Quick the twitter army are approaching!
Time to brush off the dust and wind up the cogs again. No posts in a while yes yes, but there back now. Well, just a quick one.
I have been an avid Twitter user for a long time now. But, recently I think I’ve spotted a dark side to Twitter that many probably haven’t realised yet. I think it’s important to set the scene before I continue.
I’ve been following Stephen Fry since I joined Twitter. I enjoy his tweets throughout the day and he links to many interesting sites. He has over 1,290,540 followers and it’s growing day by day. With this many followers it’s clear that Stephen Fry wields allot of power online and at no time is this more prevalent than when he links to a site. Nine times out of ten the site will crash due to overloading. This isn’t something confined to Stephen Fry, it happens when anyone with a decent presence online suggests people check out a site. This got me thinking, the effect is similar to that of a Denial of Service attack. Any hackers will be familiar as it’s a fairly simple, brute force method of bringing down a site (DoS Attack).
Usually DoS attacks are carried out by hackers with use of a Bot Net. The machines in the bot net have software running on them without the users knowledge that when triggered will run any command the hacker wants. This means that they can send hundreds of thousands of requests to a web server, essentially clogging it up.
This got me thinking. People who have thousands of these followers wield so much power. They can at the touch of a few keys theoretically bring down an entire site. Where do we draw the line for the laws governing hackers and the Internet. Do we accuse the celebrities of DoS attacks, they could quite easily be motivated?
Gd point. “With great power comes fun responsibility.”