EDIT: The AMA has concluded! Thank you for all the great questions and we are looking forward to seeing some of you in our beta program next week!

What is Gladius?

[Gladius](www.gladius.io) is the decentralized solution to protect against DDoS attacks by allowing individuals to join geographically relevant protection groups and contribute to website security and load speeds, all while earning money for it. With an easy to use interface as well as powerful insight tools, Gladius enables anyone to protect and accelerate their web application. Powered by the Ethereum blockchain, we are able to create a trustless network where every network message can be privately verified. We're headquartered in Washington D.C. with a branch in New York City.

What is Gladius up to?

After months of closed beta testing in 66 countries, we are releasing our first open beta early next week! You will be able to download our software for free and start earning Gladius Tokens. To learn about how you get involved, join our Telegram chat [here](t.me/gladiusio). Also be sure to go to our [website](www.gladius.io) and subscribe to get notified when we go live! (Our new website will be up the day we launch)

What is DDoS and why are we the best solution?

DDoS stands for Distributed Denial of Service. A DDoS attack focuses on overloading the available resources of a given site, datacenter, or application. By sending too much traffic or even junk traffic at a web application, an attacker can overload the system, which in turn prevents it from working properly. These types of attacks are usually carried out as diversionary tactics but can also be used to send a statement.

Websites sitting behind CDN (Content Distribution Network) networks gain the advantage of distribution. The more places the content exists, the less likely a single outage or DDoS attack can take that content down. Layering this protection in front of proxy nodes, which act a distributed firewalls, and Master nodes, which can do deep packet inspection and regex filtering, can filter down or eliminate vulnerabilities associated with advanced persistent threat vectors. All combined, a website sitting behind a CDN network and secured behind multiple layers creates "Defense in Depth" and gives the content owners an advantage over malicious actors.

Current CDNs are centralized. DDoS mitigation is centralized, overpriced or requires far too much infrastructure. Data centers are hard to secure and are static and migration is hard in case of failure. Gladius believes we can improve on current DDoS and CDN offerings by reducing costs substantially by reducing overhead and spreading out costs amongst thousands or even millions of nodes.

Who are we?

Max Niebylski - Founder, CEO

Alex Godwin - Co-Founder, CTO, Networking Software Engineer

Marcelo McAndrew - Co-Founder, COO, Web/Blockchain Software Engineer

Nathan Grey - Web/Blockchain Software Engineer

Stuart McDonald - Networking Software Engineer

Patrick McMichael - Sales Engineer

Nicholas Zaslavsky - Social Director

Proof:

https://twitter.com/gladiusIO/status/1032994135039528960

Learn more about Gladius:

Website: https://gladius.io/

Subreddit: https://reddit.com/r/gladiusnetwork

Twitter: https://twitter.com/gladiusIO

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gladiusio/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gladiusio/?hl=en

Community Telegram: https://t.me/gladiusio

Comments: 166 • Responses: 61  • Date: 

Simpering90 karma

[deleted]

toomuchtodotoday52 karma

Oh no man, they're just going to let resi customers get booted when their nodes get saturated by DDOS attempts they're attempting to mitigate.

If I'm a residential ISP, I'd cut this shit off in a heartbeat. It's all cost so my customer can capture pennies and Gladius can make enterprise level profits.

Just use Cloudflare. Not a fan of them either, but at least they're tolerable.

GladiusOfficial7 karma

The TOS discussion is very important, and we've been working with service providers for several months now to look at this. Right now, many of the posts are looking at this from the way in which consumer TOS agreements are constructed today. We're addressing this through discussions focused on specific service provider pain points like users "cutting the cord".

In one use case, consumers that agree to become nodes on their service provider pool will be relieved of terms that would hinder their ability to become a node 24/7, would earn GLA, and get a reduction on their monthly bill (great for Gladiators!). In this case, the service provider benefits by increasing their surface area for DDoS mitigation, increasing capabilities for content delivery, and retaining customers that want to participate as part of a Gladius pool. The market is fluid and TOS change regularly.

We're focused on creating one of the largest global blockchain networks to address an enormous market while providing opportunity for everyone to participate and reap rewards. In the mean time, some users can elect to switch to a business plan if the economics make sense.

-Max

GladiusOfficial13 karma

The TOS differ by service provider, region of the world, and even by service provider by region of the world. During the closed beta, across 66 countries, we haven't had a single tester tell us they were penalized or shut down by their provider.

