At the precise time of writing (6.45pm GMT) the cablegate.wikileaks.org site is firmly unresponsive from its recent Amazon home, and a global DNS check shows that changes to its domain are currently propagating round the world – back to Bahnhof (RIPE check here).
Bahnhof is the Swedish ISP originally heralded in the media as WikiLeaks’ chosen hosting partner some time ago, thanks in part to its futuristic press shots of nuclear bunkers and movie-set lighting.
MSNBC is speculating that it might be because Amazon has taken the decision to force the site off its services. Amazon has certainly had its fair share of press coverage this time round – definitely more than the last time it happened with the Warlogs. My blog alone has received quotes and trackbacks from the Wall Street Journal (twice), The Guardian, The Register, The Seattle Weekly, and Fox News – and there are countless other outlets covering the issue too.
Whilst it’s not unusual for WikiLeaks to keep moving their services, this is the first time their use of Amazon’s servers have had such a prolonged outage despite WikiLeaks’ own claims of a huge DDoS attack. Moving to another host directly as a result of downtime would suggest unresolvable problems at Amazon.
Considering no reports of outages at other Amazon-hosted sites are proliferating, you’d be forgiven for suspecting that this time it might just be personal.
Update: If this tweet from @SkyNewsBreak is to be believed, the US Dept of Homeland Security has confirmed that Amazon has agreed to stop hosting the content. The nature of the downtime would suggest that very little notice was given before the action was taken.
Update 2: WikiLeaks themselves just tweeted effective confirmation. Does this bring the saga to an end…?
SHAME ON YOU AMAZON giving in to the right wing, corrupt, big boys.
How much did they pay you? or was it just cowardice?
Everything Wikileaks reveal is in the public interest.
Truth is the loser here.
Friday morning UK time, the Wikileaks site has gone down again due to another DOS attack, there is a mirror at http://bit.ly/fS3ETh
MyDNS has terminated the DNS service for wikileaks.
A way to circumvent this is:
On Linux, edit the file:
/etc/hosts
and add a row:
91.121.133.41 cablegate.wikileaks.org
On Windows XP, edit the file:
c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
and add the same row:
91.121.133.41 cablegate.wikileaks.org
Then the cablegate.wikileaks.org works again.
But you need to remember to remove the line, if wikileaks moves to yet another host…
-
Now gone from the swiss server as of overnight 4/5 December, a cablegate mirror site up to date as of then is available at:
http://bit.ly/fS3ETh
what security does bahnhof use that amazon wouldn’t be able to replicate?
Amazon is not the only one that sucks up to the corrupt right wing and its trolls, other suck-ups are PayPal (the main culprit), visa, mastercard, postfinance and money bookers.
Amazon and PayPal did not honor the contractual committment to serve WikiLeaks.
SHAME ON ALL THOSE THAT DO NOT SUPPORT FREEDOM OF PRESS, FREEDOM OF SPEECH, AND FREEDOM OF FREE LANCE PUBLISHERS.