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DoubleClick Hit by DDoS Attack
YetAnotherName writes "The Washington Times is reporting that everyone's most beloved online advertising distributor, DoubleClick, was subject to a DoS attack crippling the company's DNS servers, and preventing up to 75% of advertising from making it to web pages and surfers' eyes."
I'm not sure whether the encouragement of DDOS-ing even 'evil' companies should be encouraged.
Although it may seem like some sort of poetic justice that Doubleclick was attacked...
The attacks had more far-reaching effects. Pages would take forever to load for me (certain pages, not all), if they used doubleclick ads, simply because the browser was waiting for the final item (the ad) to load.
Whether or not you like doubleclick, their widespread adoption made this a productivity hit for those of us who frequent pages w/ doubleclick content (even if we never notice it).
Help a college student
There is a downside to such attacks as they harm business trust on the internet and large capital investments to the infrastructure and R&D and all. But it also has an upside, and a important one it is. Little bouts of anarchy like this show The Powers that Be that there is such a thing as an internet community who does not take slimey practices (such as the Verisign search, remember?) lightly.
It keeps commercialism in check. And that is a Good Thing (TM).
No matter how much I hate /ads/, a DDoS should not be tolerated no matter to whom it's directed. Weather it's kernel.org or microsoft.com, let's try to use our knowledge constructivly instead of destructivly. How does that sound? And where does any one person think a DDoS will get for anyone as a whole? If anything, it'll bring a stronger resolve to preventative measures and keep them going strong. They have the $!! so where will it really get those who started this "attack"?
Wait I thought doubleclick was one the thirtieth most visited site on the internet, how could they only have 900 customers? It's almost as if they don't think of the people visiting their site as customers, as if they're only there to be bent over and take it in the behind.
let subscribers do it like Fark does.
/.
Yeah, 'cause there's no bastion of journalistic potency like Fark.
Granted this story broke yesterday, but since you obviously already knew about it from *some* source, I don't see what the problem is. Now we get to discuss it on
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Item 1. shows how far political correctness can go?
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
4. Dumb pro-american sites that tell of the existence of 'terrorist training servers'
Don't one of the most aggresive advertisers in time, X10.
www.6502asm.com - Code 6502 assembly or.. DIE!!
You can argue all you want, it is a matter of personal belief. I consider it to be something that should not be made illegal, but also something that is terribly impolite to do and does have a negative effect upon something that you like enough to patronize.
It's kind of like when the cool coffee house with all the great local bands closes down because nobody bought any coffee. Everybody bitches how much it sucks, but never connects that they were taking up a chair for four hours without buying a drink.
If you like the site, how about some respect for the people who work on it? Common decency appears to be growing much less common.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Now if only there were some way to legally drive spyware / malware companies out of business. That would be an effort that I could endorse 100%. The problem with this is, well, it's still a DDoS, even if it is against a company that's pretty thoroughly reviled. I doubt that the owners of the participating computers agreed to help with the project. /., but it's likely that the number of late-bloomer techies far outnumbers the ranks of the lifelong geeks. Not everybody discovers their inner geek at the same point in life - but that's another rant.) Aunt Claire, who just wants to upload new photos to the family webpage, doesn't deserve to be pop-upped and spywared to tears, but neither does she - or anyone else - deserve to get caught in the middle of an online piss war. Poetic justice or not, this event is a Bad Thing.
Plus, there are hundreds of thousands of people out there who still haven't figured out that the big blue "e" isn't the Internet. Their day got totally hosed by web pages that refused to load, "server not found" issues, and assorted other garbage. They got hit by the "shrapnel", but were innocent bystanders. And no, using IE doesn't mean that "they got what they deserved." (We tend to be rather elitest here on
Still, it does warm the cockles of my black little heart, thinking of DoubleClick getting served a heaping helping of the kind of crap that they've dished out over the years.
Doing my level best to piss off the religious right wing...
All those sites that you go to that have these ads are staying in business because of them.
:)
False.
If DoubleClick went away so would a lot of that content.
True.
Gotta watch out for "all" and "never"...
The devil doesn't really need an advocate, eh?
<grrr>
Regarding CoolWeb we'd better skip the DDOS phase and go straight to beating the shit out of their employees with various blunt instruments, I call dibs on their "CEO". I just cleaned up a family's pc where the children got a fullscreen popup without any controls of naked 12-14 year olds, every single time they logged on. Courtesy of CoolWebSearch. That company is made up of a bunch of sick individuals, and they've perfected their "art" of drive-by-installing their spyware so much that the latest versions (there's about twenty different ones) are harder to get rid of than most virusses.
Not to get all MPAA on you, but when you block the ads, you're hurting the site. Not only that, but you're encouraging "innovation" on the advertisers side to keep you from blocking the ads. This leads to a mixing of advertising and content, so that the web pages start becoming all flash or all pictures so you can't filter out certain images without breaking the whole site for yourself.
Want to keep the subscription sites down and keep the free web up? Leave the banner ads be. Hell, click on them once in a while. If the advertisers and website are satisfied with how their ads are doing, they'll be less aggressive and less likely to piss you off.
