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"
If any story deserves that tag, its this.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Now that nefarious deeds are affecting the average net user, I wonder how long until the news agencies slog through and dust off their old virus/trojan/worm/botnet/haxx0rz stories?
http://status.twitter.com/post/157160617/site-is-down
a slashdot effect will certainly help in resolving the troubles.
... whenever a text is transmitted, variation occurs. This is because human beings are careless, fallible, and occasiona
This is what happens when you anger the googles.
http://status.twitter.com/
I've got to re-tweet this!!
... oh wait
My tweets are getting through, albeit slower than usual.
Julie Moult is an idiot.
What is twitter? Is that some new web site or something?
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
Might it have had something to do with the Twitter-based HTML demo (http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/08/05/2348219/HTML-5-Canvas-Experiment-Hints-At-Things-To-Come?art_pos=8) that made Slashdot earlier today? The site in question hits Twitter for a large number of tweets, and I imagine a lot of /.'ers were checking it out earlier. I doubt it helped, at the very least...
$ mv *.sig >/dev/null
anyone else thinks this may have something to do with this: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/08/05/1555219/XML-Library-Flaw-mdash-Sun-Apache-GNOME-Affected
So THAT's what Conficker's for.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
...the nation's IQ spontaneously rose 23 points this morning. Scientists are investigating this puzzling phenomenon but have yet to discover the cause.
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
...what will Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore do?
Wow, that segway was about as awkward as some kind of two-parallel-wheeled auto-balancing minute-muscle-movement-controlled vehicle. Of some sort.
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...
Decentralization is the solution to single-link failures.
Cloud is centralization.
JM2C, YMMV.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
The slashdot post below: "HTML 5 Canvas Experiment Hints At Things To Come" connects to Twitter for its canvas demonstration.
Finally. now everyone can get back to work.
If it ain't broke, DON'T fix it.
There was weeping and gnashing of teeth - by tweens everywhere
And there was MUCH rejoicing - By everyone else
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
To affect Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal should have been a Massive DDos. Which botnet was in this case? Maybe the "overhyped" Conflicker?
is doing it?
Best Slashdot Co
From my comcast connection at home, we've had difficulty accessing:
twitter.com, ezrider.bart.gov, and facebook.com
From my AT&T smartphone, via both the native browser (which uses AT&T's net connection) and Skyfire (which uses Skyfire's net connection -- they effectively proxy), I've had difficulty with:
twitter.com and ezrider.bart.gov
Now I'm finally in the office, on our DSL (sonic.net, copper owned by AT&T), and still can't access:
twitter.com and ezrider.bart.gov
I wonder if twitter.com and ezrider.bart.gov are sharing a datacenter or something.
Won't somebody please think of the geeks...
Really, dude? Really?
Good point - a sustained outage ought to actually be visible in the detailed breakdown of their end-of-year reports as a momentary decrease in the rate of losses.
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
I wonder what the loss of revenue is for companies like Dell who recently posted earnings of $3M from Twitter sales. I know for me, it's an inconvenience as I just released mobile versions of my rpg supplements and twittered about it, which will probably be lost in a see of tweets from various people this morning about twitter being down. I also promote other pdf books through a second Twitter account that is undoubtedly not gaining any referral fees with no one clicking on the links since the site is down. Ultimately though, my loss of revenue will be around $20 LOL so it's not like my mortgage payment or something that will make me a sad panda, but for companies like Dell, I wonder how much they estimate their losses at, probably higher than actual, but still a fair amount I bet.
Ave Molech Setting
um... no. Gwibber is also timing out when trying to connect to Twitter (or, if it does succeed, it's being painfully slow). As is Twitteriffic, Twitter Tools for WordPress and just about every other app which uses the Twitter API.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
No, really it was not.
You are all a bunch of idots.
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.
You mean the one that ended Sunday? Nice. Real nice.
Practically every news source is reporting it on their front page. Including BBC, MSNBC, Reuters, CNN, etc...
But continue on dorkmeister.
I'm wondering if that HTML5 demo http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/08/05/2348219/HTML-5-Canvas-Experiment-Hints-At-Things-To-Come?art_pos=8 had anything to do with it. If the normal /. crowd went to the demo, which then in turn loads 100 'tweets' from twitter, is that not equivalent to twitter receiving a 100x slash-dotting?
Tom...
Actually, my first thought is this
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
This could be an expensive attack. There are estimates that just a few hours without social networking could lead to billions of dollars in increased productivity.
