As some of you may know, there is a competitive programming contest on the website USACO for pre-college students like me. The contest is running now but the website is not responding!
When using Google Chrome to visit the website, it returns a 502 error. When using Mozilla Firefox, it returns a blank page. Did any of you encounter this problem? Can it be solved?
Thanks.
UPD: The USACO official website has announced this:
Announcement
This is caused by a DoS Attack!!!
Yesterday, I also participated in the contest. After around 3 hrs the website seems to be not working. First I thought that I had encounter some internet issues but CF, Atcoder, etc were working. I think because of a lot of contestant in the contest might the have some server issues.
Yeah, I hope they'll do some sort of compensation for those who got cut off in the middle of a contest.
It should be caused by DDoS. I have almost no time now, but I still can't access the website!
Anti-DDoS!
Auto comment: topic has been updated by remmymilkyway (previous revision, new revision, compare).
it'll keep happening until usaco learns and installs https and cloudflare one day
(it also got ddosed last year)
Has it happened several times before?
How does https and cloudflare protect against ddos? Cloudflare is just another server like the one usaco uses now right?
DDoS protection is one of Cloudflare's main features.
no lmao, cloudflare is trash
and how does https have anything to do with it
I mean, cloudflare is trash for codeforces, but in a contest where you are (presumably) just thinking for most of the time with no penalties, I doubt the negatives would matter at all.
"ok i'm stuck on p2 let's check back on p1"
usaco.org
Checking if the site connection is secure
□ Verify you are human
usaco.org needs to check the security of your connection before proceeding
Thing with usaco is that it has 1/2 the number of problems, 2x the time, and no penalties. A couple minutes matters a lot in CF, but i doubt anybody would really care if USACO directors decided to chop 5 minutes off the end of a contest.
Any not clown usaco contestant will open all problems in separate tabs...
(and on cf, should open full problemset to mitigate)
A week ago or so, USACO attempted to enable HTTPS.
With a self-signed certificate... They reverted it a few minutes later.
For anyone not in the know, enabling HTTPS on a website properly is so mind-bogglingly easy there is literally no possible reason one could not have it enabled other than ignorance or extreme incompetence.
It's possibly university regulation, iirc they are using server at Clemson. I know in earlier times of berkeley calico contest they also didn't have https for a similar reason.