Why Anonymous Can't Take Down Amazon.com

suraj.sun writes "The website-attacking group 'Anonymous' tried and failed to take down Amazon.com on Thursday. The group's vengeance horde quickly found out something techies have known for years: Amazon, which has built one of the world's most invincible websites, is almost impossible to crash.... Anonymous quickly figured that out. Less than an hour after setting its sights on Amazon, the group's organizers called off the attempt. 'We don't have enough forces,' they tweeted."

Comments

Re:EC2 Elastic Load Balancing

[geminidomino]

That's because you're not thinking to scale. That's $83K/year PER instance.

Re:FFS

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the OP is referring to the Waterloo, a model of car introduced in Uzvekia in 1915, named to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Napolean's defeat. Owned by the ruling class, it was made famous after a bloody 1916 factory riot in which the teeming mass of pre-Soviet strikers tried to push it back - to keep its driver from entering the factory, you understand. However, its powerful engine overcame them and drove on regardless. An apt analogy, IMHO.

Not going to happen

[Mullen]

I worked there from 2000 - 2002 and, yes, my Amazon.com knowledge might be a little dated, I can tell you one thing about Amazon.com that was just as true today as it was 10 years ago; they don't mess around when it comes to server capacity and bandwidth.

Their whole online infrastructure is built to handle the busiest hours of the busiest days of online Christmas shopping. Anonymous could never ever get enough people to make a noticeable dent in Amazon.com's ability to take orders.

Re:EC2 Elastic Load Balancing

[fusiongyro]

How do you get $83K? 0.095 * 24 * 365 = $832.20/year. 0.13 * 24 * 365 = $1,138.80/year. The difference is $306.60/year. It's too much for hosting either way, but we're talking about a ~36% Microsoft tax, which isn't far from the ordinary.

For those who are too lazy to look

[sconeu]

http://xkcd.com/325/

I can confirm - Mastercard SecureCode WAS affected

[plaukas pyragely]

We are using online payment services from SagePay in UK and almost all Mastercard transactions during the DDOS failed. Mastercard SecureCode was affected. No doubt they deny it to the press since it's quite a shame compared to Visa which had no problems with payments during DDOS.

Re:Anonymous Makes Assange Look Like a Terrorist

[BitZtream]

Terrorism is about causing fear to get your way.

That doesn't imply violence, but violence is an easy way to achieve fear.

Threatening to force someone out of their job and into financial hardship is just as much terrorism as shooting their mother, though the later is far more likely to get a response than the first, both are still terrorism even though one contains no violence.

Its pretty easy to argue that Assange is a terrorist as he clearly is attempting to put fear into 'corrupt organizations' as he deems them.

No, he's not flying planes into buildings or blowing them up or by attacking Amazon/Visa/Paypal himself, but he is most certainly attempting to use fear to get people to change, thus the very definition of terrorism applies to him.

It doesn't matter if you agree with him or disagree with him, and you don't get to qualify terrorism with your own special terms.

I'm sure you throw censorship out anytime someone does something where you don't get your way even though it would be considered the extreme fringes of censorship, now you get to see what its like on the other side.