ptpb.pw permanent shutdown

[buhman]

TL;DR: coin miners are assholes, ruining this great service for everyone

Due to continued write and egress abuse, ptpb.pw is now ~permanently shut down. The current pb implementation has always been a toy at best, and is unsuited for mitigating very real modern internet threats. Unchecked, current usage would have resulted in $3000+/mo GCP bills for network egress--grossly innapropriate for what has always been a charity project.

See the following github issues for more information:

• ptpb.pw 500 Internal Server Error on uploading png #245
• ptpb.pw is out of disk space #240

In the future, ptpb.pw may be restored, but with an entirely new (possibly backwards incompatible) API/implementation. This is months away, optimistically.

[Earnestly]

That's a pity, but thank you very much for hosting this service while it lasted.

[Cloudef]

Pity indeed, ptpb was a great paste service.

[mpan-pl]

Thanks for providing us with the service for so long!

[diamondburned]

RIP. Forgot how to use this so I went to the site. Very unfortunate to hear this.

[Forty-Bot]

RIP best paste service

[Thunderbottom]

I feel bad for this being shut down. Is there any way possible for ptpb to be a temporary storage, and use a similar formula to that of what 0x0.st uses to generate its "File Retention Period"? If I may quote so:

FILE RETENTION PERIOD
---------------------

retention = min_age + (-max_age + min_age) * pow((file_size / max_size - 1), 3)

   days
    365 |  \
        |   \
        |    \
        |     \
        |      \
        |       \
        |        ..
        |          \
  197.5 | ----------..-------------------------------------------
        |             ..
        |               \
        |                ..
        |                  ...
        |                     ..
        |                       ...
        |                          ....
        |                              ......
     30 |                                    ....................
          0                        256                        512
                                                              MiB

Something similar of this sort, if not the same formula could be used; which helps against people abusing this service. If there is anything I can do for it, please let me know. I'd be more than happy to help in any way possible.

[buhman]

Happy to discuss creative solutions.

Most cloud providers don't charge terribly much for storage or IO, so this was a mere annoyance (which is why ptpb.pw didn't shut down in december or even earlier).

I think 0x0's formula is interesting.

I've also considered some kind of "fingerprint"-based bucketing and rate-limiting. The same fingerprint buckets could be weighted in to a garbage collector.

I'm also not against tuning a logistic regression model against every imaginable feature to compute a overall "abuse" factor, which could be consumed by both the rate limiter and the garbage collector.

There are also possible privacy issues with this that I'm not sure how to handle (or even if people care about this). I think ideally the pastebin should have no knowledge of paste content via some at-rest encryption scheme, despite this possibly being one of the strongest model features: "does this look like a magnet link, mining pool file, etc.."

If there is anything I can do for it

A distributed service might be inherently more resilient to abuse. I think there is a void here, in that existing distributed services focus more on being fully distributed, greatly sacrificing usability.

A split-view DNS based service might have a centralized coordinator that handles advertisement, membership, health/sanity validation, space partitioning. There are also some harder questions related to how resilient individual pastes should be to single-node failures, how do pastes get read/write partitioned without proxying, etc.. I think this might be a fun experiment at the very least.

The dream would be people interested in contributing resources could leisurely deploy/undeploy any number of object servers, and the process for doing this should be as easy as "copy+run this signed binary".

[buhman]

I thought I'd also point out I considered redeploying pb on a provider that doesn't charge for network egress, but I think the end result of ignoring the underlying problems will be poor performance and high latency, due to abusers saturating ptpb's (now more limited) networking. I think the shutdown is more appropriate than continuing to run a degraded service.

[CounterPillow]

coiners truly are the scum of the earth.

[Cloudef]

I guess pastebin over IPFS would work for distributing.