Ironically, I'd never visited the site before it was "taken offline". You can bet that I've seen it now.

You may have seen in the news that Wikileaks, a site for whistleblowers to anonymously post confidential documents, has recently been shut down by denial-of-service attacks, a fire and a court injunction.

The idea of a site like this is certainly a little odd, and I'm amazed that it isn't already buried under thousands of joke articles from secondary schools - things like "Joe Bloggs is GAY!!!11 Evidence attached...". Strange or not, though, it's a great idea. Sometimes it is considerably more important for information to get out than be hidden, even if it may be personally inconvenient for some. The concept of providing an anonymous and worldwide utility for sharing this information is immensely powerful.

Given that the documents being leaked were frequently of a very sensitive nature (for example, one of them detailed loads of operating procedures at the US's very own gulag, Guantanamo Bay), it's not surprising that eventually something bad happened to it. I have to say, just getting DoS-ed would have been bad enough - to get hit with a fire and an injunction at the same time suggests that someone got very angry with them indeed. Anyway, the court ordered Dynadot, Wikileaks' ISP, to remove the DNS information related to the site. The URL wikileaks.org now points at a blank page. It's all over.

Well...actually, no it isn't. Either the lawyers who drew up the injunction have absolutely no idea how the internet works, or they knew they couldn't compel Dynadot to actually delete all the files, or they secretly didn't really want to get rid of them. Whatever the reason, only the DNS information - and nothing else - was deleted.

For those of you who don't know what DNS means, it's the system by which a URL is converted into an IP address. The servers around the world that host websites can only be identified by their IP, and DNS is nothing more than a way of making those IP addresses human-readable. This means that Wikileaks is still online, and still working away happily. All you need to know is the IP address of their server, and presto, you've just performed the world's easiest workaround. If that wasn't enough, the world's geeks now know what's going on, and the entire site is being downloaded en masse by thousands of people who will not let it vanish.

So, until the court realises what's going on, you've got a great window of opportunity to browse around all the documents that no-one wants you to see. Point your browser to http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Main_Page and spend a happy day digging.