{"id":6776,"date":"2019-04-17T12:32:36","date_gmt":"2019-04-17T16:32:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/general\/?p=6776"},"modified":"2019-04-19T16:28:39","modified_gmt":"2019-04-19T20:28:39","slug":"is-this-the-death-of-all-cloud-based-services","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/general\/2019\/04\/17\/is-this-the-death-of-all-cloud-based-services\/","title":{"rendered":"Is this the death of all cloud-based services?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>VRChat players trying to login and being flagged as bots\/threats;<br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/LJ5nV9aKthU\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><br \/>\nMe, already bored with VRChat from game depression;<br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.imgur.com\/j2nyGS9.png\" \/><\/p>\n<p>So, what I thought was even more fearmongering, turned out to be actually true for once. A rare thing. Yesterday afternoon, a friend sent me a long paragraph sent by someone<br \/>\nelse, warning everyone to &#8220;stay off VRChat&#8221;. First, we&#8217;re &#8216;told&#8217; to change our<br \/>\npasswords, now this? It makes perfect sense to be part of the people that didn&#8217;t listen to the boy who cried wolf that late evening.<br \/>\nUnfortunately, there actually <em>was<\/em> a wolf. And that wolf is Cloudflare; the service that not just VRChat&#8217;s servers rely on, but a 3rd of the internet. Which begs the question&#8211; is this the death of all cloud-based services? Or, just the death of Cloudflare who apparently is much more incompetent than VRChat&#8217;s dev team is? Hard to believe, yeah, but the second thing seems to be true. But it also goes to show; you &#8216;get what you pay for&#8217;. Instead of the dev team investing on Google&#8217;s cloud service, they&#8217;re relying on these nutjobs.<br \/>\nWhat&#8217;s even better? If you try to rejoin VRChat, you run a high risk of your IP being flagged as a threat and blacklisted (aka banned). This is all Cloudflare&#8217;s doing.<br \/>\nSeems like to me, Cloudflare is being DDoSd (and not telling anyone). Or, Cloudflare<br \/>\nis &#8216;giving a sample&#8217; of what Europe will be going through when Article 13 is signed into law.<br \/>\n&#8211;<br \/>\nSo yeah, I am pissed.. not at Cloudflare shockingly, but all of these fucking threats I keep getting all year about either VRChat or someone able to DDoS your Discord account if they friend you. I&#8217;m pissed of &#8216;just trying to do my job&#8217; and inform the public, only to have them shut down by know-it-alls (that may\/not know what the fuck they&#8217;re talking about).<br \/>\nThis is why in Kovo&#8217;s Discord, I came up with (what I once thought was) an extremely brilliant idea of making a new channel, and a new role called &#8216;Threat Fact Checker&#8217;: having these &#8216;experts&#8217; of account security duke it out amongst themselves instead of me. If it&#8217;s indeed a credible threat, then it would be posted in announcements.<br \/>\n&#8230;Yesterday afternoon&#8217;s threat, was one that was discussed.. except, not by the actual fact checkers I picked. Instead it was Dorrvivx and myself, going by this &#8216;threat&#8217; from yesterday to change our passwords. So much for being fair and non-bias, huh? Also, why aren&#8217;t the fact checkers doing their jobs? They&#8217;re the know-it-alls in security.<\/p>\n<p>And you know what&#8217;s the hilarious part in all of this, that I wanted to tell Vale to STFU and stop thinking you know everything!? This happened during the mess.<br \/>\nI didn&#8217;t know what was going on, but Kovo was telling Jusper that he &#8220;didn&#8217;t want to take the risk&#8221; of going to another world. That&#8217;s when I looked at the Worlds tab, and saw this disturbing thing;<br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/i.imgur.com\/DuJxO72.png\" width=\"603\" height=\"339\" \/><br \/>\nEvery. world. is missing. Even the ones I uploaded months ago. Thing is, I remember this happening months ago when the Best Boi community still existed. Very few could join the game, and it was like this. Except, I don&#8217;t remember anyone reported of being &#8216;banned&#8217; from trying to join.<br \/>\nThe issue also lasted a day, and I also don&#8217;t remember connection issues of blackscreening when trying to join a world. <em>This<\/em> issue has been happening <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">for a few <\/span><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">weeks<\/span>, and it&#8217;s only gotten progressively worse.<br \/>\nAnyway, eventually myself and Scooby were the only ones in the room. But we got bored and left, then joined an active General chat of Kovo&#8217;s Discord. I then told them what I<br \/>\nsaw, and Vale is saying &#8220;oh that&#8217;s not true, you&#8217;re not being banned, that&#8217;s stupid&#8221;. The asshole gets on my nerves so much. I swear he&#8217;s always out to downplay me, and I don&#8217;t know why. No one else does (ingame).<br \/>\n&#8212;<br \/>\nAs for the ban, I wouldn&#8217;t be surprised if VRChat told Cloudflare to do this, to keep people off the game (and are lying to us). As cruel as it is, it&#8217;s a good way to keep people from making a bad problem worse by flooding the servers instead of finding another game to play.