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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?
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"...
as a precautionary measure, i honestly think we *should take note whenever WL goes down.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
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.
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
Umm...say...what WAS the cause of the flood of traffic? Did they get some particularly juicy bit of a leak? Why the huge spike now?
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.
Fitna, the anti-muslim movie. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitna_(film)
The cause is LIKE THE FINE ARTICLE SAID, the mirroring of the movie "fitna" a movie made by a anti-moslim politicus.
:X Talking about irresponsible editors.... who fail to take any responsibilty for the slashdot effect.
To make matters worse slashdot points to the site.
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!
Look, I'm all for keeping an eye out on Wikileaks. I think it serves a very important purpose in a time when a lot of governments - and their people - feel that the withholding of information is a good idea.
But Wikileaks simply succumbed to an overwhelming demand of visitors. This news story is like saying "Look! People are actually reading shit about the Tibetan protests rather than trying to find out who Paris Hilton's new best friend is going to be! Oh my god!"
And on the same hour it gets back up again, people post a link in a /. article to the site. Way to go!
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Tom Cruise is so pissed right now.. sitting at home with 100 IE windows open hitting Refresh All Tabs.
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.
or .. needs bittorrent. Don't wikileaks host very large documents on their site? surely transferring that load to everyone else makes sense, not only because it reduces the load but also spreads the actual documents.
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?
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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?
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?
It's about 15.2 megabits per seconds, very easily in range of single server. What's the fuzz?
Yeah - it would be nice if somebody created a server-oriented bittorrent distribution system.
The website would post a torrent, and would also seed the torrent. If nobody else seeded it then the website would end up uploading the file to anybody who asked for it - which is no worse than what they'd otherwise end up doing. However, as soon as more than one person starts downloading at the same time you get automatic load-distribution, and if anybody sticks around and seeds then you get even more bandwidth.
All you need is a decent daemon that will take a file and create a torrent and track it and seed it, and restore all this stuff anytime the daemon is restarted. I can't find anything that does exactly that...
Perhaps there is an ethical concern regarding the fact that if you distribute via a torrent then the downloaders also become distributors of the content.
With the kind of material involved it could open up the "distributors" to repercussions in their home countries much more serious than those regarding copyright infringement; e.g. repercussions involving imprisonment, harassment, just being added to the wrong list, or even death in some places for treason.
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.
So wikileaks is hosting it with the expectation that people won't look at it?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
The bad thing with that is that BitTorrent traffic isn't encrypted or anonymized, so governments could then theoretically crack down on the people sharing the whistle-blowing material.
It's not anti-muslim, it's anti-Koran, particularly the anti-gay, anti-women, and pro-violence parts.
Good heavens Miss Sakamoto - you're beautiful!
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?
But Wikileaks simply succumbed to an overwhelming demand of visitors. This news story is like saying "Look! People are actually reading shit about the Tibetan protests rather than trying to find out who Paris Hilton's new best friend is going to be! Oh my god!"
Sounds like this story needs a 'suddenoutbreakofcommonsense' tag, asap.
some of the more sophisticate clients (like azureus) do make it simple to create, track and seed, but i have yet to see a way to automate this in with a web server, so that when someone uses say, a php based front end to manage a web server that it would automatically create a torrent and stuff...
however let me assure you there are plenty of people creating their own torrents on their own websites even without 'simple one click' interfaces.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Every time somebody (anybody) says anything about Islam you automatically get swirling mobs of nightshirt wearing, gun waving inbreds, chanting anti western slogans and beheading (slowly sawing off their heads with a dull butcher knife) some hapless foreigner that got caught in the wrong place by a gang of Koran toting thugs.
Which really gives non Muslim people like myself a really warm and fuzzy feeling about Islam in general and a burning to tour Islamic countries!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
Both of those websites, along with the Geert Wilders video, portray Muslims as a ideologically and politically solid group. This is a fallacy that is easy to fall into when describing any group with which you are unfamiliar (read: scared). What makes you so intent on portraying all Muslims as sabre rattling warmongers? I am facing a battle for my life. It's called "I will die some day." It is idiotic to try and move people to action based on how we "are ALL facing a battle [...]." You're just trying to engender solidarity among "anti-Muslims" another presumed group that does not exist. Just cuz you aren't in the club...
-- arstchnca
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... 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?
Yeah. We've never had the Bible-toting KKK raping or murding uppity colored folk, right?
Kindly don't blame it purely on the Koran-toters without remembering the right-wing slaughters in your own country.
"Wikileaks is down from too much traffic. Here, let me link to it from the frontpage of slashdot, that'll help!"
Look, I'm all for keeping an eye out on Wikileaks. I think it serves a very important purpose in a time when a lot of governments - and their people - feel that the withholding of information is a good idea.
The thing is, sometimes withholding information from the general public is a good idea. Not all of the general public are good guys, and there are legitimate reasons for governments to do some things in secret, for a time. The practical problem is that the general public have no way to ascertain whether any information being withheld is being kept from them for legitimate reasons or less savoury purposes if they can't see it. However, there are pragmatic alternative approaches to dealing with this problem via independent oversight that do not involve full disclosure of everything as implied by Wikileaks.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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.
Uh, I didn't post that anonymously. Feel free to look at my posting history. I hadn't even read that article until you posted it.
Before you accuse somebody of astroturfing you might want to see if your accusation has any grounding in reality...
Oh, I know it happens. But something more standardized would be useful.
I'd say the capability is there when you can shut down your webserver, boot it back up, and then touch absolutely NOTHING and have users able to download anything on the site. Oh, and all this on a server that doesn't have X11 installed.
GUI clients really shouldn't be part of server infrastructure. The whole thing should run from init.d and config files.
A nice PHP frontend like you say would be nice, but maybe not completely essential. What is essential is automated operation.
They are an organized violent group with an anti-western agenda; that is the point.
Mod Me Up. You'll make a grown man cry.
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.
Yes!
Every time I see video of some poor bastard being murdered in some gruesome, horrifying way because they were ignorant enough to travel to an Islamic country I certainly will think of the lynchings of innocent African-Americans in the past century, but that doesn't happen here anymore, but the utter disregard for human life and the rights and feelings of others is demonstrated by the "Koran toters" is evident.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
The KKK may be mostly gone, but their murderous legacy lives on. Their modern equivalent is the hate groups against Muslims, unfortunately, just as there have been active and murderous hate groups against Jews, uppity women, immigrants of all types, from among the "privileged classes" of the USA. And there are, sadly enough, their counterparts among the Muslims of the world. Beheading, rape, and torture are all familiar actions among the racists of most modern nations, and we still have people alive in every nation who remember seeing it done by their own citizens.
My point is that it's hardly unique to Muslims.