Imagine if Slashdot went down. Spam would be wiped out in a day, Linux audio would be bug free in a week, and next month we'd see the release of GNU Hurd.
Normally I would use Twitter to find out why a site is inaccessible, since it is the goto place for up to the minute news. While Slashdot did eventually bring the story forward, it too far too long to be relevant. Twitter was already back online by the time this story appeared on the front page.
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
Nations across the world increase their economic output by 78% as millions of people at work start doing their jobs again, temporarily suspending a world-wise recession.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
What's funny is when I read this article summary I loaded up twitter in one tab and clicked on the Read More link in this tab ... Twitter loaded right away, whereas slashdot could not be found, for at least a minute anyway. It's here now, but no sign of a ddos on twitter anymore... other than the fact that it's a trending topic so there were tons of inane comments there for me to read while slashdot was slashdotted.
Can someone provide a mirror of this slashdot page in case it gets slashdotted again?
9:18 PST and it is down for me in B.C.
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.
Before tweet
After tweet
So it's true. You really can do profound things limiting yourself to 140 characters.
...office productivity is up 50 percent today.
Stephen Fry has been hospitalised and is queueing messages from his PatientLine text terminal in readiness for the site returning. "Twatter ++ungood sweeties zomg I do believe I'm feeling a little faint."
The source of the attack is unknown, but is hypothesised to be either the Russian Mafia, the Iranian security forces, the Chinese government or Alan Davies recoiling from his latest humiliation on QI.
News agencies around the world condemned the attack, which hits at the root of their online news-gathering processes, and have had to resort to following the Wikipedia "Recent Changes" feed. "Apparently BUSH IS GAY LOLOLOL," says the current CNN front page headline. "Who knew?"
A new site, "Grunter," has attempted to take up the slack. Users of "Grunter" are freed from the wordy excesses of Twitter's 140-character limit and can post one of twelve pre-programmed onomatopoeic noises, such as "mmrph," "huh," "grah" or "tubgirl."
Popular teenage angst poetry blogging and fan fiction site LiveJournal was affected by a similar attack at about the same time, but that attack was considered "just as well, really."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Well I guess we know who has the biggest social network: Conflicker.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
More motivation for all the Twitter users to start using Flutter instead.
Only Windows users bring that up.
There, fixed that for you
The page at Wired.com with the story has a large graphic on the top, right part of the page saying readers can follow tech events via Twitter. Or, you know, not ... ;)
Bark less. Wag more.
Hmm, twitter is up is it? I don't think so.
All the shallow newspeak condensation of texting with character limits with all the interactivity of e-mail circa 1975, as far far as I am concerned the twitter hype can't die fast enough. Fo course it makes $ many for large centralized corporations as shallow people update us on how they just finished eating a cheeseburger (isn't that fascinating?) so we dare not question it, right net.Libertarian$?
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
As many times as I've read that news stories were first reported on twitter, I wonder if this story "broke" on twitter.
Don't they get most of their stuff from Twitter these days?
Granted, I don't watch CNN and get my impression of them from The Daily Show, but judging by that coverage it seems like CNN is reduced to just reading aloud stuff from Twitter.
I'm still waiting for The Daily Show showing a clip showing a CNN host trying to read out "OMG PWNIES!!1!!111oneONE"
I disagree, unless "segway" means anything apart from the Jeff Bezos creation.
"Segue" is pronounced "segway", and is almost certainly what the product name was evoking.
What's so special about Twitter's architecture?
Is DDoSing the login servers difficult?
Obviously someone has social problems.
Not even the fail whale was working...
It is still working fine for me, and was at the time of posting as well.
Oh, I don't think it is particularly informative to waste resources in putting Twits on the air.
Unless the Twits are reading news that actual reporters with active brains have found.
How will we find out about it without Twitter's trending topics? How did we used to find out about these things?
Or with the alleged AT&T / 4chan DDoS? http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/07/27/054230/ATT-Blocks-Part-of-4chan
Analysts report office productivity skyrocketed today.
"When I couldn't get on Twitter and Facebook, I figured I might as well get some work done," said one office denizen.
Early reports indicate the single-day increased domestic output may have propelled the country of the recession ...
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
Yeah. Almost like he tried to come up with a bad analogy.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
and mine is this... think about it, every /.er that fired up the test pulled 100-ish tweets simultaneously for the sparkling dot bling on the test page. that would make the site a slashdot-effect magnifier with a factor of about 100...
then again, how many slashdotters actually RTFA?
