[news] Al-Jazeera to move its web servers out of the US

[moe]

AL-JAZEERA TO MOVE WEB SERVERS OUT OF US
http://www.publicaddress.net/index.sm

Mediawatch presenter Russell Brown's Hard News weblog, March 28

AUCKLAND: (Hard News/Pacific Media Watch): Al-Jazeera is to move its
web servers out of  the US to a place - somewhere in Europe - where
freedom of speech is held in higher regard.

The independent Arab channel's new English-language website has been
hit by denial-of- service attacks ever since it launched on Monday.
The attacks appear to have been directed  both at the web servers and
at the DNS servers at al-Jazeera's US hosting company,  mynet.net.

The DNS attacks mean that the al-Jazeera site essentially disappears
from the Internet.  Attempts to access it draw a number of different
error messages, including: Could not open  the page
<http://english.aljazeera.net > because the server
english.aljazeera.net could not be  found. Al-Jazeera has now been
told by its upstream provider in the US that its service will be
terminated within days.

The Melbourne Age story suggests that some DNS records (including
those for the Iraqi state  ISP) may actually have been altered. Vik
Olliver, who has been exploring the problem with the  New Zealand
Linux Users Group, drew a similar conclusion after attempts to reach
www.aljazeera.info <http://www.aljazeera.info> late yesterday (it had
been reachable up till  about 4pm) returned the message: connection
timed out; no servers could be reached.

"Note that a DDoS attack will not remove an entry from a DNS server,"
she says. "There is a  different error if a domain server cannot be
contacted at all. It looks like someone actually  pulled the files
from the DNS server - the error was returned by the server after all,
so it could  be reached - and that would involve a US domain server
security breach of serious  proportions. Unless it was deliberate.

"This seems to be the case in the US too, not just NZ, as I found out
when attempting to use  the http://crit.org proxy.

"Google is also refusing to display cached pages from Al Jazeera. I
have asked colleagues in  the New Zealand Linux User's Group to repeat
this in New Zealand on different ISPs, and we  all get the same
problem."

If this is what it appears to be, it's awful. The internet and its
accompanying culture are the  great American achievement of my
lifetime. The attacks strike at its very ethos.

Meanwhile, Wellington-based Scoop <http://www.scoop.co.nz/> has
explained its decision to  continue to publish grisly pictures from
the war, including those from al-Jazeera. In a  passionate editorial
deputy editor Selwyn Manning says:

"To sanitise the reality of warfare is abhorrent to those serving to
public interest. To censor  images of capture, of death, as a
consequence of war, is wrong. If Scoop were to do so, it  would be
subscribing to the glitzy rah rah top-gun Hollywood-façade-style of
reportage that the  mainstream United States based media has become
obsessed with."

Scoop's average daily traffic has roughly doubled to around 50,000
visits a day since the war  began, with much of the traffic coming
from the US.

+++niuswire

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