they want it to be slower and less visible, obscured behind bureaucratic language, with its victims dispersed across societies, consequences unfolding over years and decades, violence concealed, and architects decentralized because it is not a crime of a man, be it Putin or Trump, but a crime of a system where no true accountability can take place. They do not need to bomb every school themselves, but rather enable minor military operations, undermine political and economic stability, and support policies that destroy a society's ability to survive. And the dozens of millions of excess and direct deaths due to these policies are meaningless, right? After all it's the school that counts - those girls had names, faces, futures, and we are rightly appalled. But the millions who die through sanctions, deprivation, and the systemic destruction of their livelihoods, they remain statistics. I mean, can you imagine the public appalled over sanctions against Cuba - what a waste of time. That's not prime time news, and it will never be. Because the sanctions work.
Yandex is Russian Google.
Of course they have bots... That's how you index the web.
If we took Google offline I bet there would also be a reduction in bot traffic from them too!
Indexing is also probably a low priority task, so if half their datacenter capacity is taken offline, their bot traffic probably reduces by more than 50%.
I don't think these are the boys they refer to?
EDIT: I was wrong, they're just generic bot vs human traffic numbers and you're right.
This is devastating for Yandex. What does the SRE recovery plan even look like? “Raise shields”?
Issue recommendation for management: exit the Ukrainian market to reduce physical cybersecurity risks.
"We should be able to handle a long term net-split" was always part of my emergency plan for every service I worked on. (ie. Imagine all Comms between the Americas and the rest of the world cut for weeks)
Pretty likely to happen if there is a major war or political upheaval to require the internet be cut in two. I didn't require the service had no downtime, but that it was reasonably possible to restore service within a few hours.
Things contributing to that are you should have either live data or a backup in similar geo location to the user. Both the data and the crypto keys. Same for the code. And you should build your service simple enough that someone else who has never seen it before can deploy it and get things at least mostly working. Things like terraform are good for that - and it dramatically reduces employee training too.
> "We should be able to handle a long term net-split" was always part of my emergency plan for every service I worked on
Netsplits were also a common feature of IRC that we had to work around quite often.
Same for AWS Bahrain, data centers are dual use technologies now and valid military targets.
https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
a quick fyi: in a total war everything is a valid military target, because economy backs up the military, and everything is economy.
> a quick fyi: in a total war everything is a valid military target
this is not true, war crimes exist and have legal definitions, even in WW2 people pushed back on some things their government decided to do, like firebombing large civilian centers
hospitals and water facilities are easy examples, which Israel is very guilty of violating in recent years
I would just like to point out that the court that prosecutes war crimes was just hit with even more sanctions from the US, with the justification that "nobody will hurt American citizens", buy the guy who indirectly ordered the bombing of the school. Legal definitions are pretty worthless if nobody gets prosecutesd.
> this is not true, war crimes exist and have legal definitions
That is why total wars are distinguished from a normal war. The concept that "all civilian infrastructure supports the war effort" is used in a total war to justify firebombing civilians.
> pushed back on some things their government decided to do, like firebombing large civilian centers
unless we're talking about, say, japan, where the firebombing campaigns killed more civilians than the two atomic bombs :P
Dresden and Hamburg, by the UK and Americans, public outcry saw this tactic end
WW2 is arguably bad example because everyone was committing crimes against humanity, worst thing humans ever did do, and today we're doing a lot of the same things that got us there
Do you have any sources on this? Would be interesting to read that perspective. Coincidentally read an article [0] on the bombings of Hamburg 2 days ago. As far as I know it was the tactic the US and UK employed until the very end of the war. Dresden was 2-3 months before the end of the war. The bombing of Hamburg was 2 years earlier.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-43546839
The "tactic" of committing war crimes? How exactly does the date make indiscriminately killing civilians more legitimate? If the bombings had targeted military installations or even civilian targets of strategic importance (which would technically still be a war crime) it would be a different story, but targeting innocent civilians in their sleep isn't really debatable.
I have no idea how you could interpret my comment to think that I'm trying legitimizing bombing civilians.
The parent said "public outcry saw this tactic end".
To my knowledge, it didn't end. That's why I asked for sources and explained how Dresden happened at the very end of the war, where they still employed the tactic, that OP said was ended because of public outcry.
As well as most of the Ruhr area.
War crimes are violations of laws of war, right? And laws only work when you can enforce them. Who's gonna do that?
>data centers are dual use technologies now and valid military targets
proclaimed by who? Even the "international order" would disagree, as Yandex Cloud wasn't providing their services to any military companies per my knowledge.
Yandex Cloud was bombed symmetrically. Ukraine made no attempt in targeting MSK-IX, which could be a real military target.
> Yandex Cloud wasn't providing their services to any military companies per my knowledge
1) or government organizations?
2) why would you have any knowledge of who Yandex's customers are?
Iranian girls school was allegedly bombed with direct AI assistance. This fact alone makes any datacenter a valid target for Iran.
Datacenter hosts Russian bots that comment on western social media. Disrupting Russian propaganda online weakens the Russian military. A crushing defeat for Trump in the mid terms is a military boost for Ukraine.
Trump derangement syndrome aside, you think those Yandex search bots are somehow being used in trollfarms? Mind sharing a proof?
You must be hosted on one of the remaining datacenters.
New account, 36 karma. Come back when you’ve got a 1000 karma and I’ll take you seriously.
But rehosting that stuff to Google or Amazon clouds is gonna take mere hours.
Google and Amazon abide by US sanctions - if these are Russian firms, it’ll take much longer to get bespoke approval to pay AWS or GCP.. my org is smaller than those and we just outright banned Russian companies after Ukraine was invaded. Too much of a headache and too risky.
Is Russia still under US sanctions though? I read something about a Trump deal to buy diesel from Russia.
Well, hopefully it is in plans, online matchmaking in EU PvP games would be better overnight
Put 90 percent energy into the shields!
Activate the failover datacenters in orbit :)
Meaning get those datacenters in a location where everyone can shoot at them, as opposed to merely capable neighbors that are physically close enough?
Great plan.
It is orders of magnitude harder to hit a satellite in orbit than a building on the ground.
And far more visible to anyone who happens to have a telescope pointed at that general section of the sky.
