In a post stamped "1 hour ago" at 9:15 a.m. PDT, Twitter's status blog reported that "the site is back up, but we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack." This blog was able to log in then, and found posts as old as "30 minutes ago," though I hadn't been able to log in just before 9 a.m.
Meanwhile, Mashable reports that Facebook also suffered outages Thursday morning, "although fortunately less frequent ones." Reporters and commenters at CNET News and Wired.com also reported problems with Facebook. Mashable's Pete Cashmore writes that the likely cause of Facebook's stagger was users flooding the site when they couldn't log in to Twitter.
(Update: Mashable reports that Facebook and Google were also hit by distributed denial-of-service attacks.)
So, if Twitter is such a big part of the Future -- not to mention the present -- of Journalism, what does it mean that an attack can silence it?
"Attacks such as this," wrote Twitter co-founder Biz Stone in a blog post Thursday, "are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users."
There's always somebody with an interest in silencing the news, right?
What it means is we need a new Twitter. That is, we need something to replace or augment or complement Twitter so that the resource -- short bursts of real-time information -- isn't so centralized, so easily attacked and silenced. We need a lot of Twitters.
"Centralized networks are especially vulnerable to DOS [denial of service] attacks," wrote Dave Winer of Scripting News this morning. Winer, a pioneer in RSS among many other things, often tweets that it's not good for one company to own a platform.
"Loosely-coupled networks can do better," he continued today. "I wanted to post that to Twitter, but it's under attack. Not a joke, but something to continue to think about, planning for the future."
Twitter got itself back on its feet quickly this morning, and that's a good thing. And while a denial of service attack is a bad thing, the kind of thing bad people do, this one could lead to a positive aftermath. If enough Twitter users were shocked this morning into realizing they've become too dependent on a single, central entity, we'll be on our way to the decentralization we need.
Isn't that what the Internet is all about?
mandalp1
Richard Davis
Chris Rywalt
Blue Roses
whitenoise
Anupum Mehrotra
Salon.com
Comments
How about a comment on the Red Sox, King? We're starving.
The problem with this is twofold. First, convincing ISPs to host "tweet servers". What motivation does Comcast, AT&T, etc. have to do this? From their point of view, better to just offload this onto Twitter's computers. Second, it's very hard to monetize something this distributed, which is unfortunately much more important now than it was, say, 15 years ago.
15-20 years ago, when most ISPs were universities and "the Internet" was run by a bunch of computer science grad students, a distributed Twitter probably would have taken off. Now? I wouldn't hold my breath.
Personally, I'm guessing that 99.9% of all tweets don't even rise to the level of "important" and I'm pretty sure that if Twitter never came back on line the Universe wouldn't implode.
Isn't that a similar point to what Rachel Maddow made last night when discussing the health care debate and the Town Halls that are being targeted by people at the behest of PR groups being funded by segments of the health care industry?
Just substitute democracy in place of Twitter.
The free flow of information demands as many voices as possible rising in a great cacophony. But it also requires careful listening and educated understanding to help elevate the best and the brightest ideas above all others.
Life is a participatory endeavor; the sideline is not the place anyone worth their salt wants to be for long.
The Giants, however - now we're talking Surprisingly Stellar!
Why no baseball? Why waste King on things like this? King, we love you and need more of your sports commentary. Salon is dumb.
BECAUSE, think about it, one day, with climate chaos putting the entire world in major mass migration troubles, with billions of cliamte refugees fleeing north to find shelter in "polar cities" (GOOGLE)......and when the entire computer electric grid goes down, maybe forever, and all email files are lost and all computers are shut off and all data online is LOST forever, then what? Yes, something to think about. Good point, Nick.
This all cannot last forever. In 30 generations from now, climate chaos will reduce the Earth and the human species -- our descendants -- to well, it won't be a pretty picture, needless to say: http://pcillu101.blogspot.com
What will happen then to all the information and files stored on computers worldwide. We do need a fail-safe system in place before then. But how?
Yes, this twittercrash was a good thing: a wake up call about the future....
http://zippy1300.blogspot.com/2009/08/mikes-males-on-future-of-internet.html
DDOS attacks are a nuisance, but this sort of orchestrated vandalism is only going to get worse before it gets better. Since as ordinary users there's nothing we can do about it, the only thing we can control is our reaction. I'd suggest some relaxation exercises ...and maybe carrying a book.
Honestly, Twitter goes down for a half hour or 24 does it really matter in the larger context of the work independent news sites and bloggers are doing, which is really the FOJ.
And for what it is worth, as long as we have an internet someone is going to suffer a DOS at some point.