Twitter Offline Due To DDoS 398
Posted
by
CmdrTaco
from the hate-when-that-happens dept.
from the hate-when-that-happens dept.
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.
Nelson ------- (Score:1, Insightful)
I hate to be the one to say it, but "Ha Ha"
Re:And nothing of value was lost (Score:2, Insightful)
I know you're joking, but Twitter does have a nearly unique architecture that makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to block without blocking the entire Internet. Now, say what you will about the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of using it as a protest or organization tool, but at least it keeps the lines of communication open in spite of government interference.
Parent is insightful, not funny (Score:2, Insightful)
Defcon to blame? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:And nothing of value was lost (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:And nothing of value was lost (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nelson ------- (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Nelson ------- (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I Only Use Slashdot Anyway (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Oh No... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not DDoS, SlashDotted (Score:3, Insightful)
Compared to Twitter's usual activity load, a slashdotting is not going to be that big a deal.
Lets look at this (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Give me a break (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:HTML5 demo (Score:4, Insightful)
Twitter's API returns tweets in chunks; it's not one call per tweet.
A slashdotting is not really an appreciable bump in traffic for Twitter. They have a lot of throughput at any given time.
Re:And nothing of value was lost (Score:1, Insightful)
Twittor
Twitter != Reliable news source (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Parent is insightful, not funny (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Parent is insightful, not funny (Score:3, Insightful)
Twitter isn't completely worthless. Like MySpace is serves a very good purpose - it keeps the idiots occupied on a very small chunk of the web so the rest of us can easily avoid them and get on with out lives.
Re:Nelson ------- (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Lets look at this (Score:2, Insightful)
"A plus to society" is the kind of thing that can only be judged in retrospect. When online social networking's been around for several generations, maybe we'll be able to decide. What is undeniable right now is that it's important to a hell of a lot of people, and people who reflexively say "no it's not" are ignoring the reality that's staring them in the face.
Re:Cloud? Decentralize (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Lets look at this (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Lets look at this (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Parent is insightful, not funny (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Parent is insightful, not funny (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah actually that's how I hear about most things first. Then when I see people we might talk about the event,but its a great casual way to organize an event amongst groups of friends. Less intrusive than a phone call or aim. Email could be sort of an alternative, but not as rich.
For most catching up of friends you are right, but you can also discover more common interests than what was possible before through a quick aim chat. You get to listen in on their conversations with other people and see how they interact with their friends and how they react to the days events. I can honestly say that I am now a much closer fired to some people I went through high school with, than when we were in high school.
Re:I Only Use Slashdot Anyway (Score:4, Insightful)
Twitter works just fine for me, unlike the new format of updating /. as I scroll down the page.
Re:My First thought was this (Score:3, Insightful)
"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.
Re:I Only Use Slashdot Anyway (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Lets look at this (Score:1, Insightful)
Well, 1 out of 6.
Millions of people use it.
It does not allow people to follow science information; talking to scientists does. Twitter is not accurate to any degree. The value of it would be characterized specifically as gossip, and nothing more, because the ability to distinguish between gossip and science information on twitter is non-existent. You can talk to a scientist, hear something come out of their mouth, and claim, "thats horseshit,"
whereas with twitter, you simply assume it is.
News of world events are not spread through twitter. Twitter simply allows idiots to update their ever changing views on such events, despite lack of information regarding them.
I have never seen a protester disseminate information. I have seen them block traffic.
Unless you consider the portion of the world where people will say literally anything because they believe no one can trace it to them, the internet is not the place to track how people behave in society. Its sort of the definition of society is that direct interaction with other people is necessary.
I don't understand what you mean in #6. I assume you are mentally retarded based on it alone.
I would agree that twitter has value, it keeps the twits from talking to me.
Re:Lets look at this (Score:3, Insightful)
And that's exactly the point, following someone on Twitter isn't even close to declaring them a "friend", it merely means that you find their thoughts interesting and would like to subscribe to their newsletter.