[tor-dev] Summary of meek's costs, April 2015

[David Fifield]

On Wed, May 06, 2015 at 11:56:36AM -0700, Arthur D. Edelstein wrote:
> > Amazon sucks and they don't have any automatic way to shut down a
> > service. I emailed them and they were very clear about that. The best
> > you can do is set up an email alert at different cost threshold (which I
> > have done). But that requires someone with credentials to be awake and
> > online when it happens. This is the main reason I want to drop Amazon.
> > (Apart from the billing concerns, Amazon's CDN, technically, is nice and
> > fast and reliable.)
> 
> Would it make sense to add some code to your meek server to monitor
> bandwidth usage and automatically shut off if a limit is reached?

I don't think that helps because I think you will still get charged for
requests+bandwidth even if the origin server is unresponsive or returns
an error. I could be wrong about this. Yawning wrote some such code a
while back.

Even if you cut off all abusive use of bandwidth, if the adversary can
figure out how to charge you for requests, they cost $1 per million on
Amazon.