Huge Interest Brings Wikileaks Offline 163
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."
coral cache (Score:3, Informative)
Server move (Score:5, Informative)
This is largely due to Fitna (Score:4, Informative)
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=3369102968312745410 [google.com]
—after Islamists told Wikileaks that they would be killed for hosting the film.
Moved more than that after a slashdotting (Score:3, Informative)
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:
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.
Re:rubbing salt in the wound (Score:3, Informative)
Re:This is largely due to Fitna (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:Not offtopic (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Freenet? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Pfft, Wikileaks (Score:5, Informative)