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This website is amazing. In love ambient sounds. It is a shame something like this happened. Glad he continues.
I heard of this on other websites. AI chatbots are web scraping data off websites, and you have to use fail2ban to block them. People are learning how to teach AI Chatbots to hack websites as well. My website http://blastar.in/ was affected, and I don't host it; a friend runs it for me, but he doesn't respond to email.
Why would someone try to hurt this guy? This site is great.
This site is fantastic. Sending a donation. Keep up the good work!
Lovely, but naive.

But naive in a way that most people (?) would like the world to be.

But ultimately, unfortunately, unrealistic.

Building has always been the kind of difficult that, had you known at the beginning then maybe you wouldn't have started. And still quickly and easily destroyed.

Keep creating and building, otherwise there's nothing else to do. Love the obstacles for challenge of defeating them, don't hate them for their existence. To build X you often have to build A, B, and C (and sometimes all the rest of the alphabet) just to have the right setup to maximise the success of X. It can grind, but focus on the benefits of X.

Which sounds like the position they've taken, thankfully.

(Where X represents "anything" and is specifically not the <whatever it's classified as> platform formally known as Twitter).

The melancholy will return, just ride it out each time. It gets easier, gradually.

Oh I downloaded and use the app but I didn't realise they had a whole site! This is great.
I'm a lifetime member and have enjoyed mynoise.net for many years. It's the best thing I've found for focus and distraction blocking. I have brain.fm, and YouTube music, but I keep coming back to his site because it's just better, more intentional, and more effective for me.
The MyNoise app has tangibly improved my life. I use a white noise machine at home, but when I travel, MyNoise is my sleep companion and I particularly appreciate that I can set the EQ to block the particular noises that are likely to wake me.

Sorry to hear about the annoying hack…

this is incredibly upsetting.

mynoise is one of the best things on the net.

It's traumatic to be victim of malevolence. There's the injury, but it is the lack of a motivation which is disturbing - it's a loss of innocence.
sorry to hear that and i can absolutely relate to this feeling of losing something, of perhaps even being dragged into a game you never wanted to even play, where no one wins and everyone loses something.

the one silver lining is that it seems to have strengthened your resolve, to keep planting and keep building instead of just letting chaos and destruction stop you in your tracks. so in that way maybe you haven’t lost after all and maybe this isn’t even a bad thing, it helped clarify the things you find important in life and even inspire others (me included). thank you!

Recently I have had to live in a building with severe noise issues, and running appropriately EQed white noise on my speaker helped mask it and maintain at least some sanity and sleep. The mynoise app might not be the fanciest but it does exactly what it says without fail or frills, and works across devices. I don’t think I knew who made it when I bought it, but this story put a face on the app.

When someone attacks you, it is additionally traumatic in that it undermines your trust in people. In this way, it can breed trauma if it makes you become more defensive/distrustful and/or offensive/trust-violating to others. This is not an excuse to the attacker, but if I were asked how we can end this vicious circle I would probably say it’s about long-term mental health (across generations).

I am so sorry to hear this story, and I am so glad to have found this website!
…people downloading a bunch of stuff from your website, even maliciously, is not a tenth of the tragedy this webpage seems to make it out to be.
I, too, just keep going back to mynoise.net for ambient sounds. It just looks "right" for the task, and is clearly designed to get out of your way and let you choose the kind of sounds that you want. Amazing site, I highly recommend it.

The attacks are painful, I hope the creator can attract some competent help from here or elsewhere to mitigate this problem.

I hope Stéphane doesn't let this sort of thing get to him too much - focus on the happy users of the site, learn to combat this sort of attack, and move on. Don't give these assholes any sort of attention.
The blog post ends in a hopeful note, seems his spirit is unaffected:

    But I’ve made a choice. I’ll keep planting trees. I’ll keep making sounds. I’ll keep helping baby pigeons.
Plus, he now has a pigeon flying around.
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Universal connectivity was the internet’s biggest promise and it turned out to be its biggest flaw. It turns out if you allow literally anyone on this planet to walk up to your front door, you will end up with the world’s criminals, psychopaths, you know, the ones in a more civilized time would be driven out of town by townsfolk wielding pitchforks, all hanging out on your porch figuring out how to pick your lock, or just to spray paint your house for the lulz and cred.

Look around and you will see every piece of cybersecurity knowledge assumes your porch will be inhabited by bad actors and there is nothing to stop them, so you absolutely need to harden your server as if you are a bank. Have you ever lived somewhere you genuinely don’t need to lock your front door to feel safe? I have, it was amazing, and it depresses me to no end to see the polar opposite to be what is expected on the internet. We were promised a world of peace and unity and total freedom of information but instead we got the tyranny of the petty cyberdelinquent, with no way to enforce prosocial values as we ought to do in a sane society. “On the internet no one knows you are a dog” was a warning, but we would be in a much better world if it’s only dogs we have to share an internet with. When humans get low they can get way lower than the worst dogs ever born.

We are already seeing a Brazilification of the internet. Crime is rampant, so you live in a gated community with private security if you can afford it. On the internet the name of this private security operation is Cloudflare. I hate one private company becoming the de facto gatekeeper of the internet but I cannot blame any individual website (including the one in the article) for using Cloudflare. It’s the thin orange line between a somewhat usable service and getting knocked off the internet by smart fridges every other day because some kid somewhere on the planet got bored.

How will this end? I honestly don’t know.

Feel for the guy. I had a couple of long owned domains stolen recently. They were so low value to anyone but me though, it makes me wonder why someone would bother.
Newly registered domains don't get the same recognition in search engines as older ones. That's why there's a market for stolen domains, the same is true for social media accounts
Scary stuff. How'd the thefts occur, in your case?
Poor guy probably got crawled by LLM bots. The "attacker" probably doesn’t know who this person is. Just a faceless corporation using his sound or white noise content to train and feed llm.

I get similar "attacks" on daily basis, but find out it’s just a bot crawling the certificate transparency logs. Inspecting site certificates, and it’s issued by Let’s Encrypt CAs. Script kiddies, at best, trying to pick off the low hanging fruit.

Hope he doesn’t take these "attacks" too personally going forward. Seems like a good guy overall, maybe too good for this world.

The unfair match between good and bad has most likely been a conundrum for thousands of years. Multiple solutions has been proposed as to how to deal with the bad ones, including; kill them, forgive them, educate and reform them - but nothing really seems to work.

One solution might be to gather them all up and send them to another planet were they can live as they please without bothering the good ones - and some might suggest that this is exactly what they did and here we are :)

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When have we tried killing malicious hackers?
1. Don't take it personally. They don't know or care who you are.

2. Some kind of rate limiter is becoming essential for servers. Scanning/probing is worse than rude but there's plenty of obnoxious out there.

Fail2ban can easily be configured to handle simple login or vulnerability scans.

If there's not something similar for web servers, it wouldn't be hard to write one. Anyone know of fail2ban or rate-limiters for webservers?

Needs to put Cloudflare (free plan) in front of the website and the problem is fixed