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."

Conspiracy theorys

[2.7182 (819680)]

I predict many conspiracy theories in the future regarding the maintainers of this site. Assasinations, bribes, etc.

Re:

[Vexorian (959249)]

That's quite a conspiracy theory.

Re:

[Ryukotsusei (1164453)]

DDoS anyone?

Freenet?

[CRCulver (715279)]

Is there any organization effort to automatically mirror the contents of Wikileaks on Freenet?

Re:Freenet?

[FreenetFan (1182901)]

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 [wikipedia.org] :
"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.

rubbing salt in the wound

[jollyreaper (513215)]

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."

And so you post the story to slashdot with a link to the site in the summary. Why don't you give 'em papercut and pour lemon juice in, too?

Re:

[wvmarle (1070040)]

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."

And so you post the story to slashdot with a link to the site in the summary. Why don't you give 'em papercut and pour lemon juice in, too?

I was thinking EXACTLY the same. But the site is still up so it seems they have done something about it.
OTOH, it seems it was because they put the video Fitna on their site and that draw all the traffic. The /. summary links to a text only page so byte traffic should be relatively light.

No matter what, good for them, more publicity for their cause.

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

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

coral cache

[by Anonymous Coward]

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 [nyud.net]

Must be the thethans...

[Pig Hogger (10379)]

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"...

Wrong setup

[debrain (29228)]

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.

Re:Wrong setup

[FudRucker (866063)]

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...

Server move

[cyxs (242710)]

wikileak.org [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

How ironic...

[A beautiful mind (821714)]

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 afr

Re:

[xtracto (837672)]

I just saw the video (downloaded from Wikileaks), and I can tell you that from what I saw there, and from what I have read, it seems to me that Islam is a really fucked up religion. And this time I mean the religion, not the church. The religion is what? 300 hundred years old? still thinking in stoning women for prostitution or whatnot?

As you said, you just can not "solve" the differences between Islam believers and the western society. Because for them, solving means that all of us convert to Islam. Some p

Re:How ironic...

[Alain Williams (2972)]

The religion is what? 300 hundred years old?

More like 1500 years. But that is not the point.

Whereas I do not doubt that everything shown in the film has happened, I do think that it is highly selective; someone trying to stir up trouble against Muslims.

There are people on both sides of this who are stirring the pot. I do not think that most muslims are seeking Jihad, however some are. I don't know enough about it. It is an error to put all muslims into one group, there are many different sects with different views, some benign, some not so.

Whatever you do: don't take everything at face value.

Re:

[chrb (1083577)]

I just saw the video (downloaded from Wikileaks), and I can tell you that from what I saw there, and from what I have read, it seems to me that Islam is a really fucked up religion. And this time I mean the religion, not the church.

People like you said the same thing about Judaism 70 years ago, and look how that turned out...

Re:

[toriver (11308)]

Easier than lying with a camera.

Re:

[Idaho (12907)]

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?

Try thepiratebay.org and search for 'fitna', you'll find plenty of mirrors - and a lot of people are seeding it, too.

It's also still available on google video [google.com], but you'd have to rip the stream if you want to rehost it I guess.

This is largely due to Fitna

[Sara Chan (138144)]

The increase in interest on Wikileaks is largely due to hosting the anti-Islam film Fitna [wikipedia.org]. The film was moved to Google Video—
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=3369102968312745410 [google.com]

—after Islamists told Wikileaks that they would be killed for hosting the film.

Not offtopic

[Cheesey (70139)]

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.

Re:

[Cheesey (70139)]

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.

Re:

[dubz (1006283)]

--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 a

Re:

[jambarama (784670)]

As I understand it, the traffic was mostly for files hosted on the site, not general site traffic. Both the Fitna and Scientology OT leaks were in huge demand. However, why not just use bittorrent to host files like that? This is almost literally the situation bittorrent was designed for - wikileaks could set up their own tracker for their own files without too much trouble.

Bullshit story / press release

[snarfies (115214)]

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.

Huge Interest

[garett_spencley (193892)]

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.

Hmmmm.

[BlackPignouf (1017012)]

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?

Re:

[StarfishOne (756076)]

The tubes were leaking!

I know who it was...

[blake1 (1148613)]

Tom Cruise is so pissed right now.. sitting at home with 100 IE windows open hitting Refresh All Tabs.

Big news

[buchner.johannes (1139593)]

Wikileaks is offline ... let's all go there to see if it is really offline :-|

164 GB/day = "enormous demand" ? Oh please ...

[mxs (42717)]

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).

mirror, mirror on the net

[beegle (9689)]

Surely somebody has put this stuff on a p2p network somewhere. Does anyone have links to it?

Not a Lot of Bandwidth

[Doc Ruby (173196)]

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

Moved more than that after a slashdotting

[DrHanser (845654)]

Got slashdotted a few years ago when I was hosting Beethoven's symphonies [slashdot.org] that the BBC had made available for download.

~167GB in 5 hours. More here [polyscience.org]. The MRTG graphs are fun:

• Graph 1 [polyscience.org]
• A few hours after I pulled the plug because of copyright nonsense [polyscience.org]

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.

Damn it, that is misleading

[zappepcs (820751)]

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?

Re:

[freeweed (309734)]

Ran Out Of My Bandwidth, Assholes?

Now... If only

[Colin Smith (2679)]

There was a protocol or system which could distribute news to millions of people without causing undue load on the originating servers.
 

headline

[BorgCopyeditor (590345)]

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."

Wikileaks back up, "Fitna" sucked.

[Animats (122034)]

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 [google.com], 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.

Pfft, Wikileaks

[Hemogoblin (982564)]

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 [slashdot.org]. I figured, "Hey it's a wiki; I should fix the errors", [slashdot.org] 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?

Re:

[NeutronCowboy (896098)]

What the hell? WikiLeaks reports NOTHING. They have no reporters. There is barely any fact-checking - as a matter of fact, due to the nature of the business (leaks of secret documents), it is damn near impossible to do any independent fact checking.

WikiLeaks is awesome as it is - a place where anyone can put up any document, free of any fear that they might be tracked down. Why you think that that makes anything true on there, I have no idea. Seriously. Were you born just yesterday?

"Interest"?

[Arancaytar (966377)]

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?

Re:Not offline?

[Mateo_LeFou (859634)]

as a precautionary measure, i honestly think we *should take note whenever WL goes down.

Re:Not offline?

[LordKaT (619540)]

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!"

Re:

[Daimanta (1140543)]

And on the same hour it gets back up again, people post a link in a /. article to the site. Way to go!

Re:

[phoenixwade (997892)]

Which is another way of saying, Mirroring.

Which is another way to say "Needs Mirroring" What I find interesting is the Slashdot effect exceeded the Slashdot effect.... In other words, Wiki-rumors, it's not just for geeks anymore....

Re:Spread the word.

[gbjbaanb (229885)]

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.

Re:

[Rich0 (548339)]

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.

A

Re:

[Danny Rathjens (8471)]

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.

Re:

[leuk_he (194174)]

The cause is LIKE THE FINE ARTICLE SAID, the mirroring of the movie "fitna" a movie made by a anti-moslim politicus.

To make matters worse slashdot points to the site. :X Talking about irresponsible editors.... who fail to take any responsibilty for the slashdot effect.