Mozilla essentially DDoS'ed themselves with record attempt
As many of you probably know, June 17, 10am PST is the drop date for Firefox 3, and they're attempting a Guinness World Record of most downloads in one day as a kickoff promotion. I'm writing this at 10:11am PST, 11 minutes after the new Firefox 3 drop date, and the site has been down for the past ~15 minutes or so. In effect, the Mozilla foundation essentially DDoS'ed themselves with their record attempt (for the newbz, DDoS = distributed denial of service, where a site goes down due to massive amounts of connection requests)! You'd think they would have anticipated the massive load.
Anyway, when you're ready to give it a shot check it out here. I've been using it since 3.0b3 and it's pretty good so far.
http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord
UPDATE - 12:15pm PST
Direct download link to the PC version...
...from this working Mozilla page - try your luck here for Mac/Linux versions
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No kidding,
I sent an email around the office today to get a bunch of people signed up but then just got a bunch of emails back saying that it didn't work and that the site was crashing.
thats a little counter productive. I wonder if we can count the crash emails. Then maybe they would break the record.
It would actually just be a plain old Denial of Service attack. A DDoS uses many "zombies" or "slaves", which are compromised systems, controlled by a single attacked to amplify an attack on an intended target. Mozilla going down was the result of many individuals attempting to access the site. Either way, It was rather foolish of them not to prepare for the expected load increase.
Well Kids, problems must be solved, because they approached 10,000,000 downloads. Obviously nothing to sneeze at!
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