Art Info: China Steps Up Its Cyberwar on Change.org

Apparently, now China is trying to shut down free speech outside its borders as well as within.

On Tuesday, we reported that the Web site Change.org, which is hosting a petition for the release of detained artist Ai Weiwei, stated that it was facing “highly sophisticated denial of service attacks from locations in China,” and that it was appealing to the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of East Asian Pacific Affairs for help. Well, the latest news is that the attacks haven’t stopped — they have only escalated, and the site says that it has engineers “working around the clock to fend off the attacks.” Below, find the complete text of Change.org’s message sent out to supporters today (in this case, our own ace associate editor Emma Allen) to update them on the situation:

( Email behind the cut )

As far as I can tell, Amazon.com hosts Change.org, along with a whole bunch of other sites. As a result, a whole bunch of domains are off-line, as documented in Amazon servers take down Reddit, Foursquare, and more. I tried to copy and paste the article, but LJ hiccoughed and wouldn't accept it. Darn.

Above crossposted to we_love_nebris on LJ and ontd_political on both Dreamwidth and on LJ.