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google usenet archives - up or down?

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  google usenet archives - up or down? Michael S <already5chosen@yahoo.com> - 2026-09-27 18:23 +0300
    Re: google usenet archives - up or down? Joseph Seigh <jseigh_es00@xemaps.com> - 2026-09-27 17:20 -0400
      Re: google usenet archives - up or down? anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2026-09-28 05:53 +0000
        Re: google usenet archives - up or down? David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> - 2026-09-28 10:32 +0200
          Re: google usenet archives - up or down? Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> - 2026-09-28 15:18 -0400
            Re: google usenet archives - up or down? Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2026-10-07 06:34 +0000
              Relentless DDoS out there (was: google usenet archives - up or down?) Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> - 2026-10-07 16:02 -0400
        Re: google usenet archives - up or down? Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2026-09-30 03:38 +0000
      Re: google usenet archives - up or down? Michael S <already5chosen@yahoo.com> - 2026-09-30 12:53 +0300
    Re: google usenet archives - up or down? "Chris M. Thomasson" <chris.m.thomasson.1@gmail.com> - 2026-10-08 14:33 -0700

#118252 — google usenet archives - up or down?

Today when I am trying to access Google Usenet archives most of the
time I get "429 Too Many Requests".
Is it just me or outage is widespread?
The link: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.arch

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#118264

On 9/27/26 11:23 AM, Michael S wrote:
> Today when I am trying to access Google Usenet archives most of the
> time I get "429 Too Many Requests".
> Is it just me or outage is widespread?
> The link: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.arch
> 

It appears to be widespread.  I've noticed it for a few weeks now.
None of my bookmarked usenet links work anymore.

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#118274

Joseph Seigh <jseigh_es00@xemaps.com> writes:
>On 9/27/26 11:23 AM, Michael S wrote:
>> Today when I am trying to access Google Usenet archives most of the
>> time I get "429 Too Many Requests".
>> Is it just me or outage is widespread?
>> The link: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.arch

Lots of bots are now requesting content from all URLs they can find,
again and again, and have done so for two or three years.  A Usenet
archive with its many URLs tends to be hit hard.  Likewise for web
interfaces to code repositories.  We have turned off cvsweb access
more than a year ago because of this, yet we still have had 804524
accesses to cvsweb pages since 2026-09-01, 29% of our web accesses.

For a well-connected organization like Google, it's unusual that they
feel the strain of these web scrapers so much that they do not service
the request, but apparently it does happen; this may also point to the
lack of importance that this service has for Google and its revenue
stream.

>It appears to be widespread.  I've noticed it for a few weeks now.
>None of my bookmarked usenet links work anymore.

In particular, al.howardknight.net is now offline, after being online,
but unusable (probably from scraper overload) during summer.

- anton
-- 
'Anyone trying for "industrial quality" ISA should avoid undefined behavior.'
  Mitch Alsup, <c17fcd89-f024-40e7-a594-88a85ac10d20o@googlegroups.com>

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#118277

On 28/09/2026 07:53, Anton Ertl wrote:
> Joseph Seigh <jseigh_es00@xemaps.com> writes:
>> On 9/27/26 11:23 AM, Michael S wrote:
>>> Today when I am trying to access Google Usenet archives most of the
>>> time I get "429 Too Many Requests".
>>> Is it just me or outage is widespread?
>>> The link: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.arch
> 
> Lots of bots are now requesting content from all URLs they can find,
> again and again, and have done so for two or three years.  A Usenet
> archive with its many URLs tends to be hit hard.  Likewise for web
> interfaces to code repositories.  We have turned off cvsweb access
> more than a year ago because of this, yet we still have had 804524
> accesses to cvsweb pages since 2026-09-01, 29% of our web accesses.
> 
> For a well-connected organization like Google, it's unusual that they
> feel the strain of these web scrapers so much that they do not service
> the request, but apparently it does happen; this may also point to the
> lack of importance that this service has for Google and its revenue
> stream.
> 
>> It appears to be widespread.  I've noticed it for a few weeks now.
>> None of my bookmarked usenet links work anymore.
> 
> In particular, al.howardknight.net is now offline, after being online,
> but unusable (probably from scraper overload) during summer.
> 
> - anton

I gather that some 60% of internet traffic is now AI bots scrapping 
sites and talking to each other.  Some sites will of course be hit 
harder than others.  And I guess a significant proportion of what they 
are "reading" is just slop created by other AIs.  What a mess!

The internet survived funny cat videos, and it survived bittorrent music 
and movies, so I expect it will survive AI too.  But it bugs me that we 
all have to pay for this total waste of money, power and bandwidth.

