and how long are we going to be down?
and that is the whole point of this lockdown? I doubt voat is still under DDOS attack(and even if we assume it is, wouldn't it be reasonable to think that if some forces have been attacking voat constantly for months, they will keep attacking voat forever?), it has been fucking months since we are down.
Owner proudly claims that:
This is where I think the hand of God works in mysterious ways. They next came after Voat, but because of the recent attacks, Voat was inaccessible to those without accounts, thus giving them zero content in which to twist and distort in order to pressure a company like CloudFlare
Am I the only one who thinks this is extremely illogical ? Declaring a victory over hate police because they were unable to 'shut us down'? no shit, they couldn't shut us down, we shut ourselves down. I think owners don't understand that they took us down,for 99.99999% of internet-they took us down, no one but registered users can access voat, I have no access to stats, but I am fairly sure that our already small population decreased even further (and vorse, right now it has zero chance of growth) Voat is nothing more than some well hidden discord group or closed niche community on major websites.
Here comes a question, sure, they didn't shut us down, but what is the point of websites' existence in this circumstances ? Can site owners tell us what goals hate police would have achieved with shutting voat down what they haven't achieved with this self imposed lockdown anyway ? is becoming small closed community group with several hundred people (at best) aim of voat? because if it is, I doubt hate police has anything against that.
and finally, what the heck are site owners planning to do ? Are you guys just waiting it to stop ? or planning to do something? and most importantly, what the heck is the strategy of the website? what is the aim?
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udo ago
TOO MANY UNKNOWNS
its a de facto honeypot for over 4 years, but not by design or intent of admins.
Before we all descend to normal prudent suspicions, never overlook this scenario :
1 - Codebase goes private for voat (done), so less professional bug hunting assistance drops to zero
2 - A type of blocking race condition added inadvertently to code that is hard to figure out because the root cause is macroscopic design issue not microscopic localized issue
3 - after adding various core dumps to freeze and dump state to study, some band aids put on, but it results in shedding of a lot of users over 3 to 4 weeks that felt like just they were getting screwed with (thin skinned paranoid users)
4 - malevolent people on VPNs work best to evade anti-ddos and anti-vpn if their final IP cannot be surrounded by ICMP echo (ping) from 2nd to last and last test to algorithmically detect a VPN, so the BEST terminus points happen to be south asia and countries putt thinks are the actual source of his DDOS
5 - the so called voat DDOS is probably algorithmic strain and gibberish "fuzzing" requests by lightly motivated hackers , not REAL DDOS that cloudflare already claims to mitigate for free :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzz_testing
https://support.smartbear.com/readyapi/docs/soapui/secure/scans/types/fuzzing-http.html
6 - new zealand so called shooting, and two other so-called shootings put 8chan and 4 chan in hot seat, so putt decides to let voat.co chill a while as a RATIONALIZATION for remaining private, until he decides he can stop "fuzzing" attacks by rewriting all of the protocol back and forth to voat.co, and maybe even a total rewrite avoiding c# (node.js , some libraries in node, and mongo distributed database)
7 srayzie drama - when debate on definition of "free speech" caused a lot of unintended consequences when one mod deleted people arguing with him ( Crensch ) : https://voat.co/v/ProtectVoat/3299539 it caused a "schizoid embolism" in poor putts head and I feel bad for him.
8 - putt posts giant "can I hire a trusted coder to rewrite a fast strong slightly scalable voat.co" plea and people like me stay silent, and he knows there are 10 to 40 people on voat.co that , under the right conditions could take up the torch, but risk putting minor targets on their own backs. Now Hiring A Few Good Goats: https://voat.co/v/Voat/3361289 Amusingly (or sadly) the admins wish to seemingly stick with .net c#, though a few rare sites are C# (stack overflow (ASP.NET MVC), GoDaddy (ASP.NET MVC) Ancestry.com (ASP.NET MVC).
