Slashdot Mirror
Twitter Offline Due To DDoS
The elusive Precision dropped a submission in my lap about a DDoS taking down Twitter running on CNet. It's been down for several hours, no doubt wreaking havoc on the latest hawtness in social networking. Won't someone please think of the tweeters? Word is that both Facebook & LiveJournal have been having problems this AM as well.
I hate to be the one to say it, but "Ha Ha"
I know you're joking, but Twitter does have a nearly unique architecture that makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to block without blocking the entire Internet. Now, say what you will about the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of using it as a protest or organization tool, but at least it keeps the lines of communication open in spite of government interference.
Who the hell modded that "funny?" Nothing of value was lost -- social networking is about as important as celebrity gossip. The only actual loss to social is the lost revenue that these websites will experience, which will hardly be a blip on the radar.
Palm trees and 8
Whats more, she blames defcon at the end of the article.. "There has been no indication that any of these various attacks are connected. But it's probably not a coincidence that they all coincide with the annual Defcon hacker convention." yes, not a coincidence at all... thats what happens when "hackers" get together...
you know you can fry stuff putting things into things that dont like the things you put into it...
You're referring to the fact that, even without internet access, messages can be posted to and read from twitter via SMS text message?
The only reason I need twitter to remain up is to prevent people from flooding other communication channels with "Twitter's down! Fail Whale!"
Actually, my first thought is this
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
have sex :p
Compared to Twitter's usual activity load, a slashdotting is not going to be that big a deal.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
1) Millions of people use it
2) It is uses to allow poeple to follow people that are interesting to them. Not just gossip, but science information, events.
3) Nearly instant knowledge of world events.
4) Allows protesters to disseminate information
5) Is allowing for a deeper understanding od human nature in large societies.
6) It's another tool for expression.
So I would say that it does have value.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Okay, so the fact that all of these sites are reporting on a temporary outage on a social networking site says more about the overall decline in the mainstream media than CNN specifically.
Also, as of right now, I don't see the story on the front page of the BBC. Fox News now has it listed as "Urgent" and has the headline in huge letters on the front page. CNN currently shows it as its top story. Reuters has it much further down the page, but it's still there.
Reporting on a story like this deep in the Technology section is one thing, but displaying it prominently as major breaking news is entirely another.
Twitter's API returns tweets in chunks; it's not one call per tweet.
A slashdotting is not really an appreciable bump in traffic for Twitter. They have a lot of throughput at any given time.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Twittor
3) Nearly instant knowledge of world events.
Instant AND not necessarily accurate. A two-for-one!
4) Allows protesters to disseminate information
Information that is more than likely one sided and ignorant of "the big picture" of any given event.
The reason email was such a boon, and the only reason it's lasted so long, is because you didn't need a login on someone else's system in order to communicate with them. Of course, that's also why the folks who came up with it never (directly) made any money off of it. (Finding interviews with the inventor of '@' are left as a googlecise for the reader.)
It's a tough position: the only way to last longer than a flash-in-the-pan fad is to give up your only obvious way to turn a profit... but no flash-in-the-pan fads have ever turned a profit either. So we'll continue to get these cyclical fads, all of us moving from service provider to service provider, like a migrating swarm of locusts, leaving fields of venture capital devastated in our wake, hoping that someone will figure out the magic formula to make money from it.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
Twitter works just fine for me, unlike the new format of updating /. as I scroll down the page.
"We're talking about twitter. This is the equivalent of running a steam roller over a chipmunk farm: Somewhat disturbing, oddly hilarious, and ultimately a loss of nothing but a bunch of chattering rodents."
That's what some poeple say about slashdot.
I've bashed twitter more than anybody I know, but I will admit now it's actually useful for some things.
Opinions about the marginal utility of various internet services notwithstanding, when any site is targeted it hurts us all.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Some people didn't like what was posted to twitter in the past 24 hours and had other people take it down. It's a distraction. Scrutinize what happened before it down and not the distraction of it going down and you'll have your answer.
Need Mercedes parts ?