No matter how many times I click refresh, the DoubleClick corporate site will not not display any banner ads, nor pop up nor pop under any X10 windows...
Oh, what did you say? "The leader in network advertising" only has tasteful advertisements on their own site?
Isn't that a tad hypocritical?
Shouldn't the people advocating annoying, bouncing, animated, rollover tripe beleive in their own products and techniques enough to use it on their own pages?
Clearly they don't, and they don't.
One could only dream of the day when all the advertisers who patronize DoubleClick ask them selves why DoubleClick doesn't use their own service to advertise their own service...
Perhaps because their customers would realize how much such techniques annoy and drive off potential clients....?
Nah, marketeers (as in mouse, not misspelling 8-) will never get wise to their own lack of wisdom.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
The people who click on the ads are Doubleclick's product.
But then again, I could be wrong.
This is...
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Do you consider it unethical to read a newspaper without reading their ads? Record a TV show and then fast forward through the commercials later? Get up and get food/go to the bathroom during commercials? Throw away mail flyers for products? Use a text based browser? Have a visual imparement?
In all these cases, you are ignoring/blocking ads. Sites have a right to try and advertise, but it's your computer, and you have a right to change the presentation to meet your needs.
Also if the advertisers learned a little something form successful advertising, such as Google and newspapers, they would have a much better chance of not getting blocked:
1) Be less obtrusive. The web is a random access media. Interrupting people with full screen or popup ads is annoying and counter the operation of the web. Thus people hate them and want them gone.
2) Be relivant. Do nto slather your ad over ever site on the internet. Target your ad at sites that attract people that care.
3) Be honest. A large number of ads are highly deceptive in their nature.
Double click violates all of these their ads are a pain, they advertise whatever, wherever and most of them are "Punch the monkey and win" or "You have a message" or "Your computer is broadcasting an Internet IP address".
I LIKE Google ads, since they relate to what I search for. Thus, if I want to buy something, I search and then look in the right hand column since the ads are unobtrusive, relivant to what I want, and honestly trying to sell me it.
Sure I can justify it - I'm not going to eat a bowl of shit just to get to the cherry.
Abusive ads are ignored in any way possible (adblock, making a note to never buy anything from that company, never visiting the site again, whatever) by everyone who visits a site in some way, either mentally or physically. If it blinks, wiggles, flashes, has sound, pops up, pops under, moves around, or is just plain ugly it gets ignored from then on - forever if it has any moving parts. Sites that elect to serve such abusive ads will eventually go out of business. Sites that make an effort to serve relevant and simple ads will still be around - some of them that make a serious effort to "do no evil", such as google, will even make money.
You liken blocking ads to rude behavior, but the reverse is also true. The majority of ads are extremely rude in the way they are delivered, with bright flashing graphics or other gimmicks that detract from the content we are trying to view.
If a site is rude to me, I'll gladly be rude in return. Going back to your example, would you feel as bad about not ordering two drinks from that bar with the two drink miniumum, if the staff treated you rudely from the moment you walked in?
Its like this. When you put your site on the Internet, it is in a public space. You are acknowledging that anyone with connectivity to your site can visit it and make use of it. The fundamental purpose of the World Wide Web is sharing information. When you put a web site up, that means you have information you want to share with anyone who can connect to your site. If you don't like the cost of sharing information ( the benefit is you can access information shared by others ), then don't put it on the WWW, or find another way of sharing it.
/me gets off soapbox
On the other hand, the browser ( aka client ), connects to the WWW because he/she wants to access the information available that is being shared there. Generally it is a good thing to be both a sharer and a sharee, as that is generally for the common benefit of everyone involved.
I hope this clarifies how it works. Commercialism would like to make you think you should pay for and be paid for anything that a price tag can be attached to, but I heartily disagree.
A few weeks ago, I jump-started a car for complete strangers. I never even gave them my name. I helped them with the understand that the good deed was a reward in itself. Yes, I was in a hurry to get to work and had to explain why I was late, so it cost me. But someday I will be that person stuck with a dead battery, and I hope someone will stop and help me without charging for it. I appy the same philosophy to web sites.
I can't afford a sig!
Ads can be sold by the clickthrough rate or the number of impressions. The thing is, when you watch an ad on TV, no one expects you to run out and buy something. Sometimes you don't need to click through for it to work. As an example, slashdot has ads for Server Beach. I was looking for a host for a client and thought, oh, lemme try server beach, their ad said they had good prices. I'm going to recommend server beach to this client.
In this case ads don't need to be clicked.
Photos.
I wasn't blocking ads on Slashdot until they started going "dynamic". If something is moving on the page besides the mouse cursor, it better be a hell of a lot more interesting than Microsoft trying to tell me that using a quad Xeon under Windows 2003 to approximate the work done by a uniprocessor AMD XP2000+ under Linux is an effective way to "lower my TCO"!
Riiight... it has nothing to do with seizure-triggering flashing, tracking cookies, and other "shut up and eat your advertising!" tactics.
You're either a troll, or just stupid.