all of the above is just my speculations. the OFFICIAL big putt rebuttal is already penned by voat.co here :
https://voat.co/v/Voat/3371593
I think its a combination of : coding BURN OUT :
http://blog.packetqueue.net/the-burnout-an-engineer-becomes-disillusioned/
project disillusionment from being a small fish free speech site with lots of multibilliondollar backed leftist enemies (ShreBlue) :
https://money.cnn.com/2017/10/17/news/george-soros-18-billion-open-society-foundations/index.html
A sense of loss of traction (common) but not in need of a pivot or merger or alliance. pivot :
https://www.startups.com/library/expert-advice/startup-business-pivot
more wild ass speculation :maybe a bug too intractable to regress back far enough to isolate? a total sense of bewilderment at hiccups in the depths of the code probably MAYBE from doing a sort before a filter coupled with too much memory to garbage collect. voat.co on proper code could handle 5,000 simultaneous users on one box, but coding designs to liberate it, by their "heavier" nature drop it probably to 2,400 PER box across a few boxes, yet voat.co can squeak by in current existence on one box. Goal of course it UNLIMITED total users, at same time, similar to most large social sites, but more users means MORE headaches. The biggest is if all is not on USA soil. The second is attempts to "frame" voat with posting very touchy stuff, the same way image servers are attacked often... image servers get attacked with non legal pron, but voat is OK because it avoid hosting any usable images. Nevertheless it can be attacked with other poisonous content to cause issues.
So many head sulking , complex topics. All I can say is I am so happy all of use found and got into voat.co and can enjoy it while it lasts, and though no new fresh meat, the v/QRV , v/milliondollarextreme, and v/TheDonald addons brought up the IQ and maturity here a bunch! Most all known social sites devolve in age lower and lower racing towards ''age 14" and kids spouting shocking obscenities and smack talk relentlessly. Voat.co will suffer death spiral to age 14 mean one day, but for now its staved off.
All off us here are grateful for two things : 1 > voats existence and free speech rules, and 2 > putt getting some bitcoin when it was far far far lower in value a long while back, to pay the server bills. 3 > because it is a 'de facto' honeypot the US LEAs (law enforcement agencies) NEVER, yes NEVER will allow actual harm to come to voat.co , else we scatter to the winds
Jewed ago
I hope it's just Putt having a learning experience with managed languages and dependency hell.
It sounds like the codebase is damn near unusable, which given the origins of it is no surprise.
Honeypots however operate on the basis of collecting flies, and since registrations and reading without being logged in are disabled, we are either in the final stages where news of massive raids on hateful antisemites and racists is trotted out as remaining users are identified and black bagged, or it's just not a direct honeypot. Remember CloudFlare has the private SSL key for voat, so the three letter agencies were always spying directly.
udo ago
I used to think that was the sort of thing only seen in Terry Gilliams "Brazil" or the movie "1984" but now I know with horror... its a real possibility for some here. Why? For a "Perp Walk". There is a HUGE (I mean truly fucking HUGE) need to "stop white terrorists harboring hate thoughts" and its been codified in congress TWICE! The second time I think it stipulated that 20% of entire FBI anti-terror budget had to be for looking for WHITE EVIL HATE THOUGHT RACIST TERRORISTS
20 fucking percent! The other 80% is for muslims, but the way. The muslims obama flooded the country with.
20% of FBI budget MUST be used to look for white terrorists and white hate crime detective work. The problem is... all the "white terrorists" are only ont the "jew box" the (((TV))) in every drama, 4 or more times per week, year after year. Hundreds of white racist monster criminals on TV, but oddly not one caught WHITE TERRORIST commiting actual white nationalist hate crimes !
THERES a database of actual hate crimes with caught suspects online... the problem is... its NEVER a straight white christian male ! : http://www.fakehatecrimes.org/ and if a straight white christian male ever is in the news for doing criminal acts ... its always a non-trump-voter, a leftist.
Not only does CloudFlare own voat.co's web SSL key, it admitted frequently letting us gov access all its stored DECRYPTED data is caches and stores... including this post I am typing now.
SAY HELLO to CIA/NSA/NRO/FBI/DIA/USDOJ/State Dept INR/USAFISR/DOE/DHS/TFI/ONSI/DOJ/ etc
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crazy_eyes ago
nonsense
fluhthreeex ago
I think you said it best with 3 - leaving would be the best thing for every like minded individual. this site is essentially a private discord and there's no point in staying around circle-jerking. are there any *chan onions up? 8chan ever come back? did 4 ever get one (does it matter since its a fedpot as well?)
udo ago
I notice you downvoted my words. sad.
fluhthreeex ago
please tell us all how you noticed how i voted. i for one would love to know your One Simple Secret! to knowing how others vote on this site.
fluhthreeex ago
no