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.
If any story deserves that tag, its this.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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
The blogosphere is buzzing about this. The amount of crap being spouted related to this incident is now causing blogal warming.
Always proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
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
Finally. now everyone can get back to work.
If it ain't broke, DON'T fix it.
I expect bloggers to go nuts about this sort of thing. What's truly disheartening to me is that a formerly relevant news site like cnn.com has it on their front page. Oh CNN, I remember when you used to report actual news...now look what you've become.
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.
No it wouldn't.
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.
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.
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.
...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
What's truly disheartening to me is that a formerly relevant news site like cnn.com has it on their front page. Oh CNN, I remember when you used to report actual news...now look what you've become.
Obviously you haven't watched CNN lately, otherwise you would know how dependent they are on Twitter now. Seems like all they do these days is read Twitter messages from viewers.
You mean like cats stuck in trees and some random missing girl out of the 100s or thousands missing just because this one happens to be rich (and/or) pretty?
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 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.
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?
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?
The funny thing is that nobody used or cared about twitter outside of a handful of nerds until the people in charge of twitter struck on the advertising idea of "convince everyone that everyone is already using it, and it's the most popular thing online". After that, it started being reported on weekly by sites like Slashdot as well as major news sites, until it started getting massive buyout offers.
Honestly, I still don't think that many people care about it. There are a handful of popular bloggers, but I don't think I've ever met a person in "real life" that has twittered for longer than a week. I'm 26, by the way.
A similar strategy was/is used by Second Life, which is why corporations started flocking to it and then realized they'd been duped.
Twitter works just fine for me, unlike the new format of updating /. as I scroll down the page.
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!!
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.)
OTOH, Mod parent up would be a good name for a rock band.
I do not have a signature
No it wouldn't.
He's posting from over 2000 years in the past, and you're quibbling over a single hour?