Aim a laser at it at a well-chosen frequency (or just use one high enough that nothing reflects it, you don't have to go that high for that), send up a couple kilowatts of power, and just wait. The cooling will not compensate and just heat the satellite to 1000 degrees or so. If needed do it for a week, a month (assuming 10W laser power isn't outright enough to destroy the solar panels or antenna or some other critical component)
Yes, I get that aiming it is pretty hard, but we've hit far smaller targets.
Build data centers in politically stable countries.
Sure you cannot bribe anyone, actually have to pay taxes and can't install gas turbines but... they don't get blown up.
Eh. I would call several of the Middle-East countries that got their data centers smushed as "politically stable." They just got into bed with the wrong ally, I guess?
They are not politically stable, quite the opposite: weak states held together by single sector revenues. Right after Ukraine war started, I started maintaining a map of next flashpoints: got a hit on Arabian peninsula + Iran, Venezuela, India/ Pakistan. Israel and Gaza were a surprise. Eastern flank (Finland/ Baltics/ Poland/ Romania is in a slow burn. Still waiting for Taiwan, south china sea and Singapore/Malaysia+ Indonesia - but that will be the big one, and actually the conflict for the straits (Malaca and Sunday) may have gotten invalidated by the Iran mess.
When the USA loses it's economic dominance, Alaska looks to be another warzone to me.
Lotsa oil, small population, hard to defend.
> I would call several of the Middle-East countries that got their data centers smushed as "politically stable."
That's the lie that the US and most other Western countries have told themselves ever since the discovery of oil turned what used to be nomads herding camels and catching fish into the thriving petrostates they are today.
Most of MENA is only stable on paper, that stability being heavily dependent on oil and gas production providing giant slush funds to citizens and a horde of exploited migrant and seasonal workers providing for daily needs. That's why they all went into tourism so hard over the last two-ish decades, they know that the fossil fuel reserves are eventually going to deplete and worldwide demand collapsing with them, and that's why everyone but Iran eventually made their peace with the existence of Israel despite sometimes heavy opposition of the population, and that's why there's still barely any opposition to the US and Israel waging war against Iran, and that's why most of MENA militaries but Iran and Israel's are utterly useless as well - a capable military would be able of coup'ing away the ruling kleptocracy.
And now the MENA countries are in for a wild ride. The Mullahs are sadly far from gone, the Western world is busy weaning itself off of oil and gas following the Russian aggression against Ukraine and the price shocks related to that plus the Iran war, tourists won't come back in meaningful numbers likely for a decade if not longer.
> barely any opposition to the US and Israel waging war against Iran
It is in the interest of everyone in the region and the world to be rid of that brutal Islamist regime. The U.S. and Israel are doing God's work.
God does not exist, so you can't be doing god's work. But even if god did exist, you wouldn't be doing God's work by killing other people.
Every side believes they're doing God's work, that's the entire basis of the conflict.
> The U.S. and Israel are doing God's work.
Google Maps on Gaza does shows a biblical scene. I'm sure everyone who ever perpetrated a massacre would argue they were doing gods work.
I agree, but the way they have gone at it is about the dumbest and incompetent way to do it. A blunder of historic dimensions, I'd even say Vietnam made more sense.
US put some of those regimes in power
Visit Iran, then visit UAE or Bahrain, then tell me again if they got in bed with the wrong ally.
I tried following your advice but the airports were closed...
These countries measure processes in decades. Their rulers are not up for election. They can go through huge (sometimes futile), multi-year projects and processes which would not survive any regime change in the west. They are willing to pay a price to assure their independence from Iranian influence - they pushed and encouraged this war in the first place.
> actually have to pay taxes
Interested in recommendations of politically stable countries where companies can't practice tax avoidance.
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I'd like to see their business continuity plan lmao
Don't invade another country. Easy.
That would be devastating for the US datacenter industry.
On the contrary, they would flourish.
No it wouldn't.
I used to say "What happens if Hurricane Sandy 2 hits?" e.g. a whole region goes down.
Now I can add "AWS Bahrain" and "Yandex" to that list.
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The other Yandex AS which is their hosting/hypervisor platform, broadly similar to AWS, Azure, whatever also shows a major drop in bot traffic:
https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/as200350?dateRange=7d
https://www.peeringdb.com/net/20950
Don't let logic get in the way of a good propaganda.
Logic says google bots do not come disguised, but as google agents.
Or is there other information?
Now there is probably also AI agent spam from google, but not at this level I believe. Also I am not fully clear what they count as spam, I doubt they would include google in this list, so do they include yandex bots here, if they come officially?
Google bots definitely come disguised, to check whether the web site serves different content to non-Google user agents.
There's also the very well known inverse phenomenon of absolutely non-google people trying to disguise their crawler as a googlebot useragent, which has been a thing since at least... 15 years now?
Yeah I see a lot of what looks like non google bots pretending to be google bots, and then the next time some other bot and so on.
How do you know they are not google? Their IP address or behavior?
Behavior mostly. I don’t expect Google to be trying to hit known exploits for that given server and similar behavior.
I am unsure what you're trying to say. But it seems like you don't understand what Bot means in general and how is it specifically defined for the metric provided in that page.
From that pages point of view, a Google bot, Yandex bot, or your uncle Tom's AI agent spam is the same, a bot.
I know what it means in general, but like I said indeed not "how is it specifically defined for the metric provided in that page."
Neither do Yandex bots. What's your point?
If official yandex bots ain't included in this data here - then it means spam/scam bots come indeed from yandex servers. As they stopped working, when the yandex data center was hit.
But what do you mean by "if"? It is a well defined metric and there is no "if".
I'll just link this comment if I may: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50042416
Thank you, I missed that one (or it was not there when I started writing).
So yandex bots are included and this metric says nothing about malicious yandex intent here.
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> HN is just filled with the same primitive tribal normies
Yes, but it's mostly the opposite tribe of the one you're complaining about.
Yeah for real, enlightened one. Russia is great by every metric /s.
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What an interesting way to phrase things when the US is responsible for much more suffering and unrest outside of it's own borders. Including the current situation in Russia, come to think of it.
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> Are these concentration camps in the room?
https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/deaths-in-detent...
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2026/05/04/ice-language-d...
> African countries are like concentration camps? Incredibly racist attitude.
You took two separate points and twisted them to suit your bias.
