http://www.guardian....et-dns-everydns
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Everydns.net says attack against leaks site endangered other customers' service – effectively pushing site off the web
The US was today accused of opening up a dramatic new front against WikiLeaks, effectively "killing" its web address just days after Amazon pulled the site from its servers following political pressure.
The whistleblowers' website went offline for the third time in a week this morning, in the biggest threat to its online presence yet.
Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate's committee on homeland security, earlier this week called for any organisation helping sustain WikiLeaks to "immediately terminate" its relationship with them.
On Friday morning, WikiLeaks and the cache of secret diplomatic documents that have proved to be a scourge for governments around the world were only accessible through a string of digits known as a DNS address. The site later re-emerged with a Swiss domain, WikiLeaks.ch.
Julian Assange this morning said the development is an example of the "privatisation of state censorship" in the US and is a "serious problem."
"These attacks will not stop our mission, but should be setting off alarm bells about the rule of law in the United States," he warned.
The California-based internet hosting provider that dropped WikiLeaks at 3am GMT on Friday (10PM EST Thursday), Everydns, says it did so to prevent its other 500,000 customers of being affected by the intense cyber attacks targeted at WikiLeaks.
The site this morning said it had "move[d] to Switzerland", announcing a new domain name – wikileaks.ch, with the Swiss suffix. However, the new address still only points to an IP address, suggesting WikiLeaks has been unable to quickly find a new hosting provider.
The Wikileaks.ch domain name, which only surfaced on Friday morning, is being served by the Swiss Pirate Party. And the routing to it is still being done by everydns.
Late yesterday evening Tableau Software, a company which published data visualisations, pulled one of its images picturing the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables at the request of Senator Lieberman. Writing on the company's blog, Elissa Fink said: "Our decision to remove the data from our servers came in response to a public request by Senator Joe Lieberman, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, when he called for organisations hosting WikiLeaks to terminate their relationship with the website."
Mark Stephens, the London-based lawyer acting on behalf of Assange, wrote on Twitter after the shutdown: "Pressure appears to have been applied to close the WikiLeaks domain name."
Andre Rickardsson, an expert on computer security at Sweden's Bitsec Consulting, told Reuters: "I don't believe for a second that this has been done by everydns themselves. I think they've been under pressure," he said, apparently referring to US authorities.
A new Germany-based WikiLeaks domain – wikileaks.dd19.de – also appeared on Friday morning, with its data apparently hosted in California. People have also taken to setting up alternative domain names that point to the WikiLeaks address. Robin Fenwick, a UK-based web services director, this morning launched Wikileeks.org.uk – a "joke domain" that points to the WikiLeaks DNS address.
In a statement on its website, the free everydns.net service said that the "distributed denial of service" (DDOS) attacks by unknown hackers – who are trying to knock WikiLeaks off the net – meant that the leaks site was interfering with the service being provided to other users. That in turn meant that WikiLeaks had broken everydns.net's terms of service, and it cut the site off at 3am GMT on Friday (10PM EST Thursday).
DNS services translate a website name, such as guardian.co.uk, into machine-readable "IP quads" – in that case 77.91.249.30, so that http://77.91.249.30 will show the Guardian site. If the DNS fails, the site is only reachable via IP address – but WikiLeaks has not yet provided one via Twitter or other means.
Everydns.net said that the attacks – which have been going on all week, and led the site to temporarily host its services on Amazon's more resilient EC2 "cloud computing" service – "threaten the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure, which enables access to almost 500,000 other websites".
WikiLeaks was given 24 hours' notice of the termination, and everydns said: "Any downtime of the wikileaks.org website has resulted from its failure to use another hosted DNS service provider."
The move comes after several days of WikiLeaks coming under a determined DDOS attack, apparently from hackers friendly to the point of view of the US government, which has disparaged the site's leaking of thousands of US diplomatic cables.
US companies have also come under intense political pressure to remove any connection to, or support for, WikiLeaks. Amazon ended its hosting of the cables on its EC2 cloud computer service earlier this week, but last night insisted in a blogpost that its decision was not due to pressure from Senator Joe Lieberman, who has called for the removal of the data – and who has influenced at least one other US company to withdraw support for WikiLeaks data.
In a blogpost late on Thursday, Amazon said reports that government inquiries prompted it to remove the data were "inaccurate".
Amazon said:
Connecting to WikiLeaks is presently not possible until it gets a new DNS service. WikiLeaks itself said on Twitter that the ending of DNS services was allegedly due to "claimed mass attacks" and called for further donations to "keep us strong".
Meanwhile Sweden working with Interpol has issued an arrest order on Assange for that Rape business a couple of months ago.
http://www.nytimes.c...ikileaks&st=cse
And the right wing wants the whistleblowers dead or put in prison for life:
http://www.huffingto...d_n_789654.html
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Bill O'Reilly took a hard line against the leakers of the classified State Department cables released by WikiLeaks this week, saying they were traitors who "should be executed or put in prison for life."
Speaking on his Monday show, O'Reilly said that the leaking of the cables, which have sparked a global diplomatic crisis and unearthed scores of revelations about the inner workings of the State Department, was an outrage.
"Whoever leaked all those State Department documents to the WikiLeaks website is a traitor and should be executed or put in prison for life," he said. "The guy who runs the website is a sleazeball named Julian Assange, who is bent on damaging America. Since he's not a U.S. citizen, it's hard for American authorities to move against him. But we can prosecute those who leak the documents to Assange."
O'Reilly then turned to Bradley Manning, the intelligence analyst who has been widely tipped as the source for WikiLeaks. If guilty, he said, Manning "is a traitor and should be given life and hard labor in a military prison."
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What do you think about all this?
Personally I am disgusted by the media spin on this. Instead of focusing on the enourmous amount of bullshit and fuck ups our governments have been committing, the focus is on these dangerous wiki people who are hurting these poor governments by airing their dirty laundry.
Guys like Mike Huckabee are calling for the death of the people who are revealing the dirty deeds of the governments. Claiming that all these secrets can cost lives, well, what about all the lives that have already been lost because of the lies of the Governments?
As somebody else mentioned in a thread in Reddit, I think we are witnessing an important moment in modern history. Free speech and Internet neutrality making the secret acts of Big Brother transparent. What will happen? Will Wikileaks be squashed or will the actions of wikileaks become a trend forcing the worlds governments to start keeping their act clean?
I certainly doubt it, but one could hope.
EDIT:
What I wanted to discuss was:
Do you think what Wikileaks has done and continues to work for is destructive or criminal?
Do you think that the safety of the citizens are really affected by these leaks?
Are the actions taken against Wikileaks wrong or right?
How should morals and ethics dictate the way a government acts?
This post has been edited by Jenisand Rul: 03 December 2010 - 06:05 PM