Recently I have had to live in a building with severe noise issues, and running appropriately EQed white noise on my speaker helped mask it and maintain at least some sanity and sleep. The mynoise app might not be the fanciest but it does exactly what it says without fail or frills, and works across devices. I don’t think I knew who made it when I bought it, but this story put a face on the app.
When someone attacks you, it is additionally traumatic in that it undermines your trust in people. In this way, it can breed trauma if it makes you become more defensive/distrustful and/or offensive/trust-violating to others. This is not an excuse to the attacker, but if I were asked how we can end this vicious circle I would probably say it’s about long-term mental health (across generations).
I had long-term noise issues with the tenant directly above me. Periodically complaining to the office got sympathy but little else.
Then I created a iOs shortcut that sent a templated email to my landlord each time I told Siri "Loud neighbors." I was surprised at the effectiveness of 3 - 4 emails a week. I suspect it is one thing to shoosh someone while ushering them out of your office. It's another to have to respond to an email every other day.
Of course, your situation may not be a amenable to this strategy. Either way, I feel you brother/sister, and I wish you peace and quiet.
I don't know if this is right time to share, but as someone who also had many noisy neighbours over the years, this made me laugh (if you haven't seen it): https://youtu.be/4IRB0sxw-YU
I lived in a situation with a noisy tenant previously. It was loud bang noises of something falling in the middle of the night, with very thin floors. In my infinite wisdom I decided to move instead of sorting it out, and traded that at least potentially negotiable situation for an inflexible yearly tenancy contract on an apartment that cost 3x more to rent with what turned to be a noisy lift that building management could not care less about despite complaints. (Silver lining, at least noise EQs more easily to cover the constant rumble.)
Pentester/bug bounty hunter here. I appreciate that this is frustrating for the owner to experience, but this reads like normal internet noise to me, or at worst someone fired up burp suite and hit go on a website. Many, many commercial tools run these sorts of attacks en masse by default, some SaaS companies even do it as a product. The entire internet is being scanned constantly and many of those scanners have automated collections of attacks run against websites when discovered. I’m not say it’s right, but it is the reality we live in. I wouldn’t be taking it personally.
I read it as the opposite, trying to help them process it as not something deeply malicious targeting them. I'm thankful of the times I took something deeply, then realized it was something else and had a change of heart. This is ultimately what trauma and processing is about: something blindsided you and your initial response is a large field of shock and avoidance, then slowly you process it until you have a practical approach to deal with the thing next time, so it doesn't blindside you again.
hackers effectively killed https://glslsandbox.com It's been closed for about a year and a half because some hackers spammed it and no one has time to deal with it. There are other sites like shadertoy that do something similar but still, it sucks to see someone's project get shit on by assholes.
As for denial of service issues, because it's free I've mostly hidden behind cloudflare in the hope of not having to personally deal with those kinds of issues on my own stuff.
It's always annoying to me the hacker attitude of "it's your fault if I can break your stuff. You should have implemented it better". Well, I can break your windows, your door, your body and it wouldn't be an excuse that it's your fault because it's possible. Still, I know it's impossible to get rid of the assholes so ...
Physical systems are different from information systems. You can make an impenetrable information system, but not an impenetrable physical system. Physical systems are inherently safe due to their locality, and can benefit from security-by-obscurity.
When you hook up a weak information system to a global network where anyone can interact with it, and someone finds a way to break it, perhaps it is worth looking into the systemic weaknesses instead of getting angry about a given attacker.
I’m a big guy, 6’3’’ 260, multiple Ironman, sport, climbing, lifting and hunting brush with a bit of combat training over the years. Most people in my life I imagine I could kill with my bare hands. But I don’t, because like you said that isn’t how life works.
Yet people apply it to anything they want recklessly. Cars, phones, or like above peoples projects. I wonder how they would feel if I beat the shit out of them and laughed, telling them their mom should have fucked someone bigger.
I'm about your size, and have actually done what you describe (not by my own choice). The process takes much longer than one might suppose, however incredibly difficult to imagine.
We are nothing more than temporary meatbags, fragilely broken. Take care of yourself, each other.
>Most people in my life I imagine I could kill with my bare hands. But I don’t, because like you said that isn’t how life works.
You don't, not because you are such a great guy, but because society's protection of physical systems is rigorous through thousands (millions?) of years of evolution. If you assault someone in the modern day, you will probably get thrown in jail or you will get shot.
Our information systems (such as the internet) are systemically weak. They are poorly designed and have not gone through the same evolution. I think it is good to exploit these weak information systems so that they can evolve.
He mentions in an earlier blog post [0] that the audio files are behind Cloudflare already so if Cloudflare did its job so I think the actual bandwidth impact on the origin server should have been pretty limited. Hopefully he'd turned on the option to ignore the query string to avoid the cache being bypassed.
I run a similar audio-heavy site [1] that's reached the front page of HN, also behind Cloudflare - the traffic spiking to terabytes a day is a bit of a shock at first but if everything's configured properly CF works well
Maybe I’m just a curmudgeonly old fart but I’m so tired of everyone pretending like the entire internet being MiTM’d by Cloudflare is somehow a good thing.
FWIF if you are looking for a decent alternative take a look at ModSecurity project by OWASP.
I've loved this site since I first learned about it. In today's increasingly densified office spaces (in my area at least), this has been an even bigger help to me.
The latest app redesign has been fantastic.
It's worth a small donation just to get access to the huge library he built.
Note that the vast majority of his content is stuff he, personally, recorded on site, mixed, and sliced into equalizer bands. That includes an Irish coastline, an underground waterway, and several forests.
The unfair match between good and bad has most likely been a conundrum for thousands of years. Multiple solutions has been proposed as to how to deal with the bad ones, including; kill them, forgive them, educate and reform them - but nothing really seems to work.