We will monitor these types of issues as the network grows and expect to continually work with web sites, pool managers and nodes if these issues arise. From a more positive point of view, there may be incentive for residential ISPs to allow customers to participate - for instance reduce cord cutters by discounting bills of customers that participate in one of their pools.

We've actively been engaging Tier-1 US ISPs to ensure Gladius doesn't cause problems. Everything we've heard has been positive and several are interested in working with us directly.

-Max

D1CKY8929 karma

I am just wondering what will the system requirements will be to run Gladius and what operating systems will you support. For example could I run Gladius on a raspberry pie?

GladiusOfficial23 karma

We don't have official system requirements now with the exception of a 64 bit OS. You CAN run Gladius on a Raspberry Pi. You will need some storage (~1GB) in order to cache content but your bandwidth will be the main contribution to the network. We support Windows, macOS, and Linux.

- Marcelo

eohorp8 karma

What kind of bandwidth is required, can you turn it off when you're using your computer and then turn it on when you go to bed/work, do you forsee any issues with ISPs who probably plan on people not using their full bandwidth 100% of the time?

GladiusOfficial8 karma

The better your upload speeds, the more valuable you become to the pool. Nodes will always have the choice of when they turn the software on/off but the more consistent your uptime and bandwidth, the better.

We have a heartbeat in all nodes that will detect unexpected downtime, but the ideal scenario is scheduled downtime (that can be updated on the fly) basically it gives us a heads up so we don't have to fail over to other nodes which would add a bit of latency for the client.

ISPs may actually be able to lower their transit costs because the traffic may never have to leave their network, however the best bet would be to make sure you have a business plan for your connection. I know where we are in DC it's a pretty inexpensive upgrade and gives you a couple more guarantees and removed restrictions.

-Alex+Marcelo

Popeatzza22 karma

Hello! I made today some calculations based on the information I found on your website. Let's say 5000 users will join your platform and all of them keep their computers open 24/7 and all of them have a 100 Mb/s internet speed. That means every user will earn around 500$ per month, that multiplied with 5000 users equals 2,500,000$ per month. Do you think this amount is achievable? Do you have enough clients to pay 2,500,000$ per month? Thank you in advance for clarification, and I wish you all the best.

GladiusOfficial13 karma

The calculator on the website is a tool that can provide a rough estimate of a user's earnings based on uptime and bandwidth during favorable market conditions with a $0.03/GB rate. There are numerous other factors, including the market conditions and the number of clients needing service at any given moment. For instance, the calculator assumes 50% saturation at all times.

Our new site will have an improved calculator with more tweakable variables.

We do not guarantee any rate or any earnings.

-Max

mata_dan19 karma

$0.03/GB

Uhm, isn't that far less than even the cheapest ISPs/connections in the world are charging their customers?

GladiusOfficial2 karma

Yes. The typical rate for DDoS/CDN services is around $.10/gb and can go up to $.15/gb. Because there are no centralized datacenters, we can offer much more attractive rates. We use $.03/gb internally, but pools can price themselves however they want in our marketplace.

-Max

actual_factual_bear2 karma

At this rate, if I used all the bandwidth I was allowed from my ISP during the month exclusively for this Gladius shit, I would make less than half what I'm paying for my service.

GladiusOfficial0 karma

Obviously not all plans are the same, and this won't work for everyone. But to give you an example of a service that would work, you could use a home buisness internet connection with an unlimited cap. In a lot of places this isn't much more expensive than a home connection and has much more permissive TOS and data caps. Also you can look into virtual private servers to host our software on.

-Alex

TheGreaterest12 karma

What is the value of having this project based on the block chain using utility tokens? Why not simply have a centralized server that records usage and pays out accordingly based on rates which would prevent issues such as price manipulation, hacking of wallets, scamming etc while also making it easier to ban people who use botnets to generate profit on this platform?

I feel that many companies use utility tokens simply as a means of gaining additional funding because of the hype surrounding crypto currency rather than as an actual value added technology so I’m curious why the team felt a centralized solution was inferior.

GladiusOfficial4 karma

First off, great question, and one we answer quite a bit. The truth is blockchain technology isn't a panacea. it doesn't solve all problems and definitely has issues, as you mentioned above.

Second, we understand the current limitations of blockchain and have moved some functionality of the software off of the blockchain and created an application server to handle some of the functions listed above. This limits blockchain transaction costs and makes it easier to perform some accounting actions.

