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.
Re:And nothing of value was lost (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (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.
Re:And nothing of value was lost (Score:5, Informative)
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Parent is insightful, not funny (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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: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: (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.
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: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: (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:And nothing of value was lost (Score:5, Funny)
Re:And nothing of value was lost (Score:5, Insightful)
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That, and correcting them for using "tweeters", people who use twitter are called "twits", I thought everyone knew that.
Re:And nothing of value was lost (Score:5, Funny)
I thought it was "twats".
So did David Cameron apparently.
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Nope, twit. Twat shares less letters with twitter, and can be construed as unnecessarily vulgar. Twit gets the point across quite nicely.
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I'll file that under "useless facts".
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Confirmed by Twitter (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
I know we don't RTFA around here, but its only sources are the Twitter blog itself.
Re:Confirmed by Twitter (Score:5, Funny)
And adding ... (Score:5, Funny)
The Dark Side. (Score:3, Funny)
This is what happens when you anger the googles.
Status page confirms its a DDOS (Score:3, Informative)
http://status.twitter.com/
Quick! (Score:5, Funny)
... oh wait
It's kinda back... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
what is twitter? (Score:4, Funny)
Whoops. (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
aha. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:aha. (Score:5, Funny)
So THAT's what Conficker's for.
Now I wish I hadn't patched my machines.
In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (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 :)
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: (Score:2)
You joke, but with Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal all down, I bet workplace productivity will see a bump today.
Oh No... (Score:3, Funny)
...what will Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore do?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Defcon to blame? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Cloud? Decentralize (Score:3, Interesting)
Decentralization is the solution to single-link failures.
Cloud is centralization.
JM2C, YMMV.
Re: (Score:2)
Big sites have issues with DDOS attacks, period. Doesn't matter if they are cloud hosted or not.
In fact, Amazon's cloud infrastructure is far more distributed than most other individual companies infrastructure. Of course, you have to set up multiple availability zones.
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.
Not DDoS, SlashDotted (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Compared to Twitter's usual activity load, a slashdotting is not going to be that big a deal.
What we will do now? (Score:4, Funny)
And Now for Something Completely Different (Score:2)
There was weeping and gnashing of teeth - by tweens everywhere
And there was MUCH rejoicing - By everyone else
MDDoS (Score:2)
Maybe the Iranian government (Score:2)
is doing it [cnet.com]?
Is this taking down an entire datacenter? (Score:2)
From my comcast connection at home, we've had difficulty accessing:
twitter.com, ezrider.bart.gov, and facebook.com
From my AT&T smartphone, via both the native browser (which uses AT&T's net connection) and Skyfire (which uses Skyfire's net connection -- they effectively proxy), I've had difficulty with:
twitter.com and ezrider.bart.gov
Now I'm finally in the office, on our DSL (sonic.net, copper owned by AT&T), and still can't access:
twitter.com and ezrider.bart.gov
I wonder if twitter.com and ezri
Geeks (Score:2)
Loss of revenue? (Score:2)
I wonder what the loss of revenue is for companies like Dell who recently posted earnings of $3M from Twitter sales [slashdot.org]. I know for me, it's an inconvenience as I just released mobile versions [bit.ly] of my rpg supplements [morbidgames.com] and twittered about it [twitter.com], which will probably be lost in a see of tweets from various people this morning about twitter being down. I also promote other pdf books [twitter.com] through a second Twitter account that is undoubtedly not gaining any referral fees with no one clicking on the links since the site is down.
Oh come on. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
On top of that,
makes me want to break pencils and kick puppies.
HTML5 demo (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm wondering if that HTML5 demo http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/08/05/2348219/HTML-5-Canvas-Experiment-Hints-At-Things-To-Come?art_pos=8 [slashdot.org] had anything to do with it. If the normal /. crowd went to the demo, which then in turn loads 100 'tweets' from twitter, is that not equivalent to twitter receiving a 100x slash-dotting?
Tom...
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.
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: (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
In the news today (Score:2)
Nations across the world increase their economic output by 78% as millions of people at work start doing their jobs again, temporarily suspending a world-wise recession.
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."
How Will CNN Survive?!? (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't they get most of their stuff from Twitter these days?
Granted, I don't watch CNN and get my impression of them from The Daily Show, but judging by that coverage it seems like CNN is reduced to just reading aloud stuff from Twitter.
I'm still waiting for The Daily Show showing a clip showing a CNN host trying to read out "OMG PWNIES!!1!!111oneONE"
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:Nelson ------- (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Nelson ------- (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What's truly disheartening to me is that a formerly relevant news site like cnn.com has it on their front page. Oh CNN, I remember when you used to report actual news...now look what you've become.
Obviously you haven't watched CNN lately, otherwise you would know how dependent they are on Twitter now. Seems like all they do these days is read Twitter messages from viewers.
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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: (Score:3, Interesting)
The funny thing is that nobody used or cared about twitter outside of a handful of nerds until the people in charge of twitter struck on the advertising idea of "convince everyone that everyone is already using it, and it's the most popular thing online". After that, it started being reported on weekly by sites like Slashdot as well as major news sites, until it started getting massive buyout offers.
Honestly, I still don't think that many people care about it. There are a handful of popular bloggers, but
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Apparently so many people were checking downforeveryoneorjustme.com in a panic that it crashed too. Ah, Twitterers.
In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
...office productivity is up 50 percent today.
Re:In other news... (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (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: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Nelson ------- (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Nelson ------- (Score:4, Funny)
No it wouldn't.
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It seems to be back on here, so this doesn't really seem all that distinguishable from normal twitter down time.
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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.
(Yes, that would be the convention that's been over for four days now anyway...)
Re:I Only Use Slashdot Anyway (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I Only Use Slashdot Anyway (Score:5, Interesting)
then again, how many slashdotters actually RTFA?
My First thought was this (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Re: (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: (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: (Score:3, Interesting)
Gregory Steuck posted about "XXE (Xml eXternal Entity) attack" on
Bugtraq in 2002 (http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/297714).
You can easily do DoS attacks on a Java-based thing running on
e.g. Linux if you manage to trick the server into parsing one of the
following two XML documents:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE foo [
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Normally I would use Twitter to find out why a site is inaccessible, since it is the goto place for up to the minute news. While Slashdot did eventually bring the story forward, it too far too long to be relevant. Twitter was already back online by the time this story appeared on the front page.
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: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: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:Who is hitting it that hard? (Score:4, Funny)
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Good point - a sustained outage ought to actually be visible in the detailed breakdown of their end-of-year reports as a momentary decrease in the rate of losses.
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