Why Antenna Didn't Have Direct Publishing Before

When I started Antenna I decided to add feed URLs to a queue for intermittent ingestion for two reasons:

• I didn't know how long a general gemini call would take and didn't want to risk the CGI script timing out all the time.
• I didn't want Antenna to be a possible vector for DOS reflection attacks.

The first is obviously solved by experience. A gemini call doesn't take very long. If it times out it's almost always a problem with the URL one calls, not the client (in this case Antenna) that calls it.

The second one... What do I mean by "DOS reflection attack"? Simply put that someone would spam the same feed URL to Antenna over and over again to cause Antenna to perform a Denial of Service attack on the server that hosts the feed.

After long experience running Antenna I've concluded that this sort of attack is unfeasible to perform, at least on my installation. Even more so since I moved the service to a new server. It comes down to the sort of protection that can't be circumvented without breaking the laws of physics. Antenna runs on hardware so weak that there's a very very high probability that it will choke under the barrage of submissions long before the intended target is overloaded.

Take that, nefarious script kiddies!

-- CC0 ew0k, 2022-05-21