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The Tiger Effect and Internet DDoS
An anonymous reader writes "Many US and Canadian ISPs thought they were under a massive denial of service attack yesterday — traffic spiked by hundreds of gigabits across North America. Turns out that the traffic was due to live streaming of the U.S. Open and Tiger Woods nail-biting victory."
Tigerdotted
I Got wooded?
ok /.ers you can do better. I need to update my ids logs to take this into consideration ;)
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
Who knew that there was a professional nail-biter's competition, let alone that Tiger Woods won it?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
You mean it wasn't due to Firefox downloads? Guess it's not yet as mainstream as I'd like it to be. :)
Developers: We can use your help.
All that an you couldn't even bother to do a "first post" quote.
You mad
I thought it was due to Euro2008 coverage on Espn360.com
Evolution is a state-sponsored, state-protected religion.
Haven't most users updated to Leopard by now?
why I'm paying 80 dollars a month for only 6mbps download and 512kb upload. And that every night around 8 or so my internet starts to go dial up speed. And that the router I have is 100% unconfigurable. I literally can't do a damn thing to it. And if that's not enough, there's one technician in the whole area. That's 4 counties. Illinois sucks. There're only two ISP's for me. One offers 512kb download and 256kb upload for 25 dollars a month. Or I can keep what I have now. Sorry for the mostly off topic rant, but I'm in a bad mood today all because of my internet. Rawrr!!!! And yet, I'm still on it.
Jennicam caused massive overloading the first time she had realtime sex. Likely there were other occasions before that too.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I remember working at a streaming media startup and a Tiger nail bitter was our first live event. 8 Years ago that was 24gb a sec and the average bit rate was 368kbs if I remember correctly. There is a lot more bandwidth now than then. The fun part was running the logs and associating the AS and often the big company associated with it, there seemed to be a lot of people with comfy offices a lot of bandwidth and a love of golf back then.
No sir I dont like it.
We could call it the mourningwoods effect. [rimshot]
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Oh sorry, that was me. I downloaded several seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Seriously, hundreds of gigabits across North America is a problem? 500 gigabits is approximately 62 GB.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
I find it hard to believe that there's anything that can possibly be nail-biting about watching golf.
If these ISPs were overloaded to the point of thinking they may be being DDoS'ed over one event online, they are they wholly unprepared for any sort of attack that may actually be focused at them? Imagine the carnage a real attack would wreak on the ISPs! Is there anyone out there that knows the likelihood of ISPs going down if they came under a real attack? If a few botnets targeted these ISPs, could they be brought down completely? Imagine one of these ISPs really stepping up the game for a tiered internet service model, putting themselves out there as a lightening rod for angry nerds. Could a coordinated effort break the back of an ISPs ability to provide any service whatsoever?
Your thoughts are most welcome and I thank you in advance for sharing your thoughts!
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
I guess since it was Monday afternoon everyone was watching it from work.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Run for the hills! Internet traffic doubles/triples during a major sports event? Who could have known!
That's about as worthy of an article as one "discovering" Euro Cup 2008 matches causes certain European streets to be abandoned for ninety minutes.
I can understand how such a traffic increase would be reason for alarm for the average network administrator, but you'd think service providers whose main business is the infrastructure would be aware of major streaming events. This shouldn't have surprised so many people.
until a DDoS effort successfully disrupts tiger wood's game
DDoG?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The summary should be edited to say Monday, not yesterday. The article came out on Tuesday, so yesterday is correct there, but the /. leads you to think the U.S. open playoff was Tuesday.
Maybe we need a better streaming video mechanism for popular live streams? I would imagine that if everyone's watching the same thing at the same time, it ideally shouldn't take up any more bandwidth than, say, one compressed standard definition cable channel. Signed, naive chemist.
Just thought of something. Was mozilla.org hosting US Open highlight clips yesterday or something? Because that would explain a lot.
Fortunately Hong Kong's Star Sports was accessible through Sopcast P2P.
Great match! I watched the back nine and the sudden death playoff hole. Unfortunately the commentators were horrible. They did not announce the length of the puts (huge annoyance) and they spoke when there was nothing to say!
We want Jim Nantz, or perhaps the British announcers at The Open.
is happening to all my comments? I posted a couple yesterday. I posted about 4 today and now the 4 I posted today are gone.
