Dear friends,
Many of you have noticed that the blog was loading very slowly or not at all. This is probably due to what is called a “distributed denial of service” attack but our IT team is also looking into the possibility of some script gone crazy. In other words, we are trying to be vigilant, but not paranoid (yet). The problem seems to be fixed but if it starts again, please do report it.
Second, a member of our community was scheduled to travel to the Donbass region as part of the announced group trip (see here for details). To my (and his) great disappointment, he cannot make it. So now we might have a position open (assuming the organizers agree).
So, if you are an ACTIVE MEMBER of the SAKER COMMUNNITY (in any capacity) and you can pay to travel to Moscow, and you want to be part of that trip, please email me ASAP with your information (including what your role is in our community). All expenses are paid and all I will ask from you is a daily report with images.
I make no promises about accepting you as a candidate, but I encourage you to try!
The Saker
I was just having problems loading this page loaded after a minute or so. Seems the DDos is still happening. Posting as you requested to say something if there are problems.
I had trouble getting the site to load very early this am, and when I checked it out with the “website down” site, they reported saker.is as down. A little later they reported it being up, but page loading was very slow. This afternoon it’s been loading fine. I’m posting from the USA – whatever use this info may be to you guys.
Shameless, Saker.
And don’t pick Anonymous.
23:30 MEZ
I live near Stockholm & have no problem with the site.
Hope this might help….
Cheers X-
Site was offline early am yesterday in Australia, then slow loading, then ok.
Extremely slow loading early am this morning, but now ok.
I’m also in Australia and can report the same.
are you Ozzies having slowness probs with anything else? Optus backbone’s been timing out a bit for past 3 days).
I’m also in Australia and can report the more or less the same. Site was offline yesterday. As was Oceania Saker. Very slow today.
It was exceedingly slow this morning from here in California. I ran some speed tests from Speakeasy Speed Test and found that nearby cities were about normal speed, but midwest and east coast was not much better than old analog modem speeds. The test to Chicago didn’t even finish. So, some of it possibly due to internet backbone problem. It is working OK now.
I had problems ( very slow or not charge at all ) on my first trying at 19:00h ( UTC+1) but then at 21:00h I had no problems yet.
Site seems fine right now…
Site horribly slow here mar 5 12 am utc.
http://rt.com/news/237645-russia-nato-black-sea/
Six NATO warships arrived in the Black Sea on Wednesday to take part in exercises with the Bulgarian, Romanian and Turkish navies, the Alliance’s Maritime Command (MARCOM) said in a statement.
http://tass.ru/en/world/781083
MOSCOW, March 4. /TASS/. Secret services have found confirmation to the data on incipient contacts between Islamic State and the terrorists operating in North Caucasus, the secretary of Russia’s Security Council, Nikolay Patrushev told reporters on Wednesday.
remember, IS=ISIS= Daesh is now “Islamic Emirate”! (see thierry meyssan latest article up)
“This information will be taken into account when decisions on consolidating Russia’s national security and protection of its national interests are taken.”????
anyone want to re-translate what this means?
Went down about 23:30 GMT, lasted for about 5 hours.
Seems fine tonight in Canada
get this http://rt.com/news/237789-snowden-talks-us-trial/ Edward Snowden is a US operative. I heard it a year ago, and this may confirm it.
“Working with the US government”
Working FOR the US government more like it.
Well,if he isn’t working for them.He is a fool to leave Russia to go back to the US.You would think he would know better than to “trust” the US government’s promises,”fair trial” my a$$.He will be charged and convicted.
I heard he was an op from a pretty reliable source. Catherine Austin Fitts. That’s what she thinks.
In case it interests anyone, Glenn Greenwald recently wrote
something about the “Snowden wants to return home” non-story.
Aw, crap. Messed up the link.
Here’s the right one: The “Snowden is Ready to Come Home!” Story: a Case Study in Typical Media Deceit
there is no such thing as FORMER c i a operative.
Former in intelligence terms means breathing dirt.
I couldn’t access the site for an hour or so.I just was able to now.
For info : RSS feed is not working. no news since 28 feb in RSS feed.
They were working on it. When the site went down a few times, I think they concentrated on that. Sorry, it will get done as soon as they can.
OT adorable video of orphan bears in russia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KycInn2uotQ&feature=player_detailpage&list=PLl454lB46JcLVKufuam-j5lD7BrseL2Ns
cute video of russian navy girls dancing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGOZ4PYO438&feature=player_detailpage&list=PLl454lB46JcLVKufuam-j5lD7BrseL2Ns
This one is kinda cute too
Been unable to get on here for 8hrs til now Australia.
yes, it was a bad outage. Still a bit slow but hoping they can prevent it from breaking again
K.K.
Has it been determined yet what caused the problem?
if it has, they’ve not let me in on it. I think it would be best to not say, anyway, so “they” don’t guess our weak spots by knowing where our defences are. If you can follow that. (There certainly are “they” in the mix).
Thanks, K.K.
another ot
Dear Putin helping disabled people to acheive high self esteem
Para olympics https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLl454lB46JcLVKufuam-j5lD7BrseL2Ns&v=q3HWCe2jD8I&feature=player_detailpage
Thursday morning 12:32 am on the Pacific Coast Canada and it downloaded very sweetly. And with only two trackers!
hi,
try some of the caching plugins (if already not implemented), this would ease the load on the database.
