SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Multiple sources reporting:
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37680411
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2016/10/17/wikileaks-says-assanges-internet-link-was-severed-by-state-party.html
http://time.com/4532984/wikileaks-julian-assange-theories/
Wikileaks has announced that Julian Assange's internet access had been intentionally severed by a state actor. I would assume this means they disrupted a VPN connection he had rather than just cutting all internet access to the Ecuadorian Embassy, but again details are limited.
The announcement of disruption was also preceded by multiple strange tweets of random numbers (likely crypto keys) that appear to be part of a dead man system activated by the disruption.
takyon: The full tweet states "Julian Assange's internet link has been intentionally severed by a state party. We have activated the appropriate contingency plans." Wikileaks recently released Part 9 of the Podesta Emails. Also at CNET and Ars Technica.
Update: Wikileaks says: "We can confirm Ecuador cut off Assange's internet access Saturday, 5pm GMT, shortly after publication of Clinton's Goldman Sachs speechs."
Perhaps the embassy's perennial guest has finally overstayed his welcome?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday October 18 2016, @01:38AM
The math doesn't tell the whole story. Years ago, when all I had was dialup in Outback Nowhere, downloading an ISO of a few hundred megabytes might take all week. We didn't have bittorrent, there were just FTP and browser downloaders, and a couple download managers. You got about half the ISO, and got a message that the file was corrupt, do you want to start over. FTP was far more reliable than any other choice of downloaders, but not all sites supported FTP.
Long story short, dial up sucked the llama's ass.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday October 18 2016, @02:32AM
Rsync was released in 1996; for those who had a shell account it could make such things relatively painless.
https://groups.google.com/forum/?_escaped_fragment_=msg/comp.os.linux.announce/tZE1qtTcQaU/IF8GhGQ_uTsJ [google.com]
Aside from that, there were (are) ways of resuming an interrupted download, or failing that, breaking a file into smaller files, to be combined after they all arrived.
zipsplit - split a zipfile into smaller zipfiles
[...]
-n size
Make zip files no larger than "size" (default = 36000).
--
http://www.info-zip.org/mans/zipsplit.html [info-zip.org]
split — split a file into pieces
[...]
-b, --bytes=SIZE
put SIZE bytes per output file
-- https://www.mankier.com/1/split [mankier.com]
ZMODEM supports enormous block sizes and, following a communication failure, allows transfers to resume from where they stopped.
-- https://www.techopedia.com/definition/1805/zmodem [techopedia.com]
The NcFTP client can reget files which have only partially downloaded.
-- http://www.linuxmisc.com/3-solaris/8399fba0726d9e39.htm [linuxmisc.com]
One fellow, however, had difficulty downloading such an FTP client:
Please, tell me where I may get an FTP client for
Windows 3.11, which has "restart" or "reget" option. I was
given a PPP connection (for free) from George Soros'
International Scientific Foundation (ISF, Kiev Branch). But
their name server is overrun by users' calls during most of
the day and I can access it only from 01.00 to 07.00.
Generally, there is only 300-800 bps speed of transfer,
which makes files larger then 500k almost unaccessible for
me. Last night I tried to pull out a 1.8M file from the USA.
That was very stupid. I went around my PC all night long
like a hungry jakal around a dying elephant but, alas. The
transfer was aborted at around 08.00 after I got a 0.7M
portion. Well, someone's surfing -- someone's "snailing".
:-(
I found a utility from ftp.download.com, which can
retrieve files in several sessions ("GetRight" shareware)
but again, it is too large for me (1.140M zip) and it
requires Windows95. I also tried to download an evaluation
copy of WS_FTP from Ipswitch.com (both "Profesional" and
"Limited Edition") but all transfers (6 attempts) were
aborted after approx. 100K had been done.
I shall appreciate it highly if somebody tell me where I can
get a "reget" (not very large and for Windows3.11).
-- https://lists.purdue.edu/pipermail/cytometry/1997-March/006699.html [purdue.edu]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday October 18 2016, @02:44AM
Informative, but I needed you to tell me this over 20 years ago. ;^)
Back then, FTP was a "new" technology to me. Not to the computing world, but to me. I certainly can't tell you which client I was using then, but it could and would fail to resume. The resume feature was there, it simply failed as often as not. And, at that time, I had no idea what rsync was. My "support" consisted of people who had relative "broadband", trying to help some country hick out. They didn't seem to understand my problems, and I certainly didn't understand how they managed to download the entire internet on a daily basis.