Re: Fwd: "Rogue" Websites

[pho <photon@2600.org.au>]

[: hacktivism :]

> WHICH IS WHICH? ON THE INTERNET, YOU NEVER CAN TELL
> 
> Every day, thousands of people looking for the Internet sites of the ultra-
> right party in Austria (http://www.fpo.at), a Liberal candidate in Australia
> (http://www.realjeff.com), the Mayor of New York (http://yesrudy.com), and a
> copyright lobbying group (http://www.grayday.org) end up very confused.

<realjeff-related slight-tangent>

At a weirdo fringe festival that various 2600 Australia members and myself 
attended, I was lucky enough to have a chat to one of the (only one?) 
realjeff admins.  He said that they were hosting their content in America 
at a hosting company (the site's content is Australian ...  though ironically 
one normally gets less latency to America around here...).  This setup was 
fine for a while, though after the site started to get some press, one day 
the admins discovered it had been mysteriously taken down (without warning!) 
by the American hosting company.  

After contacting the company involved, the admin(s?) were unable to get any 
response whatsoever by phone or email.  

That's service with a smile.

The point I'm making is that this kind of (probably financially backed) 
censorship is going to start happening more often .. and it's something 
worth thinking about.  On one of the latter panels at the fringe festival 
(Electrofringe '99 ... http://www.octapod.org/) I proposed the obvious 
solution of mirroring content far and wide, citing the example of 
Fravia's page of reverse engineering (mirrored all over the place, after 
a syn-flood took down the first page).

This requires skill on the part of the information-seeker, however, as 
they have to be able to use a *gasp* search engine ... 

Which brings me to the question ... is there another method of bringing 
transparent logical redundancy to web hosting?  If you have multiple 
IP addresses related to a single hostname, if one fails and you grab 
that IP .. will most browsers retry a secondary or tertiary IP?

</realjeff-related slight-tangent>

- pho

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