On Wednesday, we ran the results of a WHIR reader poll on WikiLeaks
Every Friday, WHIR editor in chief Liam Eagle assembles some notes on stories from the web hosting industry this week that you might have missed or that might, for one reason or another, be worth revisiting.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — While the attention has faded a little bit in the mainstream press, the big story in the technology news world remains the ongoing saga of WikiLeaks, as the politically-motivated attack activity continues, and the details of the legal battle of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange continue to emerge.
Early in the week, we reported that the website of MasterCard was taken down briefly over the weekend in one of the retaliatory actions taken by WikiLeaks supporters, a wave that also hit the website of a Swedish prosecutor associated with the Assange case later in the week.
I’ll post a link here to all our WikiLeaks coverage, rather than describe it all to you, but I would like to point out a couple of particularly interesting posts from this week.
On Wednesday, we ran the results of a reader poll we conducted on the subject. We asked readers (who tend to represent hosting providers, and providers of related services) a few simple questions about their willingness to provide services to WikiLeaks, or a similarly controversial website, their willingness to cut off such a customer if they discovered one on their network, and their opinions on the biggest dangers presented to service providers by that sort of customer.
Elaborating on one of the points of view that seemed to be showcased by the results of the poll, WHIR blogger Stacy Griggs (who works at hosting provider MaximumASP) came out strongly against the idea of hosting a customer like WikiLeaks, writing, “if ever there was a valid excuse to invoke a Terms of Service (TOS) Violation it’s a customer like WikiLeaks.”
Finally, there were two announcements around the launch of new WikiLeaks-like whistleblower websites. First, a former WikiLeaks staffer announced the launch of OpenLeaks, and then an Australian entrepreneur announced the launch of TradeLeaks, a whistleblower site aimed specifically at retailers.
Like last week, however, there was more going on than just WikiLeaks.
Earlier in the week, Stacy had another interesting blog post about the rumors from Monday that Dell might be planning to acquire Rackspace. While by the time of his post the rumors had already proven untrue, he focused on the reasons the rumors acquired so much steam, and what such an acquisition might have meant for Dell.
Ultimately, Dell bought Compellent, a storage solutions company that fit with its cloud computing plans.
And Rackspace, it turned out, was about to make an acquisition of its own, announcing on Thursday that it had acquired cloud management and monitoring company CloudKick.
Earlier in the week, Rackspace launched a new service level within its cloud computing offerings, introducing managed cloud servers.
Also this week, we posted the video archive of last week’s “hybrid DNS” webinar with Nominum. It was an interesting look at how hosts can add off-network functions to their existing DNS infrastructure without going over completely to a hosted solution. If you missed the live webinar, it’s definitely worth checking out.
Just today, we posted a Q&A with Martin Hayward, marketing director at Mirror Image, who discussed some of the ideology and functionality of the company’s recently-launched Edge Computing Framework. It’s good stuff too.
I think we’ll leave this one at that. Of course, you can feel free to keep reading. Hopefully you’re finding these Weekend Reading pieces useful. And as always, if you’ve got any thoughts to add on how they might be handled, please do leave a comment.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
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