Of course they have bots... That's how you index the web.
If we took Google offline I bet there would also be a reduction in bot traffic from them too!
Indexing is also probably a low priority task, so if half their datacenter capacity is taken offline, their bot traffic probably reduces by more than 50%.
Logic says google bots do not come disguised, but as google agents.
Or is there other information?
Now there is probably also AI agent spam from google, but not at this level I believe. Also I am not fully clear what they count as spam, I doubt they would include google in this list, so do they include yandex bots here, if they come officially?
I am unsure what you're trying to say. But it seems like you don't understand what Bot means in general and how is it specifically defined for the metric provided in that page.
From that pages point of view, a Google bot, Yandex bot, or your uncle Tom's AI agent spam is the same, a bot.
If official yandex bots ain't included in this data here - then it means spam/scam bots come indeed from yandex servers. As they stopped working, when the yandex data center was hit.
It's a nice reminder that HN is just filled with the same primitive tribal normies and is always getting oneshotted by the same transparent xenophobic hysteria that plagues the rest of the internet.
I keep thinking about them often, what a definition of cancer on modern humanity that country is. Not all people inside, far from it, but that country - absolutely, definitely and consistently.
And most of those inside allowed this to happen over decades since even harsh dictatorships represent underlying population in many ways, many even cheered / still cheer on direction their country has taken, and non-trivial amount also like raiding neighbors for the kill, loot and money in general.
A stark warning to US if you keep letting things slide to evil direction, this is roughly how you end up over time.
Yandex has cloud offering, their servers are used for actual bot traffic, not just crawlers. Yandex hasn’t been only a search company for a very long time.
I've reported high-volume exploit scanners multiple times, and when expiring blocks a week later, they typically would show up & resumt with the same IP at some point.
Maybe they'd care if the account was using a stolen credit card and there was a chance they wouldn't get their money, but they definitely do not care otherwise for normal people like me. I'm sure that'd be different if it's a multinational or a country-level government body is reporting something, but I can't get those to do my bidding.
Right, because I've had such outstanding results getting in touch with actual humans from Google when reporting abusive traffic directed towards my IP ranges. Top tier attention from people who really care.
Absence of bot traffic is secondary to the absence of nearly all Yandex traffic in general, bot or not, as a result of the datacenter being down. Which is certainly newsworthy.
The HTTP traffic from Yandex is down to ~ 0 % after the third strike, after the first two strikes already degraded it. I wonder how this looks like at the network level because their search page still serves, but presumably their crawler is inactive now
Edit: Here is some more info, they do have availability issues as is to be expected
> Because three of its primary facilities were knocked offline within four days, Yandex’s failover mechanisms broke down[1][8].
> Outages have cascaded across Yandex Go (taxis), Yandex Pay, food delivery, smart home platforms, internal logistics, and third-party corporate services hosted on Yandex Cloud[2][7]. Problems have spilled into neighboring countries using these systems (Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Serbia)[2][7].
Edit 2: Here is the Yandex Cloud status page, their GCP/AWS equivalent. The entire compute core is offline, and even worse, Cloud Backup
I don't know how useful it will be as a case study since an HA/Ops person in (let's say, the US, Canada, AU, western european countries) has access to do things like buy hypervisor capacity or colocation in just about any location. I could go buy colo in Brussels or Panama City or San Diego or Edmonton or Melbourne tomorrow by contacting the right people.
The Russians are much more restricted from doing anything geographically outside of their own borders (for very well justified sanctions reasons), so their limitations are not the same as an HA person in almost any other country. Maybe some Iranian HA/Ops people will be comparing notes with them.
Sometimes there exist data or processing residence requirements that bind you to a specific region (e.g. EU-only). Also, „all AZs in this region no longer exist“ is not on everyone‘s bingo card, this is a good reminder why multi-AZ deployment in the same region may be not enough.
For data center guys this is definitely a case study, because drone attacks are probably on the threat list for everyone now, for various reasons, including domestic terrorism and hybrid warfare. If you want to defend your investment, time to think what covers you from the air.
