Thursday, August 10, 2017

Quillette Down Again

As Anon informed us, a DDoS crashed Quillette's site after they posted a piece in which psychologists and neuroscientists defended Damore's Google echo chamber piece. Quillette confirms this on twitter. Their site is down again.
   Yet another instance of the left stifling dissent. But, hey, it's ok because it's not the government doing it!

5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

So I'm not entirely sure that was hackers. It could have been organic interest in the article. My BS, off-the-cuff guess is 70% chance of hackers, 30% chance of organic traffic.

1:37 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Quillette says DDos:
https://twitter.com/QuilletteM/status/895046114180608001

1:54 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Oh I forgot the exact wording. Still, the article very well could have 4x'ed the sites traffic. Those sort of rapid scaling events can bring someone down very easily, and I have no visibility into their tech stack and how they evaluated traffic to determine it was a true DDos attack to get a really informed take on it.

So maybe 90% hackers, 10% organic traffic.

Really my skepticism is due to the fact that I don't think Quillette is capable of actually coming to a definitive conclusion on this. I'm guessing they are deferring to a hosting platform's judgement who might just be saying DDos to get out of hot water for not autoscaling the site properly.

2:11 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Yes...yes...I completely understand many of those words...

Actually, I get it. Non-wizards such as myself tend to assume it's an obvious all-or-nothing affair...like there's a red light that goes off and a klaxon that says "DDoS! DDoS! DDos!"

2:22 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Yeah it's surprisingly fuzzy. Unless you are a major organization that can have a dedicated security team, it is entirely likely a company has no idea at all who is visiting a site at a given time. This is even true if they have a login mechanism on the site.

Even in a super low-resolution sense, like the breakdown of traffic by country/continent/whatever, it is very difficult to get good statistics. That analysis can be done, but it isn't trivial, and a lot of it is hacky.

2:33 PM  

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