They mention “measures restricting free and open access to the Internet”, which is a gross exaggeration.

The TLD .cat has “over 100 thousand active domain names”, but Spanish judges have decreed the shutdown of 10 very specific domains.

Nobody's restricting “free and open access to the Internet” in Catalonia or elsewhere in Spain; it is very confusing (or manipulative) to say so.

Web sites defending Catalan independence and organising people around that goal via democratic and lawful means are legan and stay open (and in fact, some of them receive generous public subsidies). It's only a few web sites calling for sedition and for disobeying the ruling of the Constitutional Court that are being shut down.

I think this is an excellent idea, thanks.

We considered tarpitting before, I think we were always scared off by the prospect of having to keep tens of thousands of connections open.

Does anyone have specific software to recommend that is able to keep that many connections open on a typical cheap Linux box? (Lighttpd? Nginx? Varnish? Yaws?)

The implementation I'm thinking might work well is:

Switch www.w3.org to use some lightweight server software that is able to keep lots of connections open, and configure it to serve DTD files with an artificial 5 second delay. Proxy all the other requests to our existing Apache server running elsewhere (possibly on another port on the same system)

Most people shouldn't notice or care about the delay for DTD files, only the apps that are requesting them hundreds or thousands of times in a row will notice.

W3C's current traffic is something like:

    - 66% DTD/schema files (.dtd/ent/mod/xsd)
    - 25% valid HTML/CSS/WAI icons
    - 9% other

So we'd probably want to configure the lightweight server to serve those icons too (but then it would have to do conneg as well)