Do you keep access logs? How long do you keep them?
I imagine that if you ever got a request, you’d understandably just give in and hand out the data. Have you thought of a canary?
Thanks for all your work!
The company I work for probably doesn’t see as much traffic as Reddit, but we provide services via the web in the US and roughly 15 other countries. We make use of Akamai for CDN, security, etc. and one of the things they do is provide us with raw logs of every request made to our sites. That generates a lot of data that we feed into Splunk for analysis, debugging, etc.
One of the nicer things Akamai does in their logs is to classify if they believe the request came from a bot, and if so then what bot it was. They are able to identify over 1000 individual bots, and can also detect traffic from new/unknown bots. There is a LOT of bot activity on the internet these days, and many originate from cloud providers like AWS, where it’s clear it’s a machine making the request and not a human.
If we had a legal request for logs I’d have to look at the data to see how to respond. If Akamai showed a lot of bot activity from consumer ISP IPs then I’d likely include that data in an effort to show that end users may be victims of botnets. But if bot activity was mostly originating from cloud providers etc. then I probably wouldn’t include it. Let the lawyers try to figure out from the raw data what traffic originated from humans vs bots.
snowe@programming.dev 3 months ago
I’m not in the business of collecting user data and don’t really want to be. In regards to logs, we restart our containers every 6 hours and the logs are wiped at that time, so the furthest back logs I can actually find in our system are from an hour ago.
And nah, I wouldn’t give in. There’s no real reason to request that information, as accessing a url means absolutely nothing. I did so just now to verify things and the same could be argued by any real user (oh, I clicked on the link and didn’t know what it was going to). I very much doubt the past 6 hours of logs would be useful anyway, as by the time I got the request the logs wouldn’t matter anymore.
But, I’m still going to see if I can turn off logging for requests. I do not think we need them at all, and if we do, we can simply turn it on for a few minutes to get the info we need. But on this note, since this is all federated, your requests might show up in logs to other instances. Thus the weakness of the fediverse shows itself again. Any company can simply go to a different instance and try to request the same data. And we can’t stop that.
onlinepersona@programming.dev 3 months ago
Thanks for the clear answer and thank you for maintaining this instance 💖
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snowe@programming.dev 3 months ago
Thank you for the good post. And at this point, most of the work is being done by Ategon and the other admins. I am mostly here for infrastructure support and general direction of the instance.
aport@programming.dev 3 months ago
Based Lemmy admin