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When RSS Traffic Looks Like a DDoS

An anonymous reader writes "Infoworld's CTO Chad Dickerson says he has a love/hate relationship with RSS. He loves the changes to his information production and consumption, but he hates the behavior of some RSS feed readers. Every hour, Infoworld "sees a massive surge of RSS newsreader activity" that "has all the characteristics of a distributed DoS attack." So many requests in such a short period of time are creating scaling issues. " We've seen similiar problems over the years. RSS (or as it should be called, "Speedfeed") is such a useful thing, it's unfortunate that it's ultimately just very stupid.

6 of 443 comments (clear)

  1. fp? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    fp?

  2. w00 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    yay

  3. hey dudez by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    whatz up?

  4. RSS as DDoS by CheeseburgerBlue · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    That's exactly what I told the FBI, but they ate my baby anyhow.

    FBI: "You're a Terrorist."

    Me: "No, I just have a smutty blog."

    FBI: "Is that Arabic?"

    Me: "I'm sorry?"

    FBI: "Take him away. We're blowing up Alderan, baby."

  5. Re:I'd Like to Solve the Puzzle by mgoodman · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    indeed, we all should...speaking of which...

    --
    01100111 01100101 01110100 00100000 01101111 01110101 01110100 00100000 01101101 01101111 01110010 01100101 00101110
  6. OT idea I just had by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Quick idea I'd like to post to PD it: When surveying, we often have to break a ruler, and tape it to a block to get a benchmark for our theodolites, or to read the distance of our bridge centerline from the actual center. We try to read it to the thousandth of a foot, or about 1/64 of an inch.

    However, it's rather difficult. In addition, we lose a lot of rulers, which can get expensive.

    My solution, I post here. At 600 dpi (a typical laser printer), each 100/th of a foot is 72 dots, and the precision is far better than we need. So I made a ruler on the computer. The "inch-like" measurements are marked with a number -- they're tenths of a foot. Then there are 10 "1/8th-inch-like" divisions, separated with heavy long lines at the 10th, and heavy short lines halfway between the long ones -- those are 100ths.

    All those divisions are vertical.

    But to read thousandths, I used 10 horizontal lines, above the vertical divisions. I then placed arrows above and below each horizontal line, at the appropriate distance from the even 100th. That is, for the bottom horizontal line at x=0.800ft, there are arrows above and below the horizontal line at .800 ft. .810 ft, .820 ft, and so on. For the horizontal line above it (which represents the 1st thousandth), there are arrows above and below the horizontal line at .801 ft, .811 ft, .821ft, and so on.

    Those triangular arrows are so small that from the theodolite it looks like a diagonal line that is 10 divisions rise, and 1/100th of a foot run. But where the theodolite's hairline crosses it, the line simply vanishes.

    Thus, you can read the 1000/th of a foot exactly.

    Of course, the ruler must be perpendicular to the theodolite, but that's actually fairly simple to insure with reasonable accuracy.

    Anyhow, the whole ruler looks something like this:

    8
    I_I_I_I_I_I_I_I_I_I_I
    I/_ /_/_/_/_/_ /_/_/_/I (10 horizontal lines cross the diagonals)
    I_/_ /_/_/_/_/_ /_/_/_I
    I_I_I_I_I_I_I_I_I_I_I