this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
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Privacy

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So let's say I wanna ping 1.1.1.1... every 5 seconds... forever. Alternatives? (lemmings.world)
submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by parody@lemmings.world to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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Developers (two dudes) are super responsive and would likely release an IP customization feature upon request. Is there any service that would tolerate this [D]DOS-y kind of behavior that would feel more privacy friendly than Cloudflare?

IsThereNet [for macOS] watches for internet connection status changes and draws a colored line at the top of the screen to indicate the status.

Edit: Thanks everybody!

(1) ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) Echo Requests hardly constitute a burden on a server.
(2) There is little privacy concern simply exposing your IP to Cloudflare.
(3) Uptime-Kuma can be self hosted to accomplish this task with more bells and whistles.
(4) There is an appetite for daydreaming of DDOSing bad Alphabetic actors ;) You civilly digidisobedient rascals!

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[–] douglasg14b@lemmy.world 28 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I don't think the concern over pinging 1.1.1.1 is warranted.

ICMP is pretty raw Network traffic, meaning you're not really causing much actual load here.

You can't even really try to DDOS with normal ICMP packets. You usually have have to max it's size out at 64KB with an ICMP floor to even think of having an effect. Vs the, effectively inconsequential, 32 bytes of a normal ICMP packet.

You watching a short YouTube video is equivalent Network load as 180 days of pinging for Network up time.

[–] parody@lemmings.world 4 points 4 months ago

Thanks for the explanation and easily digestible analogy :)

[–] TexMexBazooka@lemm.ee 21 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

1.1.1.1 is cloudflare dns. You can run a constant ping to it, forever, with no problem. Same with 8.8.8.8, which is google. If you want something more FOSS oriented, go with OpenDNS.

Doing so doesn’t really expose much information about you, the concern here really isn’t warranted

[–] parody@lemmings.world 3 points 4 months ago

Neat - thanks. Looks like one could use the following, but not necessary:

208.67.222.222  
208.67.220.220
[–] ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org 18 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

Funny, I wanna ping 8.8.8.8 every microsecond forever, and make as many machines as possible all around the world do the same...

[–] parody@lemmings.world 4 points 4 months ago

Naughty naughty 🙂

[–] mox@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Not a Google fan, huh?

[–] parody@lemmings.world 7 points 4 months ago

In 2004 I would not have understood why!

[–] narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee 14 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Ping your own VPS?

[–] parody@lemmings.world 3 points 4 months ago

Good alternative, thanks!

[–] listless@lemmy.cringecollective.io 12 points 4 months ago (2 children)

ICMP doesn't reveal any personal details. As opposed to say when you visit with the web browser where you can be fingerprinted, and perhaps have that tied to the rest of your browsing history or real world identity.

[–] TaviRider@reddthat.com 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

ICMP reveals your IP address, which is easily correlated with other traffic…

[–] listless@lemmy.cringecollective.io 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

If the other traffic is already correlated to your IP, then what additional info does an ICMP echo leak?

[–] TaviRider@reddthat.com 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It tells when the user is online. This is useful for sending spam, because being on top of the inbox makes it more likely your message will be read.

To be fair, I doubt anyone’s implemented this specifically for ICMP. Instead I’d expect tracking that watches for any IP traffic whatsoever, and that happens to include ICMP.

[–] listless@lemmy.cringecollective.io 1 points 4 months ago

But this user plans to leave ping running all the time to check that their own Internet connection is working.

Either way, at any given time there's tons of traffic leaving your network, it just means that software is active, not that a human is active. On top of that, Cloudflare probably isn't selling the fact that an ICMP ping was received at their DNS server directly to spammers quickly enough for them to act and put an email at the top of your inbox, assuming that spam isn't caught by a spam filter first.

[–] parody@lemmings.world 1 points 4 months ago

Thank you, and thanks for the counterpoint @TaviRider@reddthat.com

[–] jokeyrhyme@lemmy.ml 10 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Hmmm, is CloudFlare known for being a bad actor in terms of privacy?

Setting that aside, no matter what you pick, you'll be exposing your IP address, from which your ISP and/or general location may be derived

If you don't trust CloudFlare with that information then you basically cannot trust anyone else, so maybe you'd need to run your own service and ping that instead now that you're in a situation where you can only trust yourself 🤷

The other issue that comes to mind is that you're only testing reachability to one address, which means you could get a false negative where that address stops working but the rest of the internet is actually fine

[–] parody@lemmings.world 2 points 4 months ago

Ah, my threat model isn't that Snowden, thanks.

you could get a false negative

Good point. Will keep that in mind in general. (For this specific use case? Maybe it's fine since if I see the red bar while my apps are still working, I could ignore it - but now I'll think back to your comment and understand maybe Cloudflare is experiencing an issue. In which case I'll check their status pages and wouldn't be surprised to see some news article or complaints too!)

[–] MeetInPotatoes@lemmy.ml 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

ping 1.1.1.1 -n 9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999

[–] parody@lemmings.world 2 points 4 months ago

u won't

[–] mox@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Maybe a pool of big corp captive portal / connectivity test servers? For example:

https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections/connect-devices/warp/deployment/firewall/#captive-portal

https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/refs/tags/android-9.0.0_r49/services/core/java/com/android/server/connectivity/NetworkMonitor.java#101

[–] parody@lemmings.world 2 points 4 months ago

Clever! Thanks for finding those links too.

[–] dataprolet@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

You could use Uptime-Kuma to actually ping any IP every 5 seconds.

[–] parody@lemmings.world 2 points 4 months ago

I am so installing this! Will be very useful beyond the simple use case in my OP. Thanks Data.

[–] rcbrk@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

x.x.x.x))((1.1.1.1

[–] parody@lemmings.world 1 points 4 months ago

Most succinct yet informative possible description of IsThereNet, I think :)

[–] parody@lemmings.world 1 points 4 months ago

Thanks everybody!

(1) ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) Echo Requests hardly constitute a burden on a server.
(2) There is little privacy concern simply exposing your IP to Cloudflare.
(3) Uptime-Kuma can be self hosted to accomplish this task with more bells and whistles.
(4) There is an appetite for daydreaming of DDOSing bad Alphabetic actors ;) You civilly digidisobedient rascals!