Google Mistook Jackson Searches For Net Attack

Slatterz writes "Web giant Google has admitted it thought the sudden spike in searches for Michael Jackson on Thursday was a massive, coordinated internet attack, leading it to post an error page on Google News. The company's director of product management, RJ Pittman, explained that search volume began to increase around 2pm PDT on Thursday and 'skyrocketed' by 3pm, finally stabilising at around 8pm. According to Pittman, last week also saw one of the largest mobile search spikes ever seen, with 5 of the top 20 searches about Jackson. Google wasn't the only site caught out by the extraordinary events. The Los Angeles Times web site also crashed soon after it broke the news of Jackson's death."

Comments

I wonder

[whereizben]

If any other news "event" has ever caused there to be such a massive amount of searching - it worries me that it is a celebrity causing this and that people aren't this into any "real" news that actually impacts them.

Re:I wonder

[AmigaHeretic]

I don't think it's necessarily that people aren't into "real" news, I think this is one of those things that impacted a lot of people around the entire world all at the same time. As we get more and more of our news off the Internet this will become more common.

There's not a lot of news that effects everyone in the world all at once. Probably as soon as North Korea launches a nuke against someone the same thing will happen.

Re:I wonder

[basil64]

Keep in mind that every day, month and year that passes increases the ubiquitousness of web enabled devices and services (i.e. twitter, etc.) geometrically. And sad but true, celebrity foibles and deaths are and always have been more fascinating to the masses than any 'real' news.

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

[quote]Probably as soon as North Korea launches a nuke against someone the same thing will happen.[/quote]
The frightening thing is, I'm not so sure it will.

Re:I wonder

[sayfawa]

Well, right after the sept 11th attacks, the internets was pretty useless. I had access to a T3 at the time, and no news sites took less than a minute to reload. OTOH, when MJ died, I don't remember having trouble with any of my usual sources. Maybe Google had a problem, but neither thestar.com or the BBC did.

So maybe instead of a bad reflection on humanity, this is just a bad reflection on the current stability of the intertubes, Google in particular.

Re:I wonder

[644bd346996]

Yes, because a Toronto newspaper website and the BBC are definitely going to get hit hard when an American pop star dies in LA...

Re:I wonder

[Valtor]

Probably as soon as North Korea launches a nuke against someone the same thing will happen.

The frightening thing is, I'm not so sure it will.

This is indeed frightening and probably true.

Re:I wonder

[basil64]

Hell, in 2001 a minute to load a page was pretty damn good, T3 or not...

Re:I wonder

[Foobar of Borg]

There's not a lot of news that effects everyone in the world all at once. Probably as soon as North Korea launches a nuke against someone the same thing will happen.

You're probably right. On Sept. 11, 2001, the news sites all ground to a halt as everyone tried to find out what was going on.

Re:I wonder

[basil64]

I think you are correct, it would have a much less public appeal. Remember the masses are, by definition, idiots. I fear that a nuclear attack would have a similar mass interest as a US senate vote on farm subsidies (unless a really major celebrity was, in fact, caught in the nuclear conflagration...)

Re:I wonder

[cetialphav]

So maybe instead of a bad reflection on humanity, this is just a bad reflection on the current stability of the intertubes, Google in particular.

It actually seems to be a good reflection of the current stability of the internet. After all, it worked fine for you and most other people. Sites have gotten much better at handling heavy traffic so it is harder to bring them down. In Google's case, it wasn't so much the amount of traffic as it was misinterpreting what that traffic meant. They thought it was an attack and started playing defence instead of serving it. Once they realized the problem, they could easily handle the volume.

Re:I wonder

[agilen]

When I was a freshman in college, an EE professor put a chart up on the projector. It was a fairly consistent chart with one giant spike right in the middle. He explained this was demand on the US power grid over a period of several months, and asked the class what they thought caused the giant spike...most big world events of the 90s were thrown out by the students....and they were all wrong.

The spike that put all the country's power plants at full capacity was the announcement of the OJ Simpson verdict.

Re:I wonder

[HisMother]

> I don't think it's necessarily that people aren't into "real" news, I think this is one of those things that impacted a lot of people around the entire world all at the same time. I understand what you're saying, but the thing is, it really didn't actually "impact" hardly anybody. The guy could sing and dance, and now he's dead. Turn the page, y'all. There are hella more important things to search for.

Re:I wonder

[sayfawa]

Good point. Maybe the whole gist of this thread should be "nothing to see here, move along".

Re:I wonder

[Thansal]

Sorry, but as much as I love hating humanity, I am SURE that a nuke would bring the internet to it's knees (ignoring any possible actual interruption from the nuke itself). Some one pointed out the effect that 9/11 had on the news web pages, I am fairly sure that even more people will actually care (aka, be scared silly) if a nuke finally does fly. I don't care if it is 2 countries that 'we' don't care about, we have the 'fact' drilled into our heads that the only think to come of nukes is MAD.

Re:I wonder

[selven]

That's because "real news" happens in Nowheresville on the other side of the world. Celebrity life affects them, because if Angelina and Brad break up who's going to act in their movies? Once real news is happening in home turf (see: 9/11), people tend to be even more reactive than they are to celebrity stuff. Even stuff like a single 8-year-old girl getting kidnapped (here in Toronto it's happened twice now at least, [Cecilia Zhang and Tori Stafford if you're interested]) gets people more riled up than a random bunch of 50-100 civilians dying in Iraq.

Re:I wonder

[glitch23]

If any other news "event" has ever caused there to be such a massive amount of searching - it worries me that it is a celebrity causing this and that people aren't this into any "real" news that actually impacts them.

It isn't necessarily the "impact" factor but the fact that no one expected it. It was a sudden death. He was 50 years old. This is similar to the death of Heath Ledger. When someone young dies people are going to be shocked and wonder what happened. This is also one of the reasons for an autopsy. Old people who die usually don't have an autopsy done on their bodies unless something is out of whack. Someone dying young is one of those "out of whack" things. It is a curiousity thing just like staring at a car wreck and death is something anyone can relate to.

Re:I wonder

[while(true)]

Don't know about searching, but 9/11 caused several of the worlds largest news sites to be inaccessible for over an hour.

Re:I wonder

[basil64]

Point taken. I was exaggerating to make a point; many internet users are in fact teens and tweens (who have no concept of what MAD even means), and given the apalling knowledge by the lumpenproletariat, and students, of geopolitics, geography, and anything outside the realm of TMZ coverage, I have a suspicion that there would in fact be less interest...though I hope the point is never put to the test...

Re:I wonder

[Darkness404]

The thing about MJ wasn't really that he died but rather the fact that he just randomly died. He was arguably one of the most popular musicians with the general crowd to die since Elvis. Many people got texts, twitter updates, Facebook updates and wondered what exactly was going on. While no one thought MJ was in amazing health, he didn't have cancer or a long illness so many assumed it was a prank so they Googled it to get the info from a reliable source.

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. Music doesn't impact anybody. Who needs culture, anyway?

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

Srsly. Don't expect "humanity" to be any more mindful than any single human. It sucks but you just can't avoid it..

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey I'm a student and I resent that!

I'm regularly watching for news of nukes flying so I know when I can start looting and lock myself in waiting for the zombie attack!

Re:I wonder

[supernova_hq]

Wasn't there a stray nuke that ended up flying right over the U.S. from coast to coast about a year ago? I don't remember that having ANY affect on the news sites...

Re:I wonder

[atraintocry]

There's more important things than music? That's news to me.

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but as much as I love hating humanity, I am SURE that a nuke would bring the internet to it's knees (ignoring any possible actual interruption from the nuke itself).

Now that is a glorious bit of irony. ARPANet was inspired to maintain communication in the event of nuclear war, and the end result will be that there are so many people with internet access during a nuclear strike that the traffic volume will disable itself.
There's a philosophy paper somewhere in that.. thanks! :-) [Uhh, here's hoping it stays just an academic issue. :-( ]

Re:I wonder

[RulerOf]

t really didn't actually "impact" hardly anybody.

I'm sure the world is full of people, such as myself, who regret the fact that they'll never get to see him perform live.