Our solution is designed to be flexible. We can use public blockchain technology like Ethereum, but we will also work on private blockchains as well.

Also our software is designed to be run by pool managers that sit between content creators and content consumers. So we needed a way to deploy technology that harnesses the power of decentralized, secured, and flexible ledgers like blockchain. This allows pool managers to recruit untrusted nodes as well as nodes on their own network.

Also, centralized solutions act as single points of failure. Migrating workloads or recovering from failure becomes more difficult when deploying more traditional database technologies.

-Patrick

snow4me10 karma

If this is a partnership with digital ocean, how come they haven’t even acknowledged it on their blog or website? It sounds more like you are their customer than a partner. Please elaborate?

GladiusOfficial7 karma

https://twitter.com/digitalocean/status/1033006204879073281

They also retweeted our AMA announcement.

Excited to be working with them!

-Nick

GladiusOfficial6 karma

How will gladius be installed for domains, servers etc? It would be ideal to point to gladius nameservers who take over the protection and pointing to websites, then its as easy installation of protection as any other platform that offer ddos protection.

That’s exactly how it’s done. Its no different than setting up typical DDoS protection from one of our competitors.

-Max

burst_margade6 karma

When will there be a board to discuss technical questions, i mean telegram and reddit okay but not really overseeable?

revidee5 karma

How do nodes get rated (trustworthy, max bandwidth, ping etc..) and how does that effect the node's traffic. Do pool owners rate its nodes automatically, will there be configuration options?

Great project, keep it up

GladiusOfficial1 karma

Great question! The factors that can effect a score of a node are: (1) uptime, (2) bandwidth, (3) storage, (4) memory, (5) processing power, and (6) operating system. Initially this information will be captured during the installation process, but pool managers will continually check these factors for validation.

-Alex

SirNellyFresh5 karma

What do you think of the impending threat smart toasters pose as agents of destruction and chaos for bot net farms?

GladiusOfficial9 karma

We are working to make a wide range of applications to run on all types of hardware like raspberry pi's. I don't see why we couldn't load a Gladius Node on smart toasters. If it comes down to an all out toaster war, it'll be Gladius toasters vs. botnet toasters. Kinda \s

-Nate

burst_margade5 karma

From a customers view. If i ask you why should i choose your product over X, what do you say from a business view and from a technical perspective?

GladiusOfficial1 karma

Our customers are very familiar with testing new solutions, usually through lab evaluations and trials. While there are a number of great solutions out there today, we believe our real strengths come from: (1) our code is open source, (2) we're backing our code with great services and support, (3) we're leveraging the strengths of the blockchain including encryption, transaction validation, message validation, etc., (4) we're focused on distributed edge based solutions as opposed to centralized solutions, and (5) our pricing model is far better for web sites.

-Max

GladiusOfficial5 karma

Question taken from /r/GladiusNetwork

Will the team have enough funds to stay operational with all current personal for a long while? How long approximatly?

Gladius is well funded and has kept our operating costs down by creating a small but highly effective and efficient team focused on development, sales and marketing. We have more than enough runway to get us to revenue generation and self sustainability.

-Max

borgqueenx5 karma

how long is the question? Can you operate without selling the vested tokens for a year? for multiple years? some months? or....?

GladiusOfficial6 karma

Without selling tokens or obtaining a dollar of revenue, we are fully funded for a couple of years.

-Max

borgqueenx5 karma

Is it secret how long gladius can continue working on current budget without talking about selling vested tokens into the circulating supply?

GladiusOfficial6 karma

Without selling tokens or obtaining a dollar of revenue, we are fully funded for a couple of years.

- Max

DAN9911993 karma

Gladius looks like a great project, how fast do you anticipate the public beta slots being filled?

GladiusOfficial4 karma

The public beta will be truly "open". There are no designated slots to fill up. Rewards will be capped for the first 5,280 individuals as of now, but once its finished and we are protecting sites, everyone will be able to earn. The more the merrier!

-Max

GladiusOfficial3 karma

Are any new exchanges planned? If yes wich ones?

We are in the middle of discussions with exchanges and expect they will be an integral part of our ecosystem. As a utility token, we've placed emphasis on development and sales to drive demand leading up to our full product launch. We believe that the token demand will increase as our product gains market share. We're preparing with exchanges now.

-Max

adminhotep3 karma

Regarding Gladius Network's use of Gladius Nodes as CDN distribution points:

How does Gladius ensure that the cached content delivered from such a node remains true to the content the OCS wishes to deliver?