We are taking immigrants from Latin American countries and deporting them not to their home countries, but to African nations as a form of punishment, allowing them to be detained by a third party government in a country where they don't speak the language and don't have access to a way back to their home nation. If we're going to deport them it should be back to their home country, not an entirely different continent.
It's really heartbreaking to see how incredibly cruel people can be online, I hope you're not like this in person.
Edit: I meant to put the ACLU link rather than the Marshall one, but keeping both
Great links, Marshall even says how only the most far-leftists say concentration camp instead of the correct term detention center.
How to send them to their home countries if they don't want to take them?
I have a simple trick to avoid being sent to a "concentration camp", I don't illegally go to the US or any otheir country.
> Great links, Marshall even says how only the most far-leftists say concentration camp instead of the correct term detention center.
Can we not agree that people should not be detained in conditions in which they are being allowed to have an infected tooth develop sepsis leading to death? Is it so much of a stretch to say that if we're going to hold someone in custody, we have a responsibility to ensure that they're not being left in inhumane conditions. When did advocating humane conditions become leftist? How is it that we have such a massive number of incarcerated Americans in prisons but it's only the incarcerated immigrants that are dying at at a rate of one every six days?
> I have a simple trick to avoid being sent to a "concentration camp", I don't illegally go to the US or any otheir country.
Let's conveniently ignore the US citizens ICE rounded up and put into custody because they were the wrong color. Or the increasing number of legal immigrants who are rounded up based on their location and appearance to be sorted out later once an advocate is able to bring their documentation.
Why are you willing to be so cruel? How would you feel if this happened to someone you cared about?
Yeah medical care should be offered.
>How is it that we have such a massive number of incarcerated Americans in prisons but it's only the incarcerated immigrants that are dying at at a rate of one every six days?
If you checked the numbers you would notice US prisons and jails have a lot higher mortality than ICE detention, state prison being the most dangerous with about 4x more deaths than ICE.
>Let's conveniently ignore the US citizens ICE rounded
No system is perfect and idiot agents should be fired.
>How would you feel if this happened to someone you cared about?
I've had friends kicked out of the US by ICE and we mostly laugh about it, they know if you do the crime can't really cry once you're busted. Personally I'm banned for life because I'm a convicted criminal, smoked weed and did some LSD when young.
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I'm only going to bother responding to what is either an obvious bad faith argument/troll or someone who is completely deluded for the benefit of others who may have some amount of rationality and empathy left in them, as I'm sure you're going to have a "Well actually" retort for every single point I make while ignoring the increasing swell of inhumanity that they all lead to. Don't expect a followup as this is not really for you.
You ask about the deaths in concentration camps: Here's what the ACLU has to say: https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/deaths-in-detent...
You asked about calling them concentration camps, here's what the Marshall Project has to say: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2026/05/04/ice-language-d...
> You wanted silent executions where they botch up using failed lethal injections?
Executions today and throughout the existence of the internet have been "silent". We stopped making executions public events because we realized it was barbaric and celebrated violence while also being a show of force against the citizens of a nation. Public executions are something most people associate with dictatorships.
> Why this sudden sympathy for the terrorist who mercilessly murdered unarmed children and women.
I'm not advocating for sympathy for someone who committed a crime, keep your arguments on point please. I'm advocating for not making the execution of a person a public viewing event put on by the government. Two women were injured in the Fort Hood shooting, however one of the victims was pregnant, so I guess you could still try to argue "women and children", though that seems to imply the male victims were somehow worth less?
> What is this dilution of prioritising profit over human life nonsense?
If I become severely injured or ill my ability to access care to prolong my life or decrease my suffering is directly correlated with my wealth. There are plenty of countries, "third world" and otherwise, where this is simply not the case. If I lived a few hours north of where I am now I'd have universal healthcare. I had a friend who died at 22 of skin cancer because he was afraid of seeking treatment, because he knew that if it turned out to be terminal he would be leaving his family with generational debt. In the last country I visited he could have just gone to the hospital and received treatment. They viewed access to healthcare as a human right, putting the needs of people over profit. Is that country perfect, obviously not, but they've at least got that going for them.
> We kidnapped him because maduro is a dictator who profited himself and his cronies over his people and rigged the elections
Why are we the world police? Should we go "liberate" every country with an autocratic dictator? Why are we more worried about the affairs of a foreign nation and its leader than resolving the issues we have at home. The answer is oil.
> US has been savior of Jews against nazis and bombed the fascist japan regimes there by saving the world from communists who would've plunged the world to middle ages.
This statement alone is worthy of a page of retort on its own, but it's irrelevant to the point I was making, that today things are not going well here, regardless of what good we may or may not have done in the past. The America of today is not the America of yesteryear.
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This phrase is so annoying. It's one millimeter up from just doing marvel movie quotes instead of typing your actual thoughts like a real live adult human.
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> normies
Touch grass.
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Thanks for making it clear that you didn't look past the submission title.
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Still, at least Polish Facebook seem to be far quieter with anti-UA/pro russia comments. So not only search bots
Yandex has cloud offering, their servers are used for actual bot traffic, not just crawlers. Yandex hasn’t been only a search company for a very long time.
Google hosts a significant number of bots. About half of my fail2ban list is google cloud IPs.
Of course they do, but they are quick with account bans when notified because of the liability issue unlike Yandex.
I've reported high-volume exploit scanners multiple times, and when expiring blocks a week later, they typically would show up & resumt with the same IP at some point.
Maybe they'd care if the account was using a stolen credit card and there was a chance they wouldn't get their money, but they definitely do not care otherwise for normal people like me. I'm sure that'd be different if it's a multinational or a country-level government body is reporting something, but I can't get those to do my bidding.
That must be why Google has such a stelly reputation for the quality of their support operations
> liability issue
Continue drinking the Google kool-aid
Right, because I've had such outstanding results getting in touch with actual humans from Google when reporting abusive traffic directed towards my IP ranges. Top tier attention from people who really care.
/s
"If we took Google offline I bet there would also be a reduction in bot traffic from them too!"
That would be awesome.
I wonder how this will affect the Yandex search engine. I think I've read they split the Russian one and .com, but I'm not sure.
I wonder how bot traffic on propaganda platforms like Twitter changed, but they probably won't give out any information anyway.
I always wondered why every single western country is subjected to a constant stream of the same simplistic and generic anti immigration comments, regardless of the country. It's as if suddenly everyone from Poland to Portugal had the same moron racist uncle flooding their social media service of choice. There is also and always a russian-backed populist far-right emergent political party posting PG-13 versions of the same posts pushed by these bots.
