Jul 9, 2011
Visualizing WikiLeaks Mirrors
After WikiLeaks released the diplomatic cables on 28. November 2010, several DNS services refused to resolve the domains. In the days and weeks after this incident about 2.200 mirror sites were set up by volunteers. This event shows how the decentralized structure of the internet was used to prevent censorship and depression.
The video shows a visualization of the wikileaks mirrors.
Finding all domains for the mirrors was not a problem, there are several sites listing adresses on a simple HTML page. This list can easily be parsed (for that task I used node.js). For resolving these domains to a WGS84 coordinate I used the same free GeoIP database as in the traceroute project. For more details on resolving domains to coordinates and mapping them on a globe see my last blog post (visualizing traceroute).
It is pretty interesting that the servers in fact are distributed over the whole world. Most of them are located — not really surprisingly — in Central Europe. But there are also some mirrors in China. Of course these results give no 100% exact location, but I think a tendency is clearly visible.
I’ve put together a little video of the global mirror distribution:
