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Web sites on Iraq go offline

By Our Special Correspondent

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM MARCH 27. Several Web sites carrying reports critical of the war against Iraq are facing denial of service attacks or other problems.

The Web site of the Qatar-based television channel, Al Jazeera, remains inaccessible for the past three days. According to information available on the Internet, this was the result of a denial of service attack. (Denial of service attack is a technique employed by those who wish to disrupt access to a Web site. Several computers on the Internet are hacked and used to send multiple requests for services to the server hosting the Web site under attack. As the server is overwhelmed by the number of requests, it fails to serve genuine requests for pages.)

Al Jazeera had started an English version of its Web site on Monday. However, within a day the site became inaccessible. The Arabic version of the site also went off the Web.

The reporting of the war by Al Jazeera, especially the pictures of children killed in the bomb and missile attacks and images of the U.S. soldiers taken prisoners by Iraq, had invited protests from the U.S. and its supporters. However, some of the pictures published by Al Jazeera continue to be available on another site named {lt}www.aljazeerah.info{gt}. This site, which does not belong to the television network, is still working.

Another Web site hit by the denial of servicer attacks was the Iraq.net. Sites like Arab2.com, Yellowtimes.org, Iraqdaily.com, lemonde.com were also offline for the past few days.

In some cases, the hosting agencies in the U.S. have blocked or stopped the services. This could be because of an official directive or other problems such as high traffic, public protests or denial of service attack.

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