Re:I wonder

[KamuZ]

It actually seems to be a good reflection of the current stability of the internet

That reminds me the last time i tried to use my cellphone to call my relatives after an earthquake, impossible, it was only 2 years ago or so. We will see (hopefully not) when something really bad happens how the net behaves. Probably like in 9/11, we will only get text news pages. What i am worried is twitter, probably won't make it and if they did, who knows the kind of misinformation it will deliver to people... not that actual news are 100% accurate either... *sigh*

Re:I wonder

[tomhudson]

The guy could sing and dance, and now he's dead. Turn the page, y'all. There are hella more important things to search for.

The "attack" was just millions saying "I have no life, you insensitive clod!"

Google should have returned a custom error page for Michael Jackson searches - either Error 301: Moved Permanently, or Error 410: Gone would have been fine, accompanied by a "Resource Expired: Beat It!" message.

Re:I wonder

[tomhudson]

It isn't necessarily the "impact" factor but the fact that no one expected it.

Actually, most people were probably surprised that he lasted as long as he did. With body parts falling off or changing colour, he was obviously WAY past his "best before" date.

That he died of a heart attack is just so ... mundane ... you'd expect it to be something like an angry parent or slipping off a balcony or a hyperbaric chamber malfunction or something involving Bubbles, a rope, and a closet.

Re:I wonder

[caladine]

Mostly because it was in the belly of a US Air Force bomber at the time, and because most of us didn't find out about it until long after it happened.

Re:I wonder

[ckaminski]

And then there were those of us who didn't give a shit, and just wanted to get some news from CNN. WTF?

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

The spike that put all the country's power plants at full capacity

I doubt that. More plausibly, each point was the cumulative total for the day, and extra TVs turned on during the day, in addition to normal evening use, accounted for the spike. If the graph showed the full year, you'd probably see a much larger increase in the summer for air conditioner usage, which certainly has been known to cause brownouts.

Re:I wonder

[Evil Shabazz]

I don't think you are grasping the whole picture, and your post is modded up by the same kind of people who complain that MJ out-twittered Iran for a little while. Do you believe that we are really incapable of being concerned about multiple topics at once? I am, of course, way more concerned for the people in Iran and the conflict that is happening there than I am about MJ's death - but did I search Google after my friend came by my desk that afternoon and said, "Michael Jackson died!" - of course I did! Does that mean I don't care about the coup in Honduras or the sham trial in Burma, or about Obama's new healthcare plans? No. And frankly, that's stupid to even suggest.

You see, those other things I listed are not surprise, immediate events. Those things are not likely to have caused millions upon millions of people with internet access to suddenly, at the same time, wonder, "is that true?" I'll let you finish thinking about only this post while I go check out some pr0n, read my email, and browse some other news headlines.

Re:I wonder

[superslacker87]

Most American school systems who face budget cuts, apparently.

Re:I wonder

[treat]

The thing about MJ wasn't really that he died but rather the fact that he just randomly died. He was arguably one of the most popular musicians with the general crowd to die since Elvis. Many people got texts, twitter updates, Facebook updates and wondered what exactly was going on. While no one thought MJ was in amazing health, he didn't have cancer or a long illness so many assumed it was a prank so they Googled it to get the info from a reliable source.

That's the right answer.

The story is exactly relevant enough and questionable enough that it needs verification. So -everyone- verifies it.

The question should be - what about Michael Jackson's life leads people to believe that news of his death is so likely to be a prank that it must be immediately verified?

Re:I wonder

[Keybase]

You don't live in Canada you live out west.... Canada is located in southern Ontario.

Didn't you know? Since the economic downturn Canada has had to move to Saskatchewan to find a job. Some of it even overflowed into Alberta. The move started in the 1800's with the building of the CPR.

Re:I wonder

[kdemetter]

So you must be what , in your 30s ?
As a 'tween' , i don't see how anyone can mistake the principle of mutually assured destruction.
Basically , anyone who fires a nuke first, will get nuked as well , thus leaving no survivors and no winners.

However , these days , the MAD principle can be abused by terrorists : they just have to ensure that one nuke gets lauched at one side ,and the other countries will respond , destroying everything.

Re:I wonder

[supernova_hq]

And if a country launched one at the U.S., you think to government would tell people ahead of time?

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not at all clear to me that Google had a "problem" in the sense of not being able to handle the load. Reading the article, it almost sounds like some programmatic DDOS attack sensor went of and automatically responded by putting up the error page. This would seem to be a reasonable response to take if they actually were under some sort of massive DDOS attack and taking the action automatically might be deemed by Google to be necessary/appropriate in such a set of circumstances. The article says that Google users were getting the error page instead of actual results for Michael Jackson searches for about 25 minutes. If the decision to start responding to searches with the error page was made by a human then SURELY it would not have taken that human (i.e. someone with authority to make such a call) 25 minutes to discover that Michael Jackson had died (i.e. something pretty MAJOR in Michael Jackson land had just happened). On the other hand, if the "decision" to start responding with an error page was made automatically, one can easily imagine that there might be some delay between the time that the error page starts appearing and someone with the authority to turn it off decides to turn it off. In such a scenario, a 25 minute interval during which they responded with the error page doesn't sound all that far out of line.

Re:I wonder

[allcoolnameswheretak]

Michael Jacksons death was very real news to me, and I suspect millions of other people. I've listened to MJs music almost all my life. I have fond childhood memories watching the "Moonwalker" movie. Therefore MJs cultural impact and musical career are a very "real" part of my life. Quite alot more real than the financial crisis we seem to be having right now or some ships getting hijacked off the coast of Somalia.

Re:I wonder

[node 3]

That he died of a heart attack is just so ... mundane

Cardiac arrest is not the same as a heart attack. Cardiac arrest is when the heart just stops, a heart attack is when the heart stops receiving blood/oxygen (as ironic as that sounds).

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

The question should be - what about Michael Jackson's life leads people to believe that news of his death is so likely to be a prank that it must be immediately verified?

A highly popular public figure who was known throughout the world is reported to have suddenly died with no warning? You wouldn't want to know if it were true?

Hell, if any world renown figure suddenly died with no warning you'd see some serious spikes.

Imagine if you suddenly heard the Pope was dead. Or Kim Jong Il. Or Bill Gates. Some are good, some are bad, the only connection is that they're huge public figures known throughout the world.

Re:I wonder

[XorNand]

That's a common misconception.

It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started claiming that the ARPANET was somehow related to building a network resistant to nuclear war. This was never true of the ARPANET, only the unrelated RAND study on secure voice considered nuclear war. However, the later work on Internetting did emphasize robustness and survivability, including the capability to withstand losses of large portions of the underlying networks.

"A Brief History of the Internet", Internet Society.

Re:I wonder

[Firehawke]

I don't necessarily agree here. It's not the verification, it's the "Okay, what facts do we have?" question.

At least in my case, someone told me the guy had died and my first reaction was to google it and see HOW he had died. I'd think that's more likely than the suspicion of a hoax.

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

oh, good thing I'm on my bee

Re:I wonder

[Quiet_Desperation]

A highly popular public figure who was known throughout the world is reported to have suddenly died with no warning? You wouldn't want to know if it were true? ... Imagine if you suddenly heard the Pope was dead. Or Kim Jong Il. Or Bill Gates.

Depends on the figure.

The President? Very likely.

Kim Jong Il? No, but mainly because you can't believe anything out of that place- probably not a good example. I wouldn't expect there to be anything verified for a while.

Bill Gates? Meh... maybe just to see how much the media mistakenly claims he or Microsoft invented. You know that's going to happen.

Some singer? I'd just wait for the news media to sort it out and get on with my day, which is exactly what I did with Jackson.

The Pope? Wouldn't give a shit. They just go out and get another fossil to wear the silly hat anyway.

William Shatner? I'd personally slag one of Google's servers with my frantic searches! No, just kidding. :-)

Re:I wonder

[JerryQ]

I think that had the internet been around when John Lennon was shot, (it was so 'instant', verifiable and on the street) the spike would have been massive.

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. Also it's obvious now that at his age death was a good career move.

Re:I wonder

[xouumalperxe]

A tween with a 6-digit UID? When did you register? When you were 8?

Re:I wonder

[nidarus]

Once real news is happening in home turf (see: 9/11),

You do know that people outside of North America use the Internet as well, right?

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

If you mean the North Korean's first attempt then no. It didn't even launch. There wasn't a nuke that went coast to coast at all. Give the US some credit. If they knew of something like that they would have acted (not necessarily in the people's best interest, but acted). NK's first attempt was a dud and we knew it from the get go but there was much press on how it COULD have reached Hawaii or California.

