About 4 days ago my reported hashrate at eligius.st dropped from the usual ~600gh to ~200gh.

What causes this??

Eligius is working just fine for me FWIW.
Even to the extent that I can cleanly use the stats for testing.

Maybe it's hardware specific?

I'm using Ants... two S2s and one S1s, going through a stratum proxy.

M

For protecting my mining address from passive observers.

Luke/wk I would be happy to pay for a semi-private TLS endpoint for those more conscious of their privacy needs.

Will

If it gets any worse, it will be quicker picking up micro payments from the "Free Bitcoin sites"

Ha Ha Ha  

On a more serious note, could we see a reduction in diff for the first time if all pools seem to be down on luck ?

Pool's working fine for me. I haven't noticed anything different.

Now that I think about it, only the host name part of the URL would be visible to an eavesdropper on a network.

https://eligius.st/~wizkid057/newstats/userstats.php/1zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

So my bad on that one :-/.

The other way someone could take a guess at which address was yours was if they knew what hashrate you were hashing at. If that were the case then they could merely visit http://eligius.st/~wizkid057/newstats/topcontributors.php and work out which one was yours.

Standard SSL ciphers all the communication in a way that the url is only known after the handshake is done and the server certificate is provided, this indeed is a problem for sites as it forces to have only site per IP.
Currently most browsers support an protocol extension to provide with the url in clear text but it is on the user side so you can disable it if you wish.

So no, SSL ciphers all the stream, not even the hostname is known for an eavesdropper, only the IP and port is known.

What puzzles me a bit is the following: I have two clusters of miners pointing at different adresses. Both of these clusters have all 17 to 19 hours difficulties to connect. But often not at the same time, there is sometimes a difference between the two clusters, sometimes at the same time. They are on different networks, in different buildings. So something IS going on, although I don't know yet what it is.