tal

Internet Protocol is the protocol underlying all Internet communications, what lets a packet of information get from one computer on the Internet to another.

Since the beginning of the Internet, Internet Protocol has permitted Computer A to send a packet of information to Computer B, regardless of whether Computer B wants that packet or not. Once Computer B receives the packet, it can decide to discard it or not.

The problem is that Computer B also only has so much bandwidth available to it, and if someone can acquire control over sufficient computers that can act as Computer A, then they can overwhelm Computer B's bandwidth by having all of these computers send packets of data to Computer B; this is a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

Any software running on a computer

a game, pretty much any sort of malware, whatever

normally has enough permission to send information to Computer B. In general, it hasn't been terribly hard for people to acquire enough computers to perform such a DDoS attack.

There have been, in the past, various routes to try to mitigate this. If Computer B was on a home network or on a business's local network, then they could ask their Internet service provider to stop sending traffic from a given address to them. This wasn't ideal in that even some small Internet service providers could be overwhelmed, and trying to filter out good traffic from bad wasn't necessarily a trivial task, especially for an ISP that didn't really specialize in this sort of thing.

As far as I can tell, the current norm in 2026 for dealing with DDoSes is basically "use CloudFlare".

CloudFlare is a large American Content Delivery Network (CDN) company

that is, it has servers in locations around the world that keep identical copies of data, and when a user of a website requests, say, an image for some website using the CDN, instead of the image being returned from a given single fixed server somewhere in the world, they use several tricks to arrange for that content to be provided from a server they control near the user. This sort of thing has generally helped to keep load on international datalinks low (e.g. a user in Australia doesn't need to touch the submarine cables out of Australia if an Australian CloudFlare server already has the image on a website that they want to see) and to keep them more-responsive for users.

However, CDNs also have a certain level of privacy implications. Large ones can monitor a lot of Internet traffic, see traffic from a user spanning many websites, as so much traffic is routed through them. The original idea behind the Internet was that it would work by having many small organizations that talked to each other in a distributed fashion, rather than having one large company basically monitor and address traffic issues Internet-wide.

A CDN is also a position to cut off traffic from an abusive user relatively-close to the source. A request is routed to its server (relatively near the flooding machine), and so a CDN can choose to simply not forward it. CloudFlare has decided to specialize in this DDoS resistance service, and has become very popular. My understanding

I have not used CloudFlare myself

is that they also have a very low barrier to start using them, see it as a way to start small websites out and then later be a path-of-least-resistance to later provide commercial services to them.

Now, I have no technical issue with CloudFlare, and as far as I know, they've conducted themselves appropriately. They solve a real problem, which is not a trivial problem to solve, not as the Internet is structured in 2026.

But.

If DDoSes are a problem that pretty much everyone has to be concerned about and the answer simply becomes "use CloudFlare", that's routing an awful lot of Internet traffic through CloudFlare. That's handing CloudFlare an awful lot of information about what's happening on the Internet, and giving it a lot of leverage. Certainly the Internet's creators did not envision the idea of there basically being an "Internet, Incorporated" that was responsible for dealing with these sort of administrative issues.

We could, theoretically, have an Internet that solves the DDoS problem without use of such centralized companies. It could be that a host on the Internet could have control over who sends it traffic to a much greater degree than it does today, have some mechanism to let Computer B say "I don't want to get traffic from this Computer A for some period of time", and have routers block this traffic as far back as possible.

This is not a trivial problem. For one, determining that a DDoS is underway and identifying which machines are problematic is something of a specialized task. Software would have to do that, be capable of doing that.

For another, currently there is little security at the Internet Protocol layer, where this sort of thing would need to happen. A host would need to have a way to identify itself as authoritative, responsible for the IP address in question. One doesn't want some Computer C to blacklist traffic from Computer A to Computer B.

For another, many routers are relatively limited as computers. They are not equipped to maintain a terribly-large table of Computer A, Computer B pairs to blacklist.

However, if something like this does not happen, then my expectation is that we will continue to gradually drift down the path to having a large company controlling much of the traffic on the Internet, simply because we don't have another great way to deal with a technical limitation inherent to Internet Protocol.