I run an IPTV headend and our combined multicast traffic is 2 Gb/s of data. Adding a zero to that is nothing, not to mention I run that through one router and this was distributed through the U.S.
I think the bigger deal is that it was isolated to a few sites. ESPN has to have some big pipes. As Mike and Mike said best in the morning, Tiger Woods is the next Michael Jordan.
Crap! I just kissed my karma good-bye.
The US Open nail-biting ended on Monday, are they sure it wasn't Firefox 3?
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
1) Give Tiger Woods a cadillac made of gold in order to, after his surgery, play in a major and make it close so that it goes to a playoff. Ask him to keep the tie breaker going for as long as he can.
2) Advertise how the internet can't handle the bandwidth, scream fire and brimstone, exclaim that you may not be able to see Tiger again in a playoff if this isn't fixed and sell network upgrades.
3) Profit!
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Did it occur to them to examine the contents of this supposed DDoS? You know, take a look at the source / destination IPs and perhaps a sampling of packet payloads in an attempt to figure out what was going on?
I'm not in favor of indiscriminate snooping, but as a security professional, this would be the first thing I would expect.
I believe everyone is talking about the game where you try to put a 40 mm ball into a small hole couple of hundred meters away by hitting the ball with a club.
Not the Volkswagen line of cars.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I bet the ISP are just twiddling there thumbs right now at the idea of charging by the GB for internet.
Scary but true.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
What's with all these nazi and gay posts on slashdot lately ? Mods should start banning left and right.
How could this possibly be confused with a DDOS attack?
It makes me nervous that it even got to that point. How can a competent ISP confuse DDOS attacks with streaming video (most likely, the same streaming video sent to all people)? Isn't there a pattern there? Couldn't they see the connections were all coming from the same server or block of servers? Couldn't they see all of the connections were using the same protocol? Couldn't they see they were all using the same port?
How the hell do they confuse that with a DDOS? I am just a lowly part-time IT network manager at my company and even I can see the difference between streaming video and "other bad stuff".
Someone smarter than me please help me understand more about this. How did this get far enough to convince the ISP's they were being DDOS'd?
I remember a better, halcyon time, when the only people on the Internet were avid sports non-fans. They were all educated computer professionals....good times...
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
Let's launch a massive counter-attack!
Where I work they thought we were having issues, and found that many people were streaming the competition. When they found that out they asked everyone to go watch it on television in our big meeting room.
Pretty fun.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
I don't know, I never watch it. I heard it's a bunch of white guys who run around a course occupying prime real-estate that sucks up so much water for irrigation that its run-off alone contributes the majority of pollution found in downstream water sources.
A REAL sport is where men and woman compete equally, like late-nite strip poker (no Tilly sisters allowed - they cheat, at least the raunchy one does), not a bunch of white guys chasing after a little white ball.
While the video on ESPN was pretty good, the audio died. However, on MSNBC the video died but the audio was perfect. So, I had both going...
Isn't this one of the negative consequences of net neutrality ?
\u262D = \u5350
Never. Mods are there to mod up or mod down, never to ban. Trolls are trolls, learn how to ignore them. Posting AC because this is off topic.
And I was trying to watch the NBA match online... no way!
What's the point on watching a guy with a stick if u can watch LA getting crushed?
He can DoS ISP's with only a set of golf clubs!
I guess I was part of the problem. I watched a good portion of it, at least the first nine holes until it switched to NBC coverage where my MythTV DVR could record it (the first half was on ESPN, and I don't get cable).
I was surprised at how good the video looked. I have tried several other events in the past, and have always been disappointed, or completely unable to view it. Although, for the NCAA Final Four this year, I was finally able to actually watch a game after failing the last few years. I had to use Win2K within a VMware VM, but it did work.
The U.S. Open video worked directly from my Mac, had decent sized video, and was completely watchable on my laptop. Nice job USGA, NBC, etc.
How about getting multicast finally into proper use? Then these kind of things wouldn't be an issue at all, or even get noticed...
Having each and every client streaming the same content separately is completely broken concept.
It's one thing to be a Windows or Linux troll. That I can live with. It's another to post information that is completely off topic (and also likely NSFW). While I'm a great advocate of free speech, not everything should be said everywhere. And slashdot should be a place for nerds to converse about tech stuff. Not a platform for gay lifestyle discussions or radical political commentary.