How are the risks of a malicious node acting as a MITM attacker mitigated when you are using a distributed network of cached content?

GladiusOfficial1 karma

We're in the process of revising our technical whitepaper to go into more depth about this topic, hopefully released next week. Anyways the tl;dr of it is that there are two types of nodes at the edge: proxy nodes and content nodes. Proxy nodes act as a TCP proxy to build a distributed firewall which allows HTTPS to protect data from MITM attacks. As far as content integrity goes, we serve a small wrapper page with javascript that loads the actual page content and checks the SHA256 hash of any and all content served from a content node before it is rendered/executed in the browser.

- Stuart / Alex

actual_factual_bear1 karma

How do you prevent the content nodes from serving their own wrapper pages which checks alternate SHA256 hashes that it provides?

GladiusOfficial1 karma

The wrapper page is served from a trusted source (the masternode) and proxied to the browser.

-Stuart

burst_margade3 karma

Could you create some *.deb, flatpak, RPM and so on packages for the larger linux distributions?

GladiusOfficial2 karma

We will be creating a *.deb for other linux distros. We initially had troubles with packaging but are hoping to take another crack at it soon. We are open source so we're always looking for contributors :)

- Marcelo

OctoEN3 karma

Aren't there concerns of using consumer grade handware and connections for possibly very heavy traffic sites? Sudden downtimes, disconnections, slow downs could be a very large issue.

GladiusOfficial2 karma

You're right - using consumer / household hardware alone to handle heavy traffic would be troublesome. Our solution is to use masternodes (special high-performance servers run by pool managers) to route traffic to edge nodes where the site content will ultimately be served from. This means that the edge nodes (consumer hardware) will each be serving a fraction of the total requests directed at a protected site. Edge nodes are also financially incentivized to provide high uptime so if someone's hardware is getting overloaded, they may be motivated to upgrade their hardware to earn higher rewards. We're also planning on adding some failover mechanisms so that if an edge node fails to serve content, a different edge node will pick up the slack.

- Stuart

RedditXesc3 karma

Are you mostly worried or excited about the Public Beta Launch next week? Are we on track for that?

GladiusOfficial2 karma

Super excited, of course. we have been hard at work building some really cool software, and this is a great opportunity to see it thriving in the wild. We are looking forward to the experience and learning from the successes as well as the failures. We are using the beta to strengthen the software and make it better and will take all the feedback to heart. Next week is still on track!

-Patrick

burst_margade2 karma

In telegram was said that there will be a way to purchase the products e.g. via USD. So how will you make that process transparent to the token holders. Lets say someone buys for 500 USD and will get X GLA. Where will those GLA come from? - Team Gladius Stack - Exchange - ..

GladiusOfficial1 karma

Potential customers can use an exchange to buy GLA with USD, can request help from Gladius to help purchase GLA with USD as a service, can reach out to OTC desks, dark pools, etc. There are a number of ways to facilitate the USD to GLA exchange and the method will largely be dictated by the client and their familiarity with the crypto markets in general

-Max

burst_margade2 karma

Ok lets say they reach out to Gladius to help them buying GLA. Will it be transparent where those GLA are bought/come from?

GladiusOfficial1 karma

The blockchain takes care of that transparency. You can check and see which wallet(s) the tokens were sent from and which wallet(s) they were sent to.

-Max

burst_margade2 karma

What about illegal or questionable content that wants to use gladius protection. Is against the law to offer service to those sites?

GladiusOfficial1 karma

Similar to the ISP question above, laws differ by region of the world. We have a great legal team and we expect to continuously work with pool managers to ensure that all pools comply with their regionally specific laws and regulations.

-Max

FG39V9-12 karma

Where are you based? If somewhat in Europe other than the UK, how about you give me a job no questions asked? ;)

GladiusOfficial1 karma

We are based in Washington D.C. and New York City. As far as jobs, you can check out https://jobs.gladius.io or send your resume to [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])

-Max

TemporaryBoyfriend1 karma

Can you explain how this isn’t just inviting your local network to be an innocent bystander victim of a DDOS?

GladiusOfficial1 karma

We split our network into two types of nodes: content and proxy. Content nodes are much less likely to experience this, but as a proxy node you are opening yourself up to this possibility. This is one of the reasons that you are being compensated however! Also protection pools can have thousands of others, so attacks are distributed amongst many. Additionally if a pool is overwhelmed, website traffic can simply spill over into other pools, limiting the overall load.

