by Hermilia C. Banayat-Nas(7th entry)
Last week, we discussed demand-of-service (DOS) attacks. As I understand, a DOS attack is a surge in accommodation demands that lead to a website's failure. When is this an attack? If the surge is planned and intentional, made with the intention of collapsing the site by messing up with the bandwidth, it is an attack.
Have you ever encountered the Fail Whale in Twitter? It is an image of a white whale being held up by birds. You would see the Fail Whale if Twitter is experiencing some downtime. In its own terms, a Fail Whale calls for "unplanned" maintenance. I don't know how Twitter's software engineers solve tweets overload, but the important thing is they do. A Fail Whale lasts only a few seconds on my Twitter account.
Given the definition of DOS attacks, I swore to be patient every time I see the Fail Whale (or other site's version of the fail whale). Sure, it devolves upon Twitter to provide higher server capacities to accommodate the growing number of mini-blogs. But a Fail Whale does not necessarily mean that it (Twitter) is not prepared for its rise to fame. There is a possibility that a DOS attack (this has happened before, in August 2009) is maliciously overloading the site and denying me (user) the chance to post or read tweets. What is important to me is that there are software engineers working overtime to perform their "unplanned" maintenance.
Fail whale image from: http://dangreenblatt.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/twitter-fail-whale.png
1 comment:
microblogging sites and social networking sites should always anticipate attacks since they are putting themselves out there and a lot of users are at risk. i guess they really have to make a certain amount of revenue from these networking sites in order for them to afford to stave off such attacks. hmmm, the price of free publicity nga naman :)
Post a Comment