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UK Ministry of Defense Broken by Spoof Video

Posted by timothy on from the oopsie-daisy dept.

An anonymous reader submits "It seems that the Royal Dragoon Guards in Iraq decided to make a spoof of a Tony Christie video, which was recently re-released by Peter Kay for Comic Relief. However, the video file was over 50MB and it took out various e-mail systems, including those at RAF Strike Command. Despite the inadvertant denial of service attack, the MoD said the spoof was 'brilliant.'"

10 of 574 comments (clear)

  1. Where can we get it now? by kgroves · · Score: 2, Informative

    So, can anyone provide details of a location we can get the video from?

    --
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    1. Re:Where can we get it now? by gowen · · Score: 2, Informative

      That's not the whole video, just the news item featured in yesterday's flagship BBC news program.

      --
      Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
    2. Re:Where can we get it now? by NetNifty · · Score: 4, Informative

      Torrent here. WMV format.

      --
      Linux Wireless Hardware in the UK
    3. Re:Where can we get it now? by Excors · · Score: 5, Informative

      52MB WMV torrent. Also magnet:?xt=urn:btih:YVWX5ASA63LAOYSHSXG7Y2ULDEZE57 VF (minus spaces) for Azureus users, since that tracker won't be kept up for long.

  2. Correction by rpjs · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's the "UK Ministry of DefenCe", not "Defense".

    1. Re:Correction by WIAKywbfatw · · Score: 4, Informative

      Sorry, I know there are transatlantic spelling differences but I doubt even Americans spell "pedantic" as "poduntic". Time you buy yourself a dictionary.

      And, for the record, it is The Ministry of Defence, not The Ministry of Defense. I'm British, but I'd never refer to the US's equivalent, the DOD, as the Department of Defence. It's called respecting other cultures, you know?

      --

      "Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
  3. Re:Kosovo by imogthe · · Score: 2, Informative

    As of yesterday I could access it here : http://www.big-boys.com/articles/kosovo.html

    I don't know if it's taken down as the site is blocked from where I work:(

  4. Re:The video was on the Channel 4 news last night by kthnx · · Score: 2, Informative

    In the recent Peter Kay video for Comic Relief, Ronnie Corbett fell over.

  5. Re:Ouch by 1u3hr · · Score: 2, Informative
    Do you really want to be the IT guy who takes the call that says: "Hi, I'm with British Army operations in the middle of Iraq, and my soldiers here -- who are getting shot at on your behalf -- are really fucking annoyed that they can't send video messages home

    If I was the IT guy, I'd say "I've put it on our webserver. Tell the squaddies to send quote this: 'http://video.mod.uk/Christie.wmv' to their families and everyone can get it without melting down mail servers across the country."

    Real anecdote: I occasionally need to send largish (20+ MB) files to a company I do work for. This is too big for my free web space, they have an FTP server but won't give me a login for "security" reasons (seems to me a running FTP server won't be less secure if I have a restricted password, but that argument fell on deaf ears). I can set up my own FTP server, but it's not terribly convenient as I have broadband but not a static IP, so now I just email the damn thing, hoping it won't get interrupted or bounce, taking 50% longer because of MIME encoding than if I could do a binary FTP upload. One day I'll get a hosted domain....

  6. A bit exaggerated by modworker · · Score: 2, Informative
    As one of those who was affected, this is definitely a bit exaggerated. Here's what really happened (at least, on the system that I use; I can't speak for others).

    The mail servers went down for a couple of hours last Friday morning - mail couldn't be sent or received. About an hour into the outage, the sysadmins sent a Windows Messaging service message to all terminals saying that the problem was a 52Mb file called "Amarillo Video" (or something like that) which people were e-mailing internally and please don't do it any more! That was it, essentially - a short-term nuisance, nothing more.

    As for why this happened - well, our computer infrastructure is pretty old and cranky. The systems that fell over were mostly head office ones in London - there are literally hundreds of separate corporate networks currently in use, held together by duct tape (or so it sometimes seems), so only a fraction of the MOD was affected in the first place. They're all due to be replaced by a shiny new Defence Information Infrastructure (http://www.mod.uk/dcsa/organisations/dii/) which will be all singing, all dancing, capable of dealing with huge files etc etc etc. (Also all Windows, but you can't have everything.)