I wonder what kind of fluctuation we will see in these bots traffic.
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Its a deliberate attack being done by actors such as Elon musk. How you say? They are making the world think bots and AI automation are ok by supplying basic tools to help everybody scrape while they use technology 100x far more advanced to make everybody else's scraping pointless. They are making all Americans fight with each other and then using their huge data centers to harvest all of the data and keep users on their social media platforms. They basically use a fake Twitter account to "retweet" everybody's news or information and take it off their website into the social realm. They are delibertly sending more and more bots into the world so that they aren't noticed as much. If they didnt.. everybody would be pissed at their AI slop. People like ai meta have far advanced residential ips setup almost undetectable while all the new scraper people are easily detected but their ego and greed will not let them stop.. They are being trained to think it's ok to bot another person and steal their stuff because it's "seo" and "not illegal" "if I don't. Somebody else will" the bad actors here are Elon musk and Meta AI. There is no doubt about it. Don't be fooled by this fraud. Their setups to run their bots is easily 100000 a month... And nobody will be able to compete at that scale and expertise without just getting blocked.
They say it's 60% percent but that's not even close to the truth. In my niche the bots are now about 100 to 1. Yes. For every 1 visitor I get it's 100 automated bots using different ips.. after tracing most of them with fingerprint analysis.. the main culprits are Facebook and Elon musk. Meta is using something called "muse ai" to feed all the data from these bots and Elon musk appears to be channeling everything to x. I think that's what the X logo stands for.. the stocks and market.. everybody going down while he goes up.. the X is their plan on the economy and I just told you for fact how they are doing it.. yet all the morons who have been doing Internet work for 3 years are incapable of understanding. They just hire an Indian worker to fuel the fire
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Can you point to a few comments that you consider examples?
I've never noticed occurrences of such stuff, so I'm curious what I'm failing to key in on.
Edit: and would someone mind explaining the downvotes? If they're meant to communicate something to me, I'm genuinely not understanding.
I like to study rhetoric, and appreciate folks asking for specifics. There's a lot of generalities thrown around on this forum that are highly questionable, and the only antidote I have is to request details. It's surprising how often folks resist.
A sibling comment replying to you is using a familiar tactic, which is to try to shame you for asking for specifics, while simultaneously providing none and telling you that it's obvious.
Occasionally people do provide details and I learn something, but that's not the common case, sadly.
Post a controversial political statement and grab a beer.
Obviously. Because anyone who disagrees with the Western online consensus must be a bot, essentially by definition.
Would it please you if “useful idiot” would be used over bot when someone regurgitates Russian metodichkas?
No matter what ideology you follow, you are someone’s useful idiot, so this term is meaningless.
Russia is no more (and no less) my enemy than the US and the EU are. And as far as spreading propaganda goes, Russia is downright mediocre compared to the latter two.
What you’re saying is not wrong, but it is also empty.
It’s impossible to talk about this without concrete examples and opinions about them.
Ehh, there are enough humans that would do that. Don't delude yourself thinking that there are no people that hold such views.
That's half the point of the bots though, to spread the propaganda to other people so they spread it as well
Having multiple genuinely different viewpoints in a discussion isn’t evidence of “bots”, it’s the default in any community that isn’t heavily censored to silence dissent. And individuals voicing their different viewpoints isn’t “propaganda”, it’s the definition of discourse.
> Can you point to a few comments that you consider examples?
Just search for “Russia” on HN and follow threads. You’ll find lots of “what about West/Jews”, “Russia is fighting against NATO”, etc. Then open any western news outlet on YouTube and follow comments too.
The russian bots are better.. usually its conspiracy fog, attached to a valid russia opposing point that reveals them. Chinese bots are just this months CCP talking points, so can be quite easily visible if they cram some topic only china cares about into every reply.
Nobody wants honesty, everyone just wants to fit in with the collective. The downvotes are the collective, reactive mindset, showing itself.
The downvotes are because you're resisting easily-observed reality with the seemingly-rational response "Where is this 'air'? If I'm breathing it, it should be easy to point to, no?"
No. If you can't see it, and don't understand it's there, you cannot be explained to. You're someone with no palate asking how anyone else can know if a wine tastes good.
I appreciate that response. I don't know if/how to convince you that I'm asking the question in good faith, but (FWIW) I am.
Regardless, wouldn't it be easy to point me to even one example if it's as prevalent as (I think) you're saying?
Or am I missing your main point, i.e. that what's being described can't be demonstrated via example?
> wouldn't it be easy to point me to even one example
Read and think about my wine analogy, if you care.
I think you're saying that it's hard to articulate why some particular comment should be judged as having come from a bot. I.e., similar to the SCOTUS opinion regarding pornography: "I know it if I see it".
Is that correct?
If so, wouldn't that still admit someone providing a specific example? The whole point of my original comment was that I knew I wasn't judging these things the same as others were.
Nonsense. They’re trying to breathe and the downvotes won’t allow it.
Point out any wine that doesn't taste the same as any other, to me who has said he cannot taste wine.
Only then, I'll believe you that wine can taste good or bad.
Is my mind open? Is this not a waste of your time?
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Someone needs to learn how to read the Bot Traffic page.
That is a drop in traffic specifically from Yandex bots (which includes their crawlers and other apps hosted in their DC)
Now compare it with Bot Traffic in:
* Russia: https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/ru?dateRange=7d
* Europe: https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/europe?dateRange=7d
* Worldwide: https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots?dateRange=7d
Dip is barely noticeable even in Russia.
Its like saying, "API requests are completely down" (and small disclaimer: only from your server, because your server is down)
Absence of bot traffic is secondary to the absence of nearly all Yandex traffic in general, bot or not, as a result of the datacenter being down. Which is certainly newsworthy.
Your initial submission title sounded as if Yandex DC was used as a bot attack and because they were down, bot traffic in the whole internet was substantially down.
Don't worry, now that Trump started protecting the refineries, the other data centers will be hit sooner rather than later. All those fresh fp2 drones can't go to waste. The only question is whats next - power plants? Water treatments? Heating somewhere up north?
