Slashdot Mirror
Huge Interest Brings Wikileaks Offline
DragonFire1024 writes "Wikinews.org — The Wikileaks website, which publishes sensitive and censored material submitted by anonymous contributors, has experienced unprecedented levels of Internet traffic today through public interest. This interest has caused the website's servers to be unable to meet the enormous demand of over 164 gigabytes of download traffic within twenty-four hours, leading the site to be temporarily inaccessible."
I predict many conspiracy theories in the future regarding the maintainers of this site. Assasinations, bribes, etc.
Is there any organization effort to automatically mirror the contents of Wikileaks on Freenet?
"This interest has caused the website's servers to be unable to meet the enormous demand of over 164 gigabytes of download traffic within twenty-four hours, leading the site to be temporarily inaccessible.""
Which is another way of saying, Mirroring.
I had an issue with the same thing when the Scientology papers were leaked. Lets hope they can recover.
Wikileaks is back up. Can anyone say "slow news day?"
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Yea -_- I haven't RTFA yet but from summary I get the impression that Botnets started to cooperate with Baer or whatever else organization got pissed off.
This link bypasses DNS poisoning and uses a caching proxy to take the load off Wikileaks servers: http://88.80.13.160.nyud.net:8080/wiki/Wikileaks
It must be the operating thethans(TM) of the church of $cientology® who DDOSed it following the "leak" of their "holy" (as in "full of holes") "scriptures"...
brilliant, /.ing is sure to help with their bandwidth problems
Yes, and being on the front page of Slashdot is a very effective way to remedy the situation.
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
A server over http appears the wrong tool for this job. It's subject to a variety of forms of denial of service. Freenet, or another distributed database, that shares the load and precludes a single point of failure, would be a better option.
One has to wonder, how popular would Wikileaks be if they had never been censored by an overzealous judge! In the immortal words of Killer Instinct: "C-C-C-C-COMBO BREAKER!"
I guess the gist of the current Fitna debacle is that "Islam is a religion of peace and we'll kill everyone who doesn't think so". You know what is the worst possible reaction to this? Tolerance. You cannot be tolerant if someone threatens you with violence if you don't comform to his point of view. Taking the video down from a lot of sites in order to avoid violence is understandable if done due to fear, but collectively we, as society cannot be afraid from some archaic religious madmen.
So, if you're afraid, but only slightly, please rehost the video. Anyone got a link to it so that I can mirror it on my own site?
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
The increase in interest on Wikileaks is largely due to hosting the anti-Islam film Fitna . The film was moved to Google Video—
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=3369102968312745410
—after Islamists told Wikileaks that they would be killed for hosting the film.
BTW - trackers still have it on PirateBay and elsewhere in hi-def.
wikileaks.org works for me as of 3/29/08, 9:30AM. So I looked at the story on wikinews. It lists NO DATES that wikileaks.org was allegedly offline. I call bullshit. I say it was never offline due to high traffic, it is merely wishful thinking on their part, an attempt to get everyone to look to see if it is, in fact, offline.
Those damned bankers will get you every time. You really have to go over your loan agreements and read all the fine print carefully.
:(
R.I.P Wikileaks
May you pay off your debt and rise once again.
Is "164 gigabytes of download traffic within twenty-four hours" so huge?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's only about 2MB/s on average, which shouldn't scare any decent web-server.
Sure enough, 2MB/s on average means bursts to some dozens of MB/s.... but what is the amount of data Slashdot has to deliver every day?
of course it's offline! you just slashdotted it!
Tom Cruise is so pissed right now.. sitting at home with 100 IE windows open hitting Refresh All Tabs.
If they are running Linux, they should, IMHO, move to operating system of a better quality, such as FreeBSD 7.0 or Solaris 10, because Linux is not able to catch up in heavy loaded internet servers :-(
Could this be a wave of a new breed; the Success Of Service Attack.
This is exactly why Wikileaks was offline. The whole story is about Fitna. Basically, the Wikileaks admins got death threats and had to take the video offline, replacing it with an apology about having to put staff safety before freedom of speech. Later, the site might have been taken down by the increased traffic, but by that time Fitna was already on Google Video and Youtube, so it was way too late to stop people seeing it.
I think the Slashdot editors might have been looking for a story about Fitna that doesn't explicitly mention Fitna in the summary, since they no doubt wish to avoid getting some death threats of their own.
