The Quantum Pontiff

Has the arXiv been hacked or is it offline? When I connect to arxiv.org it shoots me to mirror sites which haven’t been updated since Oct 08. Via @MartinQuantum. Also nanoscale views reports the arXiv down.

Since this is a blog we can easily spread rumors by including a link to an article today about cyberattacks going on right now possibly originating from North Korea.

Update 9:03 am PST: At lanl.arxiv.org you can now get papers greater than October 2008 by searching, but the “recents” and “new” isn’t working. Also the RSS feed seems to only have yesterdays posts. A comment on Secret Blogging Seminar got a response back on the problem: “technical difficulties”.

Update 8:31 pm PST: Full day of meetings, but before they started the arXiv got at least yesterday’s posts up (and I could run scirates scripts to download the day.) Anyone know if you can submit papers?

Comments

#1 Evan Berkowitz
July 8, 2009

The LANL mirror seems to be up-to-date.
#2 Ashlery
July 8, 2009

In fact, the arxiv’s been knackered for hours – since 8am UK time today at least. On the other hand, it was still working at about 3am UK time… The behaviour’s been changing, too: at first the main site was showing papers from October 2008, but recently it’s been redirecting (randomly?) to other mirrors, all of which are also showing October 2008.

Not sure there’s any real evidence of hacking, though… my no. 1 guess would be a hard disk crash which has taken out everything from 2009. At one point if you searched for papers from 2009, you could see the title but not the abstract or any other content…
#3 Dave Bacon
July 8, 2009

@Evan: hm, I just tried lanl and it doesn’t work for me.
#4 mick
July 8, 2009

I second “Ashlery’s” opinion. Especially since he meant to type “Ashley” 🙂

This arXiv issue has been bugging us all day here in EUland – we were wondering how long it would take before people in the US noticed…
#5 Dave Bacon
July 8, 2009

@Evan: Wait I take that back. The papers are searchable now, but the “recents” and “new” aren’t working.
#6 charlie
July 8, 2009

maybe it has something to do with this new iPhone app called “ArXiview”
#7 Dave Bacon
July 8, 2009

@charlie: you forgot the obligatory link to the iTunes store.

When I was a grad student twice in a row when Daniel Lidar submitted one of our papers the arXiv mailing came out later than usual. So I think we should blame Daniel 🙂 (If he submitted a paper yesterday I think I win the internet.)
#8 Ian Durham
July 8, 2009

The most up-to-date mirror I can find is the APS mirror at aps.arxiv.org. I posted a paper on May 29 that can be downloaded from the latter but not from the former.

I had the same thought about N. Korea: truth or fiction, it’s an interesting coincidence.
#9 sep332
July 8, 2009

What’s that? Iranian hackers using unfounded rumors on blogs to attack critical US science infrastructure? I must blog this immediately!
#10 Jon
July 8, 2009

Working again.
#11 Jon
July 8, 2009

No, I take it back. Only the mirrors are working again.
#12 Suresh
July 8, 2009

They are still not accepting submissions to the arXiv — I’ve been trying to submit a paper for the past twelve hours or so and have not managed to do it. I also did see some strange behavior with searches giving only the title but no abstract.
#13 Suresh
July 9, 2009

I managed to post my paper on the arXiv about four to five hours ago. So now they are back to accepting submissions. However, there has been no listing of new papers for today.
#14 Michael Kelsey
July 9, 2009

I had notified arXiv of their DB problems on Tuesday morning. Only some of the physics categories were affected. Jake Weiskoff got back to me later that day, that they had had some sort of disk problems.

By Wednesday morning, they had set up “arxiv.org” to dynamically redirect to the mirrors, which were, as people have noted, not themselves fully up to date. It appears that everything is accessible now (Thursday a.m.), but there aren’t any new listings yet.
#15 Joe Fitzsimons
July 11, 2009

Is it just me or has adsabs gone down too?