It's an open question at what point we'll start seeing small fiesty startups that want to sell you a privately owned air defense system for your datacenter roof. The tech to do it is probably far ahead of the regulatory regime to own and operate autonomous small radar+SAM batteries.
It will require some involvement of state, but it is plausible, that critical infrastructure will be required to have this covered and certain big, licensed private contractors may be able to operate air defense systems on such sites (do you smell the money and lobbying effort?).
Also this may influence the design of such data centers. A drone that a paramilitary group can build is not very sophisticated and won’t carry big payloads. Put an outer concrete shell or some better passive defense, and maybe that will be enough.
As a result of some of my work only slightly related to telecom/internet infrastructure, I happened to get on the marketing lists for about six different Chinese companies that will gladly sell you a full size Shahed-136 clone complete with 2 stroke petrol motor. I wouldn't say that small paramilitaries being only able to fly a 5-10kg max size quadcopter with a munition on it into a datacenter is the limit of possible future capabilities. These things are cheaply made in fiberglass molds and look to be dead simple. They're already showing demo videos of them flying around with very low cost ardupilot capable flight controllers.
They even advertise the airframe and motor packages on Instagram....
It was clearly meant as an example of the ease of a non-russian company buying geographically-distributed services in the global marketplace, not "I could go buy this with a few docusign signatures and SWIFT wire transfers tomorrow". I am not in the market for colo in Panama City or Melbourne. I don't think it's a bad thing that the russians are hampered by many limitations but whatever lessons their HA people are learning these days are probably very specific to a sanctioned Russia.
Unironically yes, if you're just a typical B2B SaaS who doesn't have "datacenter getting hit by a literal missile" in your threat model, this coupled with offsite backups is probably the logical DR plan for that scenario.
I don't think there is much you can do about being targeted by a military, simply because of how unique the attack vector is.
Hacking is smart but happens through software, so if you have hardware (i.e. physical) barriers, that stops the hacking.
Natural disasters happen physically but they are dumb, so if you have software redundancy (i.e. by copying the data to multiple locations), that stops them from destroying everything.
A military is both physical AND smart. They can target multiple locations at once and destroy whole buildings.
Yandex is a part of Russia's military. Just the same as Google, MS, Amazon etc. provide services for the US military. Google et al. are probably in the critical path of defence for most European countries as well, insane though that is.
Not defending Yandex here, but I think their military involvement might be as accidental as of an American farmer whose beef landed in the cantina of aircraft carrier. Government and military procurement in Russia is its own universe, with strong players having specific IT expertise and capable of building DCs and tech. Assuming that everywhere in the world it’s the same as in America is wrong. Consumer tech companies aren’t operating this way usually, it is the scale of American Big Tech that allows them to compete with traditional contractors.
You can learn to quickly diversify availability (or at least data safety) beyond the region of conflict when a kinetic war breaks out. The moment “kinetic sanctions” became the strategy, the risk to data centres should have been self-evident. And if it wasn’t immediately obvious, it should have been blindingly so when targeting expanded from oil refineries to Wildberries warehouses.
I don‘t think you can build a new data center in such a short time frame that passed since attacks on WB, definitely not when you can source hardware only from the black market.
I’m not describing what Yandex should do, but rather what their customers should do. Whether that means diversifying to eastern Russia, or China, or Belarus, I don’t know what options exist.
I feel like this isn't even a particularly new thing. I worked at a medium-sized SaaS company and we did disaster recovery drills for moving our stack from eu-west-1 to eu-central-1 in case something catastrophic happened in Ireland. If you want HA, you kinda have to assume that any single country in the world can have some kind of a crippling disaster. Unfortunately for Yandex's clients, Yandex only has regions in two countries, and not that many regions either.
I predict a great many more videos coming out of Russia of Firepoint UAVs flying into refineries and such, punctuated by background audio commentary that can be summed up as "cyka blyat"
I can’t believe there are so many dumb comments in this thread.
All it shows is that crawling from Yandex search engine stopped from one Yandex data center ASN.
No one runs opinion/malicious bots from data center IPs that people mention here.
On the other hand there are plenty of datacenter located command/control systems that puppeteer vast fleets of residential proxies (and Russia is by no means the only one doing so), so it will be very telling to see what social media accounts go silent over the coming days and weeks.
