[charcircuit]

Are Hacker News users part of a botnet since they link to sites that when people click they go down due to all of the traffic? Am I part of a botnet if I have HN open as it means HN can execute javascript? I think it's stretching the definition.

[gbear605]

Hacker News absolutely would be if it was making those requests to random sites that the user doesn’t know about, and have no reason to be making requests to other than attacking them.

I suppose if all the users go on the site intentionally wanting to take part in a DDoS, then sure it’s not a botnet. But that’s not reality.

[fastball]

If you don't think this is a DDoS with archive.today visitors acting as an unwitting/unwilling botnet, how do you think this normally works? It's not any more sophisticated. There is not much functional difference between someone telling my smart fridge to ping https://gyrovague.com and a website telling my browser to do it.

[charcircuit]

I don't think it's a botnet. To me that implies that the software that runs on your computer is a service that talks to a C&C server or to other bots P2P, forming the net(work) part of a botnet. In this case it is not a bot downloading a payload from a C&C, but a user intentionally visiting a website which downloads and runs the payload. It does not really work as a botnet since the web browser is not a service that will continually talk with a network of other servers to get a new payload.

Try ignoring what the payload is as it does not really matter in defining what is or isn't a botnet (though botnets typically imply malicious or sketchy payloads).

In regards to it being a DDoS it leans more in the yes direction due to the intent of it, but it also sites sending traffic to other sites is part of the web. You can embed things from other sites like images and then those others sites will fulfill those requests. The web didn't restrict pages to only send requests and load content from the same domain.