Iraqi Shoe-Tosser Guy DDOSes Boing Boing Sort Of
THE SAGA OF THE SHOE-TOSSER AND BOINGBOING: So, yesterday, some friends sent me animated gif-phemera based on the Iraqi Shoe-Tosser Guy Incident. What incident, you say? The one in which 28-year old Baghdad journalist Muntadhar al Zaidi (now an imprisoned folk hero) took off every 'ZIG'!! and threw them at George W. Bush for great justice. Of course an internet meme would ensue.
When it did, I posted a bunch of the gifs here on Boing Boing without thinking through what would happen if this image-dense post went crazy viral and every idiot in the world hotlinked us. The result: Just 24 hours later, this one dumb post cost us thousands of bucks in bandwidth (HELLO, BAILOUT OVER HERE?). Thankfully, our eagle-eyed sysadmin Ken Snider spotted the trouble before things got mega-bad and more zeroes accrued on the end of that figure.
We unpublished the post for a while, made arrangements to host the images on archive.org, and have republished.
♥ Iraq Shoe Tosser Guy: The Animated Gifs (NOW WITH MORE LULZ) ♥
INSTRUCTIVE MORAL: Shoes can be expensive. I could have purchased 8.3 pairs of real live Manolos for what this blog post cost us in just 24 hours.
BEST SPECIMENS OF THIS MEME: The Three Stooges one, which came from The American Caliban, or this YTMND thing: "Bush Dodges Everything." (contains loud hypnotic sound).SELF-INFLICTED PUNISHMENT: I must now wear The Hat Of Shame, shown below. One of the Boing Boing Gadgets guys found this. Please do not hotlink it. In fact, close your eyes right now.
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Missing link from the self-inflicted-punishment section?
what's with the cat?
There goes the solstice bonus.
I was wondering about that when I first saw all those gif animes start flailing around...
Welp, that's what you get for ignoring my fantastic, non-moving rendition of Cheney's response: http://flickr.com/photos/49403380@N00/3110319200/
Evil shoe karma.
Animated GIFs ≠ Bandwidth-efficient video
@ #2
it's Maru the Cat :)
http://boingboing.net/2008/11/08/magu-the-cat.html
http://sisinmaru.blog17.fc2.com/
BoingBoing got SlashDuggBoingReddited? Wow. How "meta".
By buying myself a copy of "Content" for Christmas, I hope I have contributed my share ;)
That's Maru!!!!
http://sisinmaru.blog17.fc2.com/
More specifically-
http://sisinmaru.blog17.fc2.com/page-2.html#pagetop
If you're going to go viral, you have to put up with the occasional pandemic.
ahh ok thanks. i remember that cat now. so it's just a chaser.
On a more somber note, he's been beaten to a pulp in custody.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7785338.stm
Wow, you really can BB yourself!
[embarrased] well, i'm one of those idiots that happens to be a faithful reader of your wonderful blog. for that i am sorry for being such an idiot and hotlink the post to my friends. i found it funny and instructive. fuck me :( [/embarrased]
I'm reminded of the XKCD cartoon about transposing hyphens: "Iraqi-shoe tosser ..."
I, too, wondered at the use of the term "idiot" in the post. BB's bread and butter is linking to other sites. And, as has been noted, BB causes these sorts of link headaches for other sites due to BB's popularity. No need for name calling, really.
Looks to me like the term "idiot" was reserved for hot linkers. If you sent someone a link to the boingboing page you are not a hot linker. If you embedded an image posted on the boingboing server in your own page or in a forum somewhere, you are an idiot and should curtail your internet activities until you get a clue.
Wow, you boing-boinged yourself. That's meta.
speaking of words, time perhaps for "getting boinged" to pass into the realm of sexual innuendo and double entendre, don't you think? I am not quite sure as to specific mechanics said act should entail. Shall we throw the floor open for suggestions? I'm thinking enthusiasm should be an element.
@chungdoh @javitrino and others, the "idiots" i referred to are hotlinkers, please re-read the post.
Yes, they are idiots.
Xeni: Out of curiosity, how much of the hotlinking was through Google Reader? Can you tell?
For all those sites I've tried to view over the years who got boinged, never did I think that it would be a self-referential recursive boing.
Boing-Boing rules!
I want a boing boing t-shirt with Maru wearing the Hat of Shame for Christmas. Who's with me?
What happened to the too-cheap-to-meter future I was promised? Not here yet?