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

I suppose a large portion of the problem is perspective. I had no difficulties with any of the sites I frequent when the towers fell over. However, I assume it would be a very different story within the US - particularly with some specific US focused news sites.

At what point does a slowdown of a news site, a set of news sites or even a nation get considered as an 'internet slowdown', when the vast majority of the internet is still unaffected?

Re:I wonder

[c6gunner]

Well, right after the sept 11th attacks, the internets was pretty useless. I had access to a T3 at the time, and no news sites took less than a minute to reload.

On the other hand, I didn't even bother checking the news sites. I was logged into an IRC network, getting news reports relayed from something like 20 different cities. The internet still worked fine for disseminating information.

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

Cardiac arrest is not the same as a heart attack. Cardiac arrest is when the heart just stops, a heart attack is when the heart stops receiving blood/oxygen (as ironic as that sounds).

Someone has been paying attention to the MJ coverage, it seems!

If nothing else, everyone in America knows this tidbit now.

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, just like the US knew about Saddams huge WMD arsenal. US intelligence isn't as intelligent as you or those cheesy American-made movies make out. The whole country was brought to its knees on 9/11 by 19 men armed with box cutters.

Re:I wonder

[redcaboodle]

If any other news "event" has ever caused there to be such a massive amount of searching - it worries me that it is a celebrity causing this and that people aren't this into any "real" news that actually impacts them.

There's people for you. We are a social species after all. As a society we lost someone who meant something or other to everyone.

I found it rather amazing to hear all kinds of groups, temporary and permanent, talk about Jackson. I work in an office building with a lot of small companies and there was Jackson music coming from most offices on Friday, either from the Net or any local FM station.

People were talking conciliatory about him, mostly praising his music and pitying him for being such a screwed up character. As far as it is proven in court, he never hurt any child, so very few people felt the need to discuss his alleged child-abuse. We do not talk ill of the dead.

Still, I enjoyed the jokes about this demise. Humour is one way of dealing with loss.

Very few people get such a worldwide eulogy.

Re:I wonder

[houghi]

Well, clearly I am not everyone. I did not verify it. I could not care less if he is dead or alive. I do like some of his music, but whether he is dead or not does not affect the music he already made. It does not affect the way I live my live.

To be honest, the same applies to all 'celebrities' dead or now alive, including Linus and Bill. Graveyards are full of irreplaceable people.

Re:I wonder

[Nathrael]

With Obama leading the US? Whether nuclear retribution would be a good or bad thing is debatable, but as long as Obama's president, I don't think it's going to happen. That is, unless it's the US that gets nuked, in which case he'd likely get impeached and voted out of office again for allowing his own country to get nuked by his inaction.

All evil needs to succeed is for good men to do nothing, after all.

Re:I wonder

[jez9999]

Imagine if you suddenly heard the Pope was dead. Or Kim Jong Il. Or Bill Gates. Some are good, some are bad, the only connection is that they're huge public figures known throughout the world.

Which are bad?

Re:I wonder

[Nathrael]

No, but if it exploded, it would be difficult to cover-up, no? Covering up a nuke being transported in a bomber is one thing, covering up a glass parking lot where once was that nice island called Hawaii is another.

Re:I wonder

[jimbob666]

I remember reading something about a whole lot of international telecommunications and fibre links were housed in one of the Twin Towers. I might be wrong here, but didn't a lot of the cross-ocean fibre links terminate around the Twin Towers area or at least that is where top level ISPs were?

Re:I wonder

[jonbryce]

I think the reason a lot of people searched Google News is because they heard about it and weren't sure if it was true or not. If someone wanted to spread an untrue rumour about something, this is the sort of subject they would choose.

I searched Google News for that reason, and when I saw it was reported on news sources that are usually reliable for that type of news, like BBC and Sky News, I then believed it was true.

Also, like a million or so other people, I have tickets for his show in London next month, so it does impact me.

Re:I wonder

[janrinok]

Its a bit of a leap to say the 'whole country was brought to its knees' when actually the direct effects of the attack were much less severe. The indirect effects, i.e. those introduced by the Government in the wake of 9/11, were much more noticeable but I would not describe the Government as '19 men armed with box cutters'. Most of the problems resulting from 9/11 are self-induced and, as many have commented elsewhere numerous times before, they do little to change the probability of a terrorist attack actually occurring again in the future.

Look at the total number of deaths caused by 9/11 and then compare it to the number of deaths caused by traffic accidents or coronary disease, or the damage caused by floods resulting from by hurricanes.

Re:I wonder

[The Slashdot Guy]

Yes, we do. We just don't feel it's worth mentioning you because most of the time all you say is stupid shit like, "You do know that people outside of North America use the Internet as well, right?"

Re:I wonder

[sckeener]

Hopefully he didn't buy the account. Though if he did buy it, I could then forgive the KDE in his id. (kidding)

Re:I wonder

[Chrisje]

What does everyone have against Hawaii? They have naked women and flowers. And they already got the short end of the stick in 41.

Why not nuke Kansas or Ohio? THat'll improve the IQ and educational system while only killing 2 men and a donkey.

Re:I wonder

[ukyoCE]

Well, the real question is who they launch it against.

If they nuke South Korea, sadly, we may not see many in the US flinch. If they nuke Hawaii or California though, you certainly will.

The WTC attacks were the last time I remember the internet getting hit hard by a news event.

Re:I wonder

[Dishevel]

Very few people were actually "Affected" by the Pedo Thrillers death. People make themselves over emotionally attached to celebrities so they can feel like they matter. Fucking Losers! If those people searched for things that "affected" them they might do searches on political leaders and current and proposed laws. Nope. That shit is not important and dose not affect these fuckers. They are sheep sitting in front of a fucking T.V. waiting to be sheared of their excess dollars by advertisers and politicians.

Re:I wonder

[ukyoCE]

Exactly, good call. I actually heard about it on WOW in a general chat channel. Sources hadn't announced his death yet, and only a few sources (eg. CNN) even had information posted that he had been sent to the hospital. People in the chat channel were claiming he was dead, others were accusing them of lying.

If we had gone from zilch to "yep he's dead" on every news site in 5 minutes, the traffic may not have been nearly as bad.

The fact that there were rumors and half-released information dragging out the announcement over a few hours meant the same people refreshing the same pages waiting for an update.

Re:I wonder

[TyrainDreams]

...Yes lets destroy states with above average IQ and educational systems...because Ohio doesn't have the 15th largest city in the US...

You don't even live here do you... I am under the impression you are European...

Ohio also is the 7th most populated state in the US, being 7 out of 50 tends to lend to more than 1 man and .5 donkey...

Just keep your mouth shut and move along sir...

Re:I wonder

[steelfood]

It's as if millions of voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know if there is such a thing, but perhaps Google should open up "Google News," and hire some staff to keep an eye out for potential search engine killer news.

If anyone doubted that Michael Jackson could generate this much interest; they've obviously been too busy getting coffee enemas and ordering double silly extra mocha chocolate sprinkles with whipped cream and caramel cafe lattes. Ironically, it's these same people that are prone to say no one cares about MJ while posting on /.

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

Looting? You must be an African American Ghetto Rat.

Re:I wonder

[steelfood]

or something involving Bubbles, a rope, and a closet.

You're thinking of the other creepy old guy that recently died.

Re:I wonder

[DriedClexler]

The question should be - what about Michael Jackson's life leads people to believe that news of his death is so likely to be a prank that it must be immediately verified?

Well, in my case, because my brother used to prank me exactly that way when we were younger. He would occasionally tell me "Michael Jackson died" and then laugh when I found out it wasn't true. I assumed it was a common prank people played, like they do with Stephen King.

Then when a co-worker told me MJ died, I assumed the same thing was going on, and was like, "you're joking right?" But I didn't do more than load news.google.com, which I do anyway, to verify.

Re:I wonder

[pureevilmatt]

On the evening of September 10 of 2001, The Jackson 5 reunited and played a show in N.Y.C.

Re:I wonder

[greyhueofdoubt]

Well I don't know about you guys, but my only news sources are slashdot and the air raid siren down the block. What else do you really *need* to know? ;)

-b

Re:I wonder

[Dragoness Eclectic]

Does the date September 11, 2001 ring a bell?

