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Science-Based Medicine is down…again

Given how many of you read this blog and Science-Based Medicine, I thought I should make an announcement. Sometime this morning or early this afternoon, the Science-Based Medicine blog went down, returning only a cryptic message saying that the site has been “suspended.” This is the second time it’s gone completely down, the first being Friday for most of the day, and the performance of the site has been painfully slow all weekend, with interminable waits for page loads, etc.

The SBM team is aware of the problem. All I can say is that the problem is being worked on, but the technical guys are volunteers with day jobs; so they can’t just drop everything to work on this. I’m hoping the site will be back up soon, but Steve Novella has not yet been able to give me an estimate as to when that might happen.

Stay tuned, and please be patient.

By Orac

Orac is the nom de blog of a humble surgeon/scientist who has an ego just big enough to delude himself that someone, somewhere might actually give a rodent's posterior about his copious verbal meanderings, but just barely small enough to admit to himself that few probably will. That surgeon is otherwise known as David Gorski.

That this particular surgeon has chosen his nom de blog based on a rather cranky and arrogant computer shaped like a clear box of blinking lights that he originally encountered when he became a fan of a 35 year old British SF television show whose special effects were renowned for their BBC/Doctor Who-style low budget look, but whose stories nonetheless resulted in some of the best, most innovative science fiction ever televised, should tell you nearly all that you need to know about Orac. (That, and the length of the preceding sentence.)

DISCLAIMER:: The various written meanderings here are the opinions of Orac and Orac alone, written on his own time. They should never be construed as representing the opinions of any other person or entity, especially Orac's cancer center, department of surgery, medical school, or university. Also note that Orac is nonpartisan; he is more than willing to criticize the statements of anyone, regardless of of political leanings, if that anyone advocates pseudoscience or quackery. Finally, medical commentary is not to be construed in any way as medical advice.

To contact Orac: [email protected]

4 replies on “Science-Based Medicine is down…again”

Bummer. I hadn’t read today’s post yet, and I hit refresh on the page I brought up first thing this morning to get the comments freshened up before I started to read it and lost the post.

I’d love to find out what’s been going on. Has SMB been the target of some jerk’s DOS attacks designed to push it over its service limit?

The Darkness of ignorance fears the light of critical thinking, reason, and science.

If this is in fact the result of malice, then it refutes a standard altie argument: from their POV, SBM is run by Big Pharma, which last I checked has armies of lawyers on their payroll and can get the government to do their bidding at the snap of their fingers. So hacking SBM would be an act of martyrdom (effectively a kamekaze mission). But if it is malice, I’ll bet it’s just some two-bit coward, and the fact that they don’t get disappeared means that they aren’t really fighting Evil Overlords after all.

I don’t know what’s going on. I only know that SBM went down for most of the day Friday and has been intolerably slow over the weekend. Sometime this morning it went down and stayed down. It’s still down. In fact, I’m getting worried and disturbed that it’s not back up again, but the tech stuff is not what I do. The tech guys are working on it, but I don’t know why it’s taking so long. What I can say is that they will be switching servers again, which means it’ll take several hours for the new server to propagate, once the switch is finally made.

Orac, DDoS attacks are notoriously difficult to deal with, as they often involve a lot of co-operation from upstream vendors and contacts.

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