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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?

I'm most surprised that I've seen practically zero news about it.

Any news about outages from elsewhere in the world? Or is it just in the US?

Also, when in doubt, blame Chinese hackers.

bhamv3 said:

Any news about outages from elsewhere in the world? Or is it just in the US?

Also, when in doubt, blame Chinese hackers.

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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

stienman said:

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.

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... Holy shit.

Not making your own offline backups of anything you create makes you a complete idiot.

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.

bhamv3 said:

when in doubt, blame Chinese hackers.

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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.

Are we under secret internet attack?

Thanks, Obama!

Ravenpoe said:

Are we under secret internet attack?

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Oh yes, a fire sale! Someone please get John McClane into that!

Apparently the BoA outage is related to a power outage in Florida that took the provider (Alltel, possibly) for their banking software offline. Reports have started filtering in that their ATMs no longer work and debit cards aren't working at gas pumps and some POS machines.

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.

stienman said:

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.

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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?

Gared said:

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?

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I still have all my DVD's and Blurays so I can still watch my shows!

Azurephoenix said:

I still have all my DVD's and Blurays so I can still watch my shows!

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Ok... good for you, I guess?

GasBandit said:

Not making your own offline backups of anything you create makes you a complete idiot.

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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

PatrThom said:

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

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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.

PatrThom said:

I would hope that the hosting company has a backup strategy that they can lean on

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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.

Twitter apparently had their servers hacked. And they're blaming java.

Java is really not coming out of all this looking very well. (Note to self: do not buy Oracle stock.)

Yeah. Java's had several issues lately. I feel kinda bad for Mojang.

Java is the reason mine craft is cross platform. It also contributes to the poor performance, though most of that has to do with poor programming choices.

But yeah, oracle's not been keeping java as secure as it should be.

stienman said:

Java is the reason mine craft is cross platform. It also contributes to the poor performance, though most of that has to do with poor programming choices.

But yeah, oracle's not been keeping java as secure as it should be.

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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.

GasBandit said:

I love minecraft, but I hate that it's in java. So much resources wasted.

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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

PatrThom said:

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

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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.

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.

fade said:

http://www.optionscity.com/blog/java-slowness-myth

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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.

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.

Horses for courses, and all that. Java has a place, and it's certainly earned it.

It's over 21 years old, now.

Well, sure. It definitely has excellent uses. Swing alone is worth it.

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.

I was seeing a server error from Youtube a while ago. I think they're having some kind of problem. I was getting a white screen with an HTTP error.

fade said:

I was seeing a server error from Youtube a while ago. I think they're having some kind of problem. I was getting a white screen with an HTTP error.

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Yesterday I was getting a lot of pages that loaded without CSS or whatever, showing up as white space with links galore all formatted incorrectly.

--Patrick

Me too, but a reload always fixed it for me.

Although Facebook was down for a time yesterday, and took a lot of websites that have Facebook integration features with it.

PatrThom said:

Yesterday I was getting a lot of pages that loaded without CSS or whatever, showing up as white space with links galore all formatted incorrectly.

--Patrick

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Yeah, I was having issues with that as well. Especially on the WSDOT site while I was attempting to pay off a toll bill. I just figured they were a bunch of complete amateurs and botched their CSS.

Damn you Youtube- WHY DON'T YOU WORK FOR ME!

Has anyone tried tracing a route to 216.81.59.173 lately?

evilmike said:

Has anyone tried tracing a route to 216.81.59.173 lately?

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Heh. Saw that. Nerds at their nerdiest.

--Patrick

IDGI

If you wait long enough, a very familiar scroll will come up.



Of course, you young'ns won't get it.

PatrThom said:

Heh. Saw that. Nerds at their nerdiest.

--Patrick

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You know what would make this perfect? If the number resolved to "towel.blinkenlights.nl".

evilmike said:

Has anyone tried tracing a route to 216.81.59.173 lately?

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Mere words fail to describe how awesome that is.

jwhouk said:

If you wait long enough, a very familiar scroll will come up.



Of course, you young'ns won't get it.

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Oh, okay. I didn't get it because I didn't actually try it. Which seems rather overly paranoid in retrospect. Then again...

When a computer sends a packet on the internet, there is a field that tells how many times the packet can be forwarded before it expires. For instance, this might be set to 10, and after it hits 10 routers, the eleventh one would reject it and send a packet back saying it was rejected. This way you don't get a packet running in circles around the same set of routers forever, eventually it'll expire.

Trace Route uses this feature to find all the routers between your computer and a remote IP address. By sending a packet with zero in this field, the next router rejects it, and your computer gets a rejection packet back with that router's ip address. It then sends another packet with that field set to 1, so it goes through the first router, then gets rejected at the second router. It continues to do this, incrementing this field each time, receiving a rejection packet from every router in its path, until it finally hits the destination IP.

In this way, one can map all the routers between their computer and another computer on the internet.

When your computer gets an IP address back, it can query the DNS system (which is usually used to convert domain names, such as halforums.com, into IP addresses, such as 199.193.246.206) to turn the IP address of the router into a domain name.

So some bored router engineer created a series of routers which have DNS names such that if you try to trace the route to 216.81.59.173 then you will receive the opening text crawl of Star Wars IV.

On any internet connected computer open a terminal window (windows: click the windows start button, then type "cmd" and press enter) and use the command "tracert 216.81.59.173" to execute a trace route on that IP address. On OSX and many unix systems it's "traceroute" and linux often uses "tracepath". Some versions will prematurely end the crawl (after 30-60 hops, since anything longer on today's internet is usually an anomaly) so you'll need to add a few command line options to make it keep tracing until the very end:

tracert -w 3 -h 100 216.81.59.173

And for those of you who want to experience it without actually messing with the command line, this is what it looks like on my wife's computer:

Huh. My work ISP apparently blocks it.