Chatroulette wieder online - neue Version mit leicht verändertem Layout

Nachdem der Videochat-Dienst Chatroulette vergangene Woche nicht genutzt werden konnte (SN berichtete), ist die Seite, die wahllos zwei User in einer Videokonferenz miteinander verbindet, mit einem veränderten Layout wieder online.

Das neue Interface ist sehr schlicht gehalten. Es findet sich ein Fenster, in dem der Zugeschaltete zu sehen ist, ein Fenster zeigt das eigene Webcambild, eine Chatbox und einen grauer Balken, der den "Next"-Knopf ersetzt.

Es wird vermutet, dass Chatroulette offline ging, um eine Sicherheitslücke zu schließen.

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Chatroulette Version 2 Now Up: New Yes. Improved, No.
By OLIVER CHIANG

After the site was down for the past week and looked like it had some technical difficulties Sunday, online “chat with strangers” service Chatroulette is finally back up and running. The new interface is really spartan: a couple of video chat screens for both parties, a text chat box and an un-labeled grey bar that took me a while to figure out was the “Next” button. But the big question is this: was the service able to get rid of all the male genitalia that has appeared in version 1 of the site? Not by a long shot.

I was never a big user of the first version, but it appears that nothing in that regard has changed in this new version. As I’ve been on the site, which is still rather unstable, for the past few minutes, I’ve seen perhaps one person masturbating per every five people Chatroulette has shown me. And that’s a generously conservative estimate.

TechCrunch guesses that the real reason behind the week the site went down was to patch a security hole that allowed another site, Chatroulette HOF, to mine data about its users. But I’ve seen an ad for Chatroulette HOF pop up on the site’s video chat screen a number of times now, so I’m not sure if the site has really been successful on that front either.

Meanwhile, the site still seems like it’s not working at 100% yet. Founder of competing video chat site Omegle, Leif K-Brooks, thinks that the site may be using a new implementation called “HTTP polling” that’s causing the server to overload from too many requests.

Says K-Brooks: “It’s almost like the site is performing a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack on itself.”

DDOS attacks are generally caused by outside parties flooding a site’s server with communication requests.