First round of French election: party attacks and a modest traffic dip
This post is also available in Français.
France is currently electing a new government through early legislative elections that began on Sunday, June 30, 2024, with a second round scheduled for July 7. In this blog, we show how Cloudflare blocked DDoS attacks targeting three different French political parties.
2024 has been dubbed “the year of elections,” with elections taking place in over 60 countries, as we have mentioned before (1, 2, 3). If you regularly follow the Cloudflare blog, you’re aware that we consistently cover election-related trends, including in South Africa, India, Iceland, Mexico, the European Union and the 2024 US presidential debate. We also continuously update our election report on Cloudflare Radar.
Recently in France, as in the early stages of the war in Ukraine and during EU elections in the Netherlands, political events have precipitated cyberattacks. In France, several DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service attack) attacks targeted political parties involved in the elections over the past few days, with two parties hit just before the first round and another on election day itself.
The first political party, shown in yellow in the previous chart, experienced a DDoS attack on Continue reading
Declare your AIndependence: block AI bots, scrapers and crawlers with a single click
To help preserve a safe Internet for content creators, we’ve just launched a brand new “easy button” to block all AI bots. It’s available for all customers, including those on our free tier.
The popularity of generative AI has made the demand for content used to train models or run inference on skyrocket, and, although some AI companies clearly identify their web scraping bots, not all AI companies are being transparent. Google reportedly paid $60 million a year to license Reddit’s user generated content, Scarlett Johansson alleged OpenAI used her voice for their new personal assistant without her consent, and most recently, Perplexity has been accused of impersonating legitimate visitors in order to scrape content from websites. The value of original content in bulk has never been higher.
Last year, Cloudflare announced the ability for customers to easily block AI bots that behave well. These bots follow robots.txt, and don’t use unlicensed content to train their models or run inference for RAG applications using website data. Even though these AI bots follow the rules, Cloudflare customers overwhelmingly opt to block them.
We hear clearly that customers don’t want AI bots visiting their websites, and especially those that do Continue reading
MUST READ: ChatGPT Is Bullshit
Bogdan Golab sent me a link to an (open access) article in Ethics and Information Technology arguing why ChatGPT is bullshit. Straight from the introduction:
Because these programs cannot themselves be concerned with truth, and because they are designed to produce text that looks truth-apt without any actual concern for truth, it seems appropriate to call their outputs bullshit.
Have fun!
Master New Platforms and Technologies with netlab
One of my readers sent me this remark (probably while trying to work on the EBGP Sessions over the IPv6 LLA Interfaces lab):
I did attempt some of your labs, like IPv6 link-local-only BGP with FRR hosts, but FRR seemed not to play ball, or I was just doing it wrong.
As he was already using netlab, I could send him a cheat code:
Master New Platforms and Technologies with netlab
One of my readers sent me this remark (probably while trying to work on the EBGP Sessions over the IPv6 LLA Interfaces lab):
I did attempt some of your labs, like IPv6 link-local-only BGP with FRR hosts, but FRR seemed not to play ball, or I was just doing it wrong.
As he was already using netlab, I could send him a cheat code:
PP021: Critical Vulnerabilities, AI-Assisted Scams, Compromised VPNs, and More Security News
It’s an all-news episode for this week’s Packet Protector podcast. We cover critical vulnerabilities in the MOVEit file transfer software and in thousands of ASUS routers, and a remote code execution vulnerability in a Windows wireless driver that you really should patch. We discuss a Wall Street Journal article about how AI tools are helping... Read more »HS077: Should IT Lead or Follow?
The evolving role of IT in business is the topic of lively discussion between co-hosts Johna Johnson and John Burke. Johna argues that IT should align with business goals, acting as an executive assistant, while John believes IT should take a proactive leadership role, driving innovation and framing business problems. They explore the challenges IT... Read more »
Running Arista cEOS in GitHub Codespaces
Yesterday, I explained how you can run netlab examples in GitHub codespaces and mentioned that they work best with vendors who understand the value of frictionless downloads. But what if you’d like to use a device from one of the good guys who provide the container images but require a registration?
It turns out the solution is trivial:
Running Arista cEOS in GitHub Codespaces
Yesterday, I explained how you can run netlab examples in GitHub codespaces and mentioned that they work best with vendors who understand the value of frictionless downloads. But what if you’d like to use a device from one of the good guys who provide the container images but require a registration?
