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Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

sfba.social

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Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#82
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know how many current Twitter engineers are on H1B? Is this based on some data, or just speculation?

Around 300. https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7z5px/twitter-employees-on-...

So maybe 20-30% of dev, which would be overrepresented here?

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#83

[flagged]

> Lest anyone doubt that Twitter was idiotic enough to release code that would cause a race condition and result in its own users executing a DDOS attack on it

Given that this is a race condition bug as stated in the original post, it's unlikely something reproducible in a deterministic way. You could probably give it a little bit more attention before leaving this reply...

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#84
post #7

This is interesting. Judging from the screenshot, a huge amount of GET /TweetDetail is generated which triggers some rate limiting, as shown by the 429. If this is indeed due to the recent decision to enforce authentication for all API calls, it means the curlprit may actually be the API gateway or something similar downstream. Also, this behavior seem to never stop, which isn't what one would expect from an exponent…

Did Elon pay the AWS bill? That seems like a likely culprit. Twitter instances are being forcibly shutdown.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#85
post #81

wow. how would one even fix this without deliberate downtime? you'd have to deploy and hope that the frontend will make it through CDNs to reduce pressure, right?

At minimum, you revert the commit/deploy to prod that caused the issue. But then that would likely mean reverting the recent policies and would make Elon look weak, so he'd never support it.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#86

Also, taking Elon's word at face value for a second... is Twitter really worth scraping for AI training or whatever? Its a hive of misinformation, disinformation and toxicity. Its succinct I guess, but nothing is eloquent or descriptive because of the character limit. And its full of repetitive "filler" information. Who wants that in a foundational LLM dataset? Maybe its OK for finding labeled images... But that stil…

It's useful if you want your LLM to be able to generate tweet-like microblogging text. That does have some value.

Or maybe you want to get an aggregate idea of what people are currently talking about in the world, stuff that doesn't rise to the level of capital-n News. There aren't a lot of alternatives for that.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#88
post #7

This is interesting. Judging from the screenshot, a huge amount of GET /TweetDetail is generated which triggers some rate limiting, as shown by the 429. If this is indeed due to the recent decision to enforce authentication for all API calls, it means the curlprit may actually be the API gateway or something similar downstream. Also, this behavior seem to never stop, which isn't what one would expect from an exponent…

Did Elon pay the AWS bill? That seems like a likely culprit. Twitter instances are being forcibly shutdown.

Twitter operates its own datacenters.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#90
post #80

Meanwhile, I can see this very Mastadon post with no login just fine. And the interface is not trying to assault me. It loads quick. ...Seems like a better product than Twitter for a public feed.

Early days of Twitter were just like that. Mastodon hasn't had the time to go to shit yet.

Well, it's a FOSS self-hostable server program. Mastodon isn't a service, so it's not susceptible to enshittification per se. A particular Mastodon host, sure. But Mastodon itself is just a codebase.
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