Wikileaks Website, Pummeled by Attacks, Loses Home | Hacker News Reader

Wikileaks Website, Pummeled by Attacks, Loses Home

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32 pointshornokplease30 comments

They're now sitting on bahnhof.net in Stockholm. If they were really getting 10Gb/s inboud DOS on AWS perhaps they just grew tired of paying the AWS fees - 0.10/GB - so $450/hr just in inbound traffic. Maybe now that the biggest media exposure is over they figure they can live with a little worse performance.

That is truly a godawful AP article.

Here's the prior discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1956981

Senators calling hosting companies to have websites shut down? Um, wasn't there something called the rule of law?

Don't hyperventilate. Anybody, from a Senator to a high school janitor, can "call a hosting company to have a website shut down". Nobody made Amazon comply.

It would be great if you could keep the debate civil. Mr. Lieberman is not just anybody. He is an official of the state with the power to hurt Amazon's business interests in many ways that are not available to a school janitor. But instead of using the great legal and legislative powers and resources he has, he chose to use his personal influence to suppress information he doesn't like.

That's my point. Exactly which "legal" or "legislative" powers has Lieberman wielded against Amazon? None. As far as I can tell, he's just bloviating. Senators don't lose the right to bloviate when they're elected.

Rupert Murdoch can harm Amazon's business interests in far worse ways than Joe Lieberman, and with far less accountability.

Use the courts or the legislative process is exactly what he should have tried to do. In that case, all the safeguards put in place by the constitution would have been properly applied. People would have looked into whether or not shutting down a media outlet that is critical of the government violates the first ammendment. That's how it should work.

Things should not happen on the personal say so of populist politicians, much less things like shutting down critics of the government. That undermines the rule of law and the separation of powers.

That's my opinion, but judging by the votes you get here, Russia style politics is rather popular in the US as well.

You think that it's better for Lieberman to have tried to legislate away hosting of Wikileaks --- legislation that very well might have passed in this climate --- than for him to have used his "influence" as one of America's least-beloved Senators to shame a multi-billion dollar company that probably planned to jettison Wikileaks anyways?

Pardon my ignorance but is there really nothing that can be done to escape DDOS attacks other than simply buying more bandwidth? What stops a criminal entity or government with enough resources from upping the size of the attack even more and prolonging it for months or even years?

Nothing... that I can think off. DDOS attacks are horrible for exactly this reason, if you can find the source and kill it as close to home as possible than you have a chance but other than that, wikileaks is in a really bad position right now.

You could distribute it via a torrent ... oh, wait.

Am I the only one that wonders if there is a casual connection between shutting down the torrent trackers, WikiLeaks releasing the diplomatic cables, and the DDoS against WikiLeaks ?

You gotta hand it to Wikileaks, they've got balls. But I'm afraid it's all going to be for naught. Nobody likes to be told, let alone admit, their government/banks/military is corrupt. No good will come from any of this because the average person really doesn't give a damn.

Nobody likes to be told, let alone admit, their government/banks/military is corrupt. No good will come from any of this because the average person really doesn't give a damn.

Then....why is this wikileaks business a front-page headlining story pretty much everywhere? Doesn't that completely counter your claim?

Further, the only reason people might not want to be told is that they already long knew it. Wikileaks hopefully has something pretty salacious to keep the interest, because thus far the response has been "Wow....is that it? I suspected much worse."

It's a frontpage story because they did what most journalists would never dare doing.

Then....why is this wikileaks business a front-page headlining story pretty much everywhere? Doesn't that completely counter your claim?

Just because "its on the news" doesn't prove that anybody gives damn. I don't see citizens rallying in favor of Wikileaks and calling for the overthrow of the US government.

The news prints what people want to read about. It's a supply/demand industry.

However what in the leaks demand that people call for the overthrow of the US government? Thus far it has been entirely predictable, tame, boring cables from individual offices and subjective interpretations. BFD. Seriously, BFD. It's like reading a diary, and that's what's interesting, but there has been nothing that is unexpected.

Except when the world reads this diary, spies will be discovered, people will die and other countries will refuse to cooperate with the United States.

The leaks have been on the home page of the NY Times for days.

A carefully selected small subset of the leaks have been on the home page of the NY Times for days.

I don't think it's really about convincing people of anything, RE Assange himself: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1955559

It's about creating an atmosphere which makes the secrecy needed for conspiracy and in turn corruption, difficult or impossible to attain effectively and without doubt. This will cause the systems of government that rely on this to change themselves or become too susceptible to attack from other more transparent governments. I see no reason this won't happen, too: the doors have been opened to this kind of activity and it will only get worse for them. They can either become more authoritative and risk unrest, even more secretive (at a detriment to their ability to operate efficiently) or they will be forced to become more open.

Who says anyone is corrupt? I don't understand why having classified information automatically makes you corrupt.

I don't know about that, a popular past-time here is complaining about all the various ways government is screwed up/stomping our rights/doing something stupid/etc.

It's what normal people talk about over beers instead of emacs vs vi.

Companies like Arbor Networks have products like Peakflow[1] that are supposed to mitigate DDoS attacks by filtering the traffic. How are they not using tools such as those?

[1] http://www.arbornetworks.com/en/delivering-in-cloud-ddos-pro...

Disclaimer: I will be interning at Arbor this summer.

Most of them can't handle really large attacks. Wikileaks was supposedly getting hit with more than 10Gbps, which is right around the maximum Peakflow can handle.

When an attack this big targets a small business, they usually just null route the servers, essentially sending all data into a blackhole. The downside is that their website will be inaccessible by legitimate users. The upside is that they don't have to pay for the used bandwidth, which is pricey at 10Gbps.

Hmz, there are a lot of reasons why Amazon could have given them the boot (hitting usage limits due to DoS, payment problems, attacks on the whole Amazon infrastructure). I'd like to hear their story.

Seems like hosting with a US company was a bad idea to begin with as any informant on the US would worry about Amazon being subpoenaed.

I don't think that wikileaks really worries about someone taking their servers at Amazon. The data on them isn't secret at all.

They have copies of the data and gave copies away as encrypted volumes on bittorent.

The identity of informants would be pretty secret. (Still waiting for wikileaksleaks.org).

I'd be surprised if this was held on the server hosting the data.

The website that distributes documents to the world does not need to be the same place where they receive incoming communications.

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