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
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.
What is twitter? Is that some new web site or something?
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
Finally. now everyone can get back to work.
If it ain't broke, DON'T fix it.
Say about Defcon what you want. Yes, it lost its edge. Yes, it got watered down. Yes, it's not the top notch hacker con it used to be. Yes, it's been turned into the BH stepchild-still-in-puberty.
But even there nobody is yet so low to consider Twitter a worthy target.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
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.
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.
...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
For people that actually socialize it provides benefits. I've reconnected with old friends, made dates, organized parties, laughed (at someones silly pictures) and learned (from someones interesting post) countless times on facebook. I've found a few people that meant a lot to me, and have restarted some kind of relationship with them. I've joined groups that share like interests and attended events that I would have otherwise missed. It has value. I don't know of any other thing that does this stuff quite as well. In short, it's a useful way to communicate with most everyone you know.
I can't speak for twitter, but millions of other people find use in it.
The whole "I'm to cool for the popular social networking sites" crowd gets on my nerves.
Because here we sit, sharing opines with like minded individuals on a public website.
Does that make us elite?
Pot-kettle-black as they say.
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.
Yes, I get CDC outbreak updates, political updates, software updates. These are hardly social nonsense. If you don't "get" twitter, that's fine, but don't assume it's useless.
Twitter is like the news ticker with RSS feeds being the newspaper.
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.
You need to look at opportunity cost: what is lost in order to gain these benefits?
1) Millions of people could be using something else.
2) "Following" people on Twitter is necessarily superficial compared to other media, which offer the same benefits without the message size limit.
3) Instant knowledge of world events is available in many media, with Twitter again being more superficial than the others.
4) No, it's a means by which protesters disseminate information. It worked in Iran because it's new and the government didn't know how to block it as well as other services at first. It has no inherent advantage in this area.
5) Your point is preposterous. It allows for a deeper understanding of how people use Twitter, sure, but that's not valuable.
6) And an inferior one at that.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Maybe it is different for you, but that seems to be the general trend that I have noticed. People find these old friends on Facebook, but never seem to really communicate with then for very long. I would guess that if it really was so important to talk to someone, you could have called or emailed them; there are a few exceptional cases where a person really did vanish for a few years and nobody knew how to get in touch with them, but that is not as common as people seem to think it is.
As a case-in-point, a friend of mine from high school who had been unreachable for 4 years because of her drug problems contacted me on AIM a few months ago; we reconnected with no social networking site, just using the same communication system we had been using before. I still have hundreds of email addresses, phone numbers, and screen names of people I was friends with at one point or another, most of whom are still reachable through those channels, who I simply do not talk to. Social networking websites do not solve this problem.
With regard to events that you would not have known about...well, unless those events were not happening before the advent of social networking services, I strongly doubt that Facebook really made you more aware of the events or more able to find them. I still manage to find out about relevant events by email, phone calls, and word of mouth, just like people did 10, 50, and 100 years ago. Can you honestly say that you go to events that you would not have heard about except over Facebook? That you did not receive any emails, phone calls, or hear any of your friends (in real life) talking about? Maybe you can; that would make you an exceptional case, at least from what I have encountered over the past few years.
It's not that I am too cool for social networking sites; I just do not use them, and that has not been a problem for me.
Palm trees and 8
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?
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.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
He's posting from over 2000 years in the past, and you're quibbling over a single hour?