I have a small mail server I use for my open source projects. Very little email gets send out. We also own our own /24 hosted in a Datacenter. Microsoft randomly blocks our mail server, not because of its reputation, but because there is an IP "near but outside" our /24 that has a bad reputation. I have went 15 rounds with their Support department who is clueless. When you first report it, they check your subnet and say "we are not blocking any IP in this range" and close the ticket. You then have to spend weeks going back and forth with them, until it magically starts working again (and no response as to why). Then a month later its back to being blocked.

At this point I have given up, and have actively blocked people from being able to sign up for our forums/services using a microsoft related domain, as they will never receive the registration email (thus causing more support issues for me).

To make matters worse, is over 50% of spam email incoming to our mail server originates from Microsoft servers.

Same I hate it and turn it off manually every time I get into the vehicle. I will pull up to a stop sign on a busy road, and it seems that every time a safe space finally appears is when the engine decides to cut out. When you start to hit the gas immediately after it turns off, there is this lag that happens. Because of the lag, its more like 2 seconds before I have actual power again, and by then I have sometimes missed my chance. My next vehicle will not have the feature or will have the ability to turn it off permanently, or else I am not buying it.

400% is what I have been seeing too, even on older used servers with DD4. I was buying some servers for my personal test rack. Before I was able to find them for $1k each, almost overnight those same servers shot up and now sell for over $4k+.

Water and power were 2 of the main reasons why our city declined an incoming DC. While not the size of Dallas, we sit at ~250k residents, and the "AI" DC that was coming into the area was projected to double both our water and electricity usage. We already typically have water restrictions in the summer months, so water was going to be a major issue, and doubling our electrical usage would have required building even more transmission lines into the town. All for a measly 45 jobs and a projected 30M in taxes (current budget for the city is ~500M).

Other reasons were noise (they were putting right near a brand new subdivision), acres to job creation ratio (130 acres can fit a lot of retail, office, or other jobs), and secrecy (the city council signed an NDA that didn't allow them to talk about the deal until a week before the vote).

Depends on the DC ofcourse, but the one that our city declined was fairly large and it was going to bring in ~45 jobs (not all full time). So no more than a few typical fast food restaurants.

You are missing that its not the big four that are doing it (for the most part). Its other unknown players out there that want to train their LLM and don't care about being polite about it.

Its when you get hit with a botnet of over a million unique IPs that has been rented from some malware provider to crawl and slurp your site down as fast as possible. When your site goes from 4-5 requests per second to 1000s. All with randomized user agents, all coming from different residential subnets in different parts of the world. And then it goes on for weeks on end. Even when you manage to block it, it doesn't stop the traffic. They keep trying, and then they keep iterating to find new ways around your block.

I built something like this a decade ago with PHP and a dictionary file. The problem that you run into, is the more bots you trap in the Labyrinth, the most CPU you end up using, because they will blindly just keep slurping up what you are giving them.

In the end I shut it down, as I would rather just block them to begin with instead of wasting CPU cycles for no real gain on my part.

I have had to fight off several, one of which I recorded over 1 million unique IPs, all random and coming out of nearly every Vietnam and Indonesian subnet, mostly residential. My site normally gets 5-10 requests per second and was now getting over 1000+ for 12-14 hours per day for 3 weeks straight. It always started at the same time of day, almost like it was on a timer. Luckily, that one all used a User Agent with the same old version of Chrome in the string and was easily blocked. But the attack continued even though every request was reporting 403 Forbidden back to them. So its like they weren't even paying attention to the data they were getting.

The next one was out of the same region but they randomized the User Agent, but still in a way that wasn't too difficult to filter out. Once they figured out to better replicate a real User Agent, then I had to resort to blocking the entire countries at the router.

Other attacks have been random IPs from all over the world, a mix of residential and cloud providers. Since then I have installed Anibus, and I haven't had a single issue.

Ugh.. you wrote a lot of words, and I didn't really want to read all that, so I asked my friend, whom I call CG3P0, and he summarized it and said the answer to your question is Yes.

Ya I noticed the same thing. I had always shown ads before as they were pretty unobtrusive, but today I noticed they went really overboard. Enabled my adblocker and noticed they implemented some checking, but it was pretty trivial to work around them.

Exactly. And it should be pointed out, that the patches were only released to the Extended support repos, not to the default repos. I know plenty of people who are still running ESXi 6.7 because they don't feel the need to throw out perfectly good hardware to upgrade to 7/8 (most have updated VCenter at least) and they didn't get these patches.

I am guessing the price wasn't the same in all locations. From the 2nd link.

1) Apple releases a loan program
2) Economy tanks, people can't repay the loan
3) Apple creates Loyalty Centers for those who can't pay
4) Apple uses the debtors to build all its electronics (only labor cheaper than India/China is slave labor)
5) ??
6) Profit!

Mostly by making it do silly things like
"Rewrite the lyrics to 'Welcome to the Jungle' to make it about an actual jungle"

other than that, I haven't found much good use for it. A friend of mine is using it to write a lot of technical docs for his Open Source project, and then he just goes behind it and cleans up and corrects any mistakes. Saves a good bit of typing.

Terrible idea. If my family knew how much I really make, they would nonstop be pestering me to "borrow" some.