I've created a monitoring program so we can watch, in near-real-time, as the poor network admins at the White House scramble to bring the First Homepage back online: http://www.mccullagh.org/bin/whmon/ As you can tell, whitehouse.gov has been up and down more than the NASDAQ (0 KB sizes mean the site was unreachable): http://www.mccullagh.org/bin/whmon/data/www.whitehouse.gov Though as recently as 7:09 pm ET, my 'bot did manage to grab a snapshot (broken links are normal): http://www.mccullagh.org/bin/whmon/snap/www.whitehouse.gov.5-22-2001.19-9-0 Stay tuned... -Declan --- http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,43993,00.html Woe Unto White House Site By Declan McCullagh (declanat_private) 3:30 p.m. May 22, 2001 PDT WASHINGTON -- President Bush's recurring problems with the First Homepage just won't go away. Malicious hackers appear to be responsible for replacing the executive branch's official site with a near-empty black screen and references to a previous break-in, which dedicated visitors were able to glimpse during one of the brief periods whitehouse.gov was reachable on Tuesday. A White House spokesman said he could not provide details, but repeated attempts to connect showed the website was unreachable for at least five hours and was still offline as of 6:45 p.m. EDT. Around 3:45 p.m., a black page with three items -- two dead links to news articles and a link to a mirror of a previous hack -- showed up on the whitehouse.gov home page. The apparent intrusion, which comes during a time of heightened alertness because of threats from pro-China hackers, caps a four-month period during which the First Homepage has been savaged by critics calling it the state-of-the-rt -- five years ago. Occasional typos and sections that are still "coming soon" don't help. But even if his staff has to restore from tape backups, President Bush still plans to redesign and relaunch his homepage in the next month or so. [...] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if it remains intact. To subscribe, visit http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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