Fighting Back

NZ Bear, the proprietor of The Truth Laid Bear is making a modest proposal. Given the continuing DDOS attacks on certain blogs, such as what is happening to Jeff Goldstein is it possible to design and implement a DGOS to combat the attacks? In other words, a blogger under attack would no longer be silenced. Sounds interesting.

Update: OK, we've got some good discussion rolling in the comments. So here's the deal: I've got ideas, and I can contribute support & a bit of thought bandwidth to this effort. But there's no way I can be the primary driver of this, what with everything else I've piled on my plate. So we need some volunteers who do have some bandwidth to form a working group to further flesh out this problem and potential solutions, and then go ahead and actually do it.

So: if you're interested in being part of such an effort, speak up in the comments, and/or e-mail me directly. If necessary, I can set up a Wiki or a mailing list to facilitate the discussion — but if someone else can do that, go ahead and do it! I won't be offended.

With that said, a few more ideas on the substance of the problem:

I believe our goal is not strictly "fault tolerance" for a given blog or set of blogs. I think accomplishing that is impractical, and would involve some kind of mirroring solution that would be overkill for what we're trying to accomplish. In my mind, our goal should be to ensure that when a blogger's site is down:

• a) They have a place to post new blog posts
• b) There is an established system so that their readers can find those new blog posts
• c) The new posts are hosted in a distibuted manner so that they are mirrored on many different sites and are therefore protected from a secondary DDOS attack.

Note that what this essentially means is that we wouldn't be constantly mirroring every participating blog's site — we'd simply be mirroring new posts by a downed blogger once the system is activated. This strikes me as a simpler, and more realistic approach, although I'm open to thoughts about some crude level of mirroring for recent, pre-DDOS attack posts. Terry proposed using RSS feeds below, which is a good first thought, but I can say from my experience with TTLB that the main problem there is many bloggers don't include full content in their RSS feeds. I suspect a better solution might be brute force: just have a way to copy the full HTML of each blog's front page to a distributed archive. The cleverest way would be to somehow have each blog copied to a small number of mirror-blogs (let's say 10) — if we have a solution spanning hundreds or thousands of blogs, it obviously doesn't make sense to have every blog mirrored at every other blog's site.

I have zero technical skill so would not be able to help on that front. But I'd sure be willing to have the Crabitat act as a mirror for those who are being targeted. (I still have not heard of one left-leaning site being targeted like this, though.)