Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Angelides Site Gone - Error Messages Look Fishy

Hmm. Goto angelides.com. See what you find.

As I type this, it's not there. (Although it may be back up again by the time most people read this post.) Went bye-bye at least 2 hours ago when I checked it last.

Three reasons it could go poof:
1) They ran out of money and the ISP pulled the plug (doubtful)
2) They got hacked (possible)
3) The site crashed because of more traffic than expected (most likely)

What's really strange is that the page gives an error with a misspelling, so it's an error that was individually crafted for use on the site, not a generic server error. It says: "Sorry, the requested page was not found. Please try again. Original URI: /" It's not written like a typical error message and they misspelled URL. I don't get it.

I'm not an expert in web programming, but I have to say it looks like from the HTML that this page was deliberately put there and I have to say based on that, I'm leaning toward thinking it was hacked (DOS - Denial Of Service - attack). It just doesn't feel to me like an authentic error page unless someone in the campaign mocked it up on a different machine when the site crashed as a temporary measure.

A few months back, the same thing happened to Lieberman's site and I didn't witness it, but I know he threatened legal action thinking it was a hacker although I assumed at the time it was more likely the server couldn't handle the load. (I also didn't see the site during the outage). In this case, I'm not so sure.

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2 Comments:

At 3:16 AM , Blogger Sarah Granger said...

Well, if it was down, it's back up now. At least it's sort-of working in two out of three browsers. Strange. I'm too tired to be a sleuth and call up the campaign HQ about it now... one would think we'll hear about it somewhere if anything really happened to it. I saved the page and the source for anyone who's interested.

 
At 10:20 AM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Identifier

 

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