How do you guarantee a sea full of online wrath if you're a simple domain name services provider? Easy—share a name that's but a few letters off from the DNS company that dropped WikiLeaks as a client.
Whoops.
As reported earlier, WikiLeaks—Jillian Assange's brainchild that's responsible for (and hosting) the release of some 250,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables—was booted off the Internet late Thursday night as a result of its DNS provider terminating service. But that's not a judgment on the site's content, according to a statement by EveryDNS, which provided WikiLeaks free domain name services, or the process that connects a typed-in domain name to the actual IP address, or server, hosting the page.
"More specifically, the services were terminated for violation of the provision which states that 'Member shall not interfere with another Member's use and enjoyment of the Service or another entity's use and enjoyment of similar services,'" reads the statement, which was issued in response to a flurry of distributed denial of service attacks targeting WikiLeaks' primary site.
It seems that few got the message at first.
The problems for competing DNS service EasyDNS arose when a number of news entities, including Gawker and the Financial Times, ran with the news that said company was terminating WikiLeaks' service—again, that's EasyDNS, not EveryDNS. It seems like a simple mistake on paper, but the misprint led to a wide public response against EasyDNS and CEO Mark Jeftovic.
"By the time I woke up this morning I was inundated with emails and comments," wrote Jeftovic in a blog post Friday.
"The incorrect info rippled through Twitter like a zombie horde. Not only did people mindlessly hit the 'retweet' button and perpetuate bad information: some took the time and care to email us, or search for our blog (why couldn't they do a whois lookup while they were at it?) and post comments about our cowardice," he added.
Jeftovic's been taking the time to address Twitter comments, blog comments, e-mails, and news articles that have incorrectly cited his company as the alleged "WikiLeaks hater." However, that's not to say that he has nothing in common with his similarly named peer. Jeftovic seems to support EveryDNS' actions in removing WikiLeaks from its client list, saying that decisions made during an aggressive denial-of-service attack are not intended to be political statements or criticisms of site content; they're made to ensure the uptime of the DNS service.
For Jeftovic, however, waxing poetic about DNS accountability will have to wait—he's still trying to put out the flames from the "direct hit to our reputation," as he describes it. And even though he had nothing to do with the original WikiLeaks issue, and EasyDNS won't have to suffer any denial-of-service attacks himself, the miscue has (predictably) gotten the Internet up in arms: This time around, it's an angry group of users over at the news aggregate Reddit versus Gawker itself.
"Thanks for defending us, everybody. I mean that," writes Jeftovic. "And now I wish everybody would just cut it out, just drop it."