Google has been DDoSing Sourcehut for over a year (drewdevault.com)

Article summary

The article discusses how Google has been DDoSing Sourcehut for over a year, allegedly due to the default behavior of the Go programming language's package manager, which calls home to Google's proxy. The issue has been ongoing despite initial reports and attempts to resolve it. The problem is attributed to the proxy's inefficient caching mechanism, which results in excessive traffic to Sourcehut. This has raised concerns about the design and behavior of the Go package manager and Google's proxy.

Main themes

• Go package manager
• Google proxy
• DDoS attack
• robots.txt
• rate limiting
• package manager design
• proxy configuration
• security and privacy concerns

What commenters say

• Google's proxy is inefficient and causes unnecessary traffic to Sourcehut, leading to DDoS-like behavior.
• The Go package manager's default behavior of calling home to Google's proxy is a non-starter for some developers due to privacy and security concerns.
• The issue is not unique to Go and that other package managers, such as npm, also have similar behaviors.
• The problem could be solved by configuring the proxy to respect robots.txt or by implementing rate limiting.
• Some argue that the issue is not with the proxy itself, but with the fact that it does not respect robots.txt and crawls too frequently.
• Others propose that the solution lies in making changes to the Go package manager or the proxy, rather than blaming the victim.
• It is suggested that the traffic could be mitigated by setting bandwidth limits or blackholing the IP addresses, but this could have unintended consequences.
• The incident highlights the need for better design and configuration of package managers and proxies to avoid similar issues in the future.