Twitter Offline Due To DDoS 398
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.
And nothing of value was lost (Score:5, Funny)
If any story deserves that tag, its this.
And adding ... (Score:5, Funny)
The Dark Side. (Score:3, Funny)
This is what happens when you anger the googles.
Quick! (Score:5, Funny)
... oh wait
Re:And nothing of value was lost (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Nelson ------- (Score:5, Funny)
what is twitter? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:And nothing of value was lost (Score:5, Funny)
aha. (Score:5, Funny)
In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh No... (Score:3, Funny)
...what will Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore do?
Re:Who is hitting it that hard? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:In other news... (Score:3, Funny)
myspace is still holding 32 points of collective IQ, and the medias and entertainments the remaining 78.
Oh well, its a start :)
What we will do now? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:And nothing of value was lost (Score:5, Funny)
I thought it was "twats".
So did David Cameron apparently.
Re:Confirmed by Twitter (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What we will do now? (Score:1, Funny)
Nah, we'll sit online blogging about it all day.
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Dimwit! 32 and 78 is 110, and everyone knows 100 is the maximum. So I'm quite happy with my 90 score!
Re:aha. (Score:5, Funny)
So THAT's what Conficker's for.
Now I wish I hadn't patched my machines.
Re:Defcon to blame? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Parent is insightful, not funny (Score:4, Funny)
Nothing of value was lost -- social networking is about as important as celebrity gossip.
Cue James Earl Jones:
I find your lack of faith disturbing. The ramifications of social networking have yet to be truly felt in the outer colonies. Communication is key to productivity and morale of the people. The Emperor is a fool to take it away and not realize it for the tool that it is. It is also quite helpful to keep tabs on the new T-17. Hot little number there. If the rebel alliance is to be deterred we must know where they are, what they're doing at all times, what they're currently dining on, when they've returned from the bathroom, and how they're wearing their hair today. Twitter is the key.
Do not fail me again.
Costly (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:It's kinda back... (Score:3, Funny)
In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
...office productivity is up 50 percent today.
Twitter crashes for 90 minutes, nerds horrified (Score:5, Funny)
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."
Re:In other news... (Score:4, Funny)
My First thought was this (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Costly (Score:1, Funny)
Don't forget Duke Nuke'm Forever!
Re:I Only Use Slashdot Anyway (Score:2, Funny)
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?
Re:My First thought was this (Score:5, Funny)
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.
All those "I've having X for lunch" tweets (Score:3, Funny)
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!!
Re:Costly (Score:3, Funny)
"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"
Your post advocates a
(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (X) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would see increased use
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(X) It requires brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of slashdot will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
(X) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack Oh, wait, it relies on that.
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes Oh, wait, it relies on that.
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work, but it's the closest I've seen.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
Re:In other news... (Score:3, Funny)
imagine the amount of power being used (on data centers, routers, switchboards, computers, monitors, data lines, cellphone lines, radio towers, TV stations, newspaper centers, printing presses, etc...) just to spread the word there's a 404 error on www.twitter.com?
Re:Nelson ------- (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Nelson ------- (Score:4, Funny)
No it wouldn't.
Re:My First thought was this (Score:3, Funny)
That's what some poeple say about slashdot.
At least slashdot gives loud mouthed assholes like me more than 140 characters to express our opinions that nobody else cares about ;)
Re:HTML5 demo (Score:1, Funny)
Re:I Only Use Slashdot Anyway (Score:5, Funny)
He's posting from over 2000 years in the past, and you're quibbling over a single hour?
Re:Oh come on. (Score:3, Funny)
On top of that,
makes me want to break pencils and kick puppies.