Sunday, November 24, 2013

#dysk Pegasus Librarian on FriendFeed's latest outage

I blogged about a 2010 outage on FriendFeed, but I'm really not going to blog about this weekend's outage because Pegasus Librarian covered it thoroughly.

However, I do want to document one particular tweet - https://twitter.com/An0nPun1shm3nt/status/404369817471176704 - in case the tweeter is subsequently so embarrassed that he or she removes it.


Over the last several hours, a number of people have addressed this claim of censorship. Here's how Pegasus Librarian addressed it:

Apparently, Anonymous has mistaken FriendFeed for “One of the biggest social networks” and is therefore venting spleen in the form of a DDoS attack. Why? Because hashtag searching for something Anonymous was interested in didn’t work and therefore must have been censored. Must have! It couldn’t possibly be that FriendFeed is actually the forgotten stepchild of Facebook and the search function hasn’t worked consistently in years for any of us…

But there's a positive story out of all of this - the story of how FriendFeed came back. At this point I have no idea whether FriendFeed was truly subject to a denial of service attack, or if some Facebook intern tripped over a power cable. But SOMETHING had to be done to bring FriendFeed back, and that something was...well, I can't tell you the details, because they were shared in a private forum. But apparently somebody knew somebody who knew some people. And the first somebody apparently promised the second somebody some beer. After this offer, the site was back up in a couple of hours.

You see, sometimes Soylent Green can't solve everything. Sometimes, you need old-fashioned food and drink to effect change.

Oh, and one more thing, regarding the hashtag applied to this post. Long-time FriendFeed users are familiar with the acronym DYSP, which stands for "Damn You Steven Perez." (In reality, the FriendFeed community loves Mr. Perez, even when he takes too many carrots and lettuce leaves from the FriendFeed garden.) The "dysk" acronym is an adaptation of that older acronym, with the substitution of the word "script kiddies."



P.S. Although I didn't link to him here, Johnny Worthington was a bastion of knowledge and sanity over these last few hours.
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