"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."
Nobody gives a shit about Twitter. I use it every day but don't care. This is news because a website a lot of people use is down and nobody can do a damn thing about it. Banks next? Paypal? IANA? A-root?
That's not what people expect of the intartubes. And half of them are going "uh, if this happened to me I would not know what to do, besides lose money".
"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.
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.
"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.
Yeah it does. Even works in FF and Opera at the same time, but if you put one window over the other the background one slows to a crawl. Also, it won't resize properly unless you reload the window.
I stared at this thing much longer than any sane person should have.
"I'm not an expert on DNS. Can someone explain to me, as simply as possible, why this is a bad thing? I understand that it's a pain to be redirected to some random ad-laden piss-poor search page, but what will this break? "
There are 65,535 ports. The behavior of this hijacking is that all names for every one of those 64K services is a function of a certain application that uses port 80 (and sometimes 443). What does "there's no such web address" mean to FTP, Mail, IRC SSH or what have you?
The thing that gets me about the gateway and pot addiction stories is this: life is full of a huge array of personality types. Some people are gonna be fucked up losers no matter what. Of course they start with pot, it's easier to get. Of course they keep going until the destroy their lives with drugs, they were sick to start with and drugs make mentally ill people worse.
But the number of people who smoke pot every day and still contribute to society? Louis Armstrong was a bigger stoner than almost anybody. Show me the harm. And there's lots of people like that.
If pot is a gateway drug that leads to harder things then this is news to me. It's not what I've observed. Being a bit cynical I'd say it was more true prescription drugs are a gateway that leads to illegal drug use. At least that you can read about in the paper.
There's a 1976 study by Car and Driver that found the same thing.
They set up a slalom, took baseline times among a number of their staff in various cars then each day had them try, on succeeding days: 1 joint, 1 drink, 2 joints, 2 drinks, 1 joint and 1 drink.
The 1 joint crowd had the fastest times. the 2 drinks and 1 joint and one drink were the slowest.
Note that the 1 joint test times surpassed the basline times.
"Older version were *really* nasty, and had a data file format so complicated... "
Rememeber that this was a product of the early 1980s; Brian Reid, Director of Digital Equipment Corporation's Network Systems Laboratory ("decwrl.uucp") hired a kid, Paul Vixie, to take the buggy Berkley B-tree code and turn it into something resembling professional software. At the time even C was not even close to ubiquitous, Assembler was though and in fact the great majority of code written for the early microprocessor based systems of that era was written in assembly.
So it should not be any great shock that bind config files looked like assembly code, or that the later versions looked like C.
Frankly I found the earlier bind config files much easier to use, and the djbdns config files even easier (once you get used to them) to use, and (much) more importantly, you can write a program to manipulate these datum very easily. It's ugly and complicated with bind data files of any version.
"This is very interesting. I'm sure the people behind BIND will scramble to get things sorted out ASAP, but I wonder how long it will take other vendors (Apple, I'm looking at you!) to release a patch. "
I'd be less concerned about that than I would be about how long it will take for people to do something about this on their nameservers. IMO the best update to BIND is DJBDNS but that's just me.
Either way, there are FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND nameservers out there. Some of them still run Bind 4.7.
Slashdot Mirror
" Fo course it makes $ many for large centralized corporations as shallow people "
Makes money? Twitter?
Um... no.
" dammit guys, what's the first rule of usenet? AND the second?" "
(waves) I know! I know! Can I answer this?
1) There is no Cabal.
2) Dinette set for sale in New Jersey - $35.
" 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."
Nobody gives a shit about Twitter. I use it every day but don't care. This is news because a website a lot of people use is down and nobody can do a damn thing about it. Banks next? Paypal? IANA? A-root?
That's not what people expect of the intartubes. And half of them are going "uh, if this happened to me I would not know what to do, besides lose money".
"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.
"Normally I would use Twitter to find out why a site is inaccessible,"
Try http://herdict.org/
"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.
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.
"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.
Yeah it does. Even works in FF and Opera at the same time, but if you put one window over the other the background one slows to a crawl. Also, it won't resize properly unless you reload the window.
I stared at this thing much longer than any sane person should have.
