"ddos" via DMCA requests is an actual thing. There are actual methods that a few ddos-as-a-service providers provide (aka booters or stressers) that will fling tons of DMCA/abuse reports at your hosting/cloud provider to get them to take action on you.

I wonder how many folks learned of tcl/tk cause of eggdrop.

I learned it originally because of Xircon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XiRCON

I remember in the 90s a classmate in my junior high lived across the street from the house that Ted grew up in (evergreen park, il). When all this was going down he mentioned how before it went public that there was a suspicious amount of people visiting that house and removing things in boxes (I guess Teds brother owned the house and still had his writings in the attic).

At the time I recall a lot of drama around Fincher taking it on ("mtv music video director takes on alien project"). Also there is the case of how did the egg get on the sulaco, which isn't clear.

I didn't see it mentioned here but if you watch the documentary on Alejandro Jodorowsky attempting to make Dune - the collection of folks he brought together (for a project that didn't happen) ended up being key folks in making Alien. Talk about bringing the right talent together

That said - love Alien and will occasionally rewatch it. It's "space trucker" environment with low tech interiors really took on a different approach compared to other works in scifi. It's tranquil scenes and score are also pretty unique. Even the trailer feels a bit ahead of it's time when compared to trailers today.

For botnets, yes.

For L7 request floods - they spin up a few dozen machines and use open & private proxies to funnel http requests thru. Sometimes those proxies are misconfigured squid, sometimes it's private proxy services, sometimes it's compromised machines converted into proxies (which may be open or require auth / has been sold).

For L3/L4 amplification/reflection they're buying machines where they can spoof and using UDP amplification lists (other people's machines) to reflect off of (and obviously not getting permission to, etc.).

Security updates is the important part. Particularly when dealing with vulnerable equipment which can be compromised and botnet malware dropped on it. A 0 day in a popular DVR/NVR or home router can lead to tens of thousands of devices that can throw a lot of heat. ISPs have been not great in this space so it's left to a small community to chase down the manufacturers to push updates out. The tragic part is for some devices - the company has gone out of business.

The scary part of auto update is when a company does a bad job of it. For example: letting the auto update site domain expire or point to an IP at a hosting provider that someone might pick up and if the devices don't do proper endpoint validation folks can use it to force downloads of compromised images.

All of these things have happened.

Is it going to be Beetlejuice goes Hawaiian like originally planned? (That was the actual pitch for several years)

India is well known for blocking CDNs IPs for a variety of reasons (don't like the content, or because you can VPN on top of them).

I've seen some CDNs who don't use anycast and rely primarily on DNS to cycle thru the IP pools vended in India because the government is slow to add new addresses to block and they maintain a cool down period before reintroducing them.

The shitty part is that the entity in India issuing this never reaches out to the CDNs to communicate exactly what they object to.

Folks sometimes start as consumers of ddos services and at some point realize they can run their own service and make money, buy API access into other booters to begin (reselling but the customer doesn't know) and then they figure out how to build their own infra (dedicated servers, front end, payments etc.).