Slashdot was the ONLY internet news site that managed to stay up that day. And calling Slashdot a "news site" is reaching, but that day, it was.

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

On Sept. 11, 2001, the news sites all ground to a halt as everyone tried to find out what was going on.

I worked at the ISP that hosted cnn.com, msnbc.com on that day.
I had 100 Mb/s to the sites (faster then the rest of the world) and I still had issues accessing them.

They started redoing the front pages of those sites to be smaller, static, etc to reduce the load.

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

>> that the only think to come of nukes is MAD.
I'm sure as soon as the first nuke goes flying, every country in the world will unanimously say "Oh, why the hell not. Mosh pit!" and launch the rest.
That's clearly the most logical response to take.

Re:I wonder

[supernova_hq]

Yes, but the U.S. is still recovering politically from the event, and will be for the next 20 years at least. Just look what happened to the airlines (pre economy crisis) when they tried to "protect" the public...

Re:I wonder

[Phroggy]

The question should be - what about Michael Jackson's life leads people to believe that news of his death is so likely to be a prank that it must be immediately verified?

When someone forwards me a chain letter about some shocking bit of news, the first thing I do is look it up online. If it's a hoax (which forwarded chain letters almost always are), I reply back to the sender (or reply to all, if I'm really annoyed and want to publicly embarrass them) and try to stop the spreading of misinformation.

When someone told me airplanes had crashed into the WTC and Pentagon, the first thing I did was look it up online. Since the first few news sites I tried were all overloaded, I immediately went to the TV to find out why.

When someone told me Michael Jackson was dead, the first thing I did was look it up online. Once I had confirmed that it was true, that was really all I needed to know. I did read one article with some details, so that I would be prepared to converse intelligently about it, because I knew that people would be talking about this. I don't really care that much, but as a functioning member of society, I like to be aware of the things that other people are talking about.

Re:I wonder

[kalirion]

I don't care if it is 2 countries that 'we' don't care about, we have the 'fact' drilled into our heads that the only think to come of nukes is MAD.

Thanks a ton, now I have the MAD TV song playing in my head.....

Re:I wonder

[Jedi_Master_SS]

This is the same type of reaction that emergency responders have. When their normal lines of communication get overloaded or taken down they fall back to the tried and true methods of communication, namely ham radio. -KB1IBT

Re:I wonder

[Nathrael]

Why do you get the impression that I hate Hawaii? Have I ever said so? Maybe I sounded a bit sarcastic, sorry for that - I was genuinely saying that Hawaii is a nice island. I just mentioned Hawaii since it's one of the two most likely locations in the States for the North Koreans to launch their nuke at according to various analysts.

Re:I wonder

[Nathrael]

Eh, wait. Allow me to whoosh myself, please >_ .

Re:I wonder

[Cornflake917]

Micheal Jackson's death is newsworthy because he had a huge influence across the globe. Much of the music we hear today has been influenced by him some way or another. Yeah he was a celebrity, but he wasn't your run-of-the-mill celebrity. He was a legend in terms of entertainment and music. So the fact that people want to look up if he died or not isn't really that alarming to me. Not to say that people don't watch news for the wrong reasons, I just don't think that's the case for this instance.

Re:I wonder

[Hurricane78]

Maybe you forgot that country that actually already threw two nukes on another country.
Actually it was the only one ever, and maybe will ever be.

Re:I wonder

[Hurricane78]

Nah. Then they would only think: "How can porn on the Internet ever expire, and how am I going to 'beat it' then? I can't go back to Playboy now?"

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey I am from Ohio I may be an A** but, we are the fifth largest state. Kerry lost Ohio and lost the race.

You better say nice things about us or we will vote for palin

Kansas, who cares more people in cleveland than all of kansas.

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

What ever happened to Bubbles

Re:I wonder

[inmytaxi]

it worries me that it worries you so much

Re:I wonder

[jrade]

Everyone knows that Ohio is a political myth

Re:I wonder

[khams]

No doubt KS has a few warheads aimed our way. Aircraft mfg. Oil, Natural Gas production, a national bio lab to be constructed here. Damn I better move to Hawaii. Please don't judge all Kansans by the actions of the so called conservative republicans that reside here

Old news

[game kid]

It's Sunday; the death occurred on Thursday and Google blogged on the "attack" problem on Friday.

Re:Old news

[Kugrian]

Non-news for most of the world. Every major broadcaster had this a few days ago. What is the point of having it here?

Re:Old news

[Anonymous Coward]

It's Sunday; the death occurred on Thursday and Google blogged on the "attack" problem on Friday.

And finally, Slashdot links to an article that won't be posted until tomorrow. From TFA

Google mistook MJ searches for net attack
by Phil Muncaster on Jun 29, 2009

P.S. I already know about the International Date Line, you don't need to spoil the joke by explaining it... oops I just did.

Re:Old news

[FishWithAHammer]

Even Fox News had the information on Friday.

Slashdot: Slower Than Fox News.

Re:Old news

[Lurchicus]

Keeping in mind that your comment was posted with humor in mind... it did bring to mind (for me anyway), that I don't read /. for news... I read it as a great place to discuss the news reported elsewhere.

They didn't read Google News?

[bignetbuy]

This is all so confusing!

If Google had read Google News, they would have known about MJs death. But Google didn't and thought they were being attacked...which led them to shutdown their news site...which would have told them about MJ.

What if this had happened in Soviet Russia?

Re:They didn't read Google News?

[game kid]

Michael Jackson would've attacked YOU with "google news" queries!

Re:They didn't read Google News?

[Anonymous Coward]

What if this had happened in Soviet Russia?

it'd be google.ru instead of google.com

Re:They didn't read Google News?

[Auxis]

It could have been an automatically triggered error page. The article didn't state whether or not that was the case.

Re:They didn't read Google News?

[MillionthMonkey]

In Soviet Russia, when Michael Jackson overdoses, YOU are still dead on the news all next week

Re:They didn't read Google News?

[calmofthestorm]

I'm pretty sure we have that here too.

Re:They didn't read Google News?

[skine]

We'll meet again,
Don't know where,
Don't know when...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxrWz9XVvls

Re:They didn't read Google News?

[rhook]

It would have been http://www.google.su/

Re:They didn't read Google News?

[Anonymous Coward]

In Soviet Russia, news finds you.

Re:They didn't read Google News?

[Culture20]

Michael Jackson would've attacked YOU with "google news" queries!

I'm decades past MJ being interested, but still disturbed by the thought of him googling me.

Re:They didn't read Google News?

[rts008]

Well, being 'decades past'*, I would think you are safe...he was more into little boys I hear.

But on a side note:
After seeing picures of him in recent years, I have often wondered if we would ever know if he came back as a zombie, or was still his same self. He already looked like a zombie some years back!

*I'm also decades past. I remember seeing him on TV when he was in single digit age as part of 'the Jackson Five', back when...never have cared for his music at all.

Re:They didn't read Google News?

[dotgain]

Oh. My. God. That joke had a cruising altitude so low the FAA should be involved. Yet still, Whoosh.

Re:They didn't read Google News?

[nidarus]

What if this had happened in Soviet Russia?

it'd be google.ru instead of google.com

If Soviet Russia still existed, there would be no .ru TLD - it would be google.su

It was actually the work of...

[BrunoBigfoot]

a smooth criminal.

Re:It was actually the work of...

[Tony Hoyle]

Clearly the boogie is to blame.

Re:It was actually the work of...

[Anonymous Coward]

I was going to ask if you'd seen that joke was already used in the grandparent and then I noticed the usernames involved. Oh, what the hell:

Did you see that joke was already made by the GP?

This is slashdot, after all. The editors accidentally put up dupes, so I expect some users do too.

Re:It was actually the work of...

[binaryseraph]

Good thing they Just Beat It

Re:It was actually the work of...

[Anonymous Coward]

nah, his heart just couldn't beat it anymore.

Re:It was actually the work of...

[bleedingpegasus]

Please the real Billy Jean, stand up!

Re:It was actually the work of...

[wv5k]

Wish I had Moderator points tonight. Definitely would've gotten another "Funny" from me...

RIP Michael

[Anonymous Coward]

How awesome is this video? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmN0dwDR1wo

Michael Jackson lives!!

Re:RIP Michael

[julien dot]

How awesome is this video game ? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lF89npFbn8g

Re:RIP Michael

[LBArrettAnderson]

That movie was a large part of my childhood (Moonwalker), and I had to watch it again yesterday. For me it will always be a classic, even though it's no longer for sale...

