Missing post?

[Ziggy]

So I guess that's why I just got an error when trying to search the forums?

I can't tell you how many times that same thing has happen to me. Wait... what if it's happening right now!?

Indeed. What if it is happening RIGHT NOW?

lol

[weasels]

that things messing me up on posting. its quite strange. oh well cant be picky.

[MrPopo]

There was a huge DDoS attack on my hosting companies servers yesterday.

Speaking of DDoS, that reminds me of a story I once heard about a DDoS Amazon experienced once. Several years back they started noticing that every day the website would get completely hammered and brought to its knees. The strange thing was that it always occured at about the same time, 5:00 PM PST. Obviously this was some kind of highly organized attack by all kinds of zombie boxes. Investigation showed that there was no pattern to the IPs being used; it was across the country. This went on for about a week, with each day's concall being more frantic than the last. We're the world's biggest online retailer, so we need to be able to withstand something like this.

Well then a developer who had heard about this problem was ordering something off the website. He saw that little counter said that if he ordered it two day within the next 30 seconds he'd get it by Friday (it being Wednesday). So he quickly scanned the reviews, saw nothing that would dissuade him from purchasing, and then made for the One-click button. But before he could get there the page refreshed, and after the refresh it showed that shipping one day would get it by Friday, and two day by Monday.

At this point a spark went off in the back of his head, and he dug a little into the code for the webpage. He found that the "Order within the next X and get it by Y" counter was a simple bit of Javascript. However, the original coder apparently didn't have a good solution for when the counter would reach 0 and need to roll over to the next day. So his solution was to trigger a browser refresh, at which point the code would reinitialize and start off anew, everything working properly.

So every day at 5:00 PM (the cutoff at the time for getting an item in time for the critical pull in our warehouses) every person who is browsing Amazon suddenly had their browser refresh, triggering a massive DDoS attack.

[racketboy]

Whoa -- that's crazy.
For some reason, I love little programming stories like that

[Ziggy]

That is pretty nuts.