-Alex

Ferelar1 karma

As a protection service, why call yourself Gladius instead of Scutum?

GladiusOfficial3 karma

Who doesn't want to be a Gladiator! To be honest, it's resonates better with most people.

-Max

Zer0Summoner1 karma

Isn't it more likely than not that you're creating a botnet and that when you need to drum up business or punish someone for not hiring you, that this network would give you the capacity to launch your own DDOS attacks?

GladiusOfficial3 karma

That is not our goal or intent at all. The same statements can be made of most any other technical security company (are virus protection companies creating viruses to drum up businesses, are firewall companies creating holes that can be exploited to sell different firewall versions, are car manufacturers creating parts that fail around warrantee time to drive service sales, etc.).

Also the idea that we use our software for punishing someone for not hiring us is both illegal and immoral and serves counter to our values as a US based company focused on legitimate business ventures and full regulatory compliance. We are currently establishing relationships with large enterprises across multiple industries. DDoS attacking someone for not hiring us would be a ridiculous thing to do for one, and would result in essentially ruining our business ambitions. There's no need to get conspiratorial, we're focused on mitigation and increasing surface area.

-Patrick

pixelkarma1 karma

So, are you actually paying yet? Your website suggests that this is a beta, and beta doesn’t pay out... if so, when will you be out of beta?

GladiusOfficial1 karma

When our open beta is released next week, you will be able to earn with your bandwidth. The payout/earning details for now until late October will be released within the next day. Initially there will be fixed award amounts for the first 5,280 to sign up and run our software. Once we start hosting more websites on our platform, we will switch to the conventional payout method.

-Max

mirnyyy1 karma

How many tokens for masternode plz?

GladiusOfficial1 karma

For the next 1-2 months Gladius will be running the official masternodes. During this timeframe we'll be documenting and sharing what it takes takes to be a masternode. As such, the Gladius Token amount currently is not set in stone. We anticipate to have a clear pricing outline for pools, maternodes, etc by the October timeframe.

-Max

I_am_the_inchworm1 karma

Hi!

A neat concept but I've got one two questions.

How does this affect network traffic in general?

Obviously DDOS attacks are a strain on the internet, but have you done an analysis of how much extra traffic is generated were your solution to become broadly used?

Being a sort of CDN, could it even mean less traffic, with data having to travel shorter distances?

GladiusOfficial1 karma

We haven't done a full analysis, however there shouldn't be more load than the attack is already creating. It will just spread it across more surface area.

This is actually something we're hoping will be a benefit to ISPs, they get to keep more of the content on their network and avoid potentially expensive transit costs between their network and others.

-Alex

Stephen3041 karma

What kind of network configuration will be required to host a node? I have a fiber connection with boatloads of bandwidth and would love to help test and potentially make some money back to pay for my connection in the future - what kind of traffic would I expect to hit my network? (what protocol, port, do I need to forward ports /upnp or will connections be established outbound from me?)

Edit: Also is the port adjustable or reverse proxyable? Can I specify a hostname to be used for inbound traffic so haproxy can proxy it or does it need to own that port entirely?

GladiusOfficial2 karma

It depends on the type of node you are. Proxy nodes operate as TCP proxies and need to have port 80 and our p2p port exposed, however content nodes need 8080 (may change) and our p2p port exposed. We're not huge fans of upnp here, so we're still considering options here.

Edit: Right now you can't specify the ports, but it will be a feature by the full release. As for the hostname, if you're a content node you'll have your own pool hostname (like edge1.examplepool.com) but as a proxy node you'll be getting incoming https requests and proxying them to the masternode, so it may be a little more challenging as you'll be acting as a transparent proxy. You could probably do it by binding to multiple hostnames in the pool, but i'm not quite sure how easy that would be.

-Alex

SirNellyFresh1 karma

A chain is only as strong as it’s weakest link, what is the weak link in the blockchain? Is it in fact dank memes?

GladiusOfficial6 karma

Dank memes are in fact the backbone of the internet. Block chain is only made stronger by incorporating dank memes directly into itself, thus reinforcing a chain of memes, which in turn creates a decentralized ledger of immutable dankness. Gladius understands this relationship and will strive to incorporate dankness throughout its software.

-Patrick

mzito1 karma

Hi there!

With all due respect, this sounds hugely overcomplicated, and a good example of a solution in search of a problem.