<br \/>\nWonder if this ban also affects Unity&#8230;<br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.imgur.com\/q3aLs4q.png\" \/><br \/>\nIf &#8216;Forbidden&#8217; means Yes, then.. OOF. Because I can&#8217;t even pull up the Settings window in the VRChat SDK tab. :\/<br \/>\nSome users have reported ways around the ban. If they actually work for you, that&#8217;s your own discretion. Me personally, I&#8217;m just gonna wait patiently. I don&#8217;t <em>NEED<\/em> to get in VRChat (unlike others);<br \/>\n1. Invest in a VPN (or find a free one that gets around Cloudflare&#8217;s blacklisting &#8216;feature&#8217;).<br \/>\n2. Unplug your router for 10 minutes, or contact your ISP for a new IP.<\/p>\n<p>All <em>I<\/em> can say is.. &#8220;glad I&#8217;m going to be getting that replacement facepad for my headset today. Be able to play Beat Saber or something!&#8221; Though Jusper told me that I didn&#8217;t have to wait this long to get back in VR. Claimed I could use paper towels as a cushion on the velcro.<\/p>\n<p>.<br \/>\nEDIT: The VRChat devs have <a href=\"https:\/\/medium.com\/@vrchat\/vrchat-downtime-post-mortem-3b956fee8c3e\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">made a statement<\/a> about the ongoing issues plaguing the game, and the issues that happened a few weeks ago.<br \/>\nGoing over them, it appears I was &#8216;half&#8217; right about a DDoS attack &#8212; there was indeed an attack &#8212; but it wasn&#8217;t against Cloudflare. Infact, they weren&#8217;t even involved when the first set of issues occurred. And what I mean about &#8216;first issues&#8217;, is the ones that happened shortly after Build 738 was released. The issues of getting sent back to your home<br \/>\nworld, not receiving invites from friends, and being stuck on a black screen when joining another world, was caused by DDoS attacks.<br \/>\nAs for the second thing (the downtime and getting your IP banned from Cloudflare), the devs explained similar to the threat sent by friends about an issue with their WebSocket client while they were trying to fix the first issue. Though they did, this was causing their own servers to flood Cloudflare. This caused users using the VRChat client to be wrongly flagged as \u201csuspicious agents\u201d.<br \/>\nThey have contacted Cloudflare, and the devs feel &#8220;the majority of this problem is behind us&#8221;, but say there&#8217;s still reports of users still blacklisted (such as me). And if you are, <a href=\"http:\/\/help.vrchat.com\/new\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">create a ticket<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/duckduckgo.com\/?q=what+is+my+ip\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">post your IP<\/a> to unflag it.<br \/>\nI&#8217;ve submitted my ticket. Also told them about my issues with Unity (not being able to open the Settings window). Even sent them the picture I shared here.<\/p>\n<p>EDIT2: Either the devs fixed my issue, or updating the SDK did. I tried this after I went over the statement again. Near the bottom of it, it shows &#8220;As it stands, you should no longer be falsely flagged while playing VRChat <strong>as long as you are running the latest version<\/strong>.&#8221;<br \/>\n<em>&#8216;<\/em><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">as long as you&#8217;re running the latest version<\/span>&#8216; made me wonder &#8220;does this <em>also<\/em> mean the SDK?&#8221; and tried it. After doing a clean install, the errors went away. Managed to open up the Options window, and I can upload avatars! WOOT! Seems like I&#8217;m good!<br \/>\nAll I have to do now, is wait for the new foam pad coming today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>VRChat players trying to login and being flagged as bots\/threats; Me, already bored with VRChat from game depression; So, what I thought was even more fearmongering, turned out to be actually true for once. A rare thing. Yesterday afternoon, a &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/general\/2019\/04\/17\/is-this-the-death-of-all-cloud-based-services\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-drama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/general\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/general\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/general\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/general\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/general\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6776"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/general\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6776\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6794,"href":"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/general\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6776\/revisions\/6794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/general\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/general\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/general\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}