> from one Yandex data center ASN
This is only one of two extant Yandex ASN, not an ASN specific to one geographic region/datacenter.
You are replying to a war propaganda post with a heavily editorialized title. Of course it's swimming in bad faith engagement, that's how these things work.
I'd expect nothing less than a comment such as this, from an account that hasn't posted even once for the last 7 months and has in its post history a claim of being located in Moscow. But hey, thanks for showing up to remind us of how terrible the imperialist war-mongering west is. Very refreshing.
Not to get sidetracked, and not to argue against anything you've said, but how do you figure that out? For people you disagree with, do you open their profile's comments and start keyword-searching "russia" "china" "moscow" etc in hopes of finding a hit? They mentioned that city once in Jan 2024, halfway down the page and in passing. I'm just curious about how others use this site.
Different people read at different speeds, it took me about 5 seconds when skimming it. If you engage in enough discussion related to Russia online you will quickly learn to identify when inauthentic commenters suddenly show up from a previously idle account to add their 2 cents.
The person in question doesn't exhibit much of it, but one will also learn when skimming to identify certain grammar and sentence structure characteristics that can point to what is the first language of a person, even if they're writing in fluent English.
All that expertise (which requires some proper experience in the topic) even before you plug a llm to it, even few years ago they were good enough to identify unique writing styles of people across different accounts on HN.
I have seen document-analysis guides with info on how to identify the regional location of anonymous Internet commenters specifically within the US 48 states if you have a sufficiently large corpus of their text, as it relates to how they use certain regional slang, metaphors, colloquialisms, and words to describe things. Think of it as similar to how linguists have made maps showing regional variations in whether people call it "soda" or "coke" or "pop", but extended to all other common forms of North American dialect.
*Sudden drop in Cloudflare bot traffic from AS13238 YANDEX — Yandex LLC
UPD Definition of bot traffic from Cloudflare's glossary:
>Bot vs. human traffic
>The percentage of HTTP requests classified as bot versus human, based on bot scores. Requests with a bot score between 1 and 29 are classified as likely automated (bot), while requests with a score of 30 or above are classified as likely human. For more information, refer to Bot classes.
>By default, Radar shows bot vs. human traffic for requests to HTML content. This filter is meant to represent traditional web traffic by excluding API calls, asset requests (images, scripts, fonts), and other machine-to-machine requests.
Everyone is mentioning crawlers, but wouldn't most traffic from a datacenter's ASN usually be bots just in general given that there's not many humans there to generate human traffic?
Here's an example French hosting company which has something like 14.8% "human" traffic, (the Yandex is under 5% human) though how much of that is actual humans and not advanced things puppeteering headless browsers is another question.
Apart from the correct argument that a search engine like Yandex will have crawlers, I would not be surprised if Western AI companies also used Yandex to scrape covertly.
Nvidia tried to pay off the Russian Anna's Archive for stolen data:
It's interesting (but not surprising) that so much traffic comes from the Netherlands and Singapore despite their sizes compared to the countries at the top of this list.
While not necessarily related to bot traffic, but I was thinking that in the age of AI perhaps we'll be comparing technological development of countries based on their usage of AI per capita (similar to what we have with electricity usage per capita).
Low-IQ Americans will think these bots are X accounts posting memes against Democrats, which is why the media is astroturfing this news to target American liberals. In reality, most of these bots are just scripts performing normal enterprise jobs, but most people know nothing about how the world works.
I'm going to be really interested how much this cleans up the internet, I mean the damage is done if you read comment sections on youtube etc, but let's see how long the BS persists.
I was thinking, we should all contribute to a Yandex fund for the Ukrainian mil to help keep the level of bot activity on the rest of the internet under control!
An eye for an eye for the Russians.
I love western imperial propaganda though, and how HN so eagerly amplifies it. There’s something self-fulfilling about willingly becoming a foot soldier of the Empire.
Here's to a world where the West is monolithic, and may Iran, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Syria, Libya, Lebanon, Palestine be only be the beginning. And may every new crusade for freedom and democracy leave behind another Gaza, in pursuit of upholding human rights and civilizing the world.
