This week, I had to give a lecture on Marxism, as applied to the Sociology of Sport. My idea was to talk on the concept of ideology, which (to me anyways) remains one of the key Marxist ideas that still holds up to scrutiny in our condition. Not that the concept is without flaw, I just like it as a heuristic device.
Anyway…
This week, as I was preparing, I was trying to turn to my old standby, marxists.org, which is a clearinghouse of articles and online resources for talking about Marxism, yet all weekend, the site was down.
Now, of course websites – especially smaller scale ones like this, are always going down. Well, as I am doing my nightly blog reading, it turns out that there is actually something behind the site being down. Boing Boing reports that Marxists.org has been under sustained cyber-attack from hosts in China, and as a resulty, the site’s ISP (the company that hosts the site) is kicking it off:
While the attacks continued and greatly degraded MIA performance, we were understandably cautious about rebuilding the kernel and trying again. On January 15, the server became unresponsive and we asked for it to be remotely rebooted, taking the opportunity to bring it up with the new kernel…The bottom line: there is a significant probability that we will not be able to find and deploy an acceptable solution in time to meet the February 1 lights-out date. This means that the MIA will be off the air. We will make every attempt to bridge the gap with the help of our dedicated mirror operators though we may need to stop serving some of our more “expensive” content such as MP3s and PDFs. There is also a chance that our ultimate solution may require us to make a long-term evaluation of the type of content we serve and make things like PDFs available via alternate distribution channels (e.g. BitTorrent). However, despite our recent litany of seemingly fatal problems, the MIA remains a strong organization with a wealth of content, committed to providing the premiere electronic library of Marxist writings. Despite the political, technical, or economic pressures, rest assured that we will find a way to keep these works available to the world.
This is really interesting to me, for some unknown reason. Thought I would share.
The Annotated Everything 