2009-06-16 00:18:38 -
Voices of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, petitioning online via the grassroots PetitionOnline.com, are silenced as that site tries to resolve internet attacks from unknown sources.
The internet's top site for grassroots activism via petitions is under attack. According to the administrators of PetitionOnline, it “is a busy site, with a top-5000 Quantcast rating, a four-digit Alexa rank, and millions of unique monthly visitors. At any given time, tens of thousands of petitions are active on the site, and 30,000 or more signatures are collected on a typical day.” Since Friday, June 15, PetitionOnline.com has been unavailable due to internet attacks from, as yet, unidentified sources.
One of the many petitions currently silenced is the 'Visiting Artists and Academics Petition' ~ found @ www.petitiononline.com/MCvisit/petition.html Launched by London-based civil liberties group, the Manifesto Club, it was launched with the endorsement of dozens of the UK's most prominent artists
and educators, including: sculptor Antony Gormley; director of the National Portrait Gallery, Sandy Nairne; and the artistic director of the Royal National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner.
Before the attack on PetitionsOnline, more than 6,000 people added their names to this petition to protest new laws which the UK government claims are needed to fight terrorism and illegal immigration. In practice, it's demonstrated the rules are targeting artists and academics visiting from non-EU countries. Cultural events described as canceled or in jeopardy as a result of these new laws include: concerts by Russian pianist Grigory Sokolov, Canadian singer-songwriter Allison Crowe, and African jazz band Les Amazones de Guinée; the English National Opera's production of Così Fan Tutte to be directed by Abbas Kiarostami, the great Iranian film-maker; and numerous more events ranging from Argentinian tango-dancers, to neuroscientists, university lecturers, Chinese artists and touring church choirs.
The regulations which came into force in November 2008, under then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, have been labelled by critics as protectionist, discriminatory and worse. In an article earlier this month, The Times of London warned:“Immigration rules threaten to destroy Britain's arts reputation”.
Manifesto Club has organized and presented the first “Cabaret Without Borders” event in London, England, to raise awareness. Their online petition has helped spread word internationally until this weekend's shutdown of PetitionOnline.
Kevin Matthews, that site's administrator says:“It's Monday now. PetitionOnline has been continuously inaccessible for more than 72 hours due to a large distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, as diagnosed by Verio technical staff, after nearly ten years without an outage a fraction of this length.
The current DDoS attack on PetitionOnline seems to have progressed far beyond the prank stage. Given the nature of PetitionOnline related to grassroots advocacy, there is a good chance there is some kind of political motive behind this massive and anonymous attack. An alternative hypothesis would be commericial sabotage from a site competition.”
“We are continuing to escalate our own responses on both the technical and legal fronts, and we will continue to escalate until a solution is reached.” Mathews adds: “You can help by spreading this link...
www.designcommunity.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=28380 ...and sharing the facts on this forced outage at PetitionOnline.”
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