WikiLeaks moves website to Switzerland after its web address is 'killed' by U.S. firm
By NIALL FIRTH
- Website down for 6 hours after U.S. firm pulls plug
- EveryDNS: WikiLeaks was subject to another hacking attack
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Wikileaks today moved its website to Switzerland after it was effectively taken off the internet when the U.S firm that 'translates' its address withdrew its services.
The site's U.S. domain name system provider, EveryDNS, said it stopped translating the wikileaks.org name into an address that computers understand after the website once again became the target of hacking attacks.
WikiLeaks has now moved to a new address based in Switzerland, wikileaks.ch.
The move will raise suspicions that the EveryDNS has come under pressure from the U.S. Government to cut ties with the controversial site.
And it comes just days after Amazon pulled Wikileaks off its servers after coming under intense political pressure.
WikiLeaks' Twitter page this morning where it claimed that its domain name had been 'killed' by EveryDNS' decision to withdraw its services
It took Wikileaks.org six hours to get back up and running after being dropped after the site's owners found a new provider. However many of the internal links on the site were still not working and are returning error messages.
EveryDNS provides access to some 500,000 websites. DNS services translate a website's domain name, such as www.dailymail.co.uk, into an IP (internet provider)address. MailOnline's IP address is 195.234.240.212, for example.
EveryDNS said in a statement that it dropped the website because the attacks by mystery hackers threatened the rest of its network.
The firm said: 'Wikileaks.org has become the target of multiple distributed denial of service attacks. These attacks have, and future attacks would, threaten the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure.'
WikiLeaks confirmed the drop on its Twitter account, saying 'WikiLeaks.org domain killed by US everydns.net after claimed mass attacks.'
The move meant that for a number of hours Wikileaks was only accessible by typing a string of numbers into an internet browser address bar.
EveryDNS said: 'Any downtime of the wikileaks.org website has resulted from its failure to use another hosted DNS service provider.'
WikiLeaks has angered the U.S. and other governments by publishing almost half a million secret documents about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The latest batch contains thousands of classified U.S. diplomatic cables.
Today it was claimed that British forces were slated as being 'not up to the task' in Afghanistan by the country's president Hamid Karzai.
WikiLeaks' release of secret government communications has seen firms that help it come under huge pressure to distance themselves
The accusation sparked indignation among some of those linked to the UK deployment in Helmand, which has swelled to 10,000 troops since it began in 2006.
On Wednesday, Amazon.com - who had provided WikiLeaks with use of its servers to distribute embarrassing State Department communications and other documents - evicted it. The site remains on servers of a Swedish host, Bahnhof.
Amazon said it stopped hosting WikiLeaks' website because it violated its terms of service, not because an inquiry by the U.S. Senate Homeland Security Committee sparked anger about the release of thousands of classified U.S. government documents.
Staff for the committee's chairman, Joe Lieberman, had questioned Amazon about its relationship with WikiLeaks on Tuesday and called on other companies that provide web-hosting services to boycott WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks turned to Amazon to keep its site available after hackers tried to flood it and prevent users accessing the classified information.
In its statement on Thursday, Amazon said its Amazon Web Services (AWS) rents computer infrastructure on a self-service basis. AWS does not pre-screen its customers, but it does have terms of service that must be followed.
For example, it said under its terms of service, a customer must guarantee it owns or controls all of the rights to the content and that use of the content will not cause injury to any person or entity.
'It's clear that WikiLeaks doesn't own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content,' Amazon said. 'It is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren't putting innocent people in jeopardy.'
WikiLeaks slammed Amazon for dropping it, claiming on Twitter that if Amazon was 'so uncomfortable with the First Amendment (of the U.S. Constitution), they should get out of the business of selling books.'
(mailonline)
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