cleolinda

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Hackers are the reason LJ's been malfunctioning?

"the belief in the sinister powers of the Russian government" ...I'll just wait for the Putin and/or Medvedev jokes to appear.

Do you have a link to the Russian news site that reported it? I'd like to read the original article.

It does. I'm a Russian Studies student and Putin is an avid discussion topic. I've seen random pictures of the two of them together where the caption's all romantic/shipper-ish that my classmates think are funny.

OK, that laugh I needed. Thanks.

Not offhand--I believe mysticowl is IN Russia, and probably didn't link because I wouldn't be able to read a Russian-language site anyway. The first link talks about the attacks themselves in English, though.

Ah, well спасибо/thanks.

I live in Canada, but I'm Russian (born and bred, speak it, read it, etc.), so I follow Russian news sites. I'll reply to the original comment with a link to the article so other Russian speakers can check it out.

SiteUA.org: Руководство ЖЖ опубликовало угрозу хакерам: http://tinyurl.com/3tnl43f

Earlier today, if you went on twitter and follows Russian responses to #livejournal, you'd see the speculation that it was all to silence @navalny (Алексей Навальный):

@navalny: А почему у меня снова все спрашивают комментарии про падение жежешечки?

SERJSANDAKOFF: @navalny Так ведь Алексей весь ЖЖ(RU) думает, что именно #DDoS атака на тебя идет. Чтоб ты не постил компрометирующие посты. #LiveJournal

Спасибо!!

SERIOUSLY WHAT THE BALLS IS THIS. So...wait, why are people doing this again? Because of the government? IDK.

To silence a Russian political blogger by taking down, oh, THE WHOLE SITE ON MULTIPLE CONTINENTS.

Oh. Well, that makes a lot of sense and is quite reasonable. >____< They seem to have sorted it out now, though...? Or did I just jinx it?

Most quotable comment ever combined with greatest icon... it's just win all around.

"Quantity has a quality all its own." - generally attributed to Stalin

Ah. At least this is unrelated to Anonymous' war on Sony.

Honestly, I think it's mostly paranoia - the belief in the sinister powers of the Russian government. It's a bloated bureaucracy.

Hm. What with murdering journalists and all, I can understand people being nervous of that government.

According to SUP's Director of Development, the DDoSing was meant to prompt bloggers to give up on Livejournal.

For those of you who can read Russian, the original article is here: http://gazeta.ru/news/blogs/2011/04/05/n_1778749.shtml

For the rest of you, a rough translation:

The attack on Livejournal servers this Monday was aimed at top ten bloggers and communities, director of product development for SUP company Ilya Dronov (igrick) writes in his livejournal.

"We can confidently declare that the attack was aimed directly at the service, without any personal preferences on the part of the attackers. And the cause of the attack in this situation is pretty much obvious - somebody really wants LJ to stop existing as a [blogging] platform" igrick writes.

He gives some technical details of the attack and notes that it was different from the DDoS-attack last Wednesday:

"The attack began on April 4th, at approximately 2:00 PM Moscow time. This time, it occurred with growing intensity. At first, we were able to handle it, to the point where it only caused a few delays in the loading of pages. But after approximately 3:30 PM, its intensity started to cause more serious problems. This was a different type of attack than the one on March 30. If the previous attack was a mix of syn and applied for of flooding, as in it aimed at both the equipment and the connections, yesterday's attack was aimed exclusively at denial of service and internet equipment and represented the blocking of the later using TCP-connections" Dronov writes in his blog.

[The previous paragraph contained some technical terminology I didn't quite understand - I translated it the best I could, but I am sure the more programming-savvy Russian speakers would be able to provide a more accurate translation].

The Director of Product Development of SUP Company concluded that the aim of the attack on the Livejournal was aimed at forcing the users to reject the common blogging platform

[Keep in mind that, in much of former Soviet Union, Livejournal is THE default blogging platform of choice for the vast majority of the population. Shutting down Livejournal would be a severe blow to Russia's blogosphere]

"Of course, one thing needs to be said - the ultimate goal of all of this is the manipulation of the LJ audience that aims as disbursing them across other social networks and standalons, where, quite obviously, it is much easier to fight against individual users. The only question is - will we fall for it or not. This is war and, unfortunately, war can't exist without casualties." igrick writes.

Monday, saw a new DDoS-attack on Livejournal servers. This was the second cyber-attack on the popular blogging service. During the previous weeks, hackers also attacked LJ. It was knocked out of service for seven hours, though the attack itself lasted longer.

SUP, the owner of Livejournal blogging service, is considering the possibility of filing a declaration law enforcement agencies that they will pursue criminal charges against the hackers that attacked Livejournal.

The [Communist Party of Russian Federation] is concerned about hacker attacks on Livejournal. In the run-up to elections, the access to information on the Internet becomes part of the political fighting. It is possible that the party will voice their concerns at the upcoming meeting with President Dmitri Medvedyev.

One of the most popular Russian bloggers,journalist and net project specialist Anton Nosik, mentioned the "Ours" movement[A youth movement loyal to the ruling United Russia Party] when commenting on the DDoS-attack on LJ last week in his column on the "Snob" [magazine] website.</i>

In other words, this is more speculation that Powers That Be behind United Russia wants to get rid of Livejournal because it has trouble controlling Russian blogosphere. Personally, I am not convinced. If the government really wanted to take out Livejournal, it would use some pretext to cancel SUP's business license, cease its servers in the name of national security and shut it down (see - Putin's destruction of Russia's independent televisions, the campaign against Yukos oil company, etc). Besides, as I mentioned earlier, Livejournal is the most popular blogging platform in Livejournal. United Russia leadership may wish for a more cooperative blogosphere, but its not in their interests to shut it down altogether.

Besides, as I mentioned earlier, Livejournal is the most popular blogging platform in Livejournal

Livejournal is the most popular blogging platform in Russia, perhaps?

Darn.

In my defense, I was in a hurry.