The HTTP traffic from Yandex is down to ~ 0 % after the third strike, after the first two strikes already degraded it. I wonder how this looks like at the network level because their search page still serves, but presumably their crawler is inactive now
Edit: Here is some more info, they do have availability issues as is to be expected
> Because three of its primary facilities were knocked offline within four days, Yandex’s failover mechanisms broke down[1][8].
> Outages have cascaded across Yandex Go (taxis), Yandex Pay, food delivery, smart home platforms, internal logistics, and third-party corporate services hosted on Yandex Cloud[2][7]. Problems have spilled into neighboring countries using these systems (Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Serbia)[2][7].
Edit 2: Here is the Yandex Cloud status page, their GCP/AWS equivalent. The entire compute core is offline, and even worse, Cloud Backup
https://status.yandex.cloud/ru/dashboard
> ru Compute Cloud, ru Kubernetes, ru PostgreSQL, ru ClickHouse, ru MySQL, ru YDB, ru Kafka, ru Application Load Balancer
Interestingly, Yandex tells its users on the status page to switch to competitors Selectel, K2Cloud, and VK Cloud. Which will probably be hit next
This will be a case study in catastrophic events for HA and Ops folks.-
I don't know how useful it will be as a case study since an HA/Ops person in (let's say, the US, Canada, AU, western european countries) has access to do things like buy hypervisor capacity or colocation in just about any location. I could go buy colo in Brussels or Panama City or San Diego or Edmonton or Melbourne tomorrow by contacting the right people.
The Russians are much more restricted from doing anything geographically outside of their own borders (for very well justified sanctions reasons), so their limitations are not the same as an HA person in almost any other country. Maybe some Iranian HA/Ops people will be comparing notes with them.
Sometimes there exist data or processing residence requirements that bind you to a specific region (e.g. EU-only). Also, „all AZs in this region no longer exist“ is not on everyone‘s bingo card, this is a good reminder why multi-AZ deployment in the same region may be not enough.
For data center guys this is definitely a case study, because drone attacks are probably on the threat list for everyone now, for various reasons, including domestic terrorism and hybrid warfare. If you want to defend your investment, time to think what covers you from the air.
It heavily depends on "what kind of DC". A lot of current DCs are not really well protected against a lot of known threats - and that's just a design tradeoff.
High value data is already protected a bit better (or at least should be - the usual trend, management gets lazy when nothing blows up). I'm old enough to have sat in the meetings for "so, apparently a plane crashing into one or more of our locations is a viable risk now" - and a DC hardened for "somebody tries to land a 747 on that thing" should also survive a small drone with a bit of explosives.
While for the younger ones the "we lose several availability zones within days" is a new thing now - it really isn't. We were planning for that back then as well, just that we didn't call it "availability zone" or "cloud" yet.
It's an open question at what point we'll start seeing small fiesty startups that want to sell you a privately owned air defense system for your datacenter roof. The tech to do it is probably far ahead of the regulatory regime to own and operate autonomous small radar+SAM batteries.
It will require some involvement of state, but it is plausible, that critical infrastructure will be required to have this covered and certain big, licensed private contractors may be able to operate air defense systems on such sites (do you smell the money and lobbying effort?).
Also this may influence the design of such data centers. A drone that a paramilitary group can build is not very sophisticated and won’t carry big payloads. Put an outer concrete shell or some better passive defense, and maybe that will be enough.
As a result of some of my work only slightly related to telecom/internet infrastructure, I happened to get on the marketing lists for about six different Chinese companies that will gladly sell you a full size Shahed-136 clone complete with 2 stroke petrol motor. I wouldn't say that small paramilitaries being only able to fly a 5-10kg max size quadcopter with a munition on it into a datacenter is the limit of possible future capabilities. These things are cheaply made in fiberglass molds and look to be dead simple. They're already showing demo videos of them flying around with very low cost ardupilot capable flight controllers.
They even advertise the airframe and motor packages on Instagram....
Well, what an interesting time we are living in…
> privately owned air defense system for your datacenter roof
Already here: https://vishkipvo.ru/
In a scenario were data centres in China, the US or France are getting blown up you're in WW3 and your food delivery service no longer matters.
Just co-located datacenter next to a military base
Just run your app on three fast servers in your office.
Yes, spend 10-100x more on 24x7 IT support for it, fiber from two different providers and take care of physical security of the server room. And when there‘s fire, you still need a cloud backup.
The DR plan for pros, "I could go buy colo tomorrow by contacting the right people"
It was clearly meant as an example of the ease of a non-russian company buying geographically-distributed services in the global marketplace, not "I could go buy this with a few docusign signatures and SWIFT wire transfers tomorrow". I am not in the market for colo in Panama City or Melbourne. I don't think it's a bad thing that the russians are hampered by many limitations but whatever lessons their HA people are learning these days are probably very specific to a sanctioned Russia.
Unironically yes, if you're just a typical B2B SaaS who doesn't have "datacenter getting hit by a literal missile" in your threat model, this coupled with offsite backups is probably the logical DR plan for that scenario.
I don't think there is much you can do about being targeted by a military, simply because of how unique the attack vector is.
Hacking is smart but happens through software, so if you have hardware (i.e. physical) barriers, that stops the hacking.
Natural disasters happen physically but they are dumb, so if you have software redundancy (i.e. by copying the data to multiple locations), that stops them from destroying everything.
A military is both physical AND smart. They can target multiple locations at once and destroy whole buildings.
> I don't think there is much you can do about being targeted by a military, simply because of how unique the attack vector is.
You could choose not to invade other countries.
This (as with defense) is kind of outside Google or Yandex's purview.
Yandex is a part of Russia's military. Just the same as Google, MS, Amazon etc. provide services for the US military. Google et al. are probably in the critical path of defence for most European countries as well, insane though that is.
Not defending Yandex here, but I think their military involvement might be as accidental as of an American farmer whose beef landed in the cantina of aircraft carrier. Government and military procurement in Russia is its own universe, with strong players having specific IT expertise and capable of building DCs and tech. Assuming that everywhere in the world it’s the same as in America is wrong. Consumer tech companies aren’t operating this way usually, it is the scale of American Big Tech that allows them to compete with traditional contractors.
In general it’s the price of working with government, also see AWS Bahrain. I wonder if their insurance actually pays out because those are not officially wars there so hopefully they could recover some what from the insurance.
AWS plays both sides in that conflict since they're also a supplier for Israel. Presumably the aggressive side got them more profit than the defensive side cost them.