It turns out the solution is trivial:
Tech Bytes: Why SD-WAN is the Secret to SASE Success (Sponsored)
The rise of SASE has eclipsed SD-WAN as organizations develop strategies and analyze products for secure access. But SD-WAN is an essential component of SASE; in fact, sponsor Palo Alto Networks says SD-WAN is the most important component. On today’s Tech Bytes podcast we talk with Palo Alto Networks about why SD-WAN underpins a SASE... Read more »NB485: A Final FU for Greg
Greg Ferro bids farewell to Network Break, and Drew Conry-Murray and Johna Till Johnson bid farewell to Greg. Of course, the podcast must go on, so we also cover some tech news. First, Nokia acquires optics maker Infinera, Broadcom brings new features to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), and campus switch sales drop. A Microsoft subsidiary... Read more »The Keynote Answers You Expect
Good morning! How are you?
I’d like to talk about keynotes, again. You know, one of my favorite subjects. I’ve been watching them intently for the past few years just hoping that we’re going to see something different. As a technical analyst and practitioner I love to see and hear the details behind the technology that drive the way our IT companies develop. Yet every year I feel more and more disappointed by the way that keynotes take everything and push it into the stratosphere to get an 80,000 foot view of the technology. It’s almost like the keynotes aren’t written for practitioners. Why? The answer lies in the statement at the top of this post.
Perfunctory Performances
When most people ask someone how their day is going they’re not actually looking for a real response. They most certainly aren’t asking for details on how exactly the person’s day is going. They’re usually looking for one of two things:
- It’s going great.
- It could be better.
Any more than that drags someone down into a conversation that they don’t want to have. Asking someone about their day is a polite way of acknowledging them and making a bit of small Continue reading
Testing Luma AI Dream Machine
In this article, we explore the capabilities and limitations of the Luma AI Dream Machine. […]
The post Testing Luma AI Dream Machine first appeared on Brezular's Blog.
Fat Pipe Transition Notification – July 2024
Hey, everyone. Ethan here with a behind-the-scenes administrative request. Several thousand of you subscribe to the Packet Pushers’ Fat Pipe. In the Fat Pipe, we’ve been stuffing every single podcast we produce. The problem is that we produce way too many shows–one almost every weekday–for the average podcast client to absorb them all. We can... Read more »Making Segment Routing user-friendly
Segment Routing was supposed to make MPLS easier and give more power to network operators. Sadly, vendors decided to make it harder by selling weird protocols and over-engineered controller bloatware.
MPLS is actually great
Despite some anti-MPLS marketing from SD-WAN …
AWS Networking Fundamentals for Beginners
Welcome to today's blog post where we're focusing on AWS Networking fundamentals. If you're new to AWS or just want to better understand AWS Networking, you've come to the right place.
We'll start by talking about Regions and Availability Zones (AZ). These are the building blocks of AWS infrastructure. Next, we'll cover how to set up your own Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). This will be your private space in the AWS cloud where you can launch resources. From there, we'll discuss subnets, breaking down the difference between public and private ones. Knowing this will help you better plan your network architecture.
To wrap it all up, we'll go through the steps of creating an EC2 instance (Linux server). Not only that, but we'll also walk you through accessing this instance over the Internet. This will give you a full-circle understanding of AWS networking basics.
Audience
If you're brand new to AWS, don't worry. This blog post focuses on AWS basic networking, so having some general networking knowledge is a plus but not a requirement. I'll explain things in clear detail to make sure everyone can follow along.
For those of you who are Network Engineers or familiar with another cloud Continue reading
Netlab Examples in GitHub Codespaces
A few days ago, someone asked me about the IPv4 next-hop details of running interface EBGP sessions. I pointed him to a blog post explaining them, adding, “And of course, you can test that in netlab.” A few minutes later, it hit me: instead of asking him to set up netlab locally, I could enable him to do that in a minute with GitHub codespaces.
Setting that up was easy: copy the .devcontainer directory from the BGP labs repository into the netlab examples repository and commit the change. After a short yak-shaving exercise (writing README files and rearranging a few folders), I successfully started the codespace and was ready for this blog post. There was just one gotcha…
Netlab Examples in GitHub Codespaces
A few days ago, someone asked me about the IPv4 next-hop details of running interface EBGP sessions. I pointed him to a blog post explaining them, adding, “And of course, you can test that in netlab.” A few minutes later, it hit me: instead of asking him to set up netlab locally, I could enable him to do that in a minute with GitHub codespaces.
Setting that up was easy: copy the .devcontainer directory from the BGP labs repository into the netlab examples repository and commit the change. After a short yak-shaving exercise (writing README files and rearranging a few folders), I successfully started the codespace and was ready for this blog post. There was just one gotcha…