dns

WikiLeaks.info, a site assisting WikiLeaks' effort to share U.S. war information and diplomatic cables, is rebutting online security organizations' warnings that its Web site could be dangerous to visit.

WikiLeaks.info provides a list of sites that mirror the original WikiLeaks content, and in recent days the main WikiLeaks.org Web site has redirected visitors to the WikiLeaks.info mirror page. WikiLeaks.info has grown in importance because of others' moves two weeks ago that made it difficult to reach WikiLeaks.org and led its operators to resurface at WikiLeaks.ch, a Swiss domain.

Spamhaus, a nonprofit volunteer … Read more

As its operations have come under increasing financial and political pressure, WikiLeaks has quietly bolstered its electronic defenses in an attempt to become more difficult to censor.

In the last few days, the portion of WikiLeaks' infrastructure that relied on a company in Reno, Nev., has been shifted outside the United States to a provider in Toronto. Instead of employing only one company to direct traffic to Wikileaks.ch, currently the organization's primary Web site, 14 providers are now being used to provide redundancy in case of legal or extralegal attack.

The reconfiguration comes as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange … Read more

Though it's in hot water with the U.S. government, WikiLeaks is being supported by online activists fighting to keep the site alive.

WikiLeaks is being propped up by a barrage of mirror sites created by activists following moves by Amazon to stop hosting its site and Domain Name System provider EveryDNS.net to cut off its DNS services, according to The New York Times. Such mirrors can replicate an entire Web site, ensuring that all content and documents remain online and accessible even if WikiLeaks' own site is taken down.

But some of WikiLeaks supporters are adopting a … Read more

Comcast customers in Illinois and three other nearby states lost their Internet access last night, apparently due to the same problem that took down service for East Coast customers just a week ago.

Reports first began showing up on Twitter, with Comcast customers in several Midwest states tweeting that their connections were down. Comcast's own Twitter account, Comcastcares, later confirmed that the outage was affecting people in Minnesota, Illinois, and Michigan and seemed to be Domain Name System (DNS) related. The company also said at the time that it was working on a fix.

More specifically, the outage hit … Read more

It probably wouldn't have helped WikiLeaks' struggle to stay on the Web last week, but Amazon.com has launched a new service for companies whose Internet operations need Domain Name Service.

DNS is technology that connects the Internet address that people use, such as www.flickr.com, to its numeric address, 68.142.214.24. It's that numeric Internet Protocol (IP) address that computers and network gear need to route data over the Internet. DNS functions not unlike a phone book, where you can find a phone number by looking up a person's name.

Now Amazon is … Read more

PayPal, the popular online payment service owned by eBay, has "permanently restricted" the account hitherto used in fund-raising efforts by WikiLeaks.

The service posted a short statement about the matter on its blog Friday:

"PayPal has permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks due to a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity. We've notified the account holder of this action."

WikiLeaks, meanwhile, updated its support page, crossing out the PayPal … Read more

WikiLeaks re-emerged today on a Swiss Internet domain and later on domains in Germany, Finland, and the Netherlands, sidestepping a move that had in effect taken the controversial site off the Internet.

The group, under heavy criticism in some quarters for publishing U.S. diplomats' classified cables, has been working hard to keep operating amid distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks over the Internet and Amazon's decision to stop hosting WikiLeaks' Web site.

Meanwhile, Swedish authorities said they had re-submitted an international arrest warrant asking U.K. police to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange following sex crime allegations, according to the BBC. … Read more

Comcast subscribers from Boston to Washington, D.C., found themselves without Internet access Sunday night after a major outage affected parts of the East Coast.

Reports first seemed to surface on Twitter last night from Comcast customers tweeting that their Internet service had gone down. Comcast's own customer service Twitter feed, known as Comcastcares, confirmed the outage, initially pointing to an issue in Boston but soon revealing that the problem was more widespread.

Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas told CNET through e-mail that last night Comcast engineers identified a server issue that affected Internet service for customers primarily in the … Read more

Six months after Web traffic involving popular U.S. sites and e-mail from computers around the globe was re-directed to Chinese servers unnecessarily, Internet watchers are trying to figure out why it happened and how to prevent future mishaps.

In at least two instances since mid-March, large amounts of traffic on the Internet have been routed to China in circumstances still shrouded in mystery, Rodney Joffe, senior technologist at DNS (Domain Name System) registry Neustar, told CNET in an interview this week.

The first situation happened on March 24, when workers at network operation centers in various parts of the … Read more