I don't think that qualifies as playing both sides.
Said every company serving fascists ever.
No, you can choose to collaborate or you can shut it down.
Collaborators don't get to point back in time and say 'oh we had no choice', even if the choice was a painful one. Sorry it does not work that way.
A very naive take from someone who clearly lives in a place where people have real choices, economic freedom, freedom of movement, and a government that protects them. "Just shut it down, bro" risks destroying your livelihood and leaving your family financially stranded, and yourself incarcerated or sent to the war zone. And it's not like Yandex develops weapons of mass destruction, you probably assume it's a collaboration even if Yandex simply hosts the Defense Ministry's websites. No sane parent will put their family at risk for this kind of stuff. "I'm going against the government for abstract ethical reasons" is something very few people/countries can afford.
And you can't shut it down anyway. The government will just nationalize it and keep it running. As long as you're the one in charge, you can at least throw a few hidden obstacles in the way, like dragging out legal processes.
No, a pretty informed take from someone who had family members that once upon a time made some very tough choices because they thought it was the right thing to do.
You can pretend at being ethical and moral as long as there is no price to pay, but when the time comes that it matters there will always be a price tag. Whether you are prepared to pay or not is what defines whether you are ethical or just pretending.
Company execs make decisions, employees make decisions, everybody carries a part.
Everything I don't like is fascist. Bed time is fascist. Blah blah. This is an incredibly naive take.
There's better definitions to use to identify fascism.
"At the core of fascism is loyalty to tribe, ethnic identity, religion, tradition, or, in a word, nation." - Jason Stanley
Also, a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control.
I guess, but that doesn't sound like something in the control of a single individual company.
Is it just me, or didn't we just see a single company cause a bit of a dustup when they refused to provide certain services to a military that wanted to bomb another country?
If it doesn't sound like something in the control of a single individual company, perhaps you have something distorting your hearing.
They control their own individual contribution.
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At least one russian shill that isn't affected by the Yandex strikes. Let's see how the rest of them fares, HN has its fair share of these characters.
The pattern is quite interesting. I think I have seen this account in another thread today. They post pro-Russia comments, get downvoted and then delete their comment again.
There must be at least 10 or 20 of these, I point them out to the mods but some of them - for instance our good friend 'drysine' - are alive and well even after months of spouting their junk. It is really annoying.
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You can learn to quickly diversify availability (or at least data safety) beyond the region of conflict when a kinetic war breaks out. The moment “kinetic sanctions” became the strategy, the risk to data centres should have been self-evident. And if it wasn’t immediately obvious, it should have been blindingly so when targeting expanded from oil refineries to Wildberries warehouses.
Wildberries warehouses were filled with flammable items boxed up in cardboard, packed for maximum efficiency and no wasted space. They were tinderboxes.
A datacenter is filled with server racks that wouldn’t burn as readily as cardboard. The fire videos I see of this datacenter don’t look as good as the Wildberries videos.
That said, I wish the Russian people good luck with booking their taxis and Yandex employees luck with finding RAM.
I don‘t think you can build a new data center in such a short time frame that passed since attacks on WB, definitely not when you can source hardware only from the black market.
I’m not describing what Yandex should do, but rather what their customers should do. Whether that means diversifying to eastern Russia, or China, or Belarus, I don’t know what options exist.
... and in the middle of the RAM-pocalypse, no less.-
I think the complete destruction of the AWS Bahrain region got there first.
I feel like this isn't even a particularly new thing. I worked at a medium-sized SaaS company and we did disaster recovery drills for moving our stack from eu-west-1 to eu-central-1 in case something catastrophic happened in Ireland. If you want HA, you kinda have to assume that any single country in the world can have some kind of a crippling disaster. Unfortunately for Yandex's clients, Yandex only has regions in two countries, and not that many regions either.
> The entire compute core is offline, and even worse, Cloud Backup
Their Kazakh regions are available according to the dashboard, so it isn't as catastrophic.
Their managed DBs and data processing services are heavily affected though with no Kazakh redundancies from the looks of it.
The KZ region wasn't intended for Russia's entire workload, that's a secondary region with better Central Asian access.
If what you deduct were correct, Yandex would not be telling its customers to switch to competitora like VK Cloud. They even have a "priority onboarding code" called "CloudBro" for three competitors.
I just searched "blyat" and it worked, so?
Given that blyad is just punctuation at this point, I am not surprised.
I predict a great many more videos coming out of Russia of Firepoint UAVs flying into refineries and such, punctuated by background audio commentary that can be summed up as "cyka blyat"
The username checks out!
("Ept" and "suka" are two other swearwords, that are also used much like punctuation.)
Get with the times, gramps
Isn't this showing the percentage of bot traffic from the Yandex IP range?
If so, it isn't particularly surprising that the line would go down.
EDIT: yes, it is. Looking at the same graph for all of Russia, and there's no discernible pattern:
https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/ru?dateRange=7d
same for the 48h view:
https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/ru?dateRange=2d
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This is true. Almost all of my website's bot traffic is from USA.
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That’s a weird thing to be proud of
I don’t think it’s “bad” to have negative sentiment towards an actively warmongering country
Now I'm confused. Which country are you now refering to?
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I never said the US was exempt from this? I’m very well aware that the US has done many shameful things
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You've been reverting to old habits of egregiously breaking HN's rules lately. If you keep this up we will ban the account.
I'm not talking about a single comment or thread here, but a clear repeated pattern. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix this.
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You've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly and egregiously, such as flamewar, personal attacks, and using the site primarily for political/ideological battle, all of which will get you banned here.
If you want to keep posting to HN, please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stop doing these things.
*Sudden drop in Cloudflare bot traffic from AS13238 YANDEX — Yandex LLC
UPD Definition of bot traffic from Cloudflare's glossary:
>Bot vs. human traffic
>The percentage of HTTP requests classified as bot versus human, based on bot scores. Requests with a bot score between 1 and 29 are classified as likely automated (bot), while requests with a score of 30 or above are classified as likely human. For more information, refer to Bot classes.
>By default, Radar shows bot vs. human traffic for requests to HTML content. This filter is meant to represent traditional web traffic by excluding API calls, asset requests (images, scripts, fonts), and other machine-to-machine requests.
https://developers.cloudflare.com/radar/glossary/#bot-vs-hum...
https://developers.cloudflare.com/bots/concepts/bot-score/
Correct, I probably didn't didn't write that in the clearest possible way, I meant "detected bot traffic hitting cloudflare originating from Yandex".
