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Malaysia Votes and We Watch the Internet!
By Alex Lam | March 9, 2008
I’m currently staying abreast of the elections which are on-going, together with my family. But contrary to the last time I voted, I’m following the results in even more-realtime as compared to merely watching TV. This year, many of my friends and I (you probably did it too) are logged online with laptops on our, errrr… laps, and busily refreshing pages every few minutes. Here’s my setup at home - following NTV7 and MalaysiaKini.
Indeed, the Internet has become a staple part of every candidates arsenal. Jeff Ooi for example has really moved from blogger to politician, and Nenek Maimun Yusof has garnered a lot of coverage for being the oldest candidate AND having Internet support - she’s got a Facebook group and a simple blog going.
Unfortunately, we have encountered issues with many of the local servers and their reliability - perhaps the virtual traffic jams have reached new levels altogether, and the providers were not ready for the surge. MalaysiaKini seems to have 2 mirror sites (as of midnight, they have SIX mirror sites up!), but they are also really slow. Here are some screenshots of our local sites during the “Great Malaysian Internet Jam”.
MalaysiaKini shows us the Live Updates on the left column and a tabulated summary of the results on the right.
Lim Kit Siang’s blog seems to have database connectivity issues! Maxed out the concurrent connections, probably!
DAP’s election website is totally stripped bare to the bones - even my website in 1995 looked better! But, I guess it loads quickly and without a database on the backend!
Errr… soon after, I realised that DAP’s site also has certain areas that are down! Probably the CMS behind it couldn’t take the traffic too. Looks like the server administrator is part of usj.com.my! Part of Jeff Ooi’s work?
Soon after, MalaysiaKini’s website started acting up. Then they added on 4 more mirror sites.
Then, I got an SMS from a close technical friend informing me that the MalaysiaKini DNS had been poisoned!
So, I did some checks - and it’s TRUE, their DNS has issues. The domain should resolve to the public IP address, but for some reason, it now shows 127.0.0.1 which is actually a loop to your own local machine! How disheartening - someone is hacking away while we await really important news!
For those wanting to access MalaysiaKini now, here are their mirror sites - Mirror 1, Mirror 2, Mirror 3, Mirror 4, Mirror 5, Mirror6
The foreign press is also covering the progress of our Malaysian elections in real-time - here’s the BBC website…
How about discussions happening here in Malaysia - just look at the Malaysia network discussions page! Posts are made every few seconds… looks like all the discussion, except the sex starved one are about the election! It’s great to know Malaysians do care about what is going on.
Oh well… I hope that as our nation matures even more in the IT realm, more and more measures will be taken to ensure the public are able to access information in a timely manner. Plan ahead for your websites, WAYYY before the traffic starts to come.
While we await the final results, let’s take a moment out to pray for peace throughout our land. Say no to violence, and yes to peace. Shall we be mature Malaysians today?
Topics: New-fangled Tech, What's That Site? |
March 9th, 2008 at 12:49 am
Thank goodness for MalaysiaKini. Our TV stations, for some reason or other, have been really really slow in announcing any results.
Save the BN wins, that is
March 9th, 2008 at 12:54 am
TM DNS is weak man… WEAK! I did lookups using both primary and secondary DNS… tsk tsk. What excuse will they give us?
March 9th, 2008 at 12:55 am
Cool dude. Same as you now, family time. Crazy news. Wake up to a new world tomorrow. Viva Le Revolucion!
March 9th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
Looks like a deliberate block or hack against malaysiakini courtesy of tmnet. To get around it and access the site use http://122.0.17.30/
Unfortunately it hasn’t been updated lately. Maybe the owners are also effected by this dns mess.
March 10th, 2008 at 10:49 pm
The Opposition has taken 4 states from BN. In 4 years (or 5) we should aim to take the nation and apply real change. (including fixing the slow and monopolizing TMNet)