Hosting of Wikileaks is being passed around like hot cakes.In a week when Wikileaks has been the main topic of conversation in the media, it emerged that cloud computing, the latest craze in the storage world, played a vital part in keeping the website alive, well for a time at least.
After being ceremoniously dumped by several ISPs who took on the task of hosting the site, Amazon dutifully took up the task, confident its powerful systems would take more than a few hackers to take it down.
Amazon’s high capacity EC2 or Elastic Cloud Compute system, allowed it to rent out the computing cloud which it uses to run its online store. It was thought the service was unbreakable given the high percentage of visitors to its site; Google revealed it was among the top 10 searches for 2010.
Unfortunately, it didn’t need a bunch of nerdy hackers to bring it down, US Senator Joe Lieberman did it instead.
The decision by Amazon followed hot on the heels of capitulations from the likes of PayPal and Mastercard, who refused to process donations to the online hacking site, as well as EveryDNS, providers of the domain name wikileaks.org.
“I will be asking Amazon about the extent of its relationship with WikiLeaks and what it and other web service providers will do in the future to ensure that their services are not used to distribute stolen, classified information,” warned Senator Lieberman.
Amazon attributed the cut off of cloud services to Julian Assanges’ brainchild to its failure to abide by the terms of its contact with the internet giant.
“It’s clear that WikiLeaks doesn’t own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content. Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren’t putting innocent people in jeopardy,” Amazon said in a statement.
The information leaking website replied with a Twitter comments stating, if “Amazon are so uncomfortable with the first amendment, they should get out of the business of selling books.”
WikiLeaks is now said to be hosted by servers in Europe.