I can’t believe there are so many dumb comments in this thread. All it shows is that crawling from Yandex search engine stopped from one Yandex data center ASN.
No one runs opinion/malicious bots from data center IPs that people mention here.
Did people actually stop thinking?
On the other hand there are plenty of datacenter located command/control systems that puppeteer vast fleets of residential proxies (and Russia is by no means the only one doing so), so it will be very telling to see what social media accounts go silent over the coming days and weeks.
> from one Yandex data center ASN
This is only one of two extant Yandex ASN, not an ASN specific to one geographic region/datacenter.
https://www.peeringdb.com/net/1751
The other one is this: https://www.peeringdb.com/net/20950
And the 200350 also shows a near complete drop off in bot activity:
https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/as200350?dateRange=7d
> command/control systems
There is Hetzner for that.
The funny thing is that apparently I'm the only one that flagged it... I don't know why people comment instead of using the tools?
The bots might be run in the datacenter and proxied through residential IPs as the exit point.
If they are, then that wouldn't be YANDEX AS13238. So the linked graph wouldn't show these changes.
Maybe they do use an obvious IP from yandex datacenter IP range so that you believe they can't possibly be yandex's bot?
You won't see this kind of stats on the CF page.
All it shows is direct traffic against CF infrastructure.
And yet overnight the pro UA comments in Polish internet dropped by order of magnitude, must be coincidence....
...it's fucking datacenter, obviously it runs more than just "crawler bots"
exactly
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Both comments, his and especially yours, are terrible interpretations. That's how any discussion is turned into a mud flinging party.
Not to get sidetracked, and not to argue against anything you've said, but how do you figure that out? For people you disagree with, do you open their profile's comments and start keyword-searching "russia" "china" "moscow" etc in hopes of finding a hit? They mentioned that city once in Jan 2024, halfway down the page and in passing. I'm just curious about how others use this site.
Different people read at different speeds, it took me about 5 seconds when skimming it. If you engage in enough discussion related to Russia online you will quickly learn to identify when inauthentic commenters suddenly show up from a previously idle account to add their 2 cents.
The person in question doesn't exhibit much of it, but one will also learn when skimming to identify certain grammar and sentence structure characteristics that can point to what is the first language of a person, even if they're writing in fluent English.
All that expertise (which requires some proper experience in the topic) even before you plug a llm to it, even few years ago they were good enough to identify unique writing styles of people across different accounts on HN.
Anonymity is gone from internet for some time.
I have seen document-analysis guides with info on how to identify the regional location of anonymous Internet commenters specifically within the US 48 states if you have a sufficiently large corpus of their text, as it relates to how they use certain regional slang, metaphors, colloquialisms, and words to describe things. Think of it as similar to how linguists have made maps showing regional variations in whether people call it "soda" or "coke" or "pop", but extended to all other common forms of North American dialect.
https://www.businessinsider.com/soda-vs-pop-map-2012-7
He isn't wrong.
So cloudflare https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots?dateRange=7d shows 40% of worldwide bot traffic is from the us and <1% is from Russia. So what is this chart of traffic from russias search engine supposed to show?
Yandex is a search engine like Google is a search engine. Both are also cloud vendors. The chart of traffic from Yandex is showing that the majority of traffic was considered bot traffic, and after Ukraine's attack on its datacenter(s), that traffic has reduced substantially.
It looks like the majority of online bot traffic is coming from cloud vendor networks, which isn't surprising to me. But it makes me think that the "bot share by location" chart is more useful as a "which cloud vendor has bad bot control" chart vs. a "where is bot traffic coming from" chart.
Ah thank you, context is illuminating.
That's some intense mitigation from Cloudflare
Their latest consumer plan includes "Super Duper Bot Fight Mode", which lets you drone strike one data center in a sanctioned country of your choosing.
For additional strikes or to upgrade to ICBM-based payloads, you'll have to contact them to set up an enterprise plan.
You gave me a good laugh, cheers!
Everyone is mentioning crawlers, but wouldn't most traffic from a datacenter's ASN usually be bots just in general given that there's not many humans there to generate human traffic?
Here's an example French hosting company which has something like 14.8% "human" traffic, (the Yandex is under 5% human) though how much of that is actual humans and not advanced things puppeteering headless browsers is another question.
https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/as12876
Maybe it shows that France is a better place for your VPN exit node than Russia? :)
Apart from the correct argument that a search engine like Yandex will have crawlers, I would not be surprised if Western AI companies also used Yandex to scrape covertly.
Nvidia tried to pay off the Russian Anna's Archive for stolen data:
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
It would not be a surprise if similar deals have been reached with Yandex.
But this is a nice demonstration by Ukraine that all our internet problems are caused by large data centers, wherever they may be located.
The US is still responsible for almost 50% of traffic of which the top are Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Cloudlare.
https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots
It's interesting (but not surprising) that so much traffic comes from the Netherlands and Singapore despite their sizes compared to the countries at the top of this list.
While not necessarily related to bot traffic, but I was thinking that in the age of AI perhaps we'll be comparing technological development of countries based on their usage of AI per capita (similar to what we have with electricity usage per capita).
100%. It will roughly translate to GDP. It is no different than industrialization/mechanization/computerization transitions.
Indeed, most of my server's 'Chinese' and 'Russian' bot traffic is originating from US IP addresses.
Interestingly most traffic coming out of this AS was actually UDP: https://dashboard.terracenetworks.com/sources/asns/13238
Pretty benign AS as far as actual exploit or malicious crawling is concerned.
Probably QUIC if true, but you should also ask how these people get their data, because this isn't something you can just see or look up.
It's actually almost entirely DNS. Also rest assured that I have definitely asked how these people get their data [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ericpauley
How do these people get their data?
Cloudflare should consider donating to the Ukrainian military for the public service they are performing.
I was thinking, we should all contribute to a Yandex fund for the Ukrainian mil to help keep the level of bot activity on the rest of the internet under control!
https://war.ukraine.ua/donate/
(I’d welcome a data center and oil infrastructure targeting specific fund)
Yandex is reporting an outage for some services. https://dzen.ru/news/story/75e4b917-952d-5304-a9b4-70e5dc1fb...