" I'm not an expert on DNS. Can someone explain to me, as simply as possible, why this is a bad thing? I understand that it's a pain to be redirected to some random ad-laden piss-poor search page, but what will this break? "
There are 65,535 ports. The behavior of this hijacking is that all names for every one of those 64K services is a function of a certain application that uses port 80 (and sometimes 443). What does "there's no such web address" mean to FTP, Mail, IRC SSH or what have you?
It literally breaks everything.
The thing that gets me about the gateway and pot addiction stories is this: life is full of a huge array of personality types. Some people are gonna be fucked up losers no matter what. Of course they start with pot, it's easier to get. Of course they keep going until the destroy their lives with drugs, they were sick to start with and drugs make mentally ill people worse.
But the number of people who smoke pot every day and still contribute to society? Louis Armstrong was a bigger stoner than almost anybody. Show me the harm. And there's lots of people like that.
If pot is a gateway drug that leads to harder things then this is news to me. It's not what I've observed. Being a bit cynical I'd say it was more true prescription drugs are a gateway that leads to illegal drug use. At least that you can read about in the paper.
There's a 1976 study by Car and Driver that found the same thing.
They set up a slalom, took baseline times among a number of their staff in various cars
then each day had them try, on succeeding days: 1 joint, 1 drink, 2 joints, 2 drinks, 1 joint and 1 drink.
The 1 joint crowd had the fastest times.
the 2 drinks and 1 joint and one drink were the slowest.
Note that the 1 joint test times surpassed the basline times.
" half-pound ball of nickel-cobalt cement reinforced with titantium carbide" "
Aren't you going to need a zirconium oxide layer on the outside as heat shield?
"Too many layers of magic would be required to make this even a fun mental exercise."
True, which means the most interesting question now is "how long". 5 years? 50 years? The answer there of course, is, "it depends".
For now though, it's cool we can even be talking about this.
"Where is the monster DHS bureaucrat - the monster that takes two hour lunch breaks, goes to conferences, and whines about their pay? "
ICANN.
" USENET died. Where else are we supposed to have tech flame wars?"
Twitter.
Start with #dns and work up to #icann.
"Comments lie. Code never lies." - Keith Doyle, 1981.
" Bullshit. The best programmers don't know if they're awesome. They just think everyone else is stupid."
Consider this: if you're of perfectly average intelligence then half the world is more stupid than you.
If you're in the top 1% of programming prowess, then, by definition, pretty much everybody else is stupid.
Q.E.D.
"Why not Amiga OS?"
Guru meditation errors, that's why not.
"It's called leadership."
It's called psychosis. Get used to it maggots, that's the way the world works. Do better when it's you.
http://www.bullyonline.org/workbully/serial.htm
" According to the "attractive, intelligent, sane: pick two" law"
TWO? I've been married twice. How do you get to pick two?
And fuck Godwin. I said it first. Really.
"Congress's reaction is predictable and hilarious, but to be fair, they are only talking about banning P2P use on government computers."
*and* government contractors. So no more show tunes in Marina del Rey at the ICANN office.
http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/internet/domains/eyestar/icann/inside/
" Older version were *really* nasty, and had a data file format so complicated... "
Rememeber that this was a product of the early 1980s; Brian Reid, Director of Digital Equipment Corporation's Network Systems Laboratory ("decwrl.uucp") hired a kid, Paul Vixie, to take the buggy Berkley B-tree code and turn it into something resembling professional software. At the time even C was not even close to ubiquitous, Assembler was though and in fact the great majority of code written for the early microprocessor based systems of that era was written in assembly.
So it should not be any great shock that bind config files looked like assembly code, or that the later versions looked like C.
Frankly I found the earlier bind config files much easier to use, and the djbdns config files even easier (once you get used to them) to use, and (much) more importantly, you can write a program to manipulate these datum very easily. It's ugly and complicated with bind data files of any version.
" Your post reads like you'll ask for $20 to show people how THEY TOO CAN SET UP A .HOSTS FILE "
Still cheaper than a $35 domain from Verisign.
" This is very interesting. I'm sure the people behind BIND will scramble to get things sorted out ASAP, but I wonder how long it will take other vendors (Apple, I'm looking at you!) to release a patch. "
I'd be less concerned about that than I would be about how long it will take for people to do something about this on their nameservers. IMO the best update to BIND is DJBDNS but that's just me.
Either way, there are FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND nameservers out there. Some of them still run Bind 4.7.