Comments on: Please kill this thread

Please kill this thread

Steven Den Beste — Tue, 11 Dec 2001 00:12:44 -0800

By: Steven Den Beste

Steven Den Beste — Tue, 11 Dec 2001 00:14:02 -0800

Have we reached the point where it's become sport to kill off other people's web pages? Why should some person at random, who may have put a great deal of work into a page, have it taken off line just become someone playing Geocities Roulette decided to pick it for a denial of service attack?

By: cps

cps — Tue, 11 Dec 2001 00:14:22 -0800

Please kill it *and* if possible get some explanation as to wtf the poster was thinking.

By: ashbury

ashbury — Tue, 11 Dec 2001 00:30:09 -0800

Agreed!
It seems that krisjohn was displaying some sort of elitism/arrogance. Frankly, it is a rude and school-bully kind of tactic that has no place in MeFi, or anywhere else, for that matter.

By: skallas

skallas — Tue, 11 Dec 2001 00:37:36 -0800

How exactly is a randomizer a DOS? The post doesn't make any sense.

By: eyeballkid

eyeballkid — Tue, 11 Dec 2001 00:44:41 -0800

I know that links getting slashdotted by (none other than) slashdot is a common occurence, but forcing a /.ing for no other purpose but fun? To put it in no uncertain terms, that's some fucked up shit right there. Agreed w/ SDB. For the love of MeFi kill that damned thing.

By: j.edwards

j.edwards — Tue, 11 Dec 2001 01:40:20 -0800

Looks like it's dead.

By: Steven Den Beste

Steven Den Beste — Tue, 11 Dec 2001 07:18:02 -0800

Thank you, Matt.

By: Carol Anne

Carol Anne — Tue, 11 Dec 2001 08:04:36 -0800

Thank you, Steven Den Beste, for bringing this to Matt's and our attention!

By: snarkout

snarkout — Tue, 11 Dec 2001 08:54:24 -0800

How exactly is a randomizer a DOS? The post doesn't make any sense.

It's not the randomizer -- the poster picked a link at random and thought it would be funny if it got shut down for exceeding its traffic limits; the FPP explicitly said that the page wasn't anything spectacular but that he wanted to see if he could get the page yank. SDB is right about the jackassitude of that kind of behavior. Good catch, Steven.

By: skallas

skallas — Tue, 11 Dec 2001 11:50:50 -0800

It's not the randomizer

It was a randomizer, I reloaded five times and got five different sites. The poster asked specifically to pick one out of random and start posting it. The post was bad, but harmless.

By: snarkout

snarkout — Tue, 11 Dec 2001 12:04:47 -0800

Nirvana MIDIs. No, there's nothing special about the link, it's a new game. Use a Random Geocities URL Generator and then post that link to as many weblog-esq places as possible to see how long it takes before they go down. Post a comment if you try to visit the page and you get a "transfer limit exceeded" error.

It's that first link, the Nirvana MIDIs one, that I was thinking of. Or did that go straight to the randomizer? I didn't click through to find out.

By: skallas

skallas — Tue, 11 Dec 2001 13:26:07 -0800

The MIDI site was the MIDI site, but the text suggests that you should go to the randomizer and pick a link and go crazy with it.

Problem with that is that the randomizer is written to be random. So if we assume there are like 10 geocities neighborhoods and 5 digits to randomly pick from, well lets just agree thats too many webpages to pull an effective DOS.

He didn't post "hey dudez lets DOS this site" he wanted you to use the randomizer.

Like I posted earlier, his post doesn't even make sense. It was a lame protest over the transfer limits over FREE web service. Its not even a protest for anything he's paying for. Its a shame that thread was killed, sometimes setting the ignorant and angry straight is a good thing.

How did you get the text of the post btw?

By: snarkout

snarkout — Tue, 11 Dec 2001 15:07:38 -0800

The MIDI site was the MIDI site, but the text suggests that you should go to the randomizer and pick a link and go crazy with it.

It also suggests that he wanted people to eat the Nirvana page's bandwidth as part of his little game. Bad post, no biscuit (and it was a marginal post even if he hadn't encouraged people to take down some poor schlub's Geocities page).

Torrez.org has some sort of scraped version of all MeFi FPPs, although without the links; I snagged it from there.

By: chipr

chipr — Tue, 11 Dec 2001 15:52:21 -0800

I want to apologize for contributing to the thread before it was pulled. In the future, I'll try to avoid posting comments after a night of drinking ... :-(

By: realjanetkagan

realjanetkagan — Tue, 11 Dec 2001 22:25:28 -0800

Aha! This may be the right place to ask you all...

I haven't posted a link to the front page yet because (in my heart of hearts) I think my favorite finds are hidden in dead ends or in little alleyways. I'm afraid they'd go down forever if you folk all jumped in to see them at same time.

If somebody linked one of my pages to the MeFi front page, my server'd go down for weeks or months. While I know one helluva lawyer who'd try to save me from any outrageous charges my server would hit me with as a result of their incompetence, I don't know if the folks who've put up the sites I really love have somebody like her to help them in times of dire need.

Whenever I've thought it appropriate, I've passed on a link I like to a MeFi discussion page, but I'm still scared I might hurt a favorite site of mine by FFPing it.

Could someone please invent a category or a code-word for "wait a coupla days and then go look here" or a pancake/pony that means "please only look in the middle of the night lest you crash this poor bugger's server"?

Meanwhile, I'll stay off the front page. Please hope me!!!

By: stavrosthewonderchicken

stavrosthewonderchicken — Wed, 12 Dec 2001 00:30:16 -0800

realjanetkagan : That's really an interesting point, and taken together with one someone else made here in MeTa recently (sorry too lazy to search it down), about the fact that while there may be x active posters here at any given moment there are 10x or 100x readers of Metafilter, has changed the way I think about this place a bit. There really are a lot of us here, aren't there?

As far as a codeword goes, that's probably not necessary : just as we use (more) sometimes on FPP's, something along the lines of (fragile : please don't slashdot) or something to that effect might ease the hitload on a delicate link. Linking to the Google cached copy of the site rather than the site itself might be a good idea too, to ease bandwidth suckage.