- DDoS mitigation tools like Prolexic are expensive, but work great for most content/e-commerce websites

- CloudFlare is cheap/free and great

- Either of these solutions are less technically complicated than Gladius, and hence, fewer moving parts and a smaller attack surface

On top of that, a blockchain use case without a clear necessity is a huge red flag in my experience. You could simply pay people for consumed bandwidth, and if you didn't want to pay them in local currency (even though systems like Stripe make that easy), you could just pay them directly in ethereum, bitcoin, or any other digital currency. Either way, *your* client/software still has to be the arbiter of how much traffic a node is delivering, so it's not really a trustless system.

Since this is an AMA, I'll ask some questions:

- How do you plan to mitigate origin latency for dynamic content?

- If I'm a website operator, why would I pick you over any of the commercial products that do this already?

- Why are you protecting Gladius via CloudFlare instead of your own product?

Thanks!

GladiusOfficial1 karma

We appreciate the questions, we've got a few answers:

(1) The CDN and DDoS markets are expected to reach approximately $35B USD by the 2023 timeframe (https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/content-delivery-networks-cdn-market-657.html and https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/ddos-protection-mitigation-market-111952874.html); the "problem" is enormous. Our solution is actually quite simple for everyone. GUI based, cross platform installers for all node types, simple sign up and onboarding processes, great community and nothing new from a contracting perspective.

(2) Current solutions do work well but are largely expensive and/or centralized. To your point about cloudflare being cheap, they charge a significant portion of their customer base multiple thousands of dollars, which allows them to offer a free plan with limited features. Any website with a moderate amount of traffic is going to want to spend several hundred dollars a month. We create a solution that's inexpensive for the website, decentralized, and beneficial for all participants. We also offer opportunities for pools to be constructed around "communities of interest". To use your example, an e-commerce website can be a pool and utilize their customer base for with DDoS mitigation and CDN, or build a solution from the ground up and create signifigant savings. All interests are aligned and everyone benefits financially and from a service availability perspective.

(3) We agree and believe that increasing the size of mitigation surface area is the most effective. Why fight a distributed attack with a centralized solution when you can fight a distributed attack with a distributed solution that can scale at the same rate or faster?

(4) The blockchain is hugely important for cryptographic capabilities, for transaction verification, for message verification, for transparency, etc.

(5) We never said the whole system is trustless, it just moves trust from one central entity to many pools as well removing trust from many of the nodes in the network (as none of the consumer hardware ever has the websites private keys).

(6) Latency is addressed via topographical means and is outlined in the technical whitepaper in detail, pool managers can also create peering relationships between their masternodes and origin servers to have better dynamic performance.

(7) You would pick Gladius to increase DDoS mitigation surface area; increase CDN performance by placing content closer to end users; and simultaneously reduce costs.

(8) We use Cloudflare now as the product is still in beta, however, starting with the open beta we will begin to protect ourselves as well. In due time we will be fully protected by our own product!

-Gladius Team

Goordon1 karma

I'm having access to a full dedicated server in Germany with a 1GBit connection that is limited to 20TB of data per month but only needs 5TB, is there a way to set some kind of monthly data budget in your software? I'd be able to give it 10TB per month. Also: Is a regular dedicated server even something you're looking for or would you much rather have regular home connections for your service?

GladiusOfficial1 karma

In the beta that sort of limiting won't be possible, but it will be in our full release. Dedicated servers will be higher valued when compared with residential connections/consumer hardware in the network, especially as a proxy node.

-Alex

GladiusOfficial1 karma

Questions taken from /r/GladiusNetwork

Why was there a increase in tokens a few weeks ago? Did the team put some tokens into the supply?

Some individuals have still yet to claim their bonus tokens. Larger buyers have longer vesting schedules.

-Max

GladiusOfficial1 karma

How will the payments in USD or EUR take place? Could you share some insights into how it works, or if not set in stone yet, how you like to see this working?

For websites looking for protection we’ll be offering a fiat payment option (most likely through Stripe) that will send a non-withdrawable amount of Gladius Tokens to their Gladius dashboard to pay for DDoS mitigation & CDN. However paying directly with Gladius Tokens will give websites more bang for their buck.

-Max

GladiusOfficial1 karma

Can you set a maximum amount of spending per minute, for example if the attack is extremely large and you do not want to pay more?