One solution might be to gather them all up and send them to another planet were they can live as they please without bothering the good ones - and some might suggest that this is exactly what they did and here we are :)
I think I saw an article recently where someone used the http protocol to serve gzipped content that was specially crafted to explode in size on the receiver side. This could be a good preventative to crawlers as they don't typically have that much space dedicated to each instance.
> One solution might be to gather them all up and send them to another planet were they can live as they please without bothering the good ones - and some might suggest that this is exactly what they did and here we are :)
Poor guy probably got crawled by LLM bots. The "attacker" probably doesn’t know who this person is. Just a faceless corporation using his sound or white noise content to train and feed llm.
I get similar "attacks" on daily basis, but find out it’s just a bot crawling the certificate transparency logs. Inspecting site certificates, and it’s issued by Let’s Encrypt CAs. Script kiddies, at best, trying to pick off the low hanging fruit.
Hope he doesn’t take these "attacks" too personally going forward. Seems like a good guy overall, maybe too good for this world.
I'm a lifetime member and have enjoyed mynoise.net for many years. It's the best thing I've found for focus and distraction blocking. I have brain.fm, and YouTube music, but I keep coming back to his site because it's just better, more intentional, and more effective for me.
Readit News
When someone attacks you, it is additionally traumatic in that it undermines your trust in people. In this way, it can breed trauma if it makes you become more defensive/distrustful and/or offensive/trust-violating to others. This is not an excuse to the attacker, but if I were asked how we can end this vicious circle I would probably say it’s about long-term mental health (across generations).
Then I created a iOs shortcut that sent a templated email to my landlord each time I told Siri "Loud neighbors." I was surprised at the effectiveness of 3 - 4 emails a week. I suspect it is one thing to shoosh someone while ushering them out of your office. It's another to have to respond to an email every other day.
Of course, your situation may not be a amenable to this strategy. Either way, I feel you brother/sister, and I wish you peace and quiet.
I also wish you all peace and quiet.
I lived in a situation with a noisy tenant previously. It was loud bang noises of something falling in the middle of the night, with very thin floors. In my infinite wisdom I decided to move instead of sorting it out, and traded that at least potentially negotiable situation for an inflexible yearly tenancy contract on an apartment that cost 3x more to rent with what turned to be a noisy lift that building management could not care less about despite complaints. (Silver lining, at least noise EQs more easily to cover the constant rumble.)
Also, sharks weren't made by ethically-questionable hackers.
I don't see why you need to dismiss this person's legitimate trauma, seems awfully boorish of you to do so.
You don't know that.
Dead Comment
As for denial of service issues, because it's free I've mostly hidden behind cloudflare in the hope of not having to personally deal with those kinds of issues on my own stuff.
It's always annoying to me the hacker attitude of "it's your fault if I can break your stuff. You should have implemented it better". Well, I can break your windows, your door, your body and it wouldn't be an excuse that it's your fault because it's possible. Still, I know it's impossible to get rid of the assholes so ...
When you hook up a weak information system to a global network where anyone can interact with it, and someone finds a way to break it, perhaps it is worth looking into the systemic weaknesses instead of getting angry about a given attacker.
I’m a big guy, 6’3’’ 260, multiple Ironman, sport, climbing, lifting and hunting brush with a bit of combat training over the years. Most people in my life I imagine I could kill with my bare hands. But I don’t, because like you said that isn’t how life works.
Yet people apply it to anything they want recklessly. Cars, phones, or like above peoples projects. I wonder how they would feel if I beat the shit out of them and laughed, telling them their mom should have fucked someone bigger.
Anyway, I agree it sucks.
We are nothing more than temporary meatbags, fragilely broken. Take care of yourself, each other.
¢¢
You don't, not because you are such a great guy, but because society's protection of physical systems is rigorous through thousands (millions?) of years of evolution. If you assault someone in the modern day, you will probably get thrown in jail or you will get shot.
Our information systems (such as the internet) are systemically weak. They are poorly designed and have not gone through the same evolution. I think it is good to exploit these weak information systems so that they can evolve.
2. Some kind of rate limiter is becoming essential for servers. Scanning/probing is worse than rude but there's plenty of obnoxious out there.
Fail2ban can easily be configured to handle simple login or vulnerability scans.
If there's not something similar for web servers, it wouldn't be hard to write one. Anyone know of fail2ban or rate-limiters for webservers?
I run a similar audio-heavy site [1] that's reached the front page of HN, also behind Cloudflare - the traffic spiking to terabytes a day is a bit of a shock at first but if everything's configured properly CF works well
[0] https://mynoise.net/blog.php#landed
[1] https://ambiph.one
FWIF if you are looking for a decent alternative take a look at ModSecurity project by OWASP.
> myNoise is now running on a Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosted at One, with audio assets served via a CDN through Cloudflare ...
The latest app redesign has been fantastic.
It's worth a small donation just to get access to the huge library he built.
Note that the vast majority of his content is stuff he, personally, recorded on site, mixed, and sliced into equalizer bands. That includes an Irish coastline, an underground waterway, and several forests.
One solution might be to gather them all up and send them to another planet were they can live as they please without bothering the good ones - and some might suggest that this is exactly what they did and here we are :)
Has been tried before, they started with telephone sanitizers, hairdressers, and advertising account executives
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Sounds like we're the bad ones here.
I get similar "attacks" on daily basis, but find out it’s just a bot crawling the certificate transparency logs. Inspecting site certificates, and it’s issued by Let’s Encrypt CAs. Script kiddies, at best, trying to pick off the low hanging fruit.
Hope he doesn’t take these "attacks" too personally going forward. Seems like a good guy overall, maybe too good for this world.