UK Ministry of Defense Broken by Spoof Video

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.'"

Comments

Tsktsktsk....

[Mister Impressive]

they should've used YouSendit d:

Re:brilliant

[gowen]

I imagine this happens all the time. When you get a load of married men, take them away from their families and dump them in a shithole army camp middle of the desert, where a significant proportion of the local population wants to kill them, it's in your interest to keep them sweet.

One way to do that is to allow them to send lengthy video messages back home to their families.

In such cases, it makes sense for compassionate considerations to trump technical considerations (and after all, it's only this freak occurence that's buggered it. The systems worked pretty well for the last two years.)

Re:I suppose you had to be there ...

[BinaryCodedDecimal]

... hilarous er, not.

Brilliant ... er, not.

You had to be there ... er, yes.

Let me guess - You're not from the UK, and you've never seen the video that this is a spoof of?

A lesson in the right thing to say.

[ear1grey]

To be fair The Ministry of Defence Press Office handled this brilliantly. Any negative comment, or any hint of any negative comment about the troops would not, and could not be made. They could have brushed it under the carpet, but by commenting positively they have reinforced the morale of the soldiers, and further, reinforced their image as an approachable peacekeeping force, something which has been key to their low engagement rates in southern Iraq.

Re:Ouch

[gowen]

I'm surprised so many mail systems are even allowing 50MB+ eMails going out.

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 because it's possible that there may be some mild Quality of Service issues at your office in Slough".