My theory on this one is some serial wantrepreneur came up with a business plan of scraping the archive and feeding it into a LLM to identify some vague opportunity. Then they paid some Fiverr / Upwork kid in India $200 to get the data.
The good news is this website and any other can mitigate these things by moving to Cloudflare and it's free.
Bright Data specifically offers a sdk that app developers can use monetize free games. A lot of free games and VPN apps are using it. Check out how they market it, it's wild... - https://bright-sdk.com/
The way it works is this: You can sign up for a proxy rotator service that works like a regular proxy except every request you make goes through a different ip address. Is that a botnet? Yes. Is it also typically used in a scraping project? Yes.
It can absolutely be that, but that requires a confluence of multiple factors - misconfigured scrapper hitting the site over and over, a big bot net like proxy setup that is way overkilled for scrapping, a setup sophisticated enough to do all that yet simultaneously stupid enough to not cope with a site is mostly text and a couple gigs at most and all that over extended timeframe without anyone realising their scrapper is stuck.
Except that I think it's clear that the motive was getting the data not taking the site offline. The evidence for that is that it stopped on its own without them doing anything to mitigate it.
Also I don't know why you think this is sophisticated, it's probably 40 lines of Python code max.
This is the main thing for me. If I can keep the cf workers backend in the same repo and deploy them together I will consider leaving Next.js for good.
Why would you assume that Costco returns are due to supplier mistakes?
Costco are legendarily permissive with returns, to extent of things like accepting bare stick-like xmas trees back after xmas, and giving a full refund, but ultimately this is to their advantage in encouraging mindless consumerism (which is also the general American model - no-question-no-fault returns are generally an American thing, not a worldwide one).
Now, a liberal return policy may work out for Costco, and Costco is obviously a high volume hence desirable customer for a supplier, but if Costco is pushing much of the cost of returns back to the supplier, that does change the picture a bit!
Those returned trees don't get sent back to the supplier, they get deducted from a pre-negotiated spoil allowance which is something separate. The supplier returns will be things like badly stacked palettes.
Sort of, but maybe not quite? When you spin up an EC2 spot instance, it's a fresh instance with whatever AMI you load into it, and it's a fresh boot at that time. (You can save persistent data to an EBS volume that you create once up front and then attach to each new instance, of course.)
With this service, it seems like the VM underpinning your session is suspended (like as if you were to suspend-to-RAM or hibernate your laptop), and then resumed the next time you sign in, so not only is the filesystem in the same state as it was during your last session, but any background processes that have spun up since then are resumed as well, and are still running.
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