WikiLeaks edges further away from the US
29th October, 2010
Not long after the Iraq War Logs website stopped being hosted on US servers, WikiLeaks' main website at wikileaks.org has followed suit.
Earlier this week, both sites were using US-based Amazon EC2 instances to serve their content. These servers have since been removed from their round-robin DNS setup, leaving only Irish and French servers to host the content for wikileaks.org and warlogs.wikileaks.org
Earlier this morning, we also noticed a change in the DNS settings for wikileaks.org. The nameservers had been altered to point to Irish servers instead of US ones:
org. 9316 IN NS c0.org.afilias-nst.info. org. 9316 IN NS d0.org.afilias-nst.org. org. 9316 IN NS a0.org.afilias-nst.info. org. 9316 IN NS a2.org.afilias-nst.info. org. 9316 IN NS b0.org.afilias-nst.org. org. 9316 IN NS b2.org.afilias-nst.org.
These nameservers are hosted in Canada by Afilias Canada Corp, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Irish company Afilias. Such a change could help WikiLeaks stay out of reach of the US government. Afilias is responsible for a fair chunk of the internet — in 2001, they launched the top-level domain registry for .info, and now act as the service provider for the .org generic top-level domain on behalf of Public Interest Registry.
Both wikileaks.org and warlogs.wikileaks.org continue to share an Amazon EC2 instance in Ireland, and a French server hosted by Octopuce. At the time of publication, wikileaks.org had reverted back to its US-based nameservers at everydns.net.