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
Wikileaks is offline ... let's all go there to see if it is really offline :-|
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
That works out to an average of 14.8mbit/s. That's not enormous. That's not even huge, or a lot. Downstream you get that kind of bandwidth on customer-grade ADSL2 connections (though upstream would be more expensive at home -- but then again, you don't host servers at home usually).
Surely somebody has put this stuff on a p2p network somewhere. Does anyone have links to it?
--
Let me guess- let mY conscience be mY guide?
fUCK OFf.
164GB:day is only about 5TB:month. I pay $100 per month for up to 2TB. I could pay $400 for 5TB:mo on a single server, or $300 for 6TB on 3 servers, which would be cheaper and more redundantly reliable. $3-400 a month isn't very much for such a site, that also clearly has lots of expensive lawyers working to protect it. Even if they're not paying for the lawyers, those kinds of operations make a $400:mo expense look like chicken feed.
No, this outage is more likely the result of shortsighted planning. Either bad architecture in the network, HW or SW for handling spikes, or just renting the wrong hosting ISP. It's been a few weeks since the site started getting huge interest. The sysadmins/webmasters should have switched hosts a long time ago.
--
make install -not war
Got slashdotted a few years ago when I was hosting Beethoven's symphonies that the BBC had made available for download.
~167GB in 5 hours. More here. The MRTG graphs are fun:
The sheer volume of traffic in GB for wikileaks doesn't seem terribly surprising. Rather, I suspect it is the dynamic nature of the website that brought it down. Simple filehosting doesn't take much in terms of resources provided your pipe is fat enough. Dynamic content, OTOH, does. I suspect they'll need to tweak/implement a caching system to mitigate this problem going forward.
What is humor if not pain tempered by time?
it equates to 479 people downloading XP SP3 (@350mb) or 240 people downloading Vista SP1 i would of thought MS would do this kind of bandwidth in 10 minutes
http://thepiratebay.org/search/Fitna/0/99/200
http://thepiratebay.org/tor/4102583/Fitna_the_Movie_by_Geert_Wilders_-_English
I don't need
A DDoS is a deliberately malicious attempt to harm a website. What happened to wikileaks is just that they RanOutofBandwidthDamnit, so can we start calling it ROBD from now on, huh?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
I think torrenting the movie is the best solution for large files. Switching their servers to Lighttpd would be a huge help as well (if they are on Apache or another slower HTTP daemon), but that certainly would not affect a bandwidth issue.
There was a protocol or system which could distribute news to millions of people without causing undue load on the originating servers.
Deleted
and we just added a Slashdot effect :p Go Wikileaks!
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
Huge Interest Brings Wikileaks Offline
How about "drives"?
Also, it's not the interest that drove them offline, but the traffic. So maybe, "Massive Traffic Drives Wikileaks Offline."
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Wikileaks is back up. I've seen "Fitna"; it looks like a YouTube mashup, zooms over stills and all. There's little original footage.
A much better comment on militant Islamic types, The Burqa Project, is down, though. That's a delightful little piece from 2005 showing three French models running around Paris in flowing, see-through burgas. Google still has thumbnails up, but the video site is now password protected.
As Heinlein liked to point out, religion needs a good belly-laugh once in a while.
I've completely lost confidence in Wikileak's ability to report anything accuractely, since they ran that terrible JP Morgan Chase Tax story. It was wrong on practically every important point, which was pointed out here on Slashdot by me and others. I figured, "Hey it's a wiki; I should fix the errors", but admin-abuse kept the original story locked. If they can be so horribly wrong on one topic, why should we trust them regarding anything else?
OK so we have to go kill all muslims now because they want to kill us. Sure. I could make a 15 minute video of new clippings showing how Christian assholes want to kill anyone who visits an abortion clinic. Including examples of all the murders committed by the Christians to that end. So maybe we should also destroy all Christianity. Was Marx right about religion? I think it has been determined that he was not.
Maybe they are right about Islam screwing up the Netherlands. They do want to ban pot all of a sudden. That is what all the religious nuts want. It seems to me that most of the Muslim immigrants are leaving their holy land because they really don't like the way the extremists are ruining things. They don't want to give up their faith, but they don't want to live in the violence either. Christians were called to go kill infidels more than once through history. Hopefully most know why that was a mistake. It would be helpful to everyone if stupidity could be cured, but so far no cure for that.