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#118315

David Brown [2026-09-28 10:32:22] wrote:
> The internet survived funny cat videos, and it survived bittorrent music and
> movies, so I expect it will survive AI too.  But it bugs me that we all have
> to pay for this total waste of money, power and bandwidth.

And it's not just a waste of resources.  It also means that DDoS is now
a normal everyday occurrence for any site whatsoever.  It makes
a qualitative change in the sense that it takes a professional sysadmin
to manage even the most innocuous web-server.


=== Stefan

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#118507

On Mon, 28 Sep 2026 15:18:36 -0400, Stefan Monnier wrote:

> It also means that DDoS is now a normal everyday occurrence for any
> site whatsoever. It makes a qualitative change in the sense that it
> takes a professional sysadmin to manage even the most innocuous
> web-server.

I don’t think having a “professional sysadmin” in charge is any
assurance against DDOS attacks. The only remedy seems to be seriously
grunty hardware acting as a filter frontend to get rid of as much of
the rubbish as possible before letting anything through to the actual
content/application server.

The only people who have such hardware are the CDNs. And sometimes
even they can be overwhelmed, if the attack is big enough.

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#118524 — Relentless DDoS out there (was: google usenet archives - up or down?)

Lawrence D’Oliveiro [2026-10-07 06:34:22] wrote:
> On Mon, 28 Sep 2026 15:18:36 -0400, Stefan Monnier wrote:
>> It also means that DDoS is now a normal everyday occurrence for any
>> site whatsoever. It makes a qualitative change in the sense that it
>> takes a professional sysadmin to manage even the most innocuous
>> web-server.
> I don’t think having a “professional sysadmin” in charge is any
> assurance against DDOS attacks. The only remedy seems to be seriously
> grunty hardware acting as a filter frontend to get rid of as much of
> the rubbish as possible before letting anything through to the actual
> content/application server.

AFAIK hardware won't save you: there's an actual arms race going on, and
you need wetware in there to adapt the response to the ever-evolving
forms of the incoming DDoS.

That's because the attackers work hard to make their incoming "rubbish"
requests look as much as possible as the legitimate requests.

BTW, this whole arms race is not just a problem for administrators of
servers, but also for clients.  More and more, you can't use `curl` or
`wget` to download PDF articles, because they get hidden behind "are
you human?" checks.  Similarly the response to the arms race tends to
prevent legitimate scraping, such as when you want to maintain a mirror
for use behind a firewall, or say the Internet Archive.

Currently, the effort goes into technical means to guess which requests
are kosher, but I think it's ultimately impossible to do that without
imposing too many restrictions.  I'd much prefer an approach based on
governance, with ways to impose sanctions on abusers.


=== Stefan

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#118332

On Mon, 28 Sep 2026 05:53:33 GMT, Anton Ertl wrote:

> For a well-connected organization like Google, it's unusual that
> they feel the strain of these web scrapers so much that they do not
> service the request, but apparently it does happen ...

Occasionally my attempt at a Google search will return some kind of
access-blocked page warning that “bot-like” activity has been detected
coming from my IP address.

I suspect it’s a false positive triggered by my propensity for using
private-browsing mode.

You’d think different Google services would respond in a uniform way,
with consistent behaviours and failure messages, but apparently not.

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#118335

On Sun, 27 Sep 2026 17:20:10 -0400
Joseph Seigh <jseigh_es00@xemaps.com> wrote:

> On 9/27/26 11:23 AM, Michael S wrote:
> > Today when I am trying to access Google Usenet archives most of the
> > time I get "429 Too Many Requests".
> > Is it just me or outage is widespread?
> > The link: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.arch
> > 
> 
> It appears to be widespread.  I've noticed it for a few weeks now.
> None of my bookmarked usenet links work anymore.

Today when I start from the top https://groups.google.com it works.
From here I can move to https://groups.google.com/recent
And here I can click comp.arch and it is working.
But then if I hit refresh it returns 429.
Also all attempts to use links to individual messages fail.
It looks like some very crude form of DDOS or anti-bot protection by
Google. Somehow they are trying to force an interactive usage.
It is so crude that it makes it unusable as archive. Which in recent
years after termination of Usenet posting service was its only
remaining usage.

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#118529

On 9/27/2026 8:23 AM, Michael S wrote:
> Today when I am trying to access Google Usenet archives most of the
> time I get "429 Too Many Requests".
> Is it just me or outage is widespread?
> The link: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.arch
> 

Me too!!!

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