Internet attack occurred before his death

[devleopard]

The coverage Mr. Jackson received in recent years, given his inability to produce anymore quality music, was the true attack on the Internet.

Some websites went down... not Google

[644bd346996]

I've seen it reported many places that Google was one of the websites that was overwhelmed by traffic resulting from Jackson's death. The fact that this is not true, and that the traffic merely activated Google's self defense mechanisms, is rather enlightening - it reveals just how much more serious Google is. However, we should hope that Google's self defense mechanisms stay this benign, else we may be in trouble when McCartney finally kicks the bucket.

Re:Some websites went down... not Google

[Anonymous Coward]

By that logic you should count "503 Service unavailable" as merely a self-defense mechanism, and those other websites weren't overwhelmed either.

Re:Some websites went down... not Google

[644bd346996]

Google gave users a CAPTCHA to let them proceed, and for somebody not searching for Michael Jackson news, the site worked normally. That's very different from a complete outage that affects even the non-sheeple users, or even the reduction in features that services like Twitter used to handle the load.

Re:Some websites went down... not Google

[Anonymous Coward]

In case Google adopts some sort of Dr Strangelove style Doomsday device?

Re:Some websites went down... not Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and shit will really hit the fan when someone dies who has actually contributed more to humanity than some catchy tunes, groovy moves and questionable fashion style.

Re:Some websites went down... not Google

[Anonymous Coward]

grr ... it will not let me log in .... this is Kara

Anyways, I have been getting the capcha a lot the past few days. None of my searches were of Michael Jackson stuff though. I had just assumed someone was trying a crack through my TOR relay all of a sudden for some reason but this makes more sense.

Good for google.

[moogied]

As much as everyone might think this is a big boo-boo by google, I say its a great job done by automated software. All systems should protect themselves from massive peaks in internet traffic in order to provide a base-line service. Twitter even pulled selected services off to keep up a minimum working level. The fact that it classified it as a "net attack" is a matter of terminology, not importance.

Re:Good for google.

[Kittenman]

Bit of a cock-up that they couldn't handle the death of a celebrity with their server capacity though. Everyone dies. The British Queen. Madonna. Obama's dog. The capacity should be there to handle a predictable event without flashing the red light.

Re:Good for google.

[d4nowar]

They never said they couldn't handle the capacity, only that the sudden and massive increase in traffic activated their 'defenses'.

Very big difference there.

Re:Good for google.

[FishWithAHammer]

So, you're a fucking retard, huh?

Google News had no capacity or throughput issues. It thought that it was a distributed denial of service attack and forced users searching for Michael Jackson to enter a captcha. I know, I saw it.

Re:Good for google.

[cetialphav]

As much as everyone might think this is a big boo-boo by google, I say its a great job done by automated software.

It is this kind of thing that always makes me suspicious of automated defences. These things usually generate a model of what is normal and interpret things that fall outside of normal as an attack. The problem is that sometimes the abnormal pattern that is seen is actually normal. It is completely predictable that a well known, controversial pop icon would generate a huge increase in traffic when he unexpectedly dies (he was planning a comeback concert tour). I'm not sure how an automated defence can have the contextual information necessary to make this kind of distinction between attacks and "normal" burstiness like this.

I agree that Google's software did its job, but I wouldn't call it great. Great is when they can stop attacks and not get a Slashdot article about how they screwed up when a major news event happens.

Re:Good for google.

[Anonymous Coward]

Whether it was malicious or otherwise - whether or not it should be called an "attack" - it still called for a defense.

It doesn't matter if someone pushes you over, or if they just tripped into you accidentally and knocked you over, knowing how to properly break your fall is useful.

If Google did something like launch a counter offensive, yes, that would be bad. That's not what happened here. Google did right.

Re:Good for google.

[tomhudson]

... and forced users searching for Michael Jackson to enter a captcha. I know, I saw it.

Do you really want to admit that? Wouldn't it be better to claim you were searching for, I don't know, porn or something?

Re:Good for google.

[Chees0rz]

... and forced users searching for Michael Jackson to enter a captcha. I know, I saw it.

Do you really want to admit that? Wouldn't it be better to claim you were searching for, I don't know, porn or something?

Getting the Michael Jackson captcha while searching for porn?

I don't even want to know what those search terms entailed... but I assume the FBI picked them up, too.

Re:Good for google.

[FishWithAHammer]

I was looking for places to troll.

Why did Michael Jackson cross the road?
Because his dick was still stuck in the kid.

Re:Good for google.

[steelfood]

The computer knows nothing about Michael Jackson, dying, or the influence of pop culture, so it doesn't take these variables into account when considering whether a behavioral pattern is benign or malicious. It also is unable to temporarily use an unknown variable as a substitute to explain away this deviation for the duration of the lifetime of the variable, which is to say, humans make judgments based on feedback but computers only do as they're told.

Welcome to Last Week

[basementman]

Welcome to last week Slashdot, I was really hoping for you guys to drum up a connection between Billy Mays and technology news. Maybe a scientific study on the effectiveness of oxi clean, or the possibility of a law limiting television volume.

Re:Welcome to Last Week

[Anonymous Coward]

They were the same age. Anyone else suspect that they were actually the same person?

Re:Welcome to Last Week

[cetialphav]

Obviously, this is a huge conspiracy. I mean, Billy May, Farrah Fawcet, and Michael Jackson? It can't possibly be a coincidence. And this comes at a time when Ron Paul is trying to get Congress to audit the Federal Reserve. Clearly, these deaths are intended to distract the media and voters before Ron Paul gets too close to the truth.

Hmmm. If someone made a movie with this plot, I'd pay to go see it. Hopefully, I don't get knocked off for discovering the conspiracy because that is usually what happens in the movies.

Re:Welcome to Last Week

[iFiLa]

Hey, let's not forget Ed McMahon (March 6, 1923 to June 23, 2009).

Re:Welcome to Last Week

[baegucb]

from Consumerist:
You have to wonder if before going to sleep last night, pitchman Billy Mays thought of Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, and Ed McMahon, and said to himself one last time, "but wait, there's more!"

Re:Welcome to Last Week

[ocularDeathRay]

I cam here for exactly the same reason, to read about Billy Mays. I figured for SURE it would be posted by now. Slashdot fails to bring me the news thats important to me. Now excuse me while I race to the store to horde my favorite household gadgets, before the lack of a marketing campaign causes them to become unpopular, and become a whiter brighter spot in the history books.

Re:Welcome to Last Week

[ocularDeathRay]

damn it... I came! I came!

Re:Welcome to Last Week

[Lurchicus]

Done properly, it would be: "And also in the news... BILLY MAYS DIED THIS WEEKEND..."

Re:Welcome to Last Week

[Anonymous Coward]

That's probably more than we needed to know.

Re:Welcome to Last Week

[Anonymous Coward]

Rumor has it that whoever operated the teleprompter had a thing for writing in ALL CAPS. There was actually some evidence that Billy could talk normally in the Pitch Men show on Discovery.

Shrug

[Quothz]

No big deal. Google'd be stupid not to have a procedure to deal with a real attack. The only real consequence of a false positive is that they lost a little revenue, and they got to test their response in exchange. They sorted it out in less than half an hour. Probably they'll try to improve their detection systems as a result, I guess. I can't get excited about one search topic being blocked for half an hour as a result of heavy inquiry unless that topic is "directions to the nearest bomb shelter".

He's not dead!

[dandart]

The media is just overreacting. He's just on Betelgeuse with Elvis.

Re:He's not dead!

[Cyberscythe]

...making awkward small talk with his former father-in-law.

Re:He's not dead!

[Quiet_Desperation]

Is there a raffle for the first posthumous Jackson sighting? Or has it already happened?

Twitter is fragile

[JonasH]

Twitter's infamous 'Fail Whale' was also called into action as servers at the micro-blogging site crashed as 66,000 Tweets were made within a 60-minute period.

That's it? That's all it takes to bring Twitter to its knees? A measily 18 tweets per second? Do they manually transcribe the messages after having read that an air gap was the most effective security you could get? Or is the article plain wrong.

Seriously confused here.

Re:Twitter is fragile

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats what happens when your site is based on Ruby...