There is a Brittish documentary that touches on the source of religion pretty well. It is actually a biological study of humans. "The Human Animal" long story short, humans are pack animals. We must have a dominant alpha male, so to avoid the constant struggle for dominance we invented the alpha male. Allah, God, Jesus, Tom Cruise, Jehova. We give him the biggest "cave" or house to live in. Church buildings, Mosques, Temples are always the largest building.(except in the US where banks have the biggest sky scrapers, money is our alpha) But tell people that their god isn't the alpha, and they must fight with you to make sure you and your fake alpha are defeated. They want to make sure that their building is the biggest, so we see the constant quest to raise money to make the biggest church. Then all the follower sheeple think it is great. Baptists make a bigger building, then the Mormons have to out do them etc.
Humans have the ability to overcome the primitive animal behavior, but it will require education. I managed, so I know others can too. The idiots must be stopped somehow, but an idiot never loses an argument, so how can people be made more intelligent? I wish I could drop something in the water supply, but nothing yet exists that would do the trick. Given the chance to improve the intelligence of all humans even if it meant destroying their religious businesses, I would. I will not support the singling out of one stupid religion over another. They are all equally bad, unless they actually teach tolerance. No Christian or Islam branch does. Got to toss out the Bible, Koran first. Start over. And Tom's cult is no improvement despite their self improvement basis.
Lets not go start a stupid war over this video. Or go ahead, but please use large nukes so that none of you will remain when the smoke clears.
It's about 15.2 megabits per seconds, very easily in range of single server. What's the fuzz?
Just got to the site, it appears they're hosting a bunch of pics from Tibet of people who've been killed by chinese forces. I'm thinking DDOS is becoming more and more of a liklihood.
What I don't understand is why sites like this don't simply host torrent seeds? Sign it with their private key so that you can be sure that it comes from them and torrent the suckers. Saves bandwidth and leaves you reasonably assured that the information comes from the right source. I imagine paying one of those certificate sites for verification is cheaper than the bandwidth and hassles of maintaining it in a central location.
There are almost as many people who don't want Wikileaks online as people who want to see it - and the former are vastly more powerful.
Surely the possibility that this is an attack rather than "interest" has crossed some people's minds? And if there is strong evidence that it isn't, why the hell isn't that evidence in the summary?
IM going to FUCKING KILL google too!
... excessive interest, and not a DOS attack? For that matter, when a page gets Slashdoted or Farked, but not DOSed, what's the difference? How do we really determine intent?
"Wikileaks is down from too much traffic. Here, let me link to it from the frontpage of slashdot, that'll help!"
I came up with this proof-of-concept idea for a similar site to Wikileaks, RecordQuest. I wanted reporters to more widely adopt BitTorrent as a protocol for sharing public records that they get during their reporting. I made a very puny Drupal install, thinking that I was going to work on it after I got my Master's (where I researched the idea). Then I got hired to run a corporate malfeasance wiki called Crocodyl, which has a similar feel, but we haven't gotten BitTorrent implemented yet.
I think a good revenue model could be to charge money for downloads, but offer the BitTorrent download for free. That way you are encouraging the public to use a free protocol to download public interest information, which should be free. You also could profit from people who want to get the information, but won't (for some reason) install a BitTorrent application. You could offer a really good text description of the contents of the documents (leaks, records or whatever) but if they want to see the original, they have to use BitTorrent or pay. Also, such a system should use Osprey, which if you haven't heard of it, is a BitTorrent tracker developed by ibiblio, and hosts a permanent seed on the server, thus negating the one fatal flaw of BitTorrent, which is not being able to get the file because no one is seeding.
Isn't there a system that allows distributed content distribution, where, rather than a site being served by a single server, the same site can be served by a number of different servers? Preferably with participants in the system automagically becoming servers when demand increases? Sort of like Bittorrent, where more downloaders means more uploaders?
If not, we should probably start creating such a system. Sites like Wikipedia and Wikileaks seem to survive without it - but with lots of headaches about funding the hosting and bandwidth bills. If we could take that load off such sites' shoulders, I feel that would be a Good Thing.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
However, the distinction is not as well understood among the general populations of both the Western and non-Western worlds. That's the sad part of it all. The resulting misconceptions about and misinterpretations of [any religion] are the cause of most of the violent and non-violent extremism shown by both sides.
I think the claimed distiction is more widely understood than your realise, the better informed choose to reject that distiction for a wholly different reason to that you imply.
They understand there is no such thing as moderate religion; all religious movements prime vunerable minds to accepting religious teaching and become vunerable to believing what they are told and punished for challenging or questining the teachings. It starts in childhood before they even have a chance to consider what is fact or fiction is, it is just the start of a very slippery slope. The is no such thing as a moderate when it comes to religion.