[HN Gopher] Tell HN: Opening this page will flag you as abusing ...
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Tell HN: Opening this page will flag you as abusing GitHub
There's a page on one project's GitHub Wiki with a lot of images
(font specimens) which will get you flagged as abusing GitHub's
infrastructure - and institute a rate limit:
https://github.com/olikraus/u8g2/wiki/fntlistall Click at your own
risk! ;>
Author : RicoElectrico
Score : 53 points
Date : 2021-04-02 18:27 UTC (4 hours ago)
| jessaustin wrote:
| Opening in an incognito window only got a fifth of the images to
| load, but it didn't seem to penalize other pages.
|
| [HN gave me a "trouble serving your request", though...]
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| HN's rate limiting can be pretty aggressive. I've hit it
| seemingly "just" clicking an upvote immediately after
| submitting a response (a common pattern as I often only
| remember to reward a good comment in the voting system after
| I've given it verbal praise).
| js4ever wrote:
| A simple lazy loading of images would save mega tons of bandwidth
| to them. This could be implemented in 10 lines of js ... Plus few
| lines of backend code to rewrite the raw html to make the images
| lazy loaded. If you work at github, do this in few hours and be
| the hero :)
| jarofgreen wrote:
| 2 years ago, I realised we were accidentally DOS'ing GitHub and
| they didn't care. I was impressed.
|
| We had software for checking a piece of data. To do this, (we
| realised later) it fetched a schema from GitHub every time. The
| context is this software was used infrequently so that was fine -
| and also there was good reasons why it should reload the schema
| every time.
|
| We then took this bit of software and dumbly used it in a tool
| for checking masses of data at once. We did this quite happily
| for 2 months or so, until one day I was trying to work out why it
| didn't run that fast. (It could only check 2 or 3 pieces of data
| a second).
|
| At this point I realised/discovered all the above, went "oh shit"
| and quickly slapped in a request caching library. We stopped
| DOS'ing GitHub and the amount of checks we could do per second
| went right up.
|
| But I'm pretty sure that at no point did GitHub rate limit us or
| block us during this - for which I was very impressed.
| exdsq wrote:
| I want to click this but I don't want to rate limit a computer I
| use for work.. Can someone imgur this for those worried about
| clicking it? :D
| foepys wrote:
| It's just a page with a lot of small images (all directly
| loaded from the repo) and a short description for each. After
| loading half of the images GitHub throttled me and blocked
| requests with an error message about abuse.
|
| After 2 minutes I was able to access GitHub again but I imagine
| they will block you for longer if you try to do it again and
| again.
| [deleted]
| chessmango wrote:
| https://i.imgur.com/qn31o2N.jpg - mobile, but
| dmlittle wrote:
| It makes sense; loading that README performs almost 1700 requests
| for GitHub resources. That's probably way off the regular GitHub
| usage and definitely enough to trigger a regular user's rate
| limit.
|
| In Chrome you can view the source here: "view-
| source:https[DELETE]://github.com/olikraus/u8g2/wiki/fntlistall"
| (added the [DELETE] after the protocol to prevent people from
| accidentally loading the actual website rather than source)
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| For those that are just curious what the flag looks like:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/BOCUzWP
|
| It looks like, based off a quick test it only blocks access to
| the website, not the git interaction.
| andrewstuart2 wrote:
| I'm curious if it's a legitimate abuse flag or if it's more
| like a rate limit with some unfortunate phrasing for the
| humanized message. Like am I just getting blocked at the edge
| for a bit or would there be a flag on my account somewhere now?
| [deleted]
| grumple wrote:
| Could GitHub mitigate the load to their servers by serving files
| via a caching layer? Obviously the first request would hit
| everything, but there's no reason that subsequent requests should
| cause problems.
| fctorial wrote:
| 429 - Too many requests (in an incognito tab)
| amelius wrote:
| I guess a malevolent actor could put this link in their website
| (e.g. as the source of a hidden frame). Greatest impact if it's a
| developers website.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| I remember, when a page had many-many-many images, we used to
| call it "56k killer" back in the old days, as it would take a
| long time to load that page on a 33k or a 56k modem.
| dclaw wrote:
| Not causing issues for me. Maybe it got resolved? Or maybe I just
| don't have the right github-fu
| imadethis wrote:
| Just tried from a residential connection on a Macbook. Only
| about a quarter of the images loaded, with the rest reporting a
| 429 error. Browsing to other pages afterwards shows me the
| "Access has been restricted" warning.
| Majestic121 wrote:
| It did not cause issue directly for me either initially, but it
| does trigger the abuse mechanism when I reloaded the page
| ipsum2 wrote:
| Accessing the page and refreshing gets me:
|
| Access has been restricted You have triggered an abuse
| detection mechanism.
|
| Please wait a few minutes before you try again; in some cases
| this may take up to an hour.
| natfriedman wrote:
| Will look into this, thanks for sharing!
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(page generated 2021-04-02 23:01 UTC)