> I would look at is P2P networking, followed by Usenet...
Usenet is the original peer to peer network.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
then again, how many slashdotters actually RTFA?
What is that A in there for? Is there some part of this whole slashdot thing that I'm missing?
Thank for reading to the sig. You may stop reading now. It is safe. There is no more content. Why are you still reading?
Facebook and Twitter are the blight of the internet.
Twitter works just fine for me, unlike the new format of updating /. as I scroll down the page.
"If I had more time I would have written a shorter letter." - Proust (?)
Brevity, simplicity, and disposability are good things for many messages. I'm learning to like a communication stream with brief updates that I can parse in three seconds or ignore when I'm busy without an email program exclaiming that I have fifty messages unread.
As I write this the first item on Google News is Could YOU be responsible for the Twitter outage?
The story says if you don't keep your computer clean of viruses you could be partly responsible.
Hopefully, a few of the people with insecure computers will get tired of being pwned and take back their machine. I would call that a plus.
==
Could YOU be responsible for the Twitter outage? ...
CNET News - Larry Magid - 43 minutes ago
Of course you're not personally responsible for bringing down Twitter, but if your computer isn't equipped with up-to-date anti-malware software and the latest version of your operating system, you could unwittingly be part of the
Facebook Confirms Problems, But Is It an Attack? PC Magazine
Twitter Hit By 'Denial-Of-Service' Attack Wall Street Journal
Computerworld - InformationWeek - Los Angeles Times - PC World
all 821 news articles
Email this story
BBC News
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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 ?
...lost! Oh the humanity.
Perhaps this is just me but...probably what you had for lunch is pretty low on most peoples "care-dar". When I get together with my friends...know how often we talk about lunch...almost never. Know how may SMSs I've received about peoples lunch? or IMs or emails for that matter? Those figures hang pretty close to zero too. But Twitter? From my modest sampling of tweets it seems like it's pretty close to mandatory to shoutout about your ingestibles. I can think of some reasons for why this particular subject comes up but the real revelation for tweeters (or twits or whatever you call yourselves) should be that MOST OF YOU ARE REACHING PRETTY DAMN FAR TO COME UP WITH SOMETHING TO TALK ABOUT!!
It's all been bullshit since Tim Berners-Lee wrote his first href.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
Dude, I am so going to Tweet thi....
I am so going to Dent this!
Nothing to see here. Move along.
"Hmm, twitter is up is it? I don't think so."
It's up. It's down. It's up. It's down.
At the moment (2:30 est) it's down. It came up enough to give me a page just now, and now it's back to being dead.
Need Mercedes parts ?
You mean PDT, right? 9:18 PST = 10:18 PDT
Twitter/Facebook down, recession declared over.
Coincidence? I think not...
Runner... run
Swimmer... swim
Twitters... twit?
"Normally I would use Twitter to find out why a site is inaccessible,"
Try http://herdict.org/
Need Mercedes parts ?
I don't know about the new attacks, but I researched a bit after
Gregory Steuck posted about "XXE (Xml eXternal Entity) attack" on
Bugtraq in 2002 (http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/297714).
You can easily do DoS attacks on a Java-based thing running on
e.g. Linux if you manage to trick the server into parsing one of the
following two XML documents:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE foo [
<!ENTITY xee SYSTEM "file:/dev/tty">
]>
<foo>foo: &xee;</foo>
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE foo SYSTEM "file:/dev/tty">
Both will make the XML parser try to read from the TTY, thus blocking
"forever" waiting for input that never comes. The fun thing is that
it doesn't help to setExpandEntityReferences(false), even though the
name sounds like it would help. The only thing that works (afaik), is
to install a custom made EntityResolver that refuses to look up
external entities. Since nobody does that, this vulnerability may be
found all over the place.
Variations exist for other OS-es and other web platforms as well. I
even found that Adobe Reader was vulnerable once
(http://shh.thathost.com/secadv/adobexxe/), and I recently stumbled
across a similar thing in a commercial web-protecting security
application. (They're working on a fix.)
People are making all their appliances twitter now.
this is about organizing for u.s. health care reform.
What's the point in DDoS twitter?
For EPIC lulz. You don't need to be a troll to appreciate the awesome hilarity in sending every twit and twitter-obsessed news channel into a panicked tizzy over a stupid microblogging site. The whole dumb world has gone nuts over the most trivial thing on the planet. I think this is the most raw unadulterated fun you could have with a botnet. If it was me I'd probably end up literally killing myself with laughter!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Its site may be down, but few people use Twitter through its web site. The service itself has been running for me all day, except for one brief period around 10AM that lasted for about 10 minutes.
