Twitter DoS and single points of failure
Twitter went down today at the hand of a denial of service attack (alongside Facebook and Livejournal; the latter has also reported an attack). In the old days, you’d shrug it off and go and look at something else. Today, Twitter is such an integral part of the landscape, and some people’s businesses, that it made BBC News and was commented on all over the Internet.
The headlines are highly strung to say the least:
- Twitter Attack Brings a Day Without Social Media (Gawker)
- A Day (Or Hour) Without Twitter Sucks (Twitterrati)
- Twitter Goes Down, Down, Down (Technologizer, who delightfully illustrated their post with an image of an anvil falling on a bird)
The stress of it all made TechCrunch come over all Mr Humphries:
Meanwhile, away from the hilarity, Dave Winer’s developing rssCloud and people are beginning to talk about Laconi.ca. The only model that makes sense is a distributed one: it’s a fundamentally harder problem to bring down a decentralized network, because there isn’t a single point of failure. So far, for example, DNS has remained pretty robust. As regular readers will know, I strongly believe there are very solid business and development reasons for going decentralized, too.
The web is becoming social, and those conversations are becoming more and more important. A malicious user or group shouldn’t be able to take down our conversation platform – or have the ability to dictate its direction. It’s time to think about a better way to build the social web.
Wave.
if FB, Twitter, livejournal (maybe?) build on the Wave *protocol* then we not only get decentralisation, but also interoperability.
that’s why google opensourced it, because it’s too big an idea for one company to take responsibility for. quite rightly so, when taking into account identity management, digital rights, content ownership etc..
mark my words!
Josh: I completely agree
I don’t know why you mentioned laconi.ca instead of plurk or jaiku. I think you meant to mention the OpenMicroBlogging protocol: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenMicroBlogging
There’s no question we need a layer underneath Twitter – to support public micro-messaging as a medium. There’s also the PubSubHubBub stuff. No one has services that have been proven yet to scale to the network-grade capacity we will need as this medium grows. It’s a tough problem but not one that can’t be solved (e.g. telecoms and financial services have network-grade systems).
This medium has the potential as most accessible, participatory public medium in history. What underpins it needs to support that and be held in the interests of the people that use it. While I love the initial efforts of the laconi.ca, SMOB, OpenMicroBlogging, and PubSubHubbub folks – I’d love a more weighty, dedicated effort that came to this from the perspective of it as a public medium.
And really, what better investment could their be for public benefit? With what little has gone into Twitter we’ve seen some incredible impacts in reporting, transparency, and disaster response. If the state department is willing to ask Twitter to stay live and treat it effectively like an essential public infrastructure, why wouldn’t a couple of leading foundations (Knight, Shuttleworth, for example) step up and support this. It would undoubtedly be the best ‘investment’ in public benefit they could ever make.
Thanks! You might appreciate this awesome post today from and Chief Scientist of Social Network Analysis at Orgnet.com — No Tweets for You at http://www.thenetworkthinker.com/2009/08/no-tweets-for-you.html
Backs up your argument here.
No se si fue aquí o en el blog de Versus donde leí la acertada metafora entre facebook y Mcdonalds, que se podría extender a twitter.
Y es que si todos los días y todas la personas comiésemos en Mcdonalds terminaría convirtiendose en la dictadura de la cadena de comida rápida. Claro que de vez en cuando todos nos podemos comer alguna hamburguesa pero no debemos hacerlo todos los días por nuestro bien y el de los demás.
Bienvenido sea este ataque que hace ver a la gente al Rey desnudo.
(y lo digo yo que uso FB y Twitter,aunque procuro no abusar de ello, no me vaya a subir el colesterol)
This comment was originally posted on http://www.deugarte.com/)“>deUgarte.com
No se si fue aquí o en el blog de Versus donde leí la acertada metafora entre facebook y Mcdonalds, que se podría extender a twitter.
Y es que si todos los días y todas la personas comiésemos en Mcdonalds terminaría convirtiendose en la dictadura de la cadena de comida rápida. Claro que de vez en cuando todos nos podemos comer alguna hamburguesa pero no debemos hacerlo todos los días por nuestro bien y el de los demás.
Bienvenido sea este ataque que hace ver a la gente al Rey desnudo.