This has become somewhat-more important recently, because various parties who would like to train AIs have been running badly-written Web spiders to aggressively scrape website content for their training corpus, often trying to hide that they are a single party to avoid being blocked. This has acted in many cases as a de facto distributed denial of service attack on many websites, so we've had software like Anubis, whose mascot you may have seen on an increasing number of websites, be deployed, in an attempt to try to identify and block these:

We've had some instances on the Threadiverse get overwhelmed and become almost unusable under load in recent months from such aggressive Web spiders trying to scrape content. A number of Threadiverse instances disabled their previously-public access and require users to get accounts to view content as a way of mitigating this. In many cases, blocking traffic at the instance is sufficient, because even though the AI web spiders are aggressive, they aren't sufficiently so to flood a website's Internet connection if it simply doesn't respond to them; something like CloudFlare or Internet Protocol-level support for mitigating DDoS attacks isn't necessarily required. But it does bring the DDoS issue, something that has always been an issue for the Internet, back to prominent light again in a new way.

It would also solve some other problems. CloudFlare is appropriate for websites, but not all Internet activity is over HTTPS. DoS attacks have happened for a long time

IRC users with disputes (IRC traditionally exposing user IP addresses) would flood each other, for example, and it'd be nice to have a general solution to the problem that isn't limited to HTTPS.

It could also potentially mitigate DoS attacks more-effectively than do CDNs, since it'd permit pushing a blacklist request further up the network than a CDN datacenter, up to an ISP level.

Thoughts?

I was a little exasperated that Nolla Games doesn't seem to be doing DLC or a Noita 2 and despite them giving multiple talks on how the game works, there doesn't appear to be anyone making games in a similar genre.

My ideal would be something that had fancier lighting than Noita, more like Starbound, with high-resolution graphics (even if the voxels are low-res, could have them join with neighboring ones in fancy ways), without the 60 FPS cap of the Noita physics engine, and it'd be neat if it could gain a bunch of performance from using the GPU. It'd also be nice to make it harder to get stuck on stray pixels, juice up the graphics a bit, and maybe make the liquid simulation more-plausible.

Lo and behold, when taking yet another search, today I finally ran into a presently-unnamed game by Meatbag Games. They're clearly trying to make a Noita spiritual successor, but using the GPU to accelerate the game and with a sci-fi theme. There's virtually nothing they have up about it aside from a few blog posts and videos, but from the "current state of the game" videos, I think it hits most of my technical wants for a new Noita:

• It's clearly high-resolution graphics-wise.

• It looks to me like the lower-resolution voxels are being processed to look pretty.

• They explicitly say on their blog that their engine is using the GPU.

• The liquid simulation looks much snazzier.

• It looks like there are being shadows cast by terrain in the demo video with all the fire.

I have no idea whether they'll improve on the "getting stuck on stray pixels" or whether the physics can run at over 60 FPS, but I have to say that everything else there looks just great.

https://meatbatgames.com/

I've no affiliation with them, just had never seen this before, thought that it looked cool, and it doesn't look like they're publicizing the thing much yet.

All that being said, the thing is clearly in an early state, and the game may never ultimately come out or it could be just less fun to play, miss gameplay magic that Noita did so well. But...I'm really hoping.

Interesting that they also appear to be Finnish, like Nolla Games.

I was wondering why the Kill-A-Watt wattmeter that I normally leave things in the room plugged into was beeping. Turned out that having an electric kettle and a space heater both on on a circuit were enough to drive the power usage over the 1800W that a normal US household circuit can provide, and that apparently the thing beeps in that case. It let me flip off the kettle before the circuit breaker flipped, which was nice.

I think I might look into a low-wattage, vacuum-insulated (to help compensate for the fact that the heat will have to be put into the water over a longer period of time) kettle.

Starlink updated its Global Privacy Policy on January 15, according to the Starlink website. The policy includes new details stating that unless a user opts out, Starlink data may be used “to train our machine learning or artificial intelligence models” and could be shared with the company’s service providers and “third-party collaborators,” without providing further details.

I'm afraid that I can't confirm it myself, as I don't use Boost, but a user here says that Boost apparently can't handle Threadiverse bang links where the hostname has hyphens in it.

He was attempting to follow !Silksong@indie-ver.se

Just wanted to get a heads-up to the Boost developers.

Thanks for your time!

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/24313827

Seriously, what the fuck is going on with fabs right now?

Micron has found a way to add new DRAM manufacturing capacity in a hurry by acquiring a chipmaking campus from Taiwanese outfit Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (PSMC).

The two companies announced the deal last weekend. Micron’s version of events says it’s signed a letter of intent to acquire Powerchip’s entire P5 site in Tongluo, Taiwan, for total cash consideration of US$1.8 billion.