What follows is a bit of an interesting story. While a lot of people have been saying that the internet doesn’t provide any sort of community, the following shows otherwise.

First off, we have Slashdot, an extremely popular “weblog” (slang, i guess, for an internet news site) that catered to Linux/Unix users, and basically just geeks in general. Second, we have Kuro5hin, another weblog, but with an open submission policy for stories. If you submitted a story, the other users would vote on it to either post it or toast it. Truly revolutionary, i thought when i first saw it. I was a user at both Slashdot and Kuro5hin, and found them to both be founts of good stories, insight, and perhaps best of all, user input. Really intelligent stuff here, folks. Albeit, the signal/noise ratio was higher on Slashdot, they both offered differing, well substantiated views on everything from the future of the net to potato-powered web servers. But anyway, on with the story.

Over the past weekend, Kuro5hin was hit with a Denial of Service (DoS) attack, that essentially crippled their servers. This DoS attack came in the form of someone, from many different compromised servers (servers with weak security who had been subsequently hacked), automatically posting garbage to Kuro5hin‘s submission service. Well, Rusty, the sysadmin there, and his gang of developers tracked this down to not allow anonymous submissions anymore. So, the DoS stopped. For the moment. They had blocked the original machines that the attacks had originated from, and thought everything was OK. Well, they were wrong. The DoS started up again, this time overloading the commenting function (also something that was anonymously available). Well, K5 (short-form) decided to go down last night/this morning.

Where does the community part come in, eh? Well, there has been a HUGE outpouring from the community of folks who read Kuro5hin, Slashdot and the others. Originally, Rusty the sysadmin had planned on shutting it down permanently. However, this tide of hope from the rest of the community, everything from free server space from VA Linux Systems, to a free pizza from Hemos, an editor at Slashdot, to offers from hackers to take this guy(s) out.

I mean, this sort of thing, however tragic and appaling it is, does bring a renewed sense of community back to computing for me, anyway. I haven’t seen this sort of thing since my BBSing days oh-so-many-years ago. Personally, i hope Kuro5hin gets back on that horse, and rights their toppled monument to open/free speech. I mean, of all the things to destroy, why destroy this? Just to prove it can be done? Kuro5hin was/is a great experiment, but then again, freedom does have its price and its drawbacks. It only takes one fool to ruin something beatiful.

Links:
Slashdot
Kuro5hin
Slashdot: Kuro5hin taken down by DoS
Slashdot: Kuro5hin, Bitter and Hopeful