Yandex is Russian Google.
Of course they have bots... That's how you index the web.
If we took Google offline I bet there would also be a reduction in bot traffic from them too!
Indexing is also probably a low priority task, so if half their datacenter capacity is taken offline, their bot traffic probably reduces by more than 50%.
I don't think these are the boys they refer to?
EDIT: I was wrong, they're just generic bot vs human traffic numbers and you're right.
The other Yandex AS which is their hosting/hypervisor platform, broadly similar to AWS, Azure, whatever also shows a major drop in bot traffic:
https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/as200350?dateRange=7d
https://www.peeringdb.com/net/20950
Don't let logic get in the way of a good propaganda.
Logic says google bots do not come disguised, but as google agents.
Or is there other information?
Now there is probably also AI agent spam from google, but not at this level I believe. Also I am not fully clear what they count as spam, I doubt they would include google in this list, so do they include yandex bots here, if they come officially?
I am unsure what you're trying to say. But it seems like you don't understand what Bot means in general and how is it specifically defined for the metric provided in that page.
From that pages point of view, a Google bot, Yandex bot, or your uncle Tom's AI agent spam is the same, a bot.
I know what it means in general, but like I said indeed not "how is it specifically defined for the metric provided in that page."
Neither do Yandex bots. What's your point?
If official yandex bots ain't included in this data here - then it means spam/scam bots come indeed from yandex servers. As they stopped working, when the yandex data center was hit.
But what do you mean by "if"? It is a well defined metric and there is no "if".
I'll just link this comment if I may: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50042416
Thank you, I missed that one (or it was not there when I started writing).
So yandex bots are included and this metric says nothing about malicious yandex intent here.
It's a nice reminder that HN is just filled with the same primitive tribal normies and is always getting oneshotted by the same transparent xenophobic hysteria that plagues the rest of the internet.
Only a dead russian is a good russian.
Cry harder about xenophobia, you vermin. It's a surefire way of identifying you woko-haram far-left jihadists.
> HN is just filled with the same primitive tribal normies
Yes, but it's mostly the opposite tribe of the one you're complaining about.
Will someone think of the Russkies.
I keep thinking about them often, what a definition of cancer on modern humanity that country is. Not all people inside, far from it, but that country - absolutely, definitely and consistently.
And most of those inside allowed this to happen over decades since even harsh dictatorships represent underlying population in many ways, many even cheered / still cheer on direction their country has taken, and non-trivial amount also like raiding neighbors for the kill, loot and money in general.
A stark warning to US if you keep letting things slide to evil direction, this is roughly how you end up over time.
Oh, you sweet summer child. The US is already evil, after its own fashion.
Yeah for real, enlightened one. Russia is great by every metric /s.
> normies
Touch grass.
I wonder how bot traffic on propaganda platforms like Twitter changed, but they probably won't give out any information anyway.
Yandex has cloud offering, their servers are used for actual bot traffic, not just crawlers. Yandex hasn’t been only a search company for a very long time.
Google hosts a significant number of bots. About half of my fail2ban list is google cloud IPs.
Of course they do, but they are quick with account bans when notified because of the liability issue unlike Yandex.
I've reported high-volume exploit scanners multiple times, and when expiring blocks a week later, they typically would show up & resumt with the same IP at some point.
Maybe they'd care if the account was using a stolen credit card and there was a chance they wouldn't get their money, but they definitely do not care otherwise for normal people like me. I'm sure that'd be different if it's a multinational or a country-level government body is reporting something, but I can't get those to do my bidding.
Right, because I've had such outstanding results getting in touch with actual humans from Google when reporting abusive traffic directed towards my IP ranges. Top tier attention from people who really care.
/s
That must be why Google has such a stelly reputation for the quality of their support operations
I wonder how this will affect the Yandex search engine. I think I've read they split the Russian one and .com, but I'm not sure.
All bot lives matter! Bots have no ethnicity! Bot Russophobia! Hypocritical West attacks Russian bots only, what about US/European bots!
Someone needs to learn how to read the Bot Traffic page.
