On 14th September 2014, nearly two years since Passion Times was founded, our Facebook page reached 60,000 likes. At that time, it was something for us to celebrate, if only mildly. Today, not two weeks after the 28th September teargas attack that symbolically signifies the beginning of the Umbrella Revolution, we have more than 210,000 likes. The video showing the sexual assault against a NOW TV reporter exceeded 1,000,000 views some two days ago, half a day after its release. One would assume, then, that this is something we should really celebrate. Perhaps we should, if not for the fact that the page view of our webpage passiontimes.hk has been distorted by daily DDoS attacks on such a massive scale that viewers now have to rely on the Facebook page for information normally viewed in our webpage.

Any regular viewer of passiontimes.hk would surely have had the experience that the webpage fails to load. In the past, this was an occasional annoyance; during this past week, this has been the case so regular that some get the impression passiontimes.hk is permanently down. The kind of DDoS attacks we suffer from should rank among those in the top end of the “Table of Victims”: at its peak, the volume of requests reaches 200Gbps, those requests coming from more than 40 countries. Since every request has the size of about 1kb, a 200 Gbps volume of requests means that we are handling 200 million service requests in one second. The huge number of zombie machines mobilised to launch this massive attack in order to take down our servers is without a doubt politically motivated. As a matter of fact, a group that names itself MESSENGERS.we has declared that they are responsible for the DDoS attacks, saying the reason why they attack us is because “[passiontimes.hk] violates ethics requirement of journalism occupation. Its only aim is to publicize the Occupy Central extremely, deteriorate the social order and further antagonize the HK government (sic).”

This is the equivalent of serial mass murders by bandits for a webpage, especially one with a budget typical among small outfits like us. Not only is it the killing of lifeless machines that deliver computer bits or bytes to various computers, tablets, and phones all over the world; it is also an attempted murder of the freedom of speech. Passion Times is the media arm of Civic Passion, one of the prime movers of new waves of social movement in Hong Kong. We are firmly and indisputably part of the “New Media” in Hong Kong, and we provide not only articles by a large number of popular writers, but also invaluable first-hand reports that would have been unavailable elsewhere. These DDoS attacks reflect the brutal ways in which the authority attempts to stifle and kill freedom of speech, of expression, and of information. The webpage also hosts archives of many excellent video shows on probably the greatest variety of topics among internet TV stations in Hong Kong.

During this week as the Umbrella Revolution unfolds, every foreign journalist we have met has expressed amazement on the quality and popularity of Passion Times, whose fans look upon the content of the webpage as an irreplaceable part of the new social movement, a webpage that informs and educates people of the meaning and significance of this movement, and thus a platform on which the more progressive among Hongkongers unite. The very brutality of the DDoS attacks might kill us, but it also reveals our importance in Hong Kong people’s defense of our freedom and our quest for democracy.