#short #scifi

When the Zendari attacked the Humans no one came to help. Humans, living on this hellscape they call home. Humans, the one we laughed at when they arrived in their clumsy ships. Humans, always so chatty, so annoying. Humans, never able to wield psychic power like the rest of us. Humans… the Humans. We did not know.

The Zendari came in full force, destroying the human ships, their orbital stations, colonies, everything on their way that was human. >>

🇬🇧 That is one happy pilot! 🤣

🇩🇪 Das ist mal ein gutgelaunter Pilot! 🤣

(Song: Let's Groove by Earth, Wind & Fire)

#Homeworld #Homeworld1 #Gaming #RetroGaming #RetroGames #VideoGames #Videospiele #ShareYourGames

Apropos of Drew DeVault's LLM Rant, I'd just share my experience in fighting these, to provide a more positive outlook.

Like many, when I started trying to defend my self-hosted things from The Bad Ones, I was pessimistic. It is very hard indeed to organically catch them. I tried a number of ways to combat them: rate limiting (doesn't work, they scrape from dozens, or even thousands of IPs simulatenously), serving known agents 403 (doesn't work, they come back in disguise), serving known agents a static page (doesn't work, they came back in disguise), trying to trap them in a place forbidden by /robots.txt (doesn't work, half of them don't even request that file, and legit, but curious visitors ended up in forbidden places too).

But then came Nepenthes with its infinite maze. I figured: if I can't make them go away, I'll serve them garbage! For various reasons, I ended up writing my own garbage generator, but the idea is similar.

Two months ago, I set up my reverse proxy to route all known bot user-agents (+ AliBaba's IP range) to iocaine. I expected to have some fun.

I did not expect what happened, though: all of the bots that previously came back in disguise when I tried to fight them in different ways are now happily gurgling up all the garbage I serve them. They don't try coming back in disguise.

Yes, it still costs me non-negligible resources, but mostly network traffic. The garbage generation is much cheaper than the dynamic sites I am protecting with it, so there's significant CPU time savings. And the network resources are also considerably smaller! An average garbage request is 4.5k. Half the size of SourceHut's main page.

Even on my tiny scale, I'm saving 200GiB of traffic daily. 99.9% of request don't even reach my backend, they're stopped by the reverse proxy, and routed to iocaine.

This allowed me to move my forge (the self-hosted service that most suffered from the Bad Ones) from a dedicated server with 16 cores and 64GiB RAM to a 4-core Mac Mini with 4GiB. Previously, my Forgejo was producing very high load - now it is barely a blip.

Oh, and on top of that: I also rate limit the maze (and only the maze!) at 100 req / sec, shared between everyone trapped in there. The Bad Ones do come back after a 429, but as long as they see a few thousand 200 pages a day, they don't come back in disguise.

Surprising this might be - it certainly was to me -, but for the past two months, this has worked remarkably well. I can highly recommend a similar approach.

Ich muss das Fass jetzt leider noch einmal aufmachen, um eine Warnung auszusprechen:

Die "Jugend gegen Rechtsruck Düsseldorf", der ich bisher gefolgt bin, hat meinen konstruktiven Hinweis auf zahlreiche fehlerhafte Informationen im Beitrag zu "No Mercy" (u.a. heißt es, es handele sich um "Survival Horror" und einen "Femizid-Simulator") einfach wortlos gelöscht. Auf erneute Nachfrage kam dann... diese Antwort.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DIwcIMksM8H/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

Keine Einsicht, stattdessen Patzigkeit und der Hinweis, man sei keine "Nachrichtenseite". Ist also deshalb Desinformation und Empörung auf Grundlage falscher Tatsachen akzeptabel?

Und um das noch einmal klar zu machen: Ich möchte das Thema nicht deshalb ungern ruhen lassen, weil es mir ein Anliegen wäre, dieses eine Spiel zu verteidigen – dem ist nicht so. Aber ich finde es erschreckend, wie hier Tatsachenverzerrung und Empörungskultur politisch legitimiert werden sollen.