WikiLeaks ...

By Claudine Beaumont, Technology Editor

The site had been forced offline after its US-based service provider, EveryDNS, withdrew support for the site, claiming that repeated distributed denial of service attacks aimed at the Wikileaks site were affecting the web operations of other EveryDNS customers.

It has taken Wikileaks just hours to make alternative hosting arrangements. The site can now be accessed through a Swiss domain, Wikileaks.ch. According to reports, the domain is registered by the Pirate Party of Switzerland, and is associated with an internet protocol address in Sweden.

The Swedish site is not hosting any Wikileaks content, and is instead directing browsers to an address in France which does host Wikileaks content, including the latest batch of diplomatic cables.

Users can also access the Wikileaks site using its unique IP address (http://88.80.13.160) rather than its more user-friendly URL.

Wikileaks, founded by Julian Assange, has been heavily criticised by governments around the world for leaking confidential communiques between diplomats, ambassadors and government agencies.

The whistleblowing website will hope that moving its operations to Swiss servers will make it more difficult for it to be forced offline.

The site was using Amazon’s web services to host some content, but Amazon removed its support for Wikileaks, supposedly after bowing to pressure from the US government.

Wikileaks: What is a DNS service and how does it work?

By Claudine Beaumont, Technology Editor

Whistleblowing website Wikileaks was forced offline when its DNS host withdrew support for the site. It’s back up and running now, with a Swiss email address, but what went wrong?
 
Wikileaks was forced offline when its host withdrew support for the site.  By Claudine Beaumont, Technology Editor 12:31PM GMT 03 Dec 2010
What is a DNS?

DNS stands for Domain Name System, the hierarchical naming system that makes it possible to give each website a unique, human-friendly address. Websites each have a unique address, known as an IP address, made up of a string of numbers. To make the web easier to navigate, the DNS system makes it possible to type in a web address – such as telegraph.co.uk – rather than a string of hard-to-remember numbers. The easiest way to think of it is to imagine the Domain Name System as the internet’s address book, translating the web addresses that we all know and use in to the IP addresses used by routers, servers and other back-end systems.

What happens if a Domain Name is withdrawn? 
 
US-based Domain Name Service provider EveryDNS withdrew its support for Wikileaks overnight. The company said the decision was not based on any kind of censorship – of not wanting its brand associated with the whistleblowing website – but because attacks aimed at the Wikileaks website by hackers were having a knock-on effect on other EasyDNS users. The net result of this was that people typing Wikileaks.org in to their browser window, or searching for Wikileaks on search engines, would not have been able to call up the Wikileaks site. However, the website still existed – it’s just that it could only be accessed by typing in the unique string of numbers that make up the IP address. Wikileaks made this information publicly available through its Twitter feed, and sought a new DNS provider so that it could generate a new human-friendly web address.

What is the situation now?

The Wikileaks website remains online, at a new web address – Wikileaks.ch. The site is registered to the Pirate Party of Switzerland, and is associated with an IP address in Sweden, which itself points to a web address in France, where the Wikileaks documents are actually hosted. Although this seems like a complicated system, it makes it trickier for hackers to force Wikileaks offline, because they have to follow a circuitous route, and it also makes it more difficult for the site to be forced offline by legal intervention, because its footprint spans so many jurisdictions.

WikiLeaks release: Why law is powerless to stop WikiLeaks from publishing

The structure of WikiLeaks makes it practically impossible for governments and other organisations embarrassed by its disclosures to make legal challenges against it.

WikiLeaks to release 3m secret US documents
 
PRQ, a Swedish internet hosting company linked to the file-sharing website The Pirate Bay, has said it provides Wikileaks with server space from a base in the Stockholm suburbs Photo: EPABy Jon Swaine in New York 10:38PM GMT 22 Nov 2010
Many of the documents published on the site are classified or protected by copyright. Ordinarily the original owners would attempt to have them removed.

However, Wikileaks hosts its publications across several different servers, which “are distributed over multiple international jurisdictions and do not keep logs” that could be seized, the organisation says.

Julian Assange, the founder and editor, has said his group uses “state-of-the-art encryption to bounce stuff around the internet to hide trails”.

Mr Assange told a conference in July that Wikileaks passes its data through countries that offer relatively strong legal protection to people who leak information, including Sweden, Iceland and Belgium.

PRQ, a Swedish internet hosting company linked to the file-sharing website The Pirate Bay, has said it provides Wikileaks with server space from a base in the Stockholm suburbs

Mikael Viborg, the owner of PRQ, said Swedish authorities were aware of the servers’ location but had not made any attempt to shut them down.

He said Wikileaks also had backup servers in place in other countries that were ready to be activated if their primary servers were shut down.

Reports have also claimed some Wikileaks servers are 30 metres underground, in a Cold War nuclear bunker that was carved out of a large rock hill in Stockholm.

After Wikileaks released its Iraq war logs earlier this year, it emerged the organisation was also “mirroring” the data on US-based servers, in a move seen as a deliberate taunt to the Pentagon and US authorities. Telegraph