Blog of Hamlesh

Faceball… well the name kinda tells you what you need to know…

Demonstrating how it works…

Ready…

Throw…

HIT

Some thoughts following on from Paul Johnson’s “how to break the internet” talk at #barcamplondon4.

Essentially he was expressing the idea of pulling RSS feeds into aggregators, then the aggregated feed into another aggregator, and so forth.  So if you were malicious, you could break friendfeed/twitter (if it wasn’t breaking itself) and the like by automating the creation of 100,000 accounts, get them to follow each other, get each one to consume RSS content from each other as well as busy sources (BBC news, etc…).  So now you have 100,000 accounts pulling 100,000^100,000 feeds… and twitter has no caching… broken interwebs!

This then led into a discussion on how to fix twitter, which unsurprisingly, is quite easy

Now time for something called Faceball… there are these inflated pink and blue balls (like the flickr logo) being thrown around the room… time to put the macbook away methinks!

IRC, it lives… check it;

irc.freenode.net

#barcamplondon4

The code review team at Yahoo have 3 highlighters;

• Fail
• Epic Fail
• Critical Fail

FAIL on the crashing macbook norm, tut.

#barcamplondon4

I guess I had better go to bed, I shall do my best to blog in real time as well as stream pictures to flickr on a regular basis.

Looking forward to playing warewolf again… although i’ve forgotten the rules…

Man, BarCamp rocks!