iPhone News Feeds

22 Jan

iMob Online Knocking Other Servers Offline, Breaking Other Apps?

Posted by: PatrickJ / Category: iPhone News

Apparently iMob Online’s problems with scaling are not just affecting the app itself anymore, but now a shared Geo-location server used by many iPhone apps has effectively been the victim of a (probably unintentional) DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service Attack) by iMob as well.

Here’s a recent forum entry from the gent who runs GeoNames, updating users on (lack of) service availability a couple of days ago:

The problem since yesterday evening is an enormously popular iphone application called iMob. It is hammering the server with > 100 requests per second which has the effect of a DDOS attack. I am trying to get in touch with the developers to have them remove this feature from their application.

In the end, GeoNames was forced to temporarily change its domain name “to protect the server from exessive use by an iphone application” – and this has apparently broken iPhone apps that referenced that domain name.

I learned of all this via a blog post at Peter Boctor’s (creator of the Hot Popcorn iPhone app) web site – hit the jump for more details from his post …

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