6 ms·
Amazon no longer hosts wikileaks
- ilconsigliere 16y agoIt's being reported that the US gov (read: Joe Lieberman) pressured Amazon to stop hosting the site. Here is a more thorough update on this situation: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-website-cables-servers-amazon http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-websit...
- vaksel 16y agogovernment censorship of dissenters...China would be proud. this is actually pretty stupid on their part, it's the equivalent of locking the barn after the animals escaped.
- tptacek 16y agoJoe Lieberman can call for whatever he wants. It's his right under the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. A Senator calling for a web host to take down a site no more constitutes "government censorship" than a Senator calling for pickles not to be put on hamburgers constitutes "food and drug regulation". Down with Wikileaks! Down with pickles! The Constitution simply does not give individual Senators the power to censor websites, or, for that matter, all Senators en masse the power to circumvent the Constitution without having that action overturned by SCOTUS. China would be embarrassed --- perhaps murderously --- if its censorship apparatus was this much of a Rube Goldberg contraption.
- michaelchisari 16y agoAll thing being equal, sure, but I think it's obvious that Joe Lieberman calling for a site to be taken down is considerably different than you or I saying the same thing. Being a member of the most powerful people in the most powerful country in the world always affords you powers not directly enumerated in the constitution.
- bluesnowmonkey 16y agoAs a simple counter-example, imagine if a sitting US Senator advised the public not to do business with black people. It can be hard to distinguish the personal opinions of a government official from the edicts of his office.
- tptacek 16y agoI don't see the parallel; calling for people not to do business with black people is absolutely indefensible; Lieberman would have a civil right to do so, but might also be impeached as a result.
- ceejayoz 16y agoYou're assuming, of course, that there weren't veiled (or otherwise) threats of legislation or investigations that would make Amazon.com suffer commercially.
- tptacek 16y agoYes, that is what I am assuming.
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y agoChoose your news source: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959697 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959697 - techdirt.com http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959655 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959655 - cnn.com http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959633 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959633 - arstechnica.com http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959607 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959607 - bgr.com http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959335 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959335 - npr.org http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959328 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959328 - guardian.co.uk http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959308 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959308 - readwriteweb.com http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959305 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959305 - reuters.com http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959257 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959257 - techcrunch.com http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959142 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959142 - foxnews.com
- darrenkopp 16y agoWhile unfortunate, I don't necessarily fault Amazon here. Amazon is a shopping website first, cloud computing platform second. I do find Joe Lieberman calling for a boycott of an American company reprehensible though.
- phillian 16y agoAgreed 100%. Seems like Lieberman chose some low-hanging anti-anything-anit-America fruit to bolster his relevancy. It's pretty transparent.
- kylec 16y agoI find Joe Lieberman reprehensible
- steveklabnik 16y agoNot for long. They've said the cloud should start making more money than the shopping shortly...
- chopsueyar 16y agoI imagine the margins are better and material handling costs much less.
- felixmar 16y agoBut it does show the Achilles heel of cloud computing. Is it wise to depend on 3 American companies that have other interests to protect? The potential cloud computing oligopoly could be bad for freedom and openness on the net.
- benatkin 16y agoThe vagueness of the term "cloud" could help the cloud oligopolists. There could be hundreds of so-called clouds, with all but a few of them being brokers for the real cloud service providers. Then it would take a couple sentences to point out the situation. Not good. :(
- cagenut 16y agoso is amazon going to even attempt to frame this as a terms-of-service violation? not a peep so far.
- celoyd 16y agoLike most hosting TOSes, theirs is written so they can boot you if they find you inconvenient, without a specific violation on your part. They say they can terminate service when (among other possibly applicable points): we determine, in our sole discretion, that our provision of any of the Services to you is prohibited by applicable law, or has become impractical or unfeasible for any legal or regulatory reason — http://aws.amazon.com/agreement/ http://aws.amazon.com/agreement/ 3.4.1 (viii) They would have a fair point that, even if it isn’t illegal, dealing with an investigation and bad publicity isn’t worth their time. For what it’s worth, I certainly wish they stood up at least until they were under specific legal threat. But they never advertised themselves as a data haven.