All these moves to charge per usage is going to blow up in their face.
They're worried this kind of usage will eat into their own TV viewership. What better way to prevent that from happening than by charging those who use it.
What will end up happening is customers will get in a tizzy and without suitable alternatives lawsuits will fly.
In the end either they'll have to abandon these plans or competition will be forced into the market.
-- taking over the world, we are.
How very free speech friendly of you.
But I have to admit I could have gone the rest of my life without having to read trash like the original post.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
In case you haven't noticed (and you may not) moderators are now getting three times as many mod points. That means that the trolls have to work three times as hard and post three times as many stupid, off-topic, offensive or otherwise inappropriate posts so that foolish moderators will waste all those mod points modding them down instead of using them to reward people for good posts. When I have mod points, I tend to ignore stupid posts if they're by AC, because it doesn't do any good. In this case, however, I'd gladly burn a mod point on the OP because the poster didn't post anonymously and would take a karma-hit for it. Of course, it's possible that it's just a throw-away account to be used until it's been down-modded to oblivion then abandoned as the troll starts a new one. So it goes.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
sarcasm - Nice to know that now we can get our shows easily and smoothly across the internet. We probably no longer need to broadcast over the air - /sarcasm
Calvin:Do you believe in the devil? Hobbes:I'm not sure man needs the help.
... Ahem, just to save bandwith, did anyone spot a copy of the playoff saved to a torrent somewhere?
Their television counterparts aren't making as much ad-sharing revenue!
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Yep, this is exactly the sort of situation that IP Multicast was created for. It has been part of the IP RFCs since forever. Maybe more incidents like this will convince more ISPs to configure their routers to support it, so we could start using it.
wi11yhill != willyhill
I guess it depends on what you want modding to be like. When I get mod points I drop to -1, look for moderator abuse and spent most of my points shooting fish in a barrel by modding down trolls which usually burns my points in 10-15 minutes. I'd rather comment than moderate discussions, but I'm happy to help take out the garbage.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I also read at -1, just in case there's some abuse to be corrected. Most of the time, however, I spend my points on posts that haven't been moderated yet. I'd much rather seek out under-appreciated posts than waste my mod points going ME TOO! by pushing a post up even further.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
AFAIK, the Usenet rec.sport hierarchy predates the actual Internet. I'm pretty sure there were sports fans on the Internet within moments of the time there was something that could reasonably be described as "the Internet".
(Wow, I can still remember my first "bang-path" address.)
1) The video stream was only viewable fullscreen on Internet Explorer (Mozilla gave javascript errors).
2) Video window could only be "full screen" mode on my primary monitor (not my secondary one).
3) The video and audio were reasonable in quality, but DRIFTED out of sync by up to 10 seconds (video was wayyy behind the audio)! So its like the commentators were giving "spoilers" for every shot! (Oh, he missed that putt! Long before seeing the putt... very annoying!). Basically the video/sound protocol was not up to the demands of the uber-popular event - I would have much preferred a degraded pic/sound that was in sync!
4) Watched the second half on real TV... WAY WAY BETTER.
'nuff said.
/No. I don't work there.
Spork.
P.S. Spork.
I don't think it's changing, so you'll either get over it, or leave.
It's not like it's hard to set your threshold higher, you know. The tools to help you ignore that stuff are there.
So what will happen when the 2008 Olympics start ?
Maybe I am unloved but I only get 5 mod points. They do arrive at a greater frequency than before though... *shrug*
Also*, I almost never mod down (twice in four years maybe?) and I never listen to posts that say, "mod parent down" or, "this is a twitter sockppuppet", etc.
*grammer nazis(sic) pay attention here
strike
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Was the "Gay vs Nazi" "Left vs Right" analogy a purposeful joke or did you just strike lucky there?
Why would ISPs want to upgrade the links, I mean all that bandwidth is only get abused by torrenters and other ne'er-do-wells ( love that phrase ), to rip off the hard working people of the MPAA/RIAA. Oh poo no, this was genuine?! Well knock me down with feather! Internet links are not fastest enough to carry a genuine, legal streamed video broadcast event to those entitled to see it? tut-tut-tut!
Windows guys please stop pissing on everyone and the Linux guys stop pissing in the wind, hoping to hit Windows guys!
I always read at -1, because I am a troll and can appreciate others' work.
After all, I am strangely colored.