The quite wonderful, fully addictive Electoral-Vote.com is seeking further backups, and thinking through their RSS strategy as well. Seems they’ve been victims of attacks (why?). Read to the bottom of the page:
“Finally, there was another attack Friday, but we seem to have done better this time. As a precaution against future attacks, I have installed a fourth server. If you can’t get through to http://www.electoral-vote.com, try http://www.electoral-vote2.com, http://www.electoral-vote3.com, and http://www.electoral-vote4.com in that order. The main one is far more powerful than the others and has multiple fiber-optic connections to the Internet. It is also updated first, so please use only http://www.electoral-vote.com unless it is not working. Another alternative in case of an attack is the RSS feed, which is much harder to attack.
I would be interested in getting a one or two more backups for emergency use in case of future attacks. I have had some volunteers, but it is hard to tell if they are friend or foe. That kind offer from sneaky-joe@unknown-company.com might be from one of the attackers, who wants to run a server with doctored data. I thought of a simple filter that will probably reduce this problem to a minimum. The server should be in the .edu domain (NOT .com or .net) and the contact person should be a tenured professor. Senior faculty members tend to have a long paper trail and would be risking their careers by attacking a political website or monkeying with the data. Since there is hardly any time left, I basically want a clone of the current servers to make sure everything works the first time. The required configuration is a Pentium 4 or Pentium III with 512 MB RAM or more, at least 1 GB of available disk space, and a connection to the Internet capable of serving 500,000 small files an hour. The software should be UNIX, BSD, or Linux (NOT Windows or Mac OS X) running Apache and a couple of other things I will tell potential sites privately. Also needed is an experienced system administrator who has earned his spurs dealing with large-scale attacks. BEFORE making an offer, please check with your local system administrator about the configuration, capacity, and hackproofness.”
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