Pool Managers will be responsible for dictating the terms and conditions of the relationship with web site owners. With that being said, each pool manager may choose to put different mechanisms in place to address this issue. In speaking with web site owners, we've found that the vast majority are more concerned with keeping their sites functional at the lowest cost possible. We believe our solution is far more cost effective than anything else available and we'll make sure pool managers have the right tools in their kit to work with web site owners to address these needs.

-Alex

GladiusOfficial1 karma

Alot of DDOS protection is in the coding, as there is a broad scale of different attacks. Using bandwidth to mitigate alot of attacks is good, but i'd say the code is just as important for countering attacks. Can i ask for ddos coding experience and how this is coming along to fight against different layer attacks?

Most of our code right now is focused on firewall rules that block IP addresses that have been flagged. How we flag them is more of a manual process right now, but in the near future we will be implementing rate limiting, detecting things like invalid sessions, etc.

-Alex

Imindless2 karma

To that point - what's preventing a botnet from attacking the IP nodes themself that support the Gladius network?

Botnets are easy enough to change IP addresses and redirect to continue the force and shut down the network.

How will you prevent against this?

GladiusOfficial1 karma

Just like all mitigations services, if you have less bandwidth than the attacker there is little you can do which is why our goal is to make it really easy to create large surface area. Like I said earlier we're working on creating real time IP data that can be used to block attacks within a few seconds

-Alex

GladiusOfficial1 karma

Referrals are one thing to attract users, but the biggest problem is in getting people to pay to protect their domains and servers with gladius, and referrals will probaly be shared to investors, not to people who want to PAY GLA for protection.

We will be giving Gladius Tokens to websites referred initially that will be locked onto the platform and not transferrable.

-Max

burst_margade1 karma

It was already asked in telegram let me ask again. What is the total supply and what is the max supply of GLA?

GladiusOfficial1 karma

Total supply is 23,990,398 GLA. Currently circulation is 17,161,829.4 GLA.

-Max

ruinevil1 karma

Why Blockchain? How are you different from CloudFlare? How are you different from TOR?

GladiusOfficial1 karma

We are using the blockchain for creating user profiles, payment, and message verification. We are different from CloudFlare because instead of a central network, we are building a trustless decentralized network. As far as Tor goes, Tor offers a separate type of service. Instead of routing a visitor throughout multiple nodes, Gladius routes the visitor to the closest content node after filtering the request for DDoS threats.

-Nate

mike_the_pirate1 karma

I have 4 separate family members with Google Fiber 1gbps service in Kansas City USA and just signed up for your beta program. I am interested an inexpensive Raspberry Pi solution to run 4 nodes but the Raspberry Pi only supports 100mbps Ethernet. Do you know of any other solution that would work well that would be inexpensive? Is it possible to give more dedicated storage space to Gladius to increase productivity/payment opportunities? I am thinking something that would support a 120gb NVMe SSD would be amazing to host a node.

GladiusOfficial3 karma

As of right now, we do not have a specific hardware list, but in the future after the beta we will have a better idea. We also plan to work with hardware parters to sell pre-configured Gladius devices. As far as storage, the CDN services would take advantage of fast storage allocation. We will make an announcement for recommended hardware in the future. That has been a very frequently asked question and until we deploy at scale, it's hard to determine.

For example, during the first phase of the closed beta, we realized that rewriting the code base in Golang gave us a 12x performance increase on existing hardware. During the second phase of the closed beta, we rewrote all of the installers and the UI, which gave us the ability to onboard new nodes faster. The open beta will focus on hardware optimization. The beta testing has been awesome!

-Nate

richgio1 karma

Does installing and using Gladius software do long term damage to CPU, GPU or any other computer components?

GladiusOfficial2 karma

Gladius does not depend on any GPU resources at all. As far as the other components, we do not see any reason why any damage would occur. Gladius Network is not a mining network or compute network. This is also completely dependent on demand, location, and capabilities of the node. Hope this helps

-Nate

richgio1 karma

Will this software run if I put my computer on sleep mode?

GladiusOfficial1 karma

For most cases, yes it will run while its on sleep mode. However certain machines with fully encrypted disks won't work while asleep.

-Alex

OctoEN1 karma

How can a specific node be prevented from executing man in the middle attacks?

RedditXesc1 karma

This question was answered just six questions down :)

OctoEN1 karma

Can't see it, if you could link it please I'll delete.

burst_margade1 karma

Can i run a Gladius node with a IPv4 dynamic WAN IP changing every 12 to 24 hours? Something was mentinoned about that in Telegram related to some p2p solution.

