Now here's an interesting twist on the WikiLeaks situation....
One of the many companies the so-called "hacktivist" WikiLeaks supporters have been targeting is the DNS provider for WikiLeaks main domain - EveryDNS.net. (DNS is the system that translates human-readable domain names like WikiLeaks.org into the IP addresses of the web servers running that site.) Knocking out a site's DNS provider makes it very difficult for regular people to get to the site. They have to go to 213.251.145.96, which isn't so memorable. The damage from taking out a DNS provider can be very big, too, since they do the name-translation for lots of other clients besides the target site.
Last Friday, WikiLeaks' DNS provider was mistakenly identified as EasyDNS* instead of EveryDNS, their actual provider. That mistake was picked up by the New York Times and The Guardian, among others, and soon EasyDNS had become a target of WikiLeaks' supporters.
On Sunday, EasyDNS says they were contacted by a group acting on behalf of WikiLeaks and asked to provide DNS for their fallback domain, wikileaks.ch, and they agreed, at least in part (according to EasyDNS) because they felt they had little choice in the face of the enormous backlash coming from the case of mistaken identity.
Amazing, right? EasyDNS was falsely identified and faced an enormous backlash that threatened all of their clients, so they agreed to become what they were falsely accused of, in order to get out of the line of fire.
EasyDNS provided lots of links to more info about the situation on their blog, but so far this morning that site is still down. Their DNS services do appear to be working.
Leave EasyDNS alone!
* EasyDNS happens to be The Stranger's DNS provider. We found out about this when EasyDNS sent an email to all their clients last night explaining the situation.