Then why not just block hotlinks server-side and serve the hotlinkers alternate content?
Xeni, you rule. This is certainly the last, best meme of the year. Thank you BoingBoing by taking one for the team and bringing this to teh interwebz.
then, i didn't commit the sin of stupidity in the shape mentioned earlier. i used the permalink provided.
anyways, i keep feeling sorry. double-triple bad.
:(
so i pretty much NEVER hotlink (cant think of the last time...) but i had to double check my facebook post after reading this.
it got me thinking...
hotlinking on facebook is probably a heinously shitty act, right? if i post a picture directly from your server, then every person who goes back to their 'feed' (aka 'home') uses your bandwidth up as long as the picture is still up right? and every time they reload as well? and every time they go to my 'posted items' page, and every time I go to my posted items page?
geez. i can see how that could add up VERY quickly. im not missing anything, am i?
how HORRIBLE i would feel to commit such an act against my main source of entertainment for the last 6(?) years!
Cats have no shame! (But they do apparently have hats of shame. It's a modeling gig, on the side, no real shame involved.)
I'm still waiting for the gif of Xeni donning The Hat of Shame . . . .
When I saw all those animated GIFs, instead of alarms going off in my mind, I just assumed that BoingBoing's backend and finances could easily absorb it. (I know Happy Mutants LLC isn't really private island rich (yet!), but I think I always imagine them significantly wealthier than perhaps they actually are. Especially after that "woah, what's with all the ads?" drama several years ago.)
It seems that George Gilder's prophecy of infinite bandwidth has given way in corporate hearts scorned by investing in all that dark fibre to the assuring scarcity paradigm which is coming to a head vis-a-vis Net Neutrality today. In the meantime, I guess we should have all been using Dijjer to transparently cache the animated GIFs in P2P topology.
(But if we're running proxies, it would have also been great for everyone to also be running the web page entanglement proxy so we could all see where all those hotlinks were coming from -- pretty much like how softlinks work on everything2.)
"Shall we throw the floor open for suggestions? I'm thinking enthusiasm should be an element."
There you go thinking again. Can't you wait until 1/20/09 when it will be officially sanctioned?
Uh. I guess I was one of the idiots. I hotlinked some of the gifs.
My bad. Sorry.
cats have no shame, but they can be embarrassed.
Re: waiting for the Sealing of The Gates of Hades; just getting warmed up!
Where is your web cache now?
It's almost self-fulfilling.
Good thing they were animated gifs and not Flash animations, otherwise, we'd never hear the end of the eeeeeevils of Flash.
Use Amazon S3 to host your images. It works for Twitter. You could get self-boinged and it wouldn't matter. The cost difference would be a tiny tiny blip. Everybody should be using S3 by now.
It's common for sites that get mentioned on boingboing to suddenly get so much traffic that they have to shut down; I'm sure we've all experienced non-working links from a new post on boingboing. You'll often see someone mention on their blog that they've "been boingboinged" and had an increase in traffic.
Looks like boingboing done boingboinged itself.
a self-disemboinging! stupendous!
Mekanikal said:
Xeni said:I said:m... lnks t PBLCLY VLBL CNTNT s hw th wb hppns t wrk.
Dn't wnt ppl lnkng t th SHT Y MD PBLC?! THN DN'T PST T!
Mrns.
ah fuck off nerdler
nerdler, how can one possibly take seriously the ramblings of a madman who doesn't even like PIZZA!?! asshat.
he...he doesn't like PIZZA?? Burn the filthy heretic! Hack off his limbs, fill his bowels with red hot iron filings!
mmmmm, bowels.
Did someone say Flash? Because I've got a link to a Flash throw-the-shoe-at-George game right here in my pocket!
Don't mind the Swedish. KAST EN SKO PA BUSH isn't hard to figure out. Neither are KAST SKOEN AND KAST IGJEN. "Vinkel" is the angle of throw. "Styrke" is how hard you throw it.
Why is he in custody?
If that shoe had hit. It would have smart as hell. Maybe even caused a crooked nose or a whiplash from a string hitting an eye. It's not a nice thing to do, but it's not very dangerous either.
So why is he held in custody for such a minor offence? Is he dangerous or is there a high risk of him disappearing or getting beat up in the streets?
I'm neither USArian nor Iraqi and him being held in custody for such a hubbub just blows my mind.
I maid a post about those gif pict, but hosting its :) and linking boing boing :)
Because it stuffs up anyone using a web-based RSS reader?