A few were tested; I don’t know the current status. Caches are great for smoothing out transaction times. But for DDoS attacks we’d rather not let them far enough in to affect the DB. I’m sure it will be sorted soon. Meanwhile if it goes off again, go to the old blog, where there’s an unmoderated thread for such emergencies. http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com
maybe they (IT) could also try writing a plugin that tests the server load and accordignliy serve cached version or goes through the database. As php has the ability to dynamically allocate memory limit, test plugin should be loaded with minimum memory limit and if passed memory limit could be set to optimmum.
also, some sites in russian had ddos testing landing page (for javascript and cookies), although this is already bypassed with advanced methods.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2056805/applicationlayer-ddos-attacks-are-becoming-increasingly-sophisticated.html
do us all a favour and pick yourself a name, please; you are not posting anything to be ashamed of.
Yes we can test for all internal loads. But not for being hit with, say, 50,000 incoming queries ( a day’s worth) in 5 minutes. That sadly can be only done in real life. Saker has put together a good IT team of experienced people, they’ll get there.
and just remmebered, as you have rss, each site or blog serving them also contribute to the server load. this cache plugin also caches rss feeds:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/
https://wordpress.org/support/topic/is-there-a-way-to-cache-rss-feeds
thanks, noname
Wow! I loved the Music or Movie Card challenge, such a dirfefent proposal! I am surely joining this challenge and my Music is an old one that I love, from Rick Astley : “Whenever You need somebody”!!! : )This music reminds me of such a great time in my life!xox Julia Se1ddi
I could not access the website am in India today; pm has been slowish but possible. Did I read somewhere that the internet traffic from Iceland flows through the UK and the agencies there might have something to do with the slow response rates to discourage use of certain Iceland sites?
It seems to me a counterattack would be appropriate, would it not?
More to the point, perhaps some of the IT people on this site could comment on Russian responses to the Empire’s cyber warfare against all that is good and just.
Dear The Saker,
It seems to be fine today. Thanks to the IT team for sorting it out. (Said a bit tongue in cheek with a wink and a sardonic tone) I notice just as FU the EU Nuland is in front of the committee trashing and lying about Russia getting more propaganda funding and at the same time Junta press blaming Russia for MH17 – your site slows/goes down ;) ……..What wonderful timing…… ;)
Rgds,
Veritas
Yesterday morning as well as last night (4th to 5th of March, CET – round about 1 am) I last observed problems while trying to renew / load this page. At the same time I detected a absolutley identical behavior while accessing the German website. All other pages were loaded witout any delay.
I’m using Firefox v. 36.0 and I’m connected to the internet with a bandwidth of 50 Mbit.
Observing that theNaked Capitalism site is down at 7:15 AM CST, 1:15 PM UT, I believe. (3/5/2015) Maybe a coincidence, maybe not. They linked to a Saker article just yesterday, I believe.
Site was down for some hours yesterday (Mass., USA).
First I got one of those annoying “you have already posted this” comments.
So, waited about five hours (I was working) and then the whole thing was frozen and new attempt to access site timed out repeatedly.
Sent an irate email to The Saker from the old blog. Sorry for irateness!
Irateness caused by the original “you are repeating yourself” comment when I was NOT!!
Katherine
Thanks, Katherine. That may have been the system’s (silly) response to starting to feel overloaded. If it happens again, let us know, it may help us catch it, or observe what’s going on (they still haven’t told us exactly).
Saker:
OT but what happened to the links to “Our Brothers in Arms” etc. that I could swear were copied to this site from the old one? I was using that to just click on the links instead of typing each one out. Thanks.
ooops, it may have fallen off when we fixed the RSS feeds. I’ll ask our webmaster to fix it.
[edit] no, it fell off during the fix for the big outage. It is being fixed as we speak
Re: Brothers in Arms” link…Thanks. I see it now.
Dear Saker – I have found your blog(s) extremely informative as well as exceptionally interesting. The content applies to many aspects of what is happening around the world, where the chronological display of content and comments is most critical to the message, given how fast things are changing.
However (yes, now comes the “however”) as with you previous blog modifications your new blog at thesaker.is confuses the chronology of events, whereas the old (blogspot blog) was a simple first in – first displayed. The newest item was the first with the the other articles and comments successively following.
I suggest a modification of your present blog, that you add a column on the side of the first page consisting of chronological links to additions to the current thesaker.is blog; the top link being the most recent addition to the blog. We could open the first link, read it, click back on the “home” button and open the next most recent addition. That way, people like us chronologically-constrained folks could continue to read and experience your blog as we always have.
Its already there. You have two choice at the top next to tab ‘Home’ is a tab called ‘Latest Articles’ these are all in chronological order. Your second choice it the tab called ‘RSS’ it also list the articles in chronologiacal order, however it requires the use of firefox or IE as a broswer to see directly. For the Chromium or Opera browsers RSS reader extensions must be added. Hope this helps.
Guess I missed the entire issue with the server. My problem with this site is just finding the new stuff. I know that there is a link to the latest articles at the top of the side bar, but why not have them front and center? I mean have the latest posts in the space now occupied by “Highlighted articles”. And move the highlighted articles to the side bar. This way the headlines are the most current articles, which is what most people are looking for when they arrive at the site.
There is also a problem with the highlighted articles: they change. So I read an interesting highlighted article some days back and I commented on it. However, it has since disappeared from the listing. I don’t remember what year and month the article was from so I can’t find it again. So my comment on it, amounts either graffiti or just talking to myself.
thesake.is site does provide what you are looking for. Next to the ‘Home’ tab at the top is a tab called ‘Latest Articles’ in provide the most current articles in chronological order. The RSS tab also provide the articles in chronological order but formated slightly different. The RSS articles are accessible with the Firefox and IE browsers. Chromium and Opera requires RSS extensions to be added.
P.S. When I tried to post my above comment I got an error message “You are posting comments too quickly, slow down”. Now its been a few days since I last posted, surely thats not too quickly ;)