WikiLeaks has set up a network of mirror sites in an effort to stay online, while its latest batch of leaked documents say the Chinese leadership directed attacks on Google.
Facing constant denial of service (DOS) attacks and legal threats from the US, French and Australian governments, Wikileaks now uses a mass mirror network of 355 sites set up by supporters worldwide.
“If you have a unix-based server which is hosting a website on the Internet and you want to give wikileaks some of your hosting resources, you can help!” Wikileaks said in call for help.
The website went off-air for seven hours on Friday after US DNS provider EveryDNS.net canceled its domain name, claiming the sites breached its fair use policy as a sustained Denial of Service attack threatened access to other sites its hosted.
“These attacks have, and future attacks would, threaten the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure, which enables access to almost 500,000 other websites,” it said.
The take-down highlighted a weakness in the open-ness of the net, whereby a handful of registrars have the ability to take a domain name offline.
The site transferred its business to a Swiss hosting firm dropping the .org tab for a .ch moniker, and began inviting web firms worldwide to set up mirrors.
The mirrored sites use a /wikileaks directory tag, such as mirror2.wikileaks.lu.
Meanwhile, in the latest batch of leaked documents, US officials say that China’s Politburo Standing Committee – the highest Communist Party organ - directed attacks on Google after a senior member found a critical article while googling his name.
The New York Timesnamed the politician as propaganda chief Li Changchun, although this does not appear in the WikiLeaks cable.
A “well-placed contact” told the US Beijing embassy that operations against Google were “100% political.” Another source believed that a senior figure was working closely with Google’s rival Baidu.
The heavy attacks led Google to announce its departure from the mainland China market early this year.
Google believed it was being harassed by the Chinese government for still allowing a link from google.cn to the uncensored google.com, citing a series of incidents in which its sites were blocked.
Google also had turned down a Chinese government request to adjust the resolution on Google Earth satellite images, which authorities had claimed presented a security threat.
Meanwhile, PayPal said it would not support payments to WikiLeaks.org because it had violated its acceptable use policy, Bloomberg reported.
The policy did not allow “activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity,” Paypal said.
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