Just a few hours after having its DNS servers terminated by a US company, WikiLeaks has anounced a move to a Swiss domain: wikileaks.ch. The domain is registered by the Pirate Party of Switzerland and it currently points to a single IP address in Sweden.

This move increases the resilience of the WikiLeaks site. Unlike wikileaks.org, the wikileaks.ch domain is not registered with a US company and is thus less likely to bow to pressure from the US government.

WikiLeaks also points out that "Free speech has a number", referring to the Swedish IP address that can be entered into a browser's address bar (http://88.80.13.160). The Swedish website does not host any WikiLeaks content; instead, it redirects browsers to an IP address in France, which does host the content (http://213.251.145.96)

French company OVH has now delegated a block of 16 IP addresses to WikiLeaks, which suggests more than a temporary relationship between the two organisations:

inetnum:        213.251.145.96 - 213.251.145.111
netname:        WIKILEAKS

Curiously, the wikileaks.ch domain is configured to use EveryDNS.net as a DNS provider. This is the same US company that terminated DNS services for the wikileaks.org domain earlier today. It could be interesting to see what happens next in this cat and mouse game.

Real-time performance graphs for wikileaks.ch can be viewed here.

WikiLeaks has been taken down again. Around 04:00 GMT this morning (Friday), DNS lookups on the wikileaks.org domain stopped working, effectively cutting the domain off from the whole internet. Neither cablegate.wikileaks.org nor www.wikileaks.org can currently be resolved to an IP address.

WikiLeaks later tweeted that the domain was "killed" by US company EveryDNS.net. This was a potential weakness that Netcraft identified back in October, when WikiLeaks temporarily stopped using US-based web servers to host the Iraq War Logs content.

Earlier this week, Joe Lieberman of the United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs had encouraged other companies to terminate their relationship with WikiLeaks. It is unclear whether this influenced EveryDNS.net's decision, as they claim it was due to the DDoS attacks against the domain. A statement from EveryDNS.net said, "The termination of services was effected pursuant to, and in accordance with, the EveryDNS.net Acceptable Use Policy." EveryDNS.net claims to have provided sufficient warning to WikiLeaks, noting that, "Any downtime of the wikileaks.org website has resulted from its failure to use another hosted DNS service provider."

The committee issued another press release yesterday, announcing their intention to go after WikiLeaks by amending the Espionage Act. Lierberman accuses "Julian Assange and his cronies" of hindering their war efforts and creating a hit list for enemies.

WikiLeaks could get their sites up and running again by using different DNS servers, such as the French ones used for the Iraq War Logs in October. However, the wikileaks.org domain is still registered with a US company, Dynadot LLC, which could be 'persuaded' by the government to prevent such modifications, or even suspend the domain.

Despite still being developed, HTML5 is already in use on more than 1% of the world's websites.

Netcraft's December Web Server Survey found the HTML5 DOCTYPE on 1.06% of homepages. An additional 0.05% of sites made use of new HTML5 features without explicitly declaring the correct DOCTYPE.

HTML5 is the next major revision of the HTML standard, and looks set to supersede HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.1 with its support for video and audio playback. Microsoft has recently shifted its strategy on Silverlight as a cross-platform solution and now wants to implement standards-based HTML5 really, really, really well in Internet Explorer 9.

Earlier this year, Google also announced that it was shifting effort towards bringing their now-deprecated Gears API capabilities into HTML5 standards. Google's Chrome browser uses the same WebKit rendering engine as Apple browsers, with Apple boasting support for HTML5 on each of its new mobile devices and Macs.

Desktop browser support for the full set of new features in HTML5 is still rather patchy, although it should be noted that the HTML5 specification is still a working draft and subject to change. Many web designers will be reluctant to use the newest features just yet, as a significant fraction of their visitors will be unable to enjoy the content as it was intended. This is clearly demonstrated by the rarity of HTML5 elements such as canvas (appearing directly on only 0.012% of homepages), video (0.011%) and audio (0.003%).

A few hours ago, we reported that cablegate.wikileaks.org was under attack. This attack has shifted its focus onto www.wikileaks.org, which is now being deluged with more than 10 gigabits of traffic per second, causing the site to become unavailable to visitors.

Since our earlier report, cablegate.wikileaks.org has been reconfigured to use a single IP address and is working normally – at least for now. The attackers may have diverted their efforts towards attacking www.wikileaks.org, as this is likely to be the first port of call for many of the site's visitors.

Real-time performance graphs for both sites are available here:

• www.wikileaks.org uptime
• cablegate.wikileaks.org uptime

WikiLeaks is currently under another distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. This time the target appears to be cablegate.wikileaks.org – the website which hosts the leaked US embassy cables.

When the cablegate site was launched on Sunday, WikiLeaks' main website at www.wikileaks.org was subjected to a similar attack, causing it to go offline for several hours. The cablegate site itself was not affected by those attacks.

Today's attack is still ongoing, and has caused noticeable downtime over the past couple of hours:

The cablegate hostname is still configured to use three different IP addresses on a round-robin basis, essentially acting as a load balancer, although this does not appear to have prevented the current attack from succeeding. The performance graph shows the site may have been attacked over shorter periods earlier in the week, even though it has only made available a small fraction of the 250,000 cable messages. The attacks are likely to be symbolic more than anything else, as several large media groups have already been supplied with the full set of leaked messages.

A real-time performance graph for cablegate.wikileaks.org can be viewed here.