Al Jazeera down?

[alphaduc]

What happened to Al Jazeera's English site? Anyone know? It wasn't working earlier. I

[Larissa]

Al-Jazeera domain hijacked
By Paul Roberts and Joris Evers
The bad news continued on Thursday for Arab satellite television network Al-Jazeera. A hacker hijacked the network's domain, www.aljazeera.Net, pointing visitors to another site that displayed a pro-war message.

Administrators at Al-Jazeera became aware of the problem late Thursday morning, Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), after being contacted by the European company that hosts the network's Web page, according to Salah AlSeddiqi, IT manager at Al-Jazeera in Doha, Qatar.

Traffic to Al-Jazeera's servers at the Europe hosting site had stopped, AlSeddiqi was told.

"They wanted to know if I had changed something. I told them I hadn't," AlSeddiqi said.

When he tried to visit Al-Jazeera's Web site, AlSeddiqi noticed that traffic was being directed to a different site,
http://membersyNetworld.com/freedom2003/Index.sb, that displayed a pro-war message.

AlSeddiqi also attempted to log on to the administrative interface for the domain, only to find that the password for the administrative account had been changed, locking him out, he said.

"It seems somebody has hijacked the domain," said Martijn Mooijman, a security specialist at security company Organisatie Beveiliging IT BV (OBIT) in The Hague, Netherlands.

The aljazeerayNet domain is managed by Network Solutions, a domain name registration service owned by VeriSign Inc.

Al-Jazeera staff worked with Network Solutions to restore ownership to the network and point the domain to Al-Jazeera's Web servers. By Thursday evening ownership of the aljazeerayNet domain was returned to the network.

VeriSign did not respond to requests for comment.

Some Web surfers could still access the site for the Qatar-based satellite news station on Thursday, even though the domain seemed to be hijacked.

That is not surprising, said Mooijman, who early evening on Thursday, GMT, could also access the Arabic Al-Jazeera site.

"It is normal that some people still see the original page, while others see the hijacker's page. It takes about 24 hours before all the DNS servers in the world are updated," he said. As a consequence, restoring
aljazeerayNet after the hijacking will also take about 24 hours, he added.

No information was available on how the domain was hijacked.

For AlSeddiqi, the domain hijacking is just the latest in a series of attacks since the beginning of the war between the U.S. and Iraq.

The network's Web sites have been crippled by distributed denial of service attacks, which began shortly after the network posted pictures of U.S. soldiers who had been captured by Iraq.

Al-Jazeera was hoping to have traffic flowing back to its Web servers by Thursday evening, but remained concerned about the possibility of further attacks from hackers who were sympathetic with the U.S. and hostile to Al-Jazeera's sometimes critical coverage of the U.S.-led attacks on Iraq.

"Its been a very hard week. We get out from one problem and we run into another," AlSeddiqi said. "We don't know what they're going to do next."

[ChiTown Lady]

I got this from another site in case any of you are interested in reading the English Language version of what Al-Jazeera is reporting. It doesn’t seem to be back up yet since the hacking incident, but I plan to check it again later – as I want to know what they are saying. The US media is clearly censoring the news from the front and this is another thing that is specifically pissin’ me off. >:
This is the reply from the topic I got from the other site:

Speaking of Al Jazeera, they say they now have 4 million subscribers in Europe. And they have a new website in English. See http://english.aljazeera.net/


I am giving my commentary about the treatment of the Al-Jazeera media and journalists now.

Everything I have read to date regarding Al-Jazeera has indicated that they are both unbiased and fair in their reporting of the news, events, and opinions. They have not only profiled interviews with Muslim-Arab official and public figures in their media coverage but have profiled and interviewed western diplomats and political figures such as Rumsfeld and Rice as well. They are fair and report all sides, which is something that I have NOT seen the US media doing lately.

Al-Jazeera has recently been sited by the US for being in breach of the Geneva Convention when it aired coverage of the five US Military personnel taken prisoner by showing them in custody over International Television, and the NY Stock Exchange has subsequently banned Al-Jazeera from covering the US Stock markets as a result.

I wonder why it was not considered a breach of the Geneva Convention just days before when the United States media aired televised footage of dozens of Iraqi POW's as they were matched in a row at gunpoint with their hands clasped on top of their heads.

Good Luck to Al-Jazeera - for real. I just tried to get into both the English and non-English sites to see if they were back up yet, but they were not. I hope they are back online soon. I'll be checking again until they get hooked up again.

[Pete]

The Link you gave us,. Chi, works but it is no longer an english langauge site.

Electronic warfare, this seems like something from a Sci-fi book. People claiming for liberty but shutting down some one who is delivering it on a telvised medium.