linksunten Archiv

During the past weeks we have been implementing changes in Indymedia linksunten's cache system. We would like to apologize for the errors and disruptions caused during this optimization process. These adaptations became necessary as Indy linksunten produced a growing number of access timeouts because our server was simply overloaded with your page requests. We would love to further improve performance by supplying even more resources; but, unfortunately, so far you are donating so little money we can not even afford the running expenses. We would like to take this opportunity to send out a big Thank You to our supportive hosters from Mayfirst and Tachanka! What's more: we've exchanged our https key and certificate in order to enhance the protection of our website.

Again? Why do you need a new certificate again?

With our https certificate you should be able to check our https key in order to guarantee that your requests to linksunten are not spied upon. But the https system is based on certificate authorities and therefore “broken” by design. A couple of different companies and government agencies are able to issue certificates for keys for the same internet address. A much better way to ensure that you use our key is to check the fingerprint of our certificate. The fingerprint should be unique. In particular nobody should be able to create a certificate with the same fingerprint for a different key. With our new certificate this kind of attack which is theoretically possible should be much less likely or at least much more expensive. For the tech-savvy: our new certificate uses a hash algorithm from the SHA-2 family, until now we've used SHA-1.

Pay attention to the fine print!

The SHA-256 fingerprint of our current certificate is:

37:93:E8:B9:13:8F:80:53:81:E6:5C:4C:7A:DC:D0:1F:6D:35:E8:5D:45:69:1C:50:E2:A8:37:A4:17:E4:D7:A4

A word of warning and an honest advice: don't rely on https. If you post on linksunten then use the Tor network in order to anonymise your postings!

What is a cache, and what's it do?

A complex website like linksunten.indymedia.org has to be constructed laboriously on access. If furthermore this site is accessed highly frequently, the web server cannot keep up anymore and will display a dull error page only, instead of our much-beloved riot porn. For this reason, pages are cached for a certain amount of time, so they don't have to be recreated on every single access. We are using Varnish for that purpose, a so-called reverse proxy, which can be adapted to the specific needs of a website using its own programming language. And exactly this programming part is what we've been changing lately (and incidentally fixed some ancient bugs, too).

What has changed and why, anyway?

Now, considerably more pages and media are cached than before. For that to happen, some previously dynamic elements had to be reconstructed as static elements. Others have been replaced by callback functions, which are executed only after the corresponding request has actually been sent. The fraction of requests served directly by our cache system (and not the web server itself) has considerably increased. Still, linksunten is pretty slow, don't you agree?

Come on: donate!

No kidding: you've got to donate more money to Indymedia. Preferably regularly. Throw fund-raising parties! Organize fund-raising people's kitchen events or cooking sessions! We'd like to thank all of our past donors at this point! We are working to capacity moderating the incoming posts. Along the way we are trying to prepare the website for migration to a new Drupal version. Additionally, we are all active in other political projects, too, and would also like to enjoy a lazy day outside in the sun once in a while. We simply do not have the time to try and raise the money required to keep linksunten up and running. And don't we all wish linksunten was faster? That's why you have to donate! Now!

Find out how to donate: linksunten.indymedia.org/donate

Let the cash flow!

Indymedia linksunten

September 2014