Re:Twitter is fragile

[Anonymous Coward]

Ruby on rails, which is like MJ on drugs - i.e. DEAD.

Re:Twitter is fragile

[Stan Vassilev]

That's it? That's all it takes to bring Twitter to its knees? A measily 18 tweets per second? Do they manually transcribe the messages after having read that an air gap was the most effective security you could get? Or is the article plain wrong.

What do you think :)? For the record, when the MJ news was at its peak, the volume was more like 1000+ tweets per second on Michael Jackson alone, so I have no idea how the article got those numbers.

Re:Twitter is fragile

[Solandri]

66,000 Tweets were made within a 60-minute period.

That's it? That's all it takes to bring Twitter to its knees? A measily 18 tweets per second?

For the record, when the MJ news was at its peak, the volume was more like 1000+ tweets per second on Michael Jackson alone, so I have no idea how the article got those numbers

66,000 tweets per minute would give you 1100 tweets per second. So likely someone misheard or misspoke 66,000 tweets per minute as 66,000 tweets per hour.

Re:Twitter is fragile

[treat]

Sadly, I saw Ruby and Ruby On Rails refused for multiple projects because of catastrophically poor benchmark results. I mean that Java, PHP, and Perl were all totally acceptable, and Ruby disqualified itself in performance. (thousands of times difference).

Glad I never wasted time learning it.

Re:Twitter is fragile

[DNS-and-BIND]

1100 entries per second at 140 bytes per message is 154,000 bytes per second, or 150kbps. Twitter fell over from *that* measly input level? Well, I don't know...maybe that's a lot for some people. To me, it's not much, and I'm not surprised what happened happened.

Re:Twitter is fragile

[jez9999]

It's all too complex, the fact is that all the public need to know is that there were a LOT OF TWEETS. I think it's clearest to say that there was a virtual chorus of birdsong at the time.

Re:Twitter is fragile

[ceejayoz]

Twitter gets much more than 60,000 tweets an hour on a normal day.

Look at the numbers increasing at http://www.twitpocalypse.com/ as an example. The page currently says 204 tweets per second - 66,000 in a little over 5 minutes. I imagine they easily hit millions when MJ died.

Re:Twitter is fragile

[bill_mcgonigle]

Glad I never wasted time learning it.

It's a pretty language. I've had a book on it in my bookcase for six or seven years now, waiting for a fast runtime.

Fortunately the Perl folks are building one that should run Ruby well.

Am I the only one

[calmofthestorm]

who had only ever heard of this guy in the context of pedophilia and absurd paranoid claims?

Re:Am I the only one

[Anonymous Coward]

unless your from the tribe in the amazon rain forrest, yep your pretty close to being the only one

Re:Am I the only one

[FishWithAHammer]

Michael Jackson was a fairly formative musical influence to a lot of modern music. The importance of "Thriller" can't really be overestimated.

Re:Am I the only one

[bendodge]

Nope.

Re:Am I the only one

[tbird81]

I guess so. Did your parents lock you in a cave as a kid or something? Or do you have no friends?

Or are you just bullshitting? Your Asperger's must be pretty severe to not have heard of Michael Jackson.

Re:Am I the only one

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome

I'm pretty sure you meant something else.

Re:Am I the only one

[owlnation]

"The importance of "Thriller" can't really be overestimated."

I think current events prove it can be. Or at least overhyped. He was a talented guy, but he was a musician. He's not Einstein. His contribution to society is really not that significant.

In 10 years he'll fade, just as Lennon and Elvis have too.

I like music as much as anyone, but it's important to put it into perspective. It's important always to remember it a commercial product and owned by one of the most unethical industries on Earth. All commercial music is overhyped. Most musicians are overrated. You may like them, I may like them, but most of them are only good at what they do and are far from masters of their instruments. Most music does not stand the test of time.

Jackson's music will last longer than most of his peers. But he isn't Wyld Stallions, he won't be creating world peace and new harmony. It's just music.

It's truly astonishing that (considering his legal history too) he has created this much hype in death. So much so that, even /. is cashing in on it.

It makes me realize that there's something fundamentally wrong with how things are valued, and how page views and impressions are the currency of the net. Waves of hype like this are not truly as valuable as people seem to think they are.

Re:Am I the only one

[SL Baur]

Michael Jackson was a fairly formative musical influence to a lot of modern music.

Maybe that's why I pretty much stopped listening to American music in the early 1990s.

I thought he was a crazy, drugged-out pederast. My wife was in tears.

I'm not particularly dismayed by the reaction of some here - to each his own. I *am* dismayed that Farrah Fawcett, who died on the same day, never got any mention here.

I find it fascinating that with all his debt issues, he was surrounded by Nation of Islam financial advisors, the same as Kareem (who ended his Hall Of Fame basketball career broke).

Now, get off my lawn and take that "King of Pop" trash with you.

Re:Am I the only one

[glwtta]

Michael Jackson was a fairly formative musical influence to a lot of modern music. The importance of "Thriller" can't really be overestimated.

Well, I suppose that depends on how you estimate the importance of modern music, doesn't it?

Re:Am I the only one

[Culture20]

I guess so. Did your parents lock you in a cave as a kid or something?

He's a 7 digit, my friend. MJ hasn't made any new truly popular music for a long time, so GP has only seen the mutilated face, the pedophilia, and the baby-dangling.

Re:Am I the only one

[merreborn]

Well, I suppose that depends on how you estimate the importance of modern music, doesn't it?

Regardless of your personal opinion of the artistic merits of Jackson's work, there's no denying he had a massive effect on American pop culture, and tens of millions of Americans.

Re:Am I the only one

[glwtta]

Of course, I'm not trying to deny that at all. I'm just saying that if it wasn't him, somebody else would've won the "superstardom" lottery, it's not like we'd end up with no music to listen to.

Re:Am I the only one

[DanJ_UK]

Aspergers peeps take things literally without looking past face value and by all accounts, at face value Michael Jackson was a celebrity fuck-up.

He did make great music though.

Re:Am I the only one

[DanJ_UK]

When the BBC announced it over in the UK, they kept playing the video on repeat of him holding the baby out the window on BBC news, I'd actually forgotten about that incident until it had been rammed into my brain again!

Re:Am I the only one

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because he was a formative influence doesn't mean that modern music is representative of what his music was like. Jackson's music was 1000 times (arbitrary I know) classier and thoughtful than almost anything made these days from his influence. Have you ever even heard his music?

Re:Am I the only one

[SL Baur]

Yeah, Farrah Fawcett, the red swimsuited, long blonde haired beauty in the poster that all of us older nerds had pinned up on our bedroom walls in the 70s died the same day.

She died of cancer, *not* drug overdose/addiction.

My wife is prettier than she was, but it does not kill the memory.

One of the most depressing things about aging is seeing professional athletes around your age or younger being called too old to play. Pinup girls that you (secretly) fantasized about in your youth dying of old-age type diseases is another. The latter is worse - I feel so old ...

Re:Am I the only one

[Anonymous Coward]

He was a talented guy, but he was a musician. He's not Einstein.

See, this I find disturbing.

I understand this is slashdot where the sciences are valued above the arts, but that doesn't mean that the arts aren't a significant part of societal development as well.

In 10 years he'll fade, just as Lennon and Elvis have too.

And so too will Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Liszt, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovitch, Joplin, Sousa, and so on.

Oh wait.

Yes, I am comparing them with those composers. The music is different and less complex. Doesn't mean it's not good stuff.

Re:Am I the only one

[oblivinated]

"His contribution to society is really not that significant." Define significant. Did the Mona Lisa solve world peace, discover electricity? No, but it was significant, from both a cultural and artistic viewpoint. The human condition drives us to find heroes, those who we feel deserved to be revered, Michael was someone who deserved this hype. Michael's dance and music was, and is significant, there was something about it that attracted and mesmerized millions of people. Don't belittle him. I assure you he has accomplished more than you ever will.

Re:Am I the only one

[Quiet_Desperation]

My wife was in tears.

That grounds for divorce in my book. ;-)

I'm tired of the "king of pop" thing, too. Am I the only one who remembers that the title did not evolve naturally, but that Jackson *demanded* he be called that? The media, of course, opened wide and took every inch of that one.

A sane media with a spine would have blinked and said, "Hey, buddy, you do decide how to do the singing and we'll decide how to do the reporting. Capisca? Now go back to that creepy amusement park you live in."