I have to wonder what will happen when the remaining 6 data centers get hit as well. It's bound to happen.
I think this really highlights the changing face of war.
It's hard to go to war now when your enemy can just use a few small drones to take out everything your citizens care about in a single day (social media, online deliveries etc).
And these things are practically irreplaceable in a war when you're sanctioned up the wazoo. Where are you buying racks of Xeons and DDR5 RAM and Nvidia GPUs?
If there will be an world-wide war, sure. But at that point, the Internet as we know it will probably collapse anyway.
There is one, but it's taking place mostly by information means, not physical.
https://postimg.cc/YjjDtrT2
Are there even six remaining?
Slightly misleading. The filter is literally bot traffic from Yandex's AS. Of course it goes down when 3 of 5 DCs is down. But if you filter by country, there's no noticeable dip.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50041619
It’s not really surprising that bot traffic originating from a network went away when _all_ traffic originating from that network stopped.
so much love for russia in the comments, maybe bot operators get some spare time to comment here
So, is sending hot hate towards a bot farm going to be a paid service on Cloudflare now?
Would be ironic, since they provide services to criminals who commit DDoS-attacks, spread malware and conduct phishing campaigns:
https://cofense.com/blog/how-cloudflare-services-are-abused-...
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Report-Cybercriminals-use-Cloud...
Or maybe they would just want to get rid of the competition.
Can someone try to tag bots that paused posting on HN during this incident?
When Brazil and Afrinet? :P
Could be just crawlers
I'm going to be really interested how much this cleans up the internet, I mean the damage is done if you read comment sections on youtube etc, but let's see how long the BS persists.
It's only counting Yandex search crawler traffic, not any actually bad bots.
That's a shame
Does that include the disinformation infrastructure? If so, they should keep it on.
surprisedpikatchu.jpeg
"Russian bots.."
Continue to live in your parallel universe created for you by your government.
Most people who are commenting and whose mouth you shut with your greasy laps, are simply Russians who are sick and tired of your antirussian chauvinism disguised as pursuing justice (Venezuela, Iran just the most recent examples of this "pursuing").
I am from western Europe, by the way, and can't wait for the moment you take your drones and submarines and get the hell out of here.
isn't this only counting russian origin already?
The URL is CF's public metrics for bot traffic from a single specific Russian ASN, Yandex.
https://www.peeringdb.com/net/1751
oh well of course if you blow up Yandex then Yandex stops sending you traffic, because they got blown up.
And nothing of value was lost.
Yandex is the best search engine that doesn't follow American censorship norms. For this reason Kagi uses them as one source of several.
“AI agents” is just a fancy rebranding of “bots” with some “intelligence”.
Now check how many open models search Yandex when asked for something.
games
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Thanks! So thats why I cant reach my bank, health insurance, municipality, tax office and government services from where I live, super!
Modern day Russia is about the furthest possible thing from "commies". Kleptocracy? Fascism? Dictatorship? Oligarchy? Sure, some bizarro world combination of all of those. But if you want people to take your opinion seriously, try not to sound like somebody's demented grandpa by tossing around "commie" like it's 1959.
I am pretty damn sure that whatever Putin is doing these days is in no way motivated by an adherence to the Marxist-Leninist way of life.
According to orthodox Marxism, the Russian empire had not fully industrialised or created a widespread bourgeoisie. It was still largely feudal and rural, and a monarchy. Some Marxists have tried to say retroactively that the Russian Revolution was a bourgeois not a proletarian revolution as a result.
Lenin tried to paint kulaks as bourgeois en lieu of actual target, and had to modify Marxism heavily to make things fit. Stalin certainly managed to industrialise much of the USSR, so fulfilled that end. Yeltsin-Putin Russia has created an actual bourgeois state, maybe allowing a workers' revolution to take place for real next time.
Or sort of. In reality, Marx was not an infallible prophet. He did not anticipate artificial intelligence or its consequences, genetic engineering, broadcast media or a host of other things. History has not followed all of the paths he suggested.
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The deranged Orange Idiot and the bloodthirsty War Criminal are the ones carrying out what you describe. The rest of "the West" wants nothing more to do with them, and is currently attempting to avoid all the knives heading for their backs.
Monolithic indeed.
The war crimes I alluded to were carried out for decades under the guise of democracy and human rights. And those same knives were pulled out from the backs of the countries that I listed above. "The West" just wants to continue using the knives quietly, expand their military presence, and sanction the opponents to submission and destruction. The destruction and crimes against humanity in Gaza did not start with Trump, they have been going on for decades. You just dislike that now it's so blunt, you'd rather have their water poisoned so that they die out slowly and "without all the drama".
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Evil, imperialistic, warmongering West that checks notes condemns Israel’s actions, and generally condemned attack on Iran.
The arms are sold(and often directly supplied) to Israel by the West. Israeli warplanes are fueled during attacks on Iran by German and NATO tankers. Israel's enemies have suffered decades of sanctions, economic strangulation, and demonization, with the intention of destroying those countries and nations - a crime beyond comprehension for the imperial foot soldiers. A foot soldier of the empire might still have a conscience, and that conscience needs soothing from time to time. So, the imperial machine declares "We condemn the cruelty" while continuing to expand its reach and devour everything in its path. The whole ME (and not only) is essentially a forward deployed ever expanding military base.
The point is that condemning a war in the ME is meaningless, because these powers do not want the war to stop, they just don't want it to be so blunt. They prefer economic strangulation, sanctions and demonization, they want it to be slower and less visible, obscured behind bureaucratic language, with its victims dispersed across societies, consequences unfolding over years and decades, violence concealed, and architects decentralized because it is not a crime of a man, be it Putin or Trump, but a crime of a system where no true accountability can take place. They do not need to bomb every school themselves, but rather enable minor military operations, undermine political and economic stability, and support policies that destroy a society's ability to survive. And the dozens of millions of excess and direct deaths due to these policies are meaningless, right? After all it's the school that counts - those girls had names, faces, futures, and we are rightly appalled. But the millions who die through sanctions, deprivation, and the systemic destruction of their livelihoods, they remain statistics. I mean, can you imagine the public appalled over sanctions against Cuba - what a waste of time. That's not prime time news, and it will never be. Because the sanctions work.
People like you are so dicusting.
propaganda