That is a drop in traffic specifically from Yandex bots (which includes their crawlers and other apps hosted in their DC)
Now compare it with Bot Traffic in:
* Russia: https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/ru?dateRange=7d
* Europe: https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/europe?dateRange=7d
* Worldwide: https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots?dateRange=7d
Dip is barely noticeable even in Russia.
Its like saying, "API requests are completely down" (and small disclaimer: only from your server, because your server is down)
Absence of bot traffic is secondary to the absence of nearly all Yandex traffic in general, bot or not, as a result of the datacenter being down. Which is certainly newsworthy.
Isn't this showing the percentage of bot traffic from the Yandex IP range?
If so, it isn't particularly surprising that the line would go down.
EDIT: yes, it is. Looking at the same graph for all of Russia, and there's no discernible pattern:
https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/ru?dateRange=7d
same for the 48h view:
https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/ru?dateRange=2d
USA accounts for 44% bot traffic worldwide. Russia 0.9%. Russia derangement syndrome on HN as usual.
This is true. Almost all of my website's bot traffic is from USA.
The HTTP traffic from Yandex is down to ~ 0 % after the third strike, after the first two strikes already degraded it. I wonder how this looks like at the network level because their search page still serves, but presumably their crawler is inactive now
Edit: Here is some more info, they do have availability issues as is to be expected
> Because three of its primary facilities were knocked offline within four days, Yandex’s failover mechanisms broke down[1][8].
> Outages have cascaded across Yandex Go (taxis), Yandex Pay, food delivery, smart home platforms, internal logistics, and third-party corporate services hosted on Yandex Cloud[2][7]. Problems have spilled into neighboring countries using these systems (Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Serbia)[2][7].
Edit 2: Here is the Yandex Cloud status page, their GCP/AWS equivalent. The entire compute core is offline, and even worse, Cloud Backup
https://status.yandex.cloud/ru/dashboard
> ru Compute Cloud, ru Kubernetes, ru PostgreSQL, ru ClickHouse, ru MySQL, ru YDB, ru Kafka, ru Application Load Balancer
Interestingly, Yandex tells its users on the status page to switch to competitors Selectel, K2Cloud, and VK Cloud. Which will probably be hit next
This will be a case study in catastrophic events for HA and Ops folks.-
I don't know how useful it will be as a case study since an HA/Ops person in (let's say, the US, Canada, AU, western european countries) has access to do things like buy hypervisor capacity or colocation in just about any location. I could go buy colo in Brussels or Panama City or San Diego or Edmonton or Melbourne tomorrow by contacting the right people.
The Russians are much more restricted from doing anything geographically outside of their own borders (for very well justified sanctions reasons), so their limitations are not the same as an HA person in almost any other country. Maybe some Iranian HA/Ops people will be comparing notes with them.
Sometimes there exist data or processing residence requirements that bind you to a specific region (e.g. EU-only). Also, „all AZs in this region no longer exist“ is not on everyone‘s bingo card, this is a good reminder why multi-AZ deployment in the same region may be not enough.
For data center guys this is definitely a case study, because drone attacks are probably on the threat list for everyone now, for various reasons, including domestic terrorism and hybrid warfare. If you want to defend your investment, time to think what covers you from the air.
It's an open question at what point we'll start seeing small fiesty startups that want to sell you a privately owned air defense system for your datacenter roof. The tech to do it is probably far ahead of the regulatory regime to own and operate autonomous small radar+SAM batteries.
It will require some involvement of state, but it is plausible, that critical infrastructure will be required to have this covered and certain big, licensed private contractors may be able to operate air defense systems on such sites (do you smell the money and lobbying effort?).
Also this may influence the design of such data centers. A drone that a paramilitary group can build is not very sophisticated and won’t carry big payloads. Put an outer concrete shell or some better passive defense, and maybe that will be enough.
As a result of some of my work only slightly related to telecom/internet infrastructure, I happened to get on the marketing lists for about six different Chinese companies that will gladly sell you a full size Shahed-136 clone complete with 2 stroke petrol motor. I wouldn't say that small paramilitaries being only able to fly a 5-10kg max size quadcopter with a munition on it into a datacenter is the limit of possible future capabilities. These things are cheaply made in fiberglass molds and look to be dead simple. They're already showing demo videos of them flying around with very low cost ardupilot capable flight controllers.
