Computerworld wants you to know WikiLeaks is nearly immune to takedown
The Swiss site (wikileaks.ch) itself has been heavily reinforced to avoid a repeat of what happened with EveryDNS, [chief technology officer at Renesys] Cowie said. To mitigate the possibility of one DNS provider once again shutting off the domain as EveryDNS did, WikiLeaks this time has signed up with separate DNS service providers in eight different countries, including Switzerland, Canada and Malaysia.
A total of 14 different name servers across 11 different networks today provide authoritative name services for the wikileaks.ch domain, Cowie noted. “If you ask any of those 14 servers where to find wikileaks.ch, they’ll point you to one of three differently routed IP blocks,” in the Netherlands, Sweden and France, he added.
The architecture sounds resilient — more resilient than before. I do not know what nearly immune means. That’s a fun phrase, though. Would a doctor tell a patient “you are now more immune than before”? I guess I did not realize there were levels of immunity, so nearly immune meant to me that something is not yet immune.
Seeing as how there is no absolute certainty that a DNS provider will not discontinue Wikileaks’s routing, “nearly immune” seems quite apt to me. One would hope that a distribution of 11 providers would do a bloody good job, though.