- fleitz 16y agoI have a feeling that 'Amazon's privacy policy forbids discussing reasons why customers were terminated with 3rd parties'
- drawkbox 16y agoThis was a bad move on Amazon's part. We expect Joe Lieberman to be a horror. But doesn't this put fear into cloud service users that their stuff can be yanked at any time? Kinda of a Godaddy/nodaddy type situation? (I use both Amazon (EC2) and Godaddy (domains) products) Granted this was a pretty big case but I think situations like this either affirm or enhance trust in a third party platform/provider. If Amazon had relented and kept hosting, it would have spoke volumes on customer dedication. Of course they probably didn't like the DDoS attacks constantly. It wasn't wikileaks that did the actions or stole the information. They just posted it. In this day and age of tepid media for profit and intertwined news organizations with gov't/business, real news like wikileaks is needed. This is an attack on the messenger.
- nodata 16y agoPeople who care can vote with their cash. I doubt many will.
- potatolicious 16y agoNote: I generally agree with the leaking of relevant government data to expose abuses. > "But doesn't this put fear into cloud service users that their stuff can be yanked at any time?" Not really. Illegal content already puts you at risk of getting yanked at any time. If you were hosting pirated material or anything else that is illegal in the jurisdiction of the host, it can be yanked. This is not a judgment on whether or not said content ought to be illegal, but rather a simple statement that nothing has changed. That being said, I am uncomfortable with this sort of thing having no set procedure, and being instigated/pressured upon by government officials. We have a clear process for DMCA takedowns, and likewise a request to remove illegal information needs to come from law enforcement within their jurisdiction, and not from self-interested politicians.
- michaelchisari 16y agoDo we have a clear declaration that this content is illegal? I wasn't aware we did.
- danhak 16y agoThis is truly fascinating. I wonder to what extent things would have played out differently were there not the looming threat of a boycott during the holiday shopping season.
- dtf 16y agoAnd to think I wrote this less than 14 hours ago, trying to sound all ominous and dramatic: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1957467 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1957467 :-)
- tybris 16y agoEveryone appears to be assuming it's for political reasons. Quite possible, but it doesn't seem like there was any serious pressure so far and there could be lots of other reasons. ("Hey, our shared infrastructure is being DoS-ed because of you")
- marcamillion 16y agoThis scenario is where my previously discussed startup idea would do really well - if someone could pull it off - http://marcgayle.com/2010/01/08/a-legal-botnet-billion-dollar-startup-idea http://marcgayle.com/2010/01/08/a-legal-botnet-billion-dolla... A completely distributed web host, hosted on people's machines. A lot more difficult to shut down (although, I guess if enough government pressure was put on some local chokepoint, it could be a problem). But if it was designed in such a way, as to mitigate these issues - it could be very powerful....imho that is :)
- QE2 16y agoFreenet is basically what you describe, and it's free.
- marcamillion 16y agoThat's very interesting. Thanks for that link. Will look into it. I was more thinking of a commercial product/platform that could be used for a variety of reasons. So what is the only anti-dote to a DDOS right now? A bigger pipe...no? Well imagine having a service that you can 'spin up' any number of nodes/machines to intercept all those packets. I am not sure how the economics would work, but in order for it to be a good service with good support it would have to be commercial - not an open source project. The only issue with that is that if there is one company, it makes it easier for major governments to try and get their hands on it. So for WikiLeaks case, it might not be completely helpful, but imagine the many other cases where popular/large sites are hit by constant DDOSs. I think there could be significant use there. Especially as high-speed & fibre connections become more prevalent and latency (around the world) comes down even further than it has over the years. Just my $0.02.
- SageRaven 16y agoIs there an official way to mirror wikileaks data, just to help in the event the public internet presence (they're also available on .onion, iirc) is somehow taken down? I have the cryptic "insurance.aes256" file from earlier this year, but is there any way normal users can help back up readble parts of wikileaks?
- AndyKelley 16y agohttp://213.251.145.96/mass-mirror.html http://213.251.145.96/mass-mirror.html That IP address is just wikileaks - the DNS is down for me currently is all.
- rwhitman 16y agoI think the only way wikileaks can stay alive over the long term is probably through torrents, the combo punch of govn't takedowns and constant DDoS attacks probably doesn't make hosting a website feasible. It would make more sense to release it in digest as a torrent, right?
- ck2 16y agoHomeland Security Theater - keeping you "safe" by covering your eyes.
- siglesias 16y agoI feel sorry for Amazon lately, thrust into Catch 22s left and right. I'm guessing that in addition to political concerns hosting Wikileaks would put a huge target on their backs from cyber attackers. That's probably the additional justification they needed to make this call.
- c2 16y agoThe lack of an official response from Amazon is telling. I wonder if DHS just gave Amazon an ultimatum along the lines of host wikileaks and we'll raid your servers. (Also the DHS/Amazon communication, if there was any, is probably classified so Amazon can't even mention it). Our government has come a long way since 2000.