Re:Am I the only one

[houghi]

So much so that, even /. is cashing in on it.

Uh, the article is about Google, not about Michael Jackson.

Re:Am I the only one

[Anonymous Coward]

"In 10 years he'll fade, just as Lennon and Elvis have too."
Just so u know, The beatles, and Elvis are history's best selling artists, 1 billion records or more...

Re:Am I the only one

[Anonymous Coward]

Wyld Stallions? Is that a real band? And they created world peace? HOW IS THIS NOT A TROLL?

Re:Am I the only one

[neomunk]

Oh, c'mon. Zombies would not be nearly as ubiquitous in modern culture without MJ's groundbreaking documentary on the subject.

Re:Am I the only one

[not-my-real-name]

In 10 years he'll fade, just as Lennon and Elvis have too.

I see you've never been to Las Vegas where you can make a good living as an Elvis impersonator. You and I many not be keen on his music, but somebody sure is.

Re:Am I the only one

[not-my-real-name]

One thing that I've noticed here and elsewhere is that most people have difficulty recognizing talent if the talent is not expressed in a way that they personally enjoy.

I was at a restaurant a few months back and one of the staff was doing a rather operatic rendition of Happy Birthday to a customer. The people I was with were dismissive of her singing ability. Now, opera is not my thing, but she did have a remarkable voice and ability to use it.

I went to a superbowl party this year. I told some people that I now know what an atheist at a revival meeting feels like. Football is not my thing. But I can recognize that the players have genuine talent, even if I don't think that they're using it very productively.

Re:Am I the only one

[meringuoid]

Regardless of your personal opinion of the artistic merits of Jackson's work, there's no denying he had a massive effect on American pop culture, and tens of millions of Americans.

I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.

(Yes, when I first heard, I thought it was a variant on the classic Stephen King troll.)

Re:Am I the only one

[Anonymous Coward]

unless your from the tribe in the amazon rain forrest, yep your pretty close to being the only one

your stupid.

Re:Am I the only one

[lennier]

Amadeus are you okay, Amadeus are you okay, are you okay Amadeus...

Well "PC AUTHORITY"

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you sure their servers "crashed" or perhaps they had just reached their maximum and did not respond to all requests? If they actually "crashed" I'd say that they were not configured properly.

Why McCartney?

[Anonymous Coward]

He doesn't seem to be as big as Michael Jackson. A major death would actually be Obama.

Re:Why McCartney?

[denzacar]

You haven't been around on this planet for very long, have you?

Although... The parent does seem to miss the point.
It is not that Michael Jackson died. It is that he died suddenly and unexpectedly.
McCartney does have that extra weird bonus of being the only Beatle who came back from the dead, but still - his death would be kinda expected nowadays.

You want to scare the shit out of Google?
Shoot Madonna with a rocket launcher in the middle of the street in broad daylight.

Re:Why McCartney?

[janrinok]

"It is not that Michael Jackson died. It is that he died suddenly and unexpectedly."

People of around his age, particularly those who might be on continual medication, are dying 'suddenly and unexpectedly' all the time. Although he is at the young end of the coronary heart disease spectrum he is by no means the only 50 year old to die of heart failure. The only reason that this made the news is because of who he was. And, as many of us have pointed out, how important or influential he might be considered to be is an individual thing. Will I wake up in a month's time thinking 'Oh no - Michael Jackson is dead'? Nope - nor do I often think of John Lennon or Elvis. I acknowledge their contribution to the music industry but there are many, many, many things far more important in day-to-day life than the death of a popular musician.

Re:Why McCartney?

[denzacar]

Yes. It made news because he was a famous musician.

It made BIG NEWS because it was a sudden and unexpected death - particularly for someone who slept in an oxygen tank and danced like he did.
And 50 years is by no account an age at which one is expected to just die.
I mean look at Gary Busey. Today is his 65th birthday.
Now, if there is one person (besides Amy Winehouse and Keith Richards) you would expect to be long dead from all the drugs and booze - that would be him.

Not Michael Jackson. At least not yet.

Nah it was the work of...

[RuBLed]

zombies.

Will people Google for

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft death too?

Re:Will people Google for

[Anonymous Coward]

won't happen anytime soon. you'll probably die well before microsoft will.

Jackson Brown does ROCK!

[Anonymous Coward]

Jackson Brown does ROCK!

Did you know that

[enoz]

if you type Jackson into Google, you can break The Internet.

They were so close to the truth!

Peer-to-peer protcols as a solution to demand

[rob101]

If we take a step back and see what Sept. 11 did to CNN and now The Times website, we can see that the internet can suffer from its own major over-subscription of users to servers/services. Particularly in times of significant current events when almost every connencted user demands information from authoritative sources.

And I'm sure the audience here is no stranger to the Slashdot/Schumaker-Levey effect?

There needs to be a blend between the ability of peer to peer protocols (bittorrent?) to service and distribute massive amounts of content and HTTP. Such technology would permit the audience (or data sinks) to service itself in times of major crisis and permit the important information to reach people.

Re:Peer-to-peer protcols as a solution to demand

[Anonymous Coward]

Your P2P protocol already exists: Freenet. The more people load a page, the more caches of the page are stored. It was made to prevent censorship, and a side effect of this is redundancy in availability and storage.

As far as "breaking the news"...

[I_am_Syrinx]

"The Los Angeles Times web site also crashed soon after it broke the news of Jackson's death."

It was actually TMZ.com that "broke" the news, many minutes before anyone else. The other news sites waited until someone they considered "legitimate" reported it before accepting it as fact. I guess they were trying to avoid a "Dewey defeats Truman" moment...

Dangerous Pattern

[Tablizer]

All a foreign gov't has to do is to kill a few big-name celebrities via snipers or poison, and our infrastructure is crippled.

Re:Dangerous Pattern

[DanJ_UK]

Google !== our infrastructure. Dealing with the whinging from all the pissed off teenagers + Stephen Fry would be a nuisance though if twitter were down even longer than it currently, regularly is.

Re:Dangerous Pattern

[Tablizer]

Google !== our infrastructure.

We only heard from Google on this. That does not mean that only Google was affected.
   

Poor boys will have to find Priests now ...

[GISGEOLOGYGEEK]

Now that Micheal's gone, I guess it's just Walmart that has little boy's pants half off.

cus.gus@hotmail.com

Re:Poor boys will have to find Priests now ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Since he was 99% plastic, they are going to recycle him into Legos so kids could play with him for a change.

I thought he was a has-been

[Animats]

I thought of him as just another has-been celebrity fuckup.

KABOOM!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now let's see if all the infomercials crash tonight due to the sudden death of Billy Mays.

Database indexing is slow

[forand]

First, twitter didn't fail; twitter removed trending topics from the sidebar. You could still search but it was not giving you trends. I strongly suspect that this is because of the load on their database server trying to load in the new entires while serving data. While you may consider trending topics to be the end all be all of twitter it should at least be noted that it is a relatively new feature and twitter does have a tendency for very slow development.

I was away from all media this weekend

[jollyreaper]

I cannot even begin to describe how utterly nice it felt to know nothing more than he's dead and I don't have to be inundated with inane television coverage.

I do think his funeral is going to be a bigger circus than the pope and Reagan combined.

sheesh!

[FudRucker]

i will be glad when michael jackson is buried and forgoten, i am tired of the damn media coverage of some dead popstar/pedophole

Re:sheesh!

[nickrout]

Farah Fawcett died and went to heaven. God asked "What do you want most for the world?" Farah answered "I want all the children to be safe" Well you know what God did next...

Re:sheesh!

[Anonymous Coward]

He's not being buried or cremated, but turned into shopping bags.

That way he can remain white, plastic and dangerous to children.

It was a Triller Zombie Attack on the net!

[itsybitsy]

Ok, couldn't resist.

Just eat it. Your table manners are a crying shame... just eat it...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyfcOriVKBM

TMZ Broke the news

[Anonymous Coward]

TMZ broke the news of his death, not the LA Times. Let's give credit where credit is due.

failure to understand cloud computing

[Anonymous Coward]

'Not have a cloud bursting strategy in the age of cloud computing isn't just wrong Ã" it's idiotic,' wrote one cloud blogger."

Why shouldn't MJ generate such a big response?