They even advertise the airframe and motor packages on Instagram....
Well, what an interesting time we are living in…
The DR plan for pros, "I could go buy colo tomorrow by contacting the right people"
It was clearly meant as an example of the ease of a non-russian company buying geographically-distributed services in the global marketplace, not "I could go buy this with a few docusign signatures and SWIFT wire transfers tomorrow". I am not in the market for colo in Panama City or Melbourne. I don't think it's a bad thing that the russians are hampered by many limitations but whatever lessons their HA people are learning these days are probably very specific to a sanctioned Russia.
Unironically yes, if you're just a typical B2B SaaS who doesn't have "datacenter getting hit by a literal missile" in your threat model, this coupled with offsite backups is probably the logical DR plan for that scenario.
I think the complete destruction of the AWS Bahrain region got there first.
I don't think there is much you can do about being targeted by a military, simply because of how unique the attack vector is.
Hacking is smart but happens through software, so if you have hardware (i.e. physical) barriers, that stops the hacking.
Natural disasters happen physically but they are dumb, so if you have software redundancy (i.e. by copying the data to multiple locations), that stops them from destroying everything.
A military is both physical AND smart. They can target multiple locations at once and destroy whole buildings.
> I don't think there is much you can do about being targeted by a military, simply because of how unique the attack vector is.
You could choose not to invade other countries.
This (as with defense) is kind of outside Google or Yandex's purview.
Yandex is a part of Russia's military. Just the same as Google, MS, Amazon etc. provide services for the US military. Google et al. are probably in the critical path of defence for most European countries as well, insane though that is.
Not defending Yandex here, but I think their military involvement might be as accidental as of an American farmer whose beef landed in the cantina of aircraft carrier. Government and military procurement in Russia is its own universe, with strong players having specific IT expertise and capable of building DCs and tech. Assuming that everywhere in the world it’s the same as in America is wrong. Consumer tech companies aren’t operating this way usually, it is the scale of American Big Tech that allows them to compete with traditional contractors.
Said every company serving fascists ever.
No, you can choose to collaborate or you can shut it down.
Collaborators don't get to point back in time and say 'oh we had no choice', even if the choice was a painful one. Sorry it does not work that way.
I guess, but that doesn't sound like something in the control of a single individual company.
They control their own individual contribution.
But apparently this does not apply to you.
At least one russian shill that isn't affected by the Yandex strikes. Let's see how the rest of them fares, HN has its fair share of these characters.
You can learn to quickly diversify availability (or at least data safety) beyond the region of conflict when a kinetic war breaks out. The moment “kinetic sanctions” became the strategy, the risk to data centres should have been self-evident. And if it wasn’t immediately obvious, it should have been blindingly so when targeting expanded from oil refineries to Wildberries warehouses.
I don‘t think you can build a new data center in such a short time frame that passed since attacks on WB, definitely not when you can source hardware only from the black market.
I’m not describing what Yandex should do, but rather what their customers should do. Whether that means diversifying to eastern Russia, or China, or Belarus, I don’t know what options exist.
I feel like this isn't even a particularly new thing. I worked at a medium-sized SaaS company and we did disaster recovery drills for moving our stack from eu-west-1 to eu-central-1 in case something catastrophic happened in Ireland. If you want HA, you kinda have to assume that any single country in the world can have some kind of a crippling disaster. Unfortunately for Yandex's clients, Yandex only has regions in two countries, and not that many regions either.
> The entire compute core is offline, and even worse, Cloud Backup
Their Kazakh regions are available according to the dashboard, so it isn't as catastrophic.
Their managed DBs and data processing services are heavily affected though with no Kazakh redundancies from the looks of it.
I just searched "blyat" and it worked, so?
Given that blyad is just punctuation at this point, I am not surprised.
I predict a great many more videos coming out of Russia of Firepoint UAVs flying into refineries and such, punctuated by background audio commentary that can be summed up as "cyka blyat"
The username checks out!
("Ept" and "suka" are two other swearwords, that are also used much like punctuation.)
