The Siroker Brothers

Web links never die

A couple of years ago, a Japanese music video named “Yatta” spread across the web like a wild fire. Six young Japanese men dressed in only fig leaves, singing and dancing in front of hundreds of Japanese teenagers, seemed too good to be true. In fact, I thought this music video was so hilarious that I decided to share it with a couple of my friends by uploading it to my website. After a couple of weeks I completely forgot about the 7.7 MB file that I had abandoned in my web directory. I had no reason to worry at the time, since I hadn’t published any active links to the file itself—I had just shared the URL with friends. How is it, then, that this file has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times over the past two years?

Word spread quickly of my Yatta “mirror” and eventually this guy decided to link to it. Soon later dozens of other web sites added links to this file completely unbeknownst to me. Even Microsoft’s Windows Media player started to list my web site as the top hit for “yatta”.

This all happened about two years ago. How did I eventually find all this out? Recently, I decided to move my web page to the account given to me as a Stanford student. When I did this I also installed awstats, a program that synthesizes the access logs generated by the web server into a easy to read report. Once I read the first report, I finally realized what had happened. I was getting hundreds of hits per hour for a file I never linked to! If you do the math, it turns out that I was serving gigabytes of data every day for just this one file.

Now I was faced with a conundrum:

1. Delete the file and have all would-be Yatta lovers reach a “404: File Not Found”
2. Redirect traffic such that everyone gets what they want, without draining stanford.edu’s bandwidth

According to the W3C, cool URIs don’t change. I couldn’t just abandon a poor web surfer who just wanted to watch six jolly Japanese men. Luckily, recent developments have pretty much answered this question for me. Since I am now hosting my web site on my own server, I decided on the second option.

It was also reassuring to notice that most of the traffic has died down lately, so hopefully I won’t be draining too much of siroker.com’s bandwidth. I used Apache’s .htaccess support for permanent server redirects to have the original file (http://www-db.stanford.edu/~dan/yattapv.asf) point to this entry.

Alright, enough babbling. Here is what you’ve been waiting for:

Original Yatta music video [7.7 MB]
Yatta performance on Jimmy Kimmel Live [15.2 MB]

Enjoy!