In Peace

Why can't the world just leave my little gemini server in peace?

gemini://rymden.no/tx/2026-04-17.gmi

• Various naughty groups scan looking for vulnerable servers to exploit, so will scan a lot.
• Various companies offer scan metadata, so will scan a lot to keep that data up-to-date.
• Various companies offer time sharing (these days called "cloud") which some will use to do scanning from.
• Various hacked computers allow most anyone to run any code on them, so will scan a lot.
• Various AI idiots download the same data over and over and over and over and
• Various network attacks may cause backscatter to your server that look like scans.

All of these fall under "privatizing profits, socializing losses" as someone else profits (a new server to hack, selling metadata, selling compute time, etc.) while many others get a shit sandwich and may spend copious amounts of time on firewall rules, log analysis, etc. to keep the network noise down to a dull roar.

Some quick kluges are to:

• Blacklist the scanner IP addresses. Some folks collect and share such lists.
• Blacklist by default all the AWS, Google, and other "cloud" compute ranges. If they can't (or won't, because lower profits) police their networks for bad behavior, they are not worth doing business with.

There are risks of false positives here, like a customer might actually use Google something for something, so if you run a server for more beings than yourself you will need to build consensus on what to do about the Google cloud attack problem, whether an alternative service can be moved to for some workflow, etc. Larger sites may not be able to ban a problematic service as well as a smaller site can, e.g. where the IT department wants to ban mailchimp because spam while the marketing department wants to use mailchimp because spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spam lovely spam!

Other efforts to treat the network disease should be reviewed for such things as:

• How much effort will it take to implement, to maintain?
• How effective will it be?
• What are the side-effects?

Longer term, the internet (it was nice while it lasted?) may not be viable for anything but large corporate hyperscalars and approved producer-consumer devices behind balkanized national firewalls so alternative means of communication may need to be considered.