Cont: Musk buys Twitter II

Samson said:
I found this passage that seems true of maybe a few million American women. It really does not matter who she is.

"I also know that I will never vote for Donald Trump.

*

“My parents used to read The New York Post,” my mother told me recently. “It was left-wing.”

“Yes, the left wing used to be working class,” I reminded her.

*

I go to an old friend’s talk. Somebody uses the word “heteropessimism”—a word I don’t know—and I bristle at it, at the cordoned-off elites coining terms about the masses that don’t actually apply to the masses, that the masses wouldn’t use for themselves. This is a crowd of almost entirely white people who’d use Latinx. They roll their eyes at X, at Elon Musk—the only platform where I feel safe telling the truth."
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An unattributed, unsourced, unverified quotation of someone. Even if the quote was sourced and attributed correctly it is still meaningless because it directly contradicts the reality of X, which is that it is not a bastion of unalloyed free speech but instead kowtows to nazis who post violent child pornography.
 
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Here's an attributed quote via
https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/media/advertiser-boycott-sees-x-revenue-collapse-381265/

Alex Wilson, a senior strategist at London agency Pitch, telling City A.M. that its unregulated nature has made it hard to convince clients to part way with money on the site.

“The verification system is a mess, half your followers are now sexbots, the most interesting people have moved somewhere else, the people still there are posting less, and your timeline is just and endless stream of misery”, he said.

“How do you make the case for advertising on a platform like that?”
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It's like how 4Chan or the Rotten.com forums never became a beacon of advertiser interest.
 
in another similarity when they did have ads it was the kind that normal advertisers didn't want to be seen next to.

but unlike twitter, they were content just having an offensive website and keeping the lights on. elon wants an offensive one that makes a trillion dollars. that's not how it works.
 
Samson said:
I found this passage that seems true of maybe a few million American women. It really does not matter who she is.

"I also know that I will never vote for Donald Trump.

*

“My parents used to read The New York Post,” my mother told me recently. “It was left-wing.”

“Yes, the left wing used to be working class,” I reminded her.

*

I go to an old friend’s talk. Somebody uses the word “heteropessimism”—a word I don’t know—and I bristle at it, at the cordoned-off elites coining terms about the masses that don’t actually apply to the masses, that the masses wouldn’t use for themselves. This is a crowd of almost entirely white people who’d use Latinx. They roll their eyes at X, at Elon Musk—the only platform where I feel safe telling the truth."
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:rolleyes:
What is this drivel supposed to mean?
 
jeremyp said:
Oh dear.

DDOS stands for "distributed denial of service".

A denial of service attack is exactly what it describes. You deny the service to other people. In the context of a web site it just means "make the web site unusable in some way". You can do it by making it impossible to connect to the web site or by making the server's responses unreasonably slow.

A couple of techniques that used to be used many years ago but are now fairly easy to mitigate are making lots of connections to the same web server to download a page. You just send the TCP connect request and leave the connection hanging. That could exhaust the available ports on the server (on IPv4) so it can no longer accept requests. Or you could make lots of requests for big files so that the server is too busy servicing your requests to do anything else. You might also exploit a bug in the web server software to crash it.

You might also be able to perform a DOS attack on the DNS servers for the domain and that will stop other people from even being able to find the web server.

A distributed denial of service attack is exactly the same as a denial of service attack except you use an army of computers to perform it instead of just one or two. Typically, the army of computers is a worldwide botnet of home PCs that have been hacked.

I have heard lots of people argue that the Tr*mp stream thing couldn't be a DOS attack because the rest of the web site was OK - it was just the one live stream that went down. That's a spurious argument because Twitter has many thousands of servers all over the World and a DOS attack could just target the one(s) hosting this particular stream.

My money is on the infrastructure just collapsing under the weight of requests for the feed. Something that has just occurred to me and for which I have no evidence is that maybe some Tr*mp supporters decided to stuff the view count by watching the stream on multiple devices. Perhaps that contributed to it.

Whatever, the Twitter infrastructure failed for some reason and it has happened before. This is an epic fail for Musk's company and Tr*mp should be furious, especially as he was one of those laughing at the previous fiasco.
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Yes, obviously I could have gone in depth about DDOS with it like you did, but it wasn't relevant. I didn't need, and I didn't think anyone wanted, to get that deep. The claim that it was a DDOS was nonsense.

He said he tested 8 million connections, without saying how, and he had less than 1 million total connections so it wasn't a port thing. That's why, again, it wasn't relevant. He's lying about either the DDOS, the test, or all of it. The latter is my guess.
 
plague311 said:
He said he tested 8 million connections, without saying how, and he had less than 1 million total connections so it wasn't a port thing. That's why, again, it wasn't relevant. He's lying about either the DDOS, the test, or all of it. The latter is my guess.
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Technically, there are other options. The test was a bad test, a test for something else, or it failed but he's created a situation where he's being lied to as a matter of course, for example. Whatever the case, it's still him failing and trying to run away from responsibility, yet again.

catsmate said:
:rolleyes:
What is this drivel supposed to mean?
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Really short version? That "ordinary" people agree with him and that we're all just being poopy heads as we disrespect things that he loves. Why we disrespect such is irrelevant.
 
catsmate said:
:rolleyes:
What is this drivel supposed to mean?
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Same thing every word out of his mouth means. "Watch me performatively role play as a Random Surrealism Generator in the middle of every discussion and literally never face any negative consequences."
 
Aridas said:
Technically, there are other options.
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It's networking lol. We could all go back and forth on what could have caused this or that a million times if we wanted to but it wouldn't really do much good. I used an extremely basic, broad explanation of the DDOS attack that he was implying happened.

