We have all seen examples of where a company may feed off a customer mistaken identity. While there are sufficient examples of intentional and deceptive business practices perpetrated upon an unsuspecting public, more often than not it could be cited that its the cost of doing business in a increasingly global society.

Tech companies are no exception. A quick perusal of the host list will show Jumphost, JumpLaunch, and Jumpline. You have Canadian Web Hosting and Canada Web Hosting. We have posted numerous stories about court actions over brand confusion eg iron mountain or that perplexing one with amazon (cute)

"Hey Joe! Where do you have your DNS stuff handled?" "I dunno, Jim, EasyDNS, EveryDNS, something like that!"

Journalists from some major media outlets including the NY Times, the Financial Times, Gawker, and GigaOm have been repeatedly using the EasyDNS name in their stories about Wikileaks.

EasyDNS has spent the past few days alerting people via Twitter, the EasyDNS official blog, and in comments posted on the offending sites, that they were falsely accused, had nothing to do with Wikileaks, and did not, in fact, take the site down.

It now appears that EasyDNS is taking another approach. The company blog now states:

Ok, so would we take on Wikileaks DNS at this point?

So after the big clusterf*** with easyDNS being falsely blamed for taking down wikileaks, somebody posts the inevitable question "Would easyDNS take wikileaks DNS"? and from there makes what I think is a dubious extension: by NOT taking them we're doing the same thing as "taking them down".

What I find dubious about all this is it seems that we are being taken to task for this and held under a more rigorous scrutiny around this incident, than the company that actually did take them down.

Having said that, earlier today when after seeing YET ANOTHER BAD TWEET that wikileaks had setup wikileaks.ch on easyDNS, I called my systems group and told them I wanted the following conditions in place, so consider this:

An Open Letter to Wikileaks Regarding DNS Hosting

If they were to put their DNS here, then this is what we'd want to have in place:

1) An open channel of communication where we could communicate with their IT people 24/7, especially going into a weekend.

2) We'd prefer to be the domain registrar for the domain so we could have control over the nameserver delegations and would be able to move them around on-on-the-fly, as per the tactics I outlined in my previous posts about DOS attacks and DNS. Keeping in mind we are a non-US based registrar, we would adhere to Canadian law with respect to takedown requests, not DMCA or other US laws.

3) We'd want the domain to be one within a TLD that supports realtime updates, for the same reason.

4) We would want to initially limit their delegation to our nameservers deployed out on Prolexic, which is basically the most DOS-resistant stuff we have, possibly complimented with some ad-hoc standalone nodes.

That's basically how we would want to play it. Again, this is all hypothetical.

[ Note to Wikileaks: if you're reading this and want to add a domain after hours this weekend, email me direct markjr [at] you know what (and it's not everydns.net)" ]