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Huge Interest Brings Wikileaks Offline

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the yet-drudge-still-stands dept.

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."

9 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. coral cache by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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

  2. Server move by cyxs · · Score: 5, Informative
    wikileak.org says that its being moved not offline due to demand.

    WikiLeakS.org seems to be down for maintenance and upgrades at the PRQ Internet hosting facility in Stockholm, Sweden
  3. This is largely due to Fitna by Sara+Chan · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:This is largely due to Fitna by dubz · · Score: 3, Informative

      --after Islamists told Wikileaks that they would be killed for hosting the film. Most users of Slashdot are intelligent enough to know the difference between Muslim and Islamist/Islamic Activist. 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 Islam are the cause of most of the violent and non-violent extremism shown by both sides.

      For those who care to know, the term Islamist, when used in such a context, is generally accepted to refer to religious activists. Most of these activists claim to be Muslims yet do not act according to the laws of Islam. Now you people out there could either help educate misguided Muslims and misinformed non-Muslims in this regard, or you could go on talking stuff about Islam that has nothing to do with the religion and cannot be found anywhere in its authenticated texts.

      -Yousuf
  4. Moved more than that after a slashdotting by DrHanser · · Score: 2, Informative

    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?
  5. Re:rubbing salt in the wound by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Wikinews is not Wikileaks... This article links to Wikinews article about Wikileaks incident. There is no link to Wikileaks.

  6. Re:Not offtopic by Cheesey · · Score: 2, Informative

    Looks like I have also been confused by the difference between Liveleak (originally hosted the video, removed it after death threats) and Wikileaks (which ran out of bandwidth). D'oh.

    --
    >north
    You're an immobile computer, remember?
  7. Re:Freenet? by FreenetFan · · Score: 4, Informative

    There is some ad-hoc mirroring of Wikileaks onto Freenet. Recently, images from the protests in Tibet, and the leaked documents from the Julius Baer bank were put there.

    According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks#Technology :
    "Wikileaks is based on several software packages, including MediaWiki, Freenet, Tor, and PGP."

    No-one involved with the Freenet project knows exactly how it uses Freenet; it certainly doesn't seem to be an official partnership.

    Freenet is ideally suited to this kind of thing: freesites (Freenet's equivalent of websites) are fairly quick to retrieve and tend to stay in the network long-term. And of course, creating and reading them is totally anonymous and uncensorable.

    There has been a lot of work done recently into making the Freenet installation process as easy as possible, and an official release of Freenet 0.7 is due in the next few weeks, so watch this space.

  8. Pfft, Wikileaks by Hemogoblin · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?