It also breaks caching a little.
η
what about how that small trade of a few Manolos opened up your audience even a few million more? charge the advertisers per hit when the big waves come in, and be thankful for the traffic - what a thing to complain about!
gtron @ 50
The point is that people linked to the anipatedgifs and NOT THE PAGE - so the advertising wasn't shown.
Read The Fucking Post man, RTFP.
#50 - I imagine if the money was coming out of YOUR pocket you wouldnt be quite so optimistic :p
Hey GTRON and others, do you know what hot linking IS?
They don't get any benefit out of it, or site visits, or ad exposure. The person hot linking is just pulling the image to their site. This isn't the same as sending a permalink to several people, or blogging about the site and putting a link up. Hot linking is using content hosted on another site on your site. Please make the effort to understand what you are talking about before posting...
on another note, am I the only one that wants to see Xeni wearing the hat of shame in her next BBtv appearance?
s skillful sculptor could make a hat-of-shame blank suitable for thermo-forming. I highly doubt the original crustacean would sue. This could be bigger than Devo hats!
I can think of a few other things I'd like to see Xeni wearing...forget the hat, man.
hubba hubba!
http://www.nyder.com/cthulhu/graphics/cthulhusuit.jpg
Exactly, Mr. Tak! --> http://www.frightcatalog.com/Halloween-Costumes/Devil-Costumes/Furry-Diablo-Costume-1104076/
now that's just sick!
Here you go, guys.
I've done even better and given you a special animated treat!
CRAB CAT!
Okay, I'm pretty sure I'm an idiot, and have been an idiot here and there in the past, and I feel poorly about it. I'm pretty sure Tumblr prevented me from being an idiot in this particular case...
Without everybody calling me names, can someone direct me towards a nice, simple tutorial on how to not be an idiot? I'm reading through Wikipedia entry on hotlinking now, edumacatin' myself, and am just asking for a kind hand.
If I stumble across an image (or a gif) somewhere, download it to my desktop, then upload it to a site, is this kosher? Or is this exactly what makes me an idiot?
Hey Klondike -- the bad behavior or idiot-making at issue is:
* you see a pic you like on someone else's website. we'll call the website owner "bob."
* you decide you'd like to post bob's image on your own website, and share the image with your own audience.
* you insert an image tag in the html on your website which serves up the image from bob's webserver, instead of uploading the image to your own server, or to a public/free/pay-per-use image-hosting server like photobucket or amazon aws or whatever.
* this behavior is considered bad because bob has to pay for the bandwidth to serve the image to users of your website.
It's no big deal unless the traffic is huge and/or the file in question is huge. Then, costs can zoom into the thousands or worse.
And uploading the image to your own server isn't always cool either. There could be copyright issues. And you should at least, always, give credit where credit is due. The safest/nicest thing is to just link to the full page of the site where the image came from.
oooh!!! can you do Xeni's post WITH Crab Cat???!
The Shoe Emperor:
"Caligula was born into an illustrious Roman family. His father was Germanicus, a hugely popular and talented general, who, before his early death, was seen as the natural heir of the reigning Augustus. “Caligula,” in fact, was a fond nickname meaning “Little Boots” (his real name was Gaius) given to him by the soldiers in Germanicus’ legions who loved to see the young boy roaming around the camps dressed up in a military uniform. When the cruel and unpopular Emperor Tiberius (who had succeeded Augustus) died, therefore, Caligula was swept into office on a wave of good will. For the masses were under the illusion that he possessed all the virtues of his father Germanicus and could restore the lustre Augustus had put on the Empire previously founded by Julius Caesar. But Caligula turned out to be the most insane of the crazy Caesars of Rome -- his evil deeds surpassed both Tiberius who reigned immediately before him or Nero shortly after."
Ah, good, thanks Ms. Jardin. I think (think) I've been pretty much an upstanding citizen, then. As much as I am in my 3D life, anyway. Can't say I've never, ever littered, for instance.
And, yah, Elsmiley, sure, I gotcha on the copyright issues. I generally try to give credit where credit is due whenever possible, except usually in Chinese or or Hungarian or something, or by setting a click-thru on the image to take one back to the original source if I have one, most especially if it's a working artist.
BoingBoing's been good to me, has driven traffic my way, which is a thrill, and I thank BoingBoing for it, so just wanted to do the right thing in return. I'm just muddling around.
Blue Eyed Devil, that's just creepy. Thanks!