What happened to Unicode CLDR's site?

Philippe Verdy verdy_p at wanadoo.fr
Tue Oct 4 11:00:18 CDT 2016


It looks that an automated bot run by Google detected an excessive use of
bandwidth and launch the block, waiting for another subcription or payment,
even if the site was (possibly) donated by Google itself. That bit probably
does not know what it does and acts like any other hosted site. (Google's
own usage policy is probably more enforced now: you can host free websites
but above some threshold it will be blocked).

Note also that this is the webhosting which is blocked, not the domain name
(hosted by Apple who probably offered it to the Consortium).

There's probably been a lack of communication somewhere in Google, or an
administrator error that removed an exception for a site that should have
first been handled specially internally by a human hierarchy.

If the usage limit was exhausted, may be this is because the site was
harvested by some malwares and I think it's reasonnable to block it first
before scanning, cleaning, restoring damaged parts from a safe backup, and
investigating about which protection measures were missing or should be
taken).

There's certainly people looking for what happend precisely. I hope this is
just an administrative measure that can be easily reversed and that no
damage happend to CLDR data (and to private data there about CLDR surveyors
or user authentication databases). I don't think there's damage on the
released CLDR data, but there could be losses in some recent ongoing works.

2016-10-04 15:53 GMT+02:00 Steven R. Loomis <srl at icu-project.org>:

> Yes, the web content is hosted by google sites, a web hosting provider.
>
> As to it being down, i understand this is being looked into.
>
> Enviado desde nuestro iPhone.
>
> El oct. 4, 2016, a las 5:51 AM, Cristian Secară <liste at secarica.ro>
> escribió:
>
> În data de Tue, 4 Oct 2016 19:50:05 +0800, gfb hjjhjh a scris:
>
> Why is the site suspended by Google and how to access it now?
>
>
> Just curious: Unicode = Google ? (physically)
>
> I am asking this because by entering directly http://cldr.unicode.org
> the error result belongs to Google and not to unicode.org.
>
> ?
>
> Cristi
>
> --
> Cristian Secară
> http://www.secărică.ro <http://www.xn--secric-k0ad.ro>
>
>
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