(y lo digo yo que uso FB y Twitter,aunque procuro no abusar de ello, no me vaya a subir el colesterol)
This comment was originally posted on http://juan.urrutiaelejalde.org/)“>Juan Urrutia 4.0 » Juan Urrutia
This comment was originally posted on http://www.deugarte.com/)“>deUgarte.com
This comment was originally posted on http://juan.urrutiaelejalde.org/)“>Juan Urrutia 4.0 » Juan Urrutia
Pánico en la Red. Tres horas sin saber si Dans va o viene del aeropuerto. O las novedades al minuto del Netoratón republicano sobre la Copa del Rey de Vela. ¡Una catástrofe!
This comment was originally posted on http://www.deugarte.com/)“>deUgarte.com
Pánico en la Red. Tres horas sin saber si Dans va o viene del aeropuerto. O las novedades al minuto del Netoratón republicano sobre la Copa del Rey de Vela. ¡Una catástrofe!
This comment was originally posted on http://juan.urrutiaelejalde.org/)“>Juan Urrutia 4.0 » Juan Urrutia
jajaja!
This comment was originally posted on http://www.deugarte.com/)“>deUgarte.com
jajaja!
This comment was originally posted on http://juan.urrutiaelejalde.org/)“>Juan Urrutia 4.0 » Juan Urrutia
The argument makes a lot of sense. I think laconi.ca’s model is a good one too considering that nodes in the distributed framework can interoperate with one another. That said it doesn’t necessarily help a network that goes down – if your account is in the affected node you’re still going to be impacted – however the outage won’t take everyone else out too. This is a good reminder that I should take another look at the platform. I created an identi.ca (runs on laconi.ca platform) account when it first launched, but haven’t done much with it since then. Here’s me: http://identi.ca/mikebogle
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
The argument makes a lot of sense. I think identi.ca’s model is a good one too considering that nodes in the distributed framework can interoperate with one another. That said it doesn’t necessarily help a network that goes down – if your account is in the affected node you’re still going to be impacted – however the outage won’t take everyone else out too. This is a good reminder that I should take another look at the platform. I created an identi.ca account when it first launched, but haven’t done much with it since then. Here’s me: http://identi.ca/mikebogle
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
yes, I subscribed to you, my nickname on Identi.ca is Olando7. The issue is of course that not many people are very active on Identi.ca. Even on Twitter the really active user base is not that enormous, let alone on Identi.ca – it’s a hangout for geeks. Which is nice, but what is for instance the political relevance of Identi.ca? You can have a well designed platform with a clever distributed architecture while being ignored completely by society at large.
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
yeah I more or less stopped using identi.ca for the reasons you described. I’ve been looking for Twitter alternatives for some time now, but the network that exists there doesn’t exist anywhere else. So it makes leaving very difficult. The advantage of the laconi.ca software is you could conceivably set up an independent node without interoperating with other nodes using the platform (e.g. a school specific space or something ) – but again, the value of these tools is in the networks and connections they facilitate. if there’s no network, there’s no real value.
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
okay, but I wonder: one could start using identi.ca and import that feed in FF, and exporting FF into Twitter. In that way one would support identi.ca while still participating in a much larger network. However, the issue remains: does one really believe in the identi.ca project? I did not decide yet, maybe I’ll give it a try.
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
I quite like laconi.ca, but I think there’s more to the equation than the software. Really the issue has nothing to do with the underlying framework and everything to do with whether or not a network develops around it. I believe in open source quite strongly and advocate openness in many forms, however that doesn’t necessarily equate to network development. There are some really nice features in the laconi.ca software, but features alone don’t make a network grow – it’s people that do that. That’s one of the reasons I’ve never used applications that ping updates everywhere. If we’re not there to engage, interact and respond with the replies and the people who send them then it’s like shouting into space and never bothering to listen. . Now if we could gather momentum amongst a community of people and establish a network of interested people who were willing to engage through laconi.ca, then we might be on to something. I guess the question comes down to how networks develop, and under what conditions. That’s a tricky…
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
I know what you mean. Really the issue has nothing to do with the underlying framework and everything to do with whether or not a network develops around it. There are some really nice features in the laconi.ca software, but features alone don’t make a network grow – it’s people that do that. That’s one of the reasons I’ve never used applications that ping updates everywhere. If we’re not there to engage, interact and respond with the replies and the people who send them then it’s like shouting into space and never bothering to listen. . Now if we could gather momentum amongst a community of people and establish a network of interested people who were willing to engage through laconi.ca, then we might be on to something. I guess the question comes down to how networks develop, and under what conditions. That’s a tricky question that I still grapple with because their nature is so complex. What are you thoughts on that?
