{"id":2965,"date":"2021-02-10T11:49:07","date_gmt":"2021-02-10T11:49:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thenextweb.com\/?p=1338419"},"modified":"2021-02-10T11:49:07","modified_gmt":"2021-02-10T11:49:07","slug":"the-mysterious-tale-of-indias-tiktok-ban-and-a-flower-picture-getting-75m-daily-hits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/?p=2965","title":{"rendered":"The mysterious tale of India\u2019s TikTok ban and a flower picture getting 75M daily hits"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/img-cdn.tnwcdn.com\/image\/tnw?filter_last=1&amp;fit=1280%2C640&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn0.tnwcdn.com%2Fwp-content%2Fblogs.dir%2F1%2Ffiles%2F2021%2F02%2Fezgif-5-43327042c565.jpg&amp;signature=5017c1b8375b33b1e89eefc9f556352a\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\"><\/div>\n<p>India banned <a href=\"https:\/\/thenextweb.com\/in\/2020\/06\/29\/india-bans-59-chinese-apps-including-tiktok-and-helo\/\">TikTok and 59 other Chinese apps<\/a> last year. This gave birth to a bunch of other short video apps that have<span>&nbsp;expanded rapidly and receive millions of hits every day.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>But there\u2019s something else that gained a ton of traffic after the TikTok ban<\/span>: a picture of a flower on Wikimedia. This image picture received more than 75&nbsp;million daily hits \u2014 almost 20% of Wikimedia\u2019s requests for images.<\/p>\n<p>You may have important questions such as \u201cwhat the fuck?\u201d and \u201chow the fuck?\u201d \u2014 but me explain how did this happen.<\/p>\n<p><span>It came to the fore when someone from the Wikimedia team reported the bug and<\/span> <a href=\"https:\/\/phabricator.wikimedia.org\/T273741\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\">then everyone got hooked onto it<\/a>. The team and <a href=\"https:\/\/news.ycombinator.com\/item?id=26072025\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\">the Hacker News community<\/a> began to dig around to find what could be the cause.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"500\" data-dnt=\"true\" readability=\"10.125850340136\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">How transparent is Wikimedia? <\/p>\n<p>Check out this actual, live ticket about an ongoing mystery. 20% of all requests to one of our data centers for media are for this image of a flower. Nobody knows why.<a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/IHrzpKGVbj\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\">https:\/\/t.co\/IHrzpKGVbj<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/Cbw6pC9txd\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\">pic.twitter.com\/Cbw6pC9txd<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Chris Albon (@chrisalbon) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/chrisalbon\/status\/1358890731981611009?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\">February 8, 2021<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Hours before the team closed the bug, it identified that this high number of requests were coming from a single Indian social media app. In a comment later, the team said that the app gained popularity around TikTok\u2019s ban, and that\u2019s when a high number of requests began hitting Wikimedia\u2019s servers.<\/p>\n<p>Intriguingly, while the app references the image, it doesn\u2019t display the picture anywhere in the interface. However,&nbsp;<span>every time anyone opens a fresh instance of the app, it made the request to the Wikimedia server.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>As many commentators on the thread noted, this was probably a classic case of copying a code snippet from StackOverflow, a site for programming related discussions. This picture of the flower appears in quite <a href=\"https:\/\/phabricator.wikimedia.org\/T273741#6813531\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\">a few examples on the site<\/a>, and probably app makers just pasted the code without making any changes to it.<\/p>\n<p>Sadly, we still don\u2019t have the name of the app. We have reached out to Wikimedia for a comment, and we\u2019ll update this mystery if we hear back. For now, the site\u2019s servers can breathe easy.<\/p>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/thenextweb.com\/dd\/2021\/02\/10\/the-mysterious-tale-of-indias-tiktok-ban-and-a-flower-picture-getting-75m-daily-hits\/\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>India banned TikTok and 59 other Chinese apps last year. This gave birth to a bunch of other short video apps that have&nbsp;expanded rapidly and receive millions of hits every day. But&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2966,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2965"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2965"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2965\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}