[ Update Dec 5th 5:45pm EST: At the moment we’re part of the delegation for wikileaks.ch and were told to expect the .org delegation, however it is now looking more nebulous. There is some confusion around control over the wikileaks.ORG domain and who has it. To be honest, it turns out we are not dealing with actual Wikileaks people on the backend, but third-parties who are co-ordinating a DNS effort for them, including the initial fallback domain, wikileaks.ch (which we were also incorrectly blamed for unplugging)

So we’re also setup here to carry DNS for wikileaks.org if and when our nameservers can be added to their delegation. We can also act as the Registrar if need be. More as it comes in ]

After being mistakenly blamed for unplugging the DNS for wikileaks on friday and then spending the weekend screaming very loudly about: mob journalism, inaccuracy, clueless commentary and badgering people to fix, retract and correct the misinformation, wikileaks[.ch] has added easyDNS to their nameserver delegation:

wikileaks.ch. 1800 IN NS dns2.easydns.net. wikileaks.ch. 1800 IN NS ns2.easydns.com.

We’ve been added to the wikileaks.ch delegation in conjunction with a group of other independent nameserver operators. We are expecting the wikileaks.org domain to follow.

From the moment this episode started, we just sort of knew that this would be the outcome of events. Over the weekend we’ve seen a lot of online banter about whether what happened with their previous DNS provider was right or wrong and we sympathize with both wikileaks and everydns. As I’ve mentioned before, unless you have personally had to face a screaming full-on DDoS attack yourself, you really have no idea wtf you’re talking about.

Generally there are two kinds of DOS targets:

Targets you never knew were using your system and when you find out, you want to take a shower. These are the targets 90% of the time: ponzi schemes, virus distributors, phishing sites, etc. These are usually scumbags who make a lot of enemies and are already violating your AUP. The DOS brings your attention to their presence on your system, you throw them under a bus and the DOS follows them. Problem solved. Then there’s “high profile” and “hot button” customers who people try to DOS just for bragging rights or some sort of vendetta. These are harder to handle, as you don’t want to cut off somebody who has a legit right to co-exist on the net with everybody else. Sometimes, you have to pull the plug, even temporarily to give yourself time to think and figure out your next move. I mean this in a very generic way: datacenters do this, network carriers do this, web hosts do this: if it gets too intense for your upstream, whammo, you’re null routed until things cool down. This is just how it works out here.

Having said that, we did raise quite a stink about being incorrectly named as the DNS provider who unplugged wikileaks, so when faced with the prospect of having them really actually use us for DNS it clearly became a case of “put up or shut up“. So now we’re going to take this on. I feel like we’ve already “done the time”, so we may as well “do the crime”.

At this point we are not the Registrar on the wikileaks.org domain, but for the most part, the conditions we stipulated in our previous post on the subject are in place.

I feel somewhat swept up in events that have taken on a life of their own and brought us to this unavoidable, inevitable place, all because somebody made a typo somewhere along the line a few days ago. Talk about “Butterfly Effect” – please go easy on us.