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Comment by moe | Hacker News Reader

Sitting down and writing a blog-post seems a pretty laid back reaction to $30k/day in Amazon bills...

First thing I'd have done is take the site offline and call the various DDoS mitigation services (Incapsula, Cloudflare, etc.).

Pretty surely most of them would gladly pick up the slack here, given the free PR (possibly even in mainstream press) they get in return.

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For them, using a DDoS mitigation service might be harder than it seems. Their project, "Collateral Freedom", depends on having a set of web frontends with some special properties. Namely, 1) the provider of the said frontends must be willing to ignore takedown / access restriction requests from (Chinese, Russian, etc) authorities, and 2) the access to those frontends can't be easily blocked by the Great Firewall of China / Russia / etc without causing massive problems to some unrelated widely used services.

(full disclosure: I do devops for one of the Russian sites that is currently mirrored by Collateral Freedom)

Not sure that turning the light off is the first thing you want to do when you're bullied.

And pretty certain that there's zero PR value in those stories.

Company under attack turns to this service to recover!

Turning off the light is a great first step when wasted money is flying out of your wallet.

They wouldn't just be giving in, it would take less than a day to get up and running on CloudFlare. That is probably worth avoiding $30k bill, especially for a non-profit.

As for PR, there absolutely is good will towards organizations that take on censorship. This is the #1 story on HN, so a company stepping in and saying "we got this covered, free of charge" not only shows they are good people, but also gives would be customers an idea of the quick implementation cycle for their CDN + the load it can handle.

Real world use case + helping to stop censorship = great PR

This is exactly what I was thinking. I read the blog post, then came to the comments. I completely expected something along the lines of ... "Hey, I'm the VP @ SomethingTech, we like what you're doing and will help you mitigate the attacks for free if you get in touch with us." ... to be the top comment here.

My reaction was based on the interview where they say that the 30k$ charge was harming, not killing them. You're more knowledgeable than me on CloudFlare and it may very well be a strong option.

Now in a way their $ penalty with this attack is not unlike growth. To me it sounds like they invested in their branding and will have a name as a company that can sustain damage and keep its ground - important because their goal is to be credible in bringing content in/out China.

What if they had given in? They'd be yet another victim of an attack sort of linked with China.

I do see a business sense behind what I assumed was their moral stance and I definitely stand by it.

Not sure that turning the light off is the first thing you want to do when you're bullied.

Unless your attitude is worth $20 USD per minute to you then yes, that's very much what you want to do.

And pretty certain that there's zero PR value in those stories.

Well, Greatfire seems to be betting a 6 figure stake on the opposite here...

Nonsense. Stop hemorrhaging $ first.

Seems brilliant to me if you are trying to battle online censorship in China and get your message out. I agree that one of the mitigation services could benefit from some pro-bono services.

I agree with this. Silently allowing a bully/attacker do as they want is never acceptable. I find GreatFire.org's work commendable and hope they get the help they need.

If they're a non profit, then maybe this is exactly what their mission is. They can sit back and rack up a huge aws bill, then Amazon has to decide whether to collect. If they do collect, then that was what the money was for anyway. I'm guessing that giving in to bullying from the Chinese government is against their core principles here.

As xnull6guest already noted, they are most probably already financed by the US government, that's why they can be laid back: they are exactly doing what they are paid for.

Its also toxic PR if you want to expand in the Chinese market.

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