[Chapter-delegates] The Internet Society on the Wikileaks issue

[Veni Markovski]

This is what I was concerned about:
http://mobile.nytimes.com/article?a=713680&f=92

And that's why Isoc and Pir could have sent a clearer message. Which,
among other things like putting the record straight, would have give
the two organizations a good exposure. Because, no matter how we
self-name Isoc and Pir, majority of the people don't know even the
names of these organizations :)



 If the link above doesn't work, here's the article below:

EasyDNS Helps WikiLeaks, After Being Accused of Dropping It

By IAN AUSTEN
Published: December 13, 2010

OTTAWA - It is not clear if the mistake first appeared on a blog or
flitted around in a Twitter message. But whatever its source, it swept
Mark Jeftovic and his company, EasyDNS, into both sides of the storm
over corporate support, or the lack thereof, for WikiLeaks.

When Mr. Jeftovic took a look at his e-mail on the morning of Dec. 3,
he was surprised to find a critical comment from a customer over his
company's decision to no longer provide domain name hosting for
WikiLeaks. While EasyDNS has about 55,000 customers, Mr. Jeftovic knew
that the company, which is based in Toronto, did not count WikiLeaks
among them.

A quick Google search made the comment less puzzling. Several blogs
and Web sites had posted variations of this sentence: "EasyDNS.net has
cut off DNS service to WikiLeaks." (DNS refers to the Domain Name
System, which is something like a switchboard for the Internet.)

WikiLeaks had indeed lost the support of the company that was
providing the connection between the domain name wikileaks.org and the
WikiLeaks Web servers. But that company was EveryDNS, a free provider
based in the United States.

For the next several days and nights, Mr. Jeftovic and his staff found
themselves engaged in variation of the game Whac-A-Mole. As they
contacted bloggers to correct their mistakes, new online posts from
several large news organizations - including The New York Times, The
Financial Times and The Guardian - with the wrong name popped up. The
news reports, in turn, set off another round of blogging.

"Twitter was the pulse of the whole thing," Mr. Jeftovic said. He
found that the messages there accelerated the spread of each incorrect
report, overwhelming, at times, his efforts at damage control. He
added: "I was really dreading getting up in the morning."

Unlike with other suppliers who were believed, correctly or otherwise,
to have abandoned WikiLeaks, its proponents made no efforts to shut
down EasyDNS by overwhelming its servers. The damage was limited to
vitriolic comments and calls for its customers to go elsewhere.

The controversy took a new turn after Mr. Jeftovic took his next step.
A person from outside of Canada, whom Mr. Jeftovic declined to
identify, approached him on behalf of a WikiLeaks consortium to help
manage the names wikileaks.org, wikileaks.ch and wikileaks.nl.

Mr. Jeftovic decided it would be hypocritical to make so much noise
about having not abandoned WikiLeaks and then not help the
organization when asked to do so. It was time, he wrote on the company
blog, to "put up or shut up."

In an e-mail, Mr. Jeftovic said it was disturbing that companies were
feeling pressure "to pull the plug, close accounts and otherwise deny
service to what is, in the absence of formal legal charges against
them, a perfectly legal entity performing legal activities."

Mr. Jeftovic has agreed to host all three of the names (though the
dot-org name is in an administrative limbo at the moment) on special
servers isolated from the rest of the company's servers. This has
sparked a second round of e-mails.

Most of the 300 or so e-mails he is now receiving each day are
supportive. But he has new critics, Mr. Jeftovic said, who are "very
upset"; an undetermined number of customers have dropped his service
as a result of its support for WikiLeaks.

"There's a minority who are saying 'You're a traitor to the U.S.' -
which is strange since I'm in Canada - 'You've got blood on your
hands, we're gone,' " Mr. Jeftovic said.

Mr. Jeftovic said he did not expect a significant loss of business, as
he anticipates some gains from the publicity. But mainly he wants the
controversy stirred up by the incorrect reports to just come to an
end.

"When I think about all the different circumstances that had to line
up to make this happen, it boggles my mind," he said.

On 12/13/10, Christian de Larrinaga <cdel at firsthand.net> wrote:
> indeed you are. :-)
> http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-arkko-ipv6-transition-guidelines-10.txt
>
> On 11 Dec 2010, at 20:28, Fred Baker wrote:
>
>>
>> On Dec 11, 2010, at 6:55 AM, Christian de Larrinaga wrote:
>>
>>> Deciding to ignore them is not so much a failure of philosophy as  a
>>> philosophy of failure. But it is wearisome to see the same old mistakes
>>> being made by people with the same old haircuts coming out of the
>>> woodwork in the same old way and then disappearing into the same old
>>> ratholes to be replaced by clones without a sense of their same old
>>> history.
>>
>> I'm not suggesting ignoring them. I personally am engaged with some of
>> them. But as you say, they are not speedy learners.
>
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