Apparently, Anonymous has mistaken FriendFeed for “One of the biggest social networks” and is therefore venting spleen in the form of a DDoS attack. Why? Because hashtag searching for something Anonymous was interested in didn’t work and therefore must have been censored. Must have! It couldn’t possibly be that FriendFeed is actually the forgotten stepchild of Facebook and the search function hasn’t worked consistently in years for any of us…
Now, for those of us active on FriendFeed, it’s a huge part of our lives and relationships. But none of us kid ourselves that we’re operating on “one of the biggest social networks.” In fact, most of us are simultaneously pleased and baffled that Facebook has let us limp along for 4 years on our preferred platform even after the whole FriendFeed team went to work for Facebook instead. TechCrunch can’t figure out why FriendFeed even still exists to be attacked. I’m mostly worried that this whole attack will remind Facebook that they forgot to pull the plug on us years ago.
So while we wait for Anonymous to realize what a backwater they’ve chosen on which to take their anti-nonexistent-censorship stand, we can speculate about a) how little they actually know about the internet, b) how bored/drunk/high they were when they launched this attack, and c) what they’ll take down next.
Rodfather has a guess about question C.
UPDATE: After almost 2 full days of downtime, Facebook got FriendFeed back up and running at 2:30 this afternoon. Rejoice!!!
Oh thank goodness you’ve written about this. I was thinking that I and a friend were the only people left using Friendfeed! Couldn’t see anything in Google search results about the outage.
You’re not the only ones!! It’s the home of the very active Library Society of the World, so there are over 900 librarians that are wandering listlessly around wondering if we’ll ever see each other again.
Wow. This would be hilarious if I weren’t feeling so twitchy about not being able to read the LSW group. When people have spread doom and gloom about Friendfeed’s impending demise, I don’t think anyone ever thought Anonymous would be involved.
I’m glad that you wrote about the ridiculousness of the whole “attack.”
there are also pretty healthy community of FF users in Italy and Turkey
I’m so glad it’s back!!!
Anonymous should attack the people who censored Friendfeed by blocking access to it for a day and a half.
GOOD POINT
[…] other theory is that this misguided Anon really did throw an epic tantrum thinking that account deletion (and therefore content deletion) combined with buggy search equals […]