Continued from our discussions in the PVP and Random Crap threads, what the hell is going on with the internet's infrastructure right now? I mean, I have a basic understanding of how the internet works, routers and stuff; and I understand what a DDoS is, but there've been some major outages recently. Blind Ferret went offline (though that appears to've been a hacking job), Amazon was down for a while today, Twitter's been having trouble today, there are three or four Facebook.com server outages. Was there some massive loss of connection and everything is still just filtering through to take up the slack? Is someone really pissed that Mega came back online?
[Question] The internet... seriously, what the hell?
- Thread starter Gared
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Looks like we currently have 5 outages in the US, one in Eastern Europe, one in Germany, and one in Russia, according to http://www.outageanalyzer.com/
Amazon hasn't yet publicly stated why they went down, it it was just their front page, other amazon pages were fine. If you were already in the process of shopping or checking out, you didn't notice unless you went to the root index page of amazon.com. That page was down for just under fifty minutes.
Blind ferret was apparently hacked, and not only was everything live deleted, but all the backups were also deleted. Sounds like they didn't have offline backup, so any creator that didn't back their comics and forums up offline may have permanently lost whatever they stored on blind ferret.
http://www.webcomics.com/public-journal/2013/1/31/psst-back-up-your-web-site.html
Blind ferret was apparently hacked, and not only was everything live deleted, but all the backups were also deleted. Sounds like they didn't have offline backup, so any creator that didn't back their comics and forums up offline may have permanently lost whatever they stored on blind ferret.
http://www.webcomics.com/public-journal/2013/1/31/psst-back-up-your-web-site.html
... Holy shit.
Bank of America is apparently suffering an outage as well, not just their online and mobile banking, but their internal computers as well. The mobile app tells you to go to a branch, but people are finding that most branches are locked down as well. The branches that are open can only tell people that their computers are down and they have no idea when they'll be back up, but they swear that their ATMs will still work.
Ok!
Actually listened to a newspiece on NPR the other day about alleged chinese hacking into the new york time's computers the day before an article about a chinese leader's family becoming rich during his leadership, and sustained hacking for months after. Looks like CNN and others have picked up the news:
http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/31/tech/china-nyt-hacking/index.html
Of course the NYT newspaper website is block in china, starting the day of article's publishing. Reports suggest that the hackers are trying to keep tabs on information the reporters are gathering. It may turn from "trying to avoid sensitive information getting out" to "finding people in china working with reporters and making sure they stop" which would be much worse. Interestingly, several NYT reporters are still getting their visas extended in China. Don't know if it's merely to avoid bad press, or what, but even though the website is blocked, the reporters are, in some cases, being allowed to stay.
Oh yes, a fire sale! Someone please get John McClane into that!
This is interesting in terms of electronic warfare though. There are dozens of largish Internet outages at all levels, routers between peers, big companies, banking systems, news sites.
In this case we can probably say its just coincidence,
But the effects of these outages are usable, measurable data.
What happens when one regional bank has one payment processor out of service for a period of time? What happens when the internees largest online retailer has no homepage for an hour? What happens when the stock market shuts down for an hour?
When someone decides to attack us economically, it could be completely Internet based. Through coordination of several smaller, seemingly unrelated takedowns of critical sites and infrastructure, one organization could cause a significant dip in national GDP, and the after effects would be interesting.
In this case we can probably say its just coincidence,
But the effects of these outages are usable, measurable data.
What happens when one regional bank has one payment processor out of service for a period of time? What happens when the internees largest online retailer has no homepage for an hour? What happens when the stock market shuts down for an hour?
When someone decides to attack us economically, it could be completely Internet based. Through coordination of several smaller, seemingly unrelated takedowns of critical sites and infrastructure, one organization could cause a significant dip in national GDP, and the after effects would be interesting.
This is the point that gets me most right now. From all indications, all of these outages are separate, completely unconnected incidents; but even as unconnected incidents, they combine to make it feel like the entirety of the internet is under attack enough to impact people's lives and daily activities, even if it's just on an annoyance scale like "my twitter API isn't working" or "gee, Netflix is running really slow tonight."
What's going to happen if someone actually pulls off a coordinated multi-level attack?
Ok... good for you, I guess?I still have all my DVD's and Blurays so I can still watch my shows!