I can’t believe there are so many dumb comments in this thread. All it shows is that crawling from Yandex search engine stopped from one Yandex data center ASN.
No one runs opinion/malicious bots from data center IPs that people mention here.
Did people actually stop thinking?
The bots might be run in the datacenter and proxied through residential IPs as the exit point.
On the other hand there are plenty of datacenter located command/control systems that puppeteer vast fleets of residential proxies (and Russia is by no means the only one doing so), so it will be very telling to see what social media accounts go silent over the coming days and weeks.
> from one Yandex data center ASN
This is only one of two extant Yandex ASN, not an ASN specific to one geographic region/datacenter.
https://www.peeringdb.com/net/1751
The other one is this: https://www.peeringdb.com/net/20950
And the 200350 also shows a near complete drop off in bot activity:
https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/as200350?dateRange=7d
> command/control systems
There is Hetzner for that.
The funny thing is that apparently I'm the only one that flagged it... I don't know why people comment instead of using the tools?
You are replying to a war propaganda post with a heavily editorialized title. Of course it's swimming in bad faith engagement, that's how these things work.
I'd expect nothing less than a comment such as this, from an account that hasn't posted even once for the last 7 months and has in its post history a claim of being located in Moscow. But hey, thanks for showing up to remind us of how terrible the imperialist war-mongering west is. Very refreshing.
Both comments, his and especially yours, are bad faith interpretations. That's how any discussion is turned into a mud flinging party.
Not to get sidetracked, and not to argue against anything you've said, but how do you figure that out? For people you disagree with, do you open their profile's comments and start keyword-searching "russia" "china" "moscow" etc in hopes of finding a hit? They mentioned that city once in Jan 2024, halfway down the page and in passing. I'm just curious about how others use this site.
Different people read at different speeds, it took me about 5 seconds when skimming it. If you engage in enough discussion related to Russia online you will quickly learn to identify when inauthentic commenters suddenly show up from a previously idle account to add their 2 cents.
The person in question doesn't exhibit much of it, but one will also learn when skimming to identify certain grammar and sentence structure characteristics that can point to what is the first language of a person, even if they're writing in fluent English.
All that expertise (which requires some proper experience in the topic) even before you plug a llm to it, even few years ago they were good enough to identify unique writing styles of people across different accounts on HN.
Anonymity is gone from internet for some time.
I have seen document-analysis guides with info on how to identify the regional location of anonymous Internet commenters specifically within the US 48 states if you have a sufficiently large corpus of their text, as it relates to how they use certain regional slang, metaphors, colloquialisms, and words to describe things. Think of it as similar to how linguists have made maps showing regional variations in whether people call it "soda" or "coke" or "pop", but extended to all other common forms of North American dialect.
https://www.businessinsider.com/soda-vs-pop-map-2012-7
*Sudden drop in Cloudflare bot traffic from AS13238 YANDEX — Yandex LLC
UPD Definition of bot traffic from Cloudflare's glossary:
>Bot vs. human traffic
>The percentage of HTTP requests classified as bot versus human, based on bot scores. Requests with a bot score between 1 and 29 are classified as likely automated (bot), while requests with a score of 30 or above are classified as likely human. For more information, refer to Bot classes.
>By default, Radar shows bot vs. human traffic for requests to HTML content. This filter is meant to represent traditional web traffic by excluding API calls, asset requests (images, scripts, fonts), and other machine-to-machine requests.
https://developers.cloudflare.com/radar/glossary/#bot-vs-hum...
https://developers.cloudflare.com/bots/concepts/bot-score/
Correct, I probably didn't didn't write that in the clearest possible way, I meant "detected bot traffic hitting cloudflare originating from Yandex".
Everyone is mentioning crawlers, but wouldn't most traffic from a datacenter's ASN usually be bots just in general given that there's not many humans there to generate human traffic?
Here's an example French hosting company which has something like 14.8% "human" traffic, (the Yandex is under 5% human) though how much of that is actual humans and not advanced things puppeteering headless browsers is another question.
https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/as12876
That's some intense mitigation from Cloudflare
You gave me a good laugh, cheers!
Yandex is reporting an outage for some services. https://dzen.ru/news/story/75e4b917-952d-5304-a9b4-70e5dc1fb...