[Phantasmagoria]

I keep reading comments that it is "a sad state of affairs" that news of a celebrity's death has garnered much more response from the world then, say, news of a recent scientific breakthrough.

The fact of the matter is, Michael Jackson is one of the most recognized persons in the world, and for quite a long time too. So what if he has contributed nothing/little to science? You think without music, art, and other culture we would be the same human beings? Art and music define us and advance us as much as science - why else would cavemen draw?

So what if so-and-so was responsible for inventing solar-power, or discovered water on mars. That isn't affecting the majority of the poor population in Bangladesh. Yet, they ALL listen to Michael Jackson.

Get over it.

Re:Why shouldn't MJ generate such a big response?

[steelfood]

Only we won't reap those benefits for another 70 years, forever if the entertainment industry has their say.

say, say, say what you want

[circletimessquare]

but don't blame me for lost connections

take, take, take what you need
but don't tweet about me in the same second

Regine Velasquez the next Michael Jackson?

[SL Baur]

Have you ever even heard his music?

Yes, and your point is? Have you ever heard the music of TAKAHASHI Mariko, or Regine Velasquez? They have voices that sound like angels, to my ears. Sadly, Regine is headed down the same road Michael Jackson apparently took.

I heard his music and I didn't like it. My wife loves his music and there is no bloody way I'm going to kick her out of bed for that.

I liked "We are the world" the first time I heard it, though it grew tedious after awhile. It took on a whole new meaning after his trials in California, "We are the world, I sleep with your children".

I *will* feel some sadness when Regine Velasquez dies of a drug overdose or something along those lines, but I will not be surprised and neither will it bother me. It's her life as Michael Jackson's life was his own.

Emergency restarts are more costly than you think

[Wee]

They did get the problem sorted, but it required changing the load balancer rules and then restarting the GFEs. That takes time, and that time means money.

I'd eager they merely changed the GSLB config and went on about their way. SRE has things well in hand.

-B

Worked fine

[S-100]

When the MJ news first hit, one of the early sites handling the rumor was TMZ.COM. I was on the page before CNN and other sources had reported MJ dead. The TMZ page automatically loaded a streaming video window with live reports of the ongoing story. I left the page open while I attended to other matters, and other than the video blanking out now and then, the stream was stable for hours. I was thinking to myself that surely this story would overload their servers, what with the home page automatically generating a live video stream, but it just never happened.

Cripes

[mellestad]

Sheeple? "The Masses"? If Gates or Linus croaked one day you would all be Googling the shit out of it, but when something happens outside of your comfort zone you mock and deride it. Sheeple indeed.

The assault Google is realy afraid from is Dolymah

[Anonymous Coward]

I hear Dolymah has legendary line-dance attack that would shimmy more than the Stars that God created back in the Book of Gens'Isis

MJ, half off.

[JBritt1234]

Interesting enough this is the second thing that Michael Jackson has taken down. The first was prompted by his Blue Light Special at K-Mart, little boys pants for half-off.

Re:Emergency restarts are more costly than you thi

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah but don't forget about the DZSs and LLXs.

Re:I wonder, 601 error

[Anonymous Coward]

that dead guy movie about space bugs and computer overload (slashdot made me write this ) "Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment ... like the body or the subject!) " Ya, fuck you too

Patience required...

[Bazman]

News media web sites may have crashed under the strain, but all I had to do was wait a few hours and read the news on paper. Paper doesn't crash.

Can't wait a few hours? Okay, switch the TV on and find a 24-hour news channel (even here in the channel-starved UK we get a choice of two). TV doesn't get slashdotted.

Old media WINS in these situations. Sure you can't write comments for all to see at the end of a news bulletin, but then you don't have to read the inane rantings of the masses after every news bulletin. See what I mean about WIN?

Re:Patience required...

[Anonymous Coward]

read the inane rantings....

Gotta go when to go dark like Jack Bauer

[Quiet_Desperation]

I literally *hid* from the news from first report through this weekend. I knew the bullshit would be enough catastrophically raise the ocean levels once it all got flushed. All I saw was a quick shot of two girls who were weeping over Jackson's death as if they just witnessed their entire families, every friend and their pets get killed in a giant fireball. Seriously, being *that* emotionally invested in a media figure has *got* to be some sort of mental illness.

So, I'm a bit out of sync. Did North Korea nuke Maui yet? ;-)

Oh, and I was on amazon looking for a book and I saw everyone was rushing to buy his albums. WTF? A musician dying makes you suddenly want to buy his album? WTF is that ghoulishness? Seriously! What mass hysteria or delusion is happening there? There's a PhD thesis waiting for someone there.

Michael Jackson, Dead at 50

[Anonymous Coward]

> The question should be - what about Michael Jackson's life leads people to believe that news of his death is so likely to be a prank that it must be immediately verified?

Ever see those troll posts saying "Xyz, dead at ##. Truly an American icon."?

Cached responses

[JerryQ]

I wonder whether Google will develop, or have developed, a cached response mechanism for situations such as this. There would seem little point, during a massive spike, in actually loading the servers with the search element of these queries. I know it's what I would do. why would you not do so? I ask because, as a designer, I would be interested in what the /. ers would think to be the pros and cons of that.

RIAA might shut up

[polyp2000]

now they have a big excuse to make money ...
At the record company meeting
On their hands - a dead star
And oh, the plans they weave
And oh, the sickening greed

At the record company party
On their hands - a dead star
The sycophantic slags all say :
"I knew him first, and I knew him well"

Re-issue ! Re-package ! Re-package !
Re-evaluate the songs
Double-pack with a photograph
Extra Track (and a tacky badge)

A-list, playlist
"Please them , please them !"
"Please them !"
(sadly, THIS was your life)

But you could have said no
If you'd wanted to
You could have said no
If you'd wanted to

BPI, MTV, BBC
"Please them ! Please them !"
(sadly this was your life)

But you could have said no
If you'd wanted to
You could have walked away ...Couldn't you ?

I touched you at the soundcheck
You had no real way of knowing
In my heart I begged "Take me with you ...
I don't care where you're going..."

But to you I was faceless
I was fawning, I was boring
Just a child from those ugly new houses
Who could never begin to know

Who could never really know
Oh ...

Best of ! Most of !
Satiate the need
Slip them into different sleeves !
Buy both, and feel deceived

Climber - new entry, re-entry
World tour ! ("media whore")
"Please the Press in Belgium !"
(THIS was your life...)

And when it fails to recoup ?
Well, maybe :
You just haven't earned it yet, baby

I walked a pace behind you at the soundcheck
You're just the same as I am
What makes most people feel happy
Leads us headlong into harm

So, in my bedroom in those 'ugly new houses'
I danced my legs down to the knees
But me and my 'true love'
Will never meet again ...

At the record company meeting
On their hands - at last ! - a dead star !
But they can never taint you in my eyes
No, they can never touch you now

No, they cannot hurt you, my darling
They cannot touch you now
But me and my 'true love'
Will never meet again

Re:RIAA might shut up

[yahwotqa]

tl;dr

I propose the renaming of the slashdot effect

[Colin Smith]

From now, your servers will have been "Jacksoned".

 

He feels BAD about this Thriller History!

[freaker_TuC]

Guess he was a SMOOTH CRIMINAL slashdotting all those servers!

LA Times???

[jag7720]

LA Times??? I thought TMZ broke this news

Fake 'DoS Attack' Attack!

[John Guilt]

Just launch a topic into the internets that is so interesting that the server[s] you wish to attack will presume that a DoS attack is in progress. Maybe via some sort of semi-popular forum....

Wa Wa Waaaahhhhh

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what everybody gets for relying on a single source for information!

Any news on whether Bing or Yahoo had problems?

Re:Why not nuke Kansas or Ohio

[ibsteve2u]

Why not nuke Kansas or Ohio? THat'll improve the IQ and educational system while only killing 2 men and a donkey.

One man and a donkey. I moved.

LA Times: MJ dead, head missing

[sean4u]

When I added the article to a hobby project I've been working on, it choked the page indexer. Not only was MJ dead, but the HEAD was missing, and still is:

http://blog.lolyco.com/sean/2009/06/26/la-times-reports-michael-jackson-dead-head-missing/

4chan

[Anonymous Coward]

People always google an artists name when a "Good night sweet prince" thread comes up at 4chan.

BY DESIGN

[khams]

Surely you understand the lack of real news reported, and the public's lack of interest in it,is by design?