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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."
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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.
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.
a daily text file (wikileaks-29-march-2008.txt) that is easily read on every platform/OS sent out as a bittorrent? like an electronic newspaper where everybody is the paperboy...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
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.
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.
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?
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.
DDoS anyone?
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?
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.
No, no, you're all wrong.
Notice that wikileaks is up right now? Wikileaks hasn't even gone down yet. Taco is attempting to ddos the wikileaks servers by conjuring up the ./ effect.
It's obvious that he's being pressured by the CIA to bring down the servers in order to stop the proliferation of leaked patent documents concerning the atomic bomb.
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?