Wikileaks, and some meta stuff

First the metastuff: I haven't been as active on this blog in recent months as I used to be. More recently, I've been wondering where to take this blog, including the question of whether to host it somewhere else. Haven't decided yet. Out of all my blogs, this is likely the only one that would be continued. Maintaining several blogs is simply not something I am interested in doing anymore. I'm also concerned about the content of this blog--I feel the need to go over all the old posts, review them for quality, and even for whether or not they still reflect my views on the various things I've posted about. I'm also intrigued by the possibility of actually making some money off of this blog. Out of my three original blogs, this one gets the lion's share of the hits, even when I neglect it for months. (Much of the traffic seems to come from Addison Rose fans...which is totally understandable. I've been known to do some searches on that little hottie myself, heheheheh.)

But enough of that for now, on to a real topic:

Wikileaks, which is a site I never even heard of until three hours ago, has had it's domain name revoked on order of an American judge. The revokation is apparently temporary, until the judge has a chance to review the case, sort of like putting a defendant in jail prior to trial. The funny part of this is that the actual server for the site is located outside of U.S. jurisdiction, so the site itself is still available (although server response was a bit slow when I tried it--most likley it's getting hit pretty hard today, since it is now famous, for the first time in its history).

What I also find interesting about this story is the site which hosts Wikileaks, PRQ. To quote an article I read earlier:

PRQ's home page offers clues that it's not just another hosting company. It paraphrases a quote from Mike Godwin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation: "I worry about my children all the time. I worry that 10 years from now, they will come to me and say, 'Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of speech away from the Internet?'"

As it turns out, PRQ is owned by two founders of the Pirate Bay, the BitTorrent tracker site that is Hollywood's least favorite online destination. The Pirate Bay guys have made a sport out of taunting all forms of authority, including the Swedish police, and PRQ has gone out of its way to host sites that other companies wouldn't touch. It is perhaps the world's least lawyer-friendly hosting company and thus a perfect home for Wikileaks, which says it is "developing an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking and public analysis."

In other words, it sounds like these PRQ people are my kind of people.

The irony here is that I only became aware of these sites, which are strongly dedicated to information transparancy and freedom of speech, through the lame efforts of some bank to shut someone up. Ooops. Thanks to this bank, awareness of the Wikileaks site and their freedom-minded hosting company has probably increased by many times. I know I'm happy with the result, even if I am irritated at the action of a certain Bush-appointed federal judge.

One other commentator noted that, with this action, the United States joins the likes of China and Thailand in its effort to censor Wikileaks. Yay. However, as I noted earlier, this appears to be a preliminary order while the judge reviews the case, rather than an outright closure.

I'll also be interested in hearing if any question is raised as to whether the domain name registrar can be held in any way responsible for the contents of the site whose domain registration they hold. The judge apparently thinks they can, at least to the extent of them being required to blank out the "wikileaks.org" domain. I'm not aware of whether anyone has ever ruled on that question, or whether any relevant laws exist.