Given how many of you read this blog and Science-Based Medicine, I thought I should make an announcement. Sometime this morning or early this afternoon, the Science-Based Medicine blog went down, returning only a cryptic message saying that the site has been "suspended." This is the second time it's gone completely down, the first being Friday for most of the day, and the performance of the site has been painfully slow all weekend, with interminable waits for page loads, etc.
The SBM team is aware of the problem. All I can say is that the problem is being worked on, but the technical guys are volunteers with day jobs; so they can't just drop everything to work on this. I'm hoping the site will be back up soon, but Steve Novella has not yet been able to give me an estimate as to when that might happen.
Stay tuned, and please be patient.
Bummer. I hadn't read today's post yet, and I hit refresh on the page I brought up first thing this morning to get the comments freshened up before I started to read it and lost the post.
I'd love to find out what's been going on. Has SMB been the target of some jerk's DOS attacks designed to push it over its service limit?
The Darkness of ignorance fears the light of critical thinking, reason, and science.
If this is in fact the result of malice, then it refutes a standard altie argument: from their POV, SBM is run by Big Pharma, which last I checked has armies of lawyers on their payroll and can get the government to do their bidding at the snap of their fingers. So hacking SBM would be an act of martyrdom (effectively a kamekaze mission). But if it is malice, I'll bet it's just some two-bit coward, and the fact that they don't get disappeared means that they aren't really fighting Evil Overlords after all.
I don't know what's going on. I only know that SBM went down for most of the day Friday and has been intolerably slow over the weekend. Sometime this morning it went down and stayed down. It's still down. In fact, I'm getting worried and disturbed that it's not back up again, but the tech stuff is not what I do. The tech guys are working on it, but I don't know why it's taking so long. What I can say is that they will be switching servers again, which means it'll take several hours for the new server to propagate, once the switch is finally made.
Orac, DDoS attacks are notoriously difficult to deal with, as they often involve a lot of co-operation from upstream vendors and contacts.