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
It is nearly impossible to predict which networks take off when. Facebook, a platform for students in the struggle for finding a partner and a walled garden, is doing great. Twitter gets tons of hype (as Second Life got a few years ago) but I still wonder whether it is really a success outside the geeky communities – a success in terms of really actively, intensely using the platform to connect, to share ideas and to engage in conversations.But what counts for me personally is the depth of the connections and the quality of ideas. In that sense Second Life is a great environment for me because I participate in some very stimulating communities. Twitter is interesting because I connect there with people who have great reading suggestions or ideas etc, networks can be quite small but have the intellectual power of 18th century salons…
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
It is nearly impossible to predict which networks take off when. Facebook, a platform for students in the struggle for finding a partner and a walled garden, is doing great. Twitter gets tons of hype (as Second Life got a few years ago) but I still wonder whether it is really a success outside the geeky communities – a success of really actively, intensely using the platform to connect, to share ideas and to engage in conversations.
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
It is nearly impossible to predict which networks take off when. Facebook, a platform for students in the struggle for finding a partner and a walled garden, is doing great. Twitter gets tons of hype (as Second Life got a few years ago) but I still wonder whether it is really a success outside the geeky communities – a success of really actively, intensely using the platform to connect, to share ideas and to engage in conversations.But what counts fo rme personally is the depth of the connections and the quality of ideas. In that sense Second Life is a great environment for me because I participate in some very stimulating communities. Twitter is interesting because I connect there with people who have great reading suggestions or ideas etc, networks can be quite small but have the intellectual power of 18th century salons…
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
I mentioned this discussion briefly on my blog: http://www.mixedrealities.com/?p=2033
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
Have you had a look at where people are taking web hooks? Beyond the push content concept inPubSubHubbub to distributed loosely coupled applications which act on information and call other applications.
http://www.slideshare.net/progrium/web-hooks-and-the-programmable-world-of-tomorrow-presentation
For a social network application all I need is for my callback/publisher url to be my openID server and we have some protocols around privacy e.g many to many encryption so I don’t need to trust intermediate hubs, and hope someone funds commodity hubs to handle the traffic.
We are working with Jaikuengine team and also pubsubhubbub team to bring a functionality where user’s tweets can flow into http://www.pboxpress.com and also users xPressions from poboxpress.com move to twitter or subscribed to any system. We are using pubsubhubbub to speed up the ATOM and RSS feeds.
We are running this on Cloud (Google Appengine) Our aim is to build open, decentralized microblogging system.
Any suggested use cases to buid more open, federated system?
Thanks
Srini Vemula
Correction to the above url it is http://www.poboxpress.com
De lo mejor que he leido esta mañana, muy buen post! Gracias
This comment was originally posted on http://www.dreig.eu/caparazon)“>El caparazón
Dolors, sobre la web de las cosas, te recomiendo http://www.webofthings.com/
Sigo esta página hace tiempo, porque da un acercamiento más científico al tema. Además, cada vez que encuentro algo sobre la web de las cosas, dejo mi comentario ahí. Un abrazo.
This comment was originally posted on http://www.dreig.eu/caparazon)“>El caparazón
Parece que estamos ante nuevos cambios muy excitantes, gracias por el análisis tengo un nudo menos en mi mente
Lo que me encanta de Twitter es su simplicidad y su cultura, aunque pueda acabar siendo un arma de doble filo, ya que igual que atrae puede acabar cansando. Hasta que no se abarate la conexión movil a internet dudo que se ponga de moda en España, y este retraso puede hacer que el “hype” haya pasado.
En cuanto al cloud computing, me parece muy útil guardar toda una masa de datos y poder acceder indiferentemente desde el movil, oficina o casa (coche?consola?). Quizás privacidad y seguridad puede convencer a los usuarios para que paguen premium, incluso si se suma a un pack con otros productos, sea streaming de contenidos o ofertas por parte de tele-operadoras? Que opinas?
La realidad aumentada quizás acelere con la difusión de moviles de ultima generación. Juegos, tarjetas y paseos virtuales, aunque solo si su producción se abarata. Alguna otra aplicación interesante?
Tu blog está en mis marcadores, gran análisis
Alex
This comment was originally posted on http://www.dreig.eu/caparazon)“>El caparazón
I’ve been trying to encapsulate the argument for this issue, because a decent phrase can make the difference in a discussion. I’ve come down to this.
The best defense against Distributed Denial of Service is Distributed Delivery of Service.
The web of services can be resilient in ways that no single site can.