It may be responsible for leaking thousands of major documents onto the internet, but just yesterday, reports have surfaced that a Californian judge has ordered an injunction on the site, thus wiping wikileaks.org out of existence. While it isn't true that the entire website was removed, its DNS for the .org domain certainly was taken offline, leaving only access via IP address to that particular domain instead.What is Wikileaks? Wikipedia describes the site with the following: Wikileaks is a website running on modified MediaWiki software which allows whistleblowers to release (whilst remaining anonymous) government and corporate documents, allegedly without possible retribution. It claims that postings are untraceable by anyone attempting to do so. It was launched in December 2006 and, as of November 2007, had contained over 1.2 million documents. It provides mirrors which can be used during outages. It is true, Wikileaks is still accessible with other domains such as wikileaks.cx and wikileaks.be which are among a massive massive list of domains that could be used to access the website still. It appears that only the .org domain was shut down. DailyKos broke the news yesterday evening saying that, "One of the most important web sites in recent months has been Wikileaks.org. Wikileaks has upset the Chinese government enough that they are attempting to censor it, as is the Thai military junta. Wikileaks is now under attack from a censorship effort by a California court." The story quickly made it to many sites including the most popular blog BoingBoing where reader Pukebazooka said, "even though this prevents the wikileaks.org link from working, it doesn't actually take down the site: everything is up and running at 88.80.13.160." "Now censorship has extended to the United States of America, land of the First Amendment. As of Friday, February 15, those going to Wikileaks.org have gotten Server not found messages. Today I received a message explaining that a California court has granted an injunction written and requested by Cayman Island’s Bank Julius Baer lawyers." Stephan Soldz said in a posting on the site, "It seems that the bank is trying to keep the public from accessing documents that may reveal shady dealings. Wikileaks was only given a couple of hours notice “by email” and was not even represented at the hearing where a U.S. judge took such a drastic step attempting to totally shut down an important information outlet." The injunction itself says, “Dynadot shall immediately clear and remove all DNS hosting records for the wikileaks.org domain name and prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website or any other website or server other than a blank park page, until further order of this Court.” It seems evident that shutting down the site will require much more effort if it is even possible at all, but some find it troubling that a judge can order a DNS to be taken down so quickly. |
 
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