Hacker News Reader

I may have a system in place that starts the pipeline for fetching a very, very large file (16TB, text file designed for testing). Not hosted by myself, except the first shard.

A surprising number of agents try to download the whole thing.

View on HN

Right, and that's why honeypots work against many targets. Why serve them an actual file, when a cgi script or whatever can just generate output in a loop.

Someone has to front the bandwidth.

Ah, speaking of that, of course you don't generate the fake data as fast as you can. You just trickle it out often enough for them not to time out.

That's why you should run a tarpit instead.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com