This is an example of an exceptionally false-positive computer virus concern. More accurate: General lack of having a clue.
How to clean the goo dot gl virus when you run it?
The worm spreads on Twitter as a link. Careful with this.
Computer Viruses: View the question and associated answers on Quora.
The impact of an Amazon Web Services* Elastic Cloud 2 outage is being determined at this very moment. It will be interesting to do some post-situation analysis, and see what the effect was on global web traffic. That is not possible at this time, as EC2 remains off-line.
Many sites are unaffected of course.
Happily, a single cloud provider has not become indispensable for the internet. This should reinforce the viewpoint that alternative provider services, at least two or three, are always to be encouraged. The BBC provides a fine summary of the situation.
*This is the product more commonly known as AWS EC2.
21 April 2011 Scores of well-known websites have been unavailable for large parts of Thursday because of problems with Amazon’s web hosting service. Foursquare, Reddit and Quora were among the sites taken offline by the glitch. No reason has so far been given for the outage.
*A reference librarian’s primary duty is to answer questions, with source citations for context or historical background.
From my answer on Quora.com web site.
Universal symbol of the anti-spam
Ari Shahdadi provides a comprehensive yet concise explanation about current measures for managing spam on the online question and answer service, Quora. The methods he describes are behavioral and process-oriented in nature. That is not surprising, as programmatic or automated methods might be proprietary technology for Quora or a vendor service. The only way I can imagine exclusively non-programmatic methods used to implement spam control would require large-scale use of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, or similar.
I am curious about quality control at Quora. Quora maintained a spam-free environment while there was low traffic, but traffic is increasing quickly.
Ari is a Quora administrator. His post, How is spam currently dealt with on Quora? is time stamped 16 January 2011.
This post should not be inferred as an oblique criticism of Quora. I make this explicit comment due to the glut of criticism directed at Quora by the tech media recently. And also due to my propensity for sarcasm and Schadenfreude, which is not applicable in this case. Quite a rare occasion indeed!
I remain puzzled as to the reason for Quora’s sudden surge in popularity in December 2010. I like it. But I like etymology and anachronisms and generally have poor social skills. I’m uncertain what the cool kids will get out of Quora, as it is quite pedantic at times and not multi-media at all. In fact that is a large part of the criticism the site is facing, the formality, not the lack of videos.
There are other issues, like favoritism and cliques, but that is a problem amongst any group of people. It has been an aspect of human behavior since, well, probably before there WAS human behavior. Cro-Magnons were probably cliquey. Neanderthals were probably cliquey too. Be that as it may, Quora has been formal, though perhaps less ego-oriented, since its inception.
