Mmh looks like despite going through the 403 errors, the current issues still ate up my reply :'(

So let me try to remember...

It started with something like "Damn, hadnt even thought about the AI thing in relation to this", and yeah, AI-based DDOS attacks are something to have fucking nightmares about. They could bring down pretty much anything and everything just by using the currently available tools for DDOSing anything and unleashing their algorithms on it.

The whole "AI" thing is only the mainstream release of what came out of the "machine learning" push that's been going on for more than a decade already. There's no intelligence behind it. They've been grabbing as much data as they could, which isn't unrelated to the whole NSA/Snowden thing, and throwing brute-force processing at it.

"Machine learning" may be only 10-15 years old, but the data processing has been going on since data could be processed. It was just a marketing term, much like AI is for the current iteration. It only means "we've been storing up everything everybody has been doing everywhere, including you, and we can now predict everything you can and would do, in order to get you to do what you should do to serve our interests".

It's not intelligence, but it's based on enough data to get close enough to it, especially when it comes to doing brute things like DDOS attacks or spamming forums with meaningless diatribes.

Them doing it to fill forums isn't new, and was scary enough, but if they're starting to use it for straight up targeted attacks on the infrastructure, and of course they would, then... well... I'd like to say that I have at least a clue as to what to do against it, but given that they already control the entire infrastructure and that precisely 0% of Internet is controlled by individuals...

Well... didn't wake up today thinking I'd end the day thinking even less of where we're heading, and yet...

Ok, first things first, still expecting Cloudflare to fix this shit up by tomorrow or at least start giving regular updates.

The overall shitfest is on a way bigger scale and outside of always trying to keep talking and discussing about everything, everywhere we can, hoping and trying to get enough people aware of what's going on around them, I'm not quite sure what more we can do. And it's already a lot.

PS: entirely unrelated but I really do need to address this at some point: how often is the source on Git rebuilt and redeployed? Because there are a few WotB-based CSS changes that I'd really like to submit in a PR if only to make the textarea properly resizable. Nothing to do with the topic at hand, sorry, just popped in my head because this next round of fighting against the incoming 403s :)

Edit: looks like the original reply being eaten up was me being impatient, stupid and most certainly both. I've been multiplying SaidIt tabs over the day because it seems to help with the checks (click the checkbox on one tab, it unlocks another one without having to wait for the original tab to reload), and I found the original reply in another tab that was still getting 403s. Must have gotten my wires crossed at some point, or a cat came in and messed everything up, I don't know. Anyway, that one is not entirely on today's mess :)