GladiusOfficial1 karma

Yes. When an IP change is detected the node updates it's state in the pool overall network, which then will update the corresponding dns record in the pool. So edge1.examplepool.com will now point to the new address.

-Alex

cptaizenzero1 karma

I didn't understood the following: Let's say you have 0 knowledge on computer systems. But you have a really good internet connection and you are interested in using it to grab a few extra bucks every month. Are you looking also for these type of users? Is there anyway to guarantee internet safety to these users?

GladiusOfficial2 karma

Yes! From the start we've been designing our software to be accessible by everyone. Installation is now as simple as clicking "next" several times on a user interface. We have been preparing very easy to follow video and text tutorials to get started with Gladius.

Gladius is safe to run on your machine. While we can't guarantee anything, we will be working to keep everyone as safe as possible. (It should be noted that opening up ports on your router or machine to the outside world does come with risks and properly securing your router by only allowing access to the application is highly recommended. This can be done within most router configurations.)

-Max

Pokemone31 karma

What are some tips for protecting yourself from ddos attacks and other security attacks?

GladiusOfficial1 karma

We recommend a nice DDoS mitigation/content distribution network that has customizable WAF (web application firewall) rules. OWASP is a very well known database of firewall rules to keep your site safe! Rumor has it Gladius is a good solution!

-Max

wdy43di1 karma

What is your plan to get on a higher traded and trusted exchange?

GladiusOfficial1 karma

We are in the middle of discussions with exchanges and expect they will be an integral part of our ecosystem. As a utility token, we've placed emphasis on development and sales to drive demand leading up to our full product launch. We believe that the token demand will increase as our product gains market share. We're preparing with exchanges now.

-Max

GladiusOfficial1 karma

Besides Digital Ocean, can you share some marketing details? For example advertisements on VPS websites, more partners to share the word etc?

Were really happy with the Digital Ocean Hatch partnership, it's providing us with the opportunity to work with amazing infrastructure and some great developers. As you've seen on other social media, we've also participated in a hackathon with Ciena, and we'll be doing another next month. The hackathon gave us insights into real world, large scale deployments as well as offered us a means to get integrated into a market leading orchestration platform. We also participated in this year's Angelwish Wiffleball Classic in both Hobken, NJ and Denver, CO where we had the opportunity to talk with a number of companies in the telecommunications carrier, datacenter, and technology sectors. Be on the look out for a few more partnership announcements that stemmed from these efforts.

-Max

burst_margade1 karma

Is it possible to create a list with the dates when the remaining GLA Tokens will be distributed?

GladiusOfficial1 karma

Approximately 71% of the tokens are already in circulation. The remaining roughly 29% will vest in the coming year.

-Max

burst_margade1 karma

Wenn the beta is public, the technical discussion chat on telegram or where ever it is will be open to anyone?

GladiusOfficial2 karma

We are looking to move the technical chat for the public beta over to a community slack group. We want to foster smaller breakout discussions and eliminate the single group chat for every question problem telegram currently has.

-Nate

Imindless1 karma

How are you complying with GDPR?

GladiusOfficial1 karma

We're one of the few blockchain companies out there with a General Counsel that has advisory/cyber security/due diligence experience, backed by top tier law firms and accounting firms, and with board members credentialed by the national Association of Corporate Directors. We're doing everything possible from KYC through on-boarding and ongoing operations to comply with all applicable regulations.

-Max

RedditXesc1 karma

Could I use the same account to operate Gladius nodes in say, 16 different locations, in seven different countries, all with different bandwidth, and will there be a control panel/overview site, to monitor the status of these?

GladiusOfficial1 karma

As of now there is no control panel for accumilating multiple nodes. However, if you do want to operate multiple with the same "account" you just need to have the same wallet on all of them. In the future we will create tools to assist nodes who wish to have operations like you are describing.

- Marcelo

W-h-o-o-o-s-h1 karma

Does it secure more than just DDoS attacks?

GladiusOfficial2 karma

Yes, we are using our network to protect against DDoS via filtering requests (WAF) and CDN (Content Delivery Network) services. So during non-DDoS attacks, Gladius Nodes will be able to deliver content from the closest Node super quickly.

-Nate

[deleted]0 karma

[deleted]

GladiusOfficial1 karma

https://twitter.com/digitalocean/status/1033006204879073281

They also retweeted our AMA announcement.

Excited to be working with them!

-Nick