Unless the hosting company was "some of the guys in the server room at Blind Ferret," I would hope that the hosting company has a backup strategy that they can lean on (…unless they specifically call out "it's all your fault" in their TOS).
--Patrick
GasBandit
Staff member
I agree, there should be. But one would still have to be an idiot for not keeping their own backups in addition.
I mean, I've got everything backed up from my web stuff... even the stuff that isn't mine/original content.
Low end hosting companies typically do not have offline backups, and do not secure the backup systems separate from the hosting systems. High end hosting, maybe, but even then most contracts include a "hacking counts as an act of god" type clause absolving them of any lasting damage due to hacking, especially since the clients are in charge of much of the code running on the server. If one can prove the hackers made it into the system from the OS side, or broke through the company's security in some other way then they might have legal recourse, but, even then, the most they will be liable for is going to be less than the amount they've paid the hosting company.
In short, don't trust your business completely to the hosting company. They run the servers, and are responsible for keeping them up and running, but they aren't going to save you from floods or hacking.
GasBandit
Staff member
Fuck cross platform, Minecraft is in Java because Notch is askeered of assembler. I love minecraft, but I hate that it's in java. So much resources wasted.
It's like your computer is a really nice car, but then when you let Java drive it he never shifts it out of 1st.
--Patrick
GasBandit
Staff member
So very apt an analogy.
Over a quarter of all of Belgium's internet and digital TV was down sunday due to a buggy software update to four (FOUR) DNS servers. Apparently there was an oopsie when updating the server OS. *snrk*
Coordinated attacks? NATO headquarters and the EU parlaiment and whatnot were cut off from the internet except over mobile devices for over a day and there was no coordination anywhere. The 'net's a scary place these days and we rely on it far far too much.
Coordinated attacks? NATO headquarters and the EU parlaiment and whatnot were cut off from the internet except over mobile devices for over a day and there was no coordination anywhere. The 'net's a scary place these days and we rely on it far far too much.
fade
Staff member
http://www.optionscity.com/blog/java-slowness-myth
It really kind of depends on how you write your Java. I've seen some blazing fast, memory intensive numerical stuff in the geophysical world written in Java. In fact, one of the best SEGY loaders I know of is written in Java, and runs faster on a desktop than some of the exponentially more expensive packages written in C# or C. If you don't know, SEGY files are seismic data, which are massive 3 or 4D images that can easily be terabytes in size.
It really kind of depends on how you write your Java. I've seen some blazing fast, memory intensive numerical stuff in the geophysical world written in Java. In fact, one of the best SEGY loaders I know of is written in Java, and runs faster on a desktop than some of the exponentially more expensive packages written in C# or C. If you don't know, SEGY files are seismic data, which are massive 3 or 4D images that can easily be terabytes in size.
So really, Java lends itself to sloppy programming and/or Java programmers tend not to spend a lot of time profiling their code, rather than it being the JVM itself?
--Patrick
That's essentially true for any language. The problem with java is that it not only makes it easy to write slow code, but its taught that way, and expected to be written that way.
Fast java programs started out as slow java programs that have been intensively profiled and core bits and pieces rewritten for speed, and sometimes in another languages, such as assembly and C just to avoid the interpreted code, which, even when cached, still is often slower than compiled code from another language.
You often find, however, that such java programs no longer remain portable.
I'm curious to know if the seismographic program fade mentioned is cross platform.
Fast java programs started out as slow java programs that have been intensively profiled and core bits and pieces rewritten for speed, and sometimes in another languages, such as assembly and C just to avoid the interpreted code, which, even when cached, still is often slower than compiled code from another language.
You often find, however, that such java programs no longer remain portable.
I'm curious to know if the seismographic program fade mentioned is cross platform.
fade
Staff member
As far as I know, it's in pure Java, and the UI is in plain old Swing. Java did start out as a slow language, but the bytecode compilation stage is fairly significant. Not as fast as GNU C for example, but faster than old Java. I know I'm preaching to the choir here, though.
All that being said, I'm not a fan regardless of the speed. I don't like classes that don't make architectural sense. I don't like garbage collecting.
All that being said, I'm not a fan regardless of the speed. I don't like classes that don't make architectural sense. I don't like garbage collecting.
Does anyone else have trouble watching Youtube videos on Firefox? I can watch it on Chrome or Internet Explorer(with extreme lag) but not Firefox.
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