Some days ago This Endeavor made mention of the particularly stupid belief that seems to exist among some government officials and legislators that if they will deal a death blow to websites they disapprove of if they can only rid the Internet of their domain names. Of course this is about as effective as some addled Anarchists believing that the world could finally be rid of Banking, if only they go about the financial districts and steal all the street signs.
In a statement on its Web site, EveryDNS.net said it terminated WikiLeaks’ domain name at around 10 p.m., Eastern time for violating its terms of service. WikiLeaks.org “has become the target of multiple distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks,” the company said. Such attacks usually involve bombarding a Web site with requests for access, effectively blocking legitimate users, and are designed to make a targeted Web site unavailable. When questioned about similar cyberattacks on Sunday against WikiLeaks, American officials vigorously denied any involvement.
And still business goes on, imagine that. Among its other workarounds, Wikileaks can be reached at the IP address http://213.251.145.96 entered into the URL bar of your browser. For deeply mysterious reasons, those who would like the Wikileaks site made unreachable have the persistent belief that the sort of person who craves reading memos presented in single-spaced Courier will be unable to type or copy-and-paste this number.
The actual hosting of the site is more problematic, however:
Earlier this week, Amazon — which rents server space to companies in addition to its online retail business — canceled its relationship with WikiLeaks after inquiries from an aide to Senator Joseph I. Lieberman. The company said the organization was violating the terms of service for the program.
“When companies or people go about securing and storing large quantities of data that isn’t rightfully theirs, and publishing this data without ensuring it won’t injure others, it’s a violation of our terms of service, and folks need to go operate elsewhere,” the company said.
It is nearly impossible to believe that anyone, anywhere, took a threat from Senator Lieberman (or his office) seriously (despite Glenn Greenwald's assertions), so Amazon's craven actions are entirely their own. A company of that size, with that utter domination of its market, has the luxury of making decisions that might be unpopular, but serve a broader principle that stands at the core of its work (distributing information).
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