As I mentioned in my previous post, Eclipse.org was hammered by a DDOS attack when we posted Eclipse 3.1. You may have noticed that the form of the attack has almost certainly inflated the number of download requests showing in the “Eclipse Download Challenge” counter.
So as described in the “Eclipse 3.1 By the Numbers” article:
The download figure is a click count of download requests at eclipse.org, including downloads served by mirrors. Direct access to mirrors, bit torrent downloads, and other download sharing are not included.
In other words, it is the best number for download requests that we can track with the infrastructure we have.
Theoretically, we could spend a bunch of time and at least approximately determine the number of bogus hits caused by the DDOS attack. But I would personally rather just pay some extra money to my favourite charity.