Aridas said:
The test was a bad test, a test for something else, or it failed but he's created a situation where he's being lied to as a matter of course, for example. Whatever the case, it's still him failing and trying to run away from responsibility, yet again.
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Exactly.
 
A couple of times as a techie I've had to lie to management provide a heuristically guided explanation of certain situations. One I had to have a quiet chat with my managers about .. well.. Suppose we had a display for Ops showing the context of every alert - like a tree structure (technically a DAG) where every alert for say a memory low warning on a backup DB server which was 1 of 4 would show a potential impact to a service. Our areas head was in Hong Kong and he decided without telling us that he would be showing all these extremely sensitive paranoid displays to very very senior managers and guess what hit the fan. I had to create parallel displays for these managers so that if nuclear strikes took out all the data centres then maybe a service impact would appear.
In CS courses they sometimes talk about managing user expectations like leaving a performance bug or some spelling mistakes for users to find and "Oh sorry, good catch we'll fix that right away. Appreciate the feedback". They talk less about managing dickhead managers. The stories I've heard about Musk resonate.
 
The Musk/Trump discussion was on Twitter Spaces, so not Twitter exactly. (Or X if you must.) So the whole site didn't need to have been down for it to have been a DDOS.

But don't jump on me!

Musk claimed they tested the Space with 8 million users before it started, and it worked, but after the talk X themselves said they got 73 million viewers.

Those 73 million probably didn't watch the whole thing, but I still think it's likely the talk crashed because of overload (more than 8 million at one time), not any sort of DDOS.

The solution they said they applied was, after all, setting up multiple Spaces to hear it.

I think Musk panicked as soon as it crashed and made that post about a DDOS, since he is a conspiracy nut after all.
 
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Orphia Nay said:
The Musk/Trump discussion was on Twitter Spaces, so not Twitter exactly. (Or X if you must.) So the whole site didn't need to have been down for it to have been a DDOS.

But don't jump on me!

Musk claimed they tested the Space with 8 million users before it started, and it worked, but after the talk X themselves said they got 73 million viewers.

Those 73 million probably didn't watch the whole thing, but I still think it's likely the talk crashed because of overload (more than 8 million at one time), not any sort of DDOS.

The solution they said they applied was, after all, setting up multiple Spaces to hear it.

I think Musk panicked as soon as it crashed and made that post about a DDOS, since he is a conspiracy nut after all.
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He’s also a liar who made his own platform unstable by firing a lot of the workforce. He’ll look a bit stupid if he admits his own meddling is the problem, and claiming it is outside forcs just makes him sound like a brave rebel to make his cult followers go starry-eyed and weak at the knees.
 
JoeMorgue said:
I
Edison did not invent the lightbuld and his improvements on the design were not nothing but they weren't THAT much. What Edison did was get an actual practical entire point A to point B system to market.

Something you could honestly call a modern-ish incandescent bulb that worked well enough for SOME use existed as far back as maybe 1791 if you really want to stretch it, certainly by the mid-1850s. But they were invented and they just... sat there doing nothing because there was no system to plug them into or way to practically use them.

Edison started selling his mildly improved design in 1879 and within a few years he had electric lighting system up in public places powered by his power plants by 1910 you could buy an entire Edison branded home electrical system with an onsite power plant, wiring, and lighting THROUGH THE SEARS CATALOG.
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You seem to have skipped something here. Edison's electric light bulb worked on a DC electrical system. His former employee (Tesla) figured out how to make AC work better than DC, including long distance distribution which was how power got distributed back then and today. (Of course the same light bulbs worked on AC too)

There was a rather famous effort by Edison to persuade the world that DC worked better than AC and that failed, famously.


It's largely the same with electric cars. An electric car is nice. An electric car without a charging network is novelty.
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Not really. I have one friend with an electric car who charges it at night from his solar powered battery.

I have a plug-in hybrid that runs on electric for the first 50 miles (9 out of 10 of my trips) and charges at home at night.

Most people who have electric cars don't use the charging networds at all, but charge from home.

They are needed for long trips (300+miles) but that network is pretty much in place.
 
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Aridas said:
Technically, there are other options. The test was a bad test, a test for something else, or it failed but he's created a situation where he's being lied to as a matter of course, for example. Whatever the case, it's still him failing and trying to run away from responsibility, yet again.



Really short version? That "ordinary" people agree with him and that we're all just being poopy heads as we disrespect things that he loves. Why we disrespect such is irrelevant.
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There's yet another alternative more plausible explanation, Galaxy Brain had his few remaining engineers so busy creating bots to inflate the numbers that they couldn't test their system and know where the problems are.
 
plague311 said:
Yes, obviously I could have gone in depth about DDOS with it like you did, but it wasn't relevant. I didn't need, and I didn't think anyone wanted, to get that deep.
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Everybody was accusing everybody else of not knowing what a DDOS attack is. I just thought we all need to be on the same page.

The claim that it was a DDOS was nonsense.
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Almost certainly, except, as I claimed above, a lot of people trying to use a site is functionally equivalent to a DDOS attack if the site is creaky.

But I would argue that it is irrelevant. There are tools and techniques available to counter DDOS attacks. If Twitter did not have these in place, it is almost as embarrassing for them as if their site just collapsed under the weight of legitimate traffic.

He said he tested 8 million connections, without saying how, and he had less than 1 million total connections so it wasn't a port thing. That's why, again, it wasn't relevant. He's lying about either the DDOS, the test, or all of it. The latter is my guess.
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Maybe somebody decided to run the test suite at the moment when the live feed was due to start.
 
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