I use Twitterific on my Mac.
I meant 9:18 AM! yes.
Stands for Read The FRIENDLY* Article
* Meanings may vary
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
What now?
Watch the average Twitter user try to figure out what a "DDoS" is in real-time! This is even funnier than the swine flu scare...
My favorite so far: "DDoS? So it's like a terrorist attack on the Internet???".
Or possibly Dean Kamen?
You are not the customer.
Patch panels can be so confusing. My bad.
He's posting from over 2000 years in the past, and you're quibbling over a single hour?
I wonder how come no company sponsors Twitter which will just appear as banner in "About" page.
For example, Turkish fast food ordering site yemeksepeti.com has "Powered by Sun" banner, a tiny banner who doesn't disturb anyone (most have no clue anyway) and when someone in IT business spot it, they say "hmm, it is ASP powered and runs on Sun blades. Perhaps Sun should be considered for our next IT expense."
For something sized like Twitter, unless there is a huge flaw in how it is designed, IBM who struggles to explain why mainframe needed could step up, say "Twitter was having serious issues and thanks to our mainframe solution which is spread to 5 continents, the issues are over"
If I ever needed some kind of massive bandwidth and uptime, "Rack Space" would come to my mind. Why? Slashdot. Basic as that. I am sure there are other hosting providers which can handle that load but I use Slashdot daily and never seen it down, even on 9/11. Most people who are interested in how things work knows slashdot is hosted on rack space, uses perl etc. Just like when someone talks about "FreeBSD is dead, netcraft confirms it", you just reply "yahoo.com".
Ahhh, that makes sense. Unfortunately, nothing of much value goes on Twitter, so I guess I'll leave others to the analysis. Now, I'm not saying Twitter isn't useful. I use it to keep in touch with what friends are doing (e.g. riding their motorcycle on a local twisty, hitting the beach, etc) which is hard to do otherwise when you live in SoCal, where you can be doing 1000 different things any day. It's cut down on the, "Hey what'd you do yesterday?" "I hit Palomar mountain." "*SIGH* I would have gone if I'd known..."
for the last few weeks, so naturally it falls over immediately, like everything else computer-related I get involved in for the last X years...As Woody Allen says, "Nothing works and nobody cares."
I was just tweeting Gavin Bonnar (Sharon Corr's husband) about how he could get more followers than his wife - just offer free concert tickets to anyone who follows him. Instant 5,000 followers! But then I told him he'd then owe her money. LOL
Following celebrities on Twitter is fun. Lisa Rinna once tweeted that she was stuck in traffic and had to pee.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
using Twitter. . . never mind, you can't.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I know of, other than the use Iranian democracy protesters are making of it, is real-time messages on what's going on in Congressional and state legislator committee meetings closed to the media.
Tech Public Policy stuff
"and mine is this... think about it, every /.er that fired up the test pulled 100-ish tweets simultaneously for the sparkling dot bling on the test page. that would make the site a slashdot-effect magnifier with a factor of about 100...
then again, how many slashdotters actually RTFA?"
You know you might not be wrong about this. For every slashdotter that didn't RTFA there was one that did. And the visual is SO cool it gets passed around to everybody they know - plus each person probably ran it a dozen times in the first day.
Twitter runs on the edge anyway - on a busy day expect the fail whale to put in an appearance, so if it's that close this might be the straw that broke the camels back.
Shut it down for an hour and see what happens.
Need Mercedes parts ?
"Its site may be down, but few people use Twitter through its web site. The service itself has been running for me all day, except for one brief period around 10AM that lasted for about 10 minutes." "
True, messages from Twitter are leaking into facebook. But, the Twitter site is still unreachable here, at least by me, 12 hours later.
I just *know* it's something I said, I just *know* it.
Need Mercedes parts ?
100 is the average.
Do you hear that noise over your head?
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
On the way home I read that "Google was also targeted but was able to fend off the assault", but now that I'm home, Gmail is timing out.
Of course I'd normally be broadcasting this information on Twitter, but I don't have an account.
I’m old enough to remember 16K of memory being described as “whopping”
i hope the first thing people will do is hand them a check for $10mill and personally thank them on behalf of the rest of the sane world.
Smoking cures cancer. Smoking also cures stupidity. check darwinawards . com for some stupid stuff