Interestingly most traffic coming out of this AS was actually UDP: https://dashboard.terracenetworks.com/sources/asns/13238
Pretty benign AS as far as actual exploit or malicious crawling is concerned.
Probably QUIC if true, but you should also ask how these people get their data, because this isn't something you can just see or look up.
It's actually almost entirely DNS. Also rest assured that I have definitely asked how these people get their data [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ericpauley
Apart from the correct argument that a search engine like Yandex will have crawlers, I would not be surprised if Western AI companies also used Yandex to scrape covertly.
Nvidia tried to pay off the Russian Anna's Archive for stolen data:
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
It would not be a surprise if similar deals have been reached with Yandex.
But this is a nice demonstration by Ukraine that all our internet problems are caused by large data centers, wherever they may be located.
The US is still responsible for almost 50% of traffic of which the top are Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Cloudlare.
https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots
It's interesting (but not surprising) that so much traffic comes from the Netherlands and Singapore despite their sizes compared to the countries at the top of this list.
While not necessarily related to bot traffic, but I was thinking that in the age of AI perhaps we'll be comparing technological development of countries based on their usage of AI per capita (similar to what we have with electricity usage per capita).
I have to wonder what will happen when the remaining 6 data centers get hit as well. It's bound to happen.
If there will be an world-wide war, sure. But at that point, the Internet as we know it will probably collapse anyway.
There is one, but it's taking place mostly by information means, not physical.
https://postimg.cc/YjjDtrT2
Are there even six remaining?
It’s not really surprising that bot traffic originating from a network went away when _all_ traffic originating from that network stopped.
propaganda
Could be just crawlers
When Brazil and Afrinet? :P
surprisedpikatchu.jpeg
Now check how many open models search Yandex when asked for something.
Low-IQ Americans will think these bots are X accounts posting memes against Democrats, which is why the media is astroturfing this news to target American liberals. In reality, most of these bots are just scripts performing normal enterprise jobs, but most people know nothing about how the world works.
I'm going to be really interested how much this cleans up the internet, I mean the damage is done if you read comment sections on youtube etc, but let's see how long the BS persists.
It's only counting Yandex search crawler traffic, not any actually bad bots.
isn't this only counting russian origin already?
The URL is CF's public metrics for bot traffic from a single specific Russian ASN, Yandex.
https://www.peeringdb.com/net/1751
oh well of course if you blow up Yandex then Yandex stops sending you traffic, because they got blown up.
And nothing of value was lost.
Yandex is the best search engine that doesn't follow American censorship norms. For this reason Kagi uses them as one source of several.
So, is sending hot hate towards a bot farm going to be a paid service on Cloudflare now?
Would be ironic, since they provide services to criminals who commit DDoS-attacks, spread malware and conduct phishing campaigns:
https://cofense.com/blog/how-cloudflare-services-are-abused-...
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Report-Cybercriminals-use-Cloud...
Or maybe they would just want to get rid of the competition.
Cloudflare should consider donating to the Ukrainian military for the public service they are performing.
I was thinking, we should all contribute to a Yandex fund for the Ukrainian mil to help keep the level of bot activity on the rest of the internet under control!
https://war.ukraine.ua/donate/
(I’d welcome a data center and oil infrastructure targeting specific fund)
Oh no, how is Trump going to win the midterms now?
“AI agents” is just a fancy rebranding of “bots” with some “intelligence”.
Now do OpenAI's dc...
Someone needs to inventory all the accounts that go dark on social media so we can flag them going forward.
Yeah, I noticed the overtone window sliding back from the right.
An eye for an eye for the Russians. I love western imperial propaganda though, and how HN so eagerly amplifies it. There’s something self-fulfilling about willingly becoming a foot soldier of the Empire.
Here's to a world where the West is monolithic, and may Iran, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Syria, Libya, Lebanon, Palestine be only be the beginning. And may every new crusade for freedom and democracy leave behind another Gaza, in pursuit of upholding human rights and civilizing the world.
Evil, imperialistic, warmongering West that checks notes condemns Israel’s actions, and generally condemned attack on Iran.