It would be nice if they said how much money they need and what their expenses are.

I also wonder if they could work with a recognized non-profit in order to make gifts tax-deductible (e.g. give them money to EFF, then EFF funds wikileaks).

They're applying for $532k here:

http://tinyurl.com/wikileaksknightapp

They do work with a non-profit (Wau Holland foundation).

That something is a non-profit doesn't mean someone doesn't take it home.

If you're asking for this kind of contribution then you need to be 100% transparent.

It's 12/31... if it's possible to make US tax-deductible donations, they should probably get that information out RFN.

I'm a big fan of Wikilekas, but I see several things wrong with this approach.

First, it's the way they ask for donations. They close the website and it's almost like "If you want Wikileaks, you have to pay". I don't think this helps their cause in any way. I remember seeing a banner while the website was still live, but that didn't last long.

Also, I don't think they reached a point where then can't hold the website online. It's not like it's new.

Like someone else said, they don't tell what their expenses are, nor how much money they need.

On the technical side, I don't see the need for having MediaWiki running. It's not the most lightweight application, and since most of the publications are done by the team behind the project, maybe having an approach like http://cryptome.org/ would make it less CPU hungry and would not depend on so many resources.

Since someone mentioned the mirror on Freenet, here is the mirror on the Onion land: http://gaddbiwdftapglkq.onion/

Thank you. I did not know about that mirror.

Your welcome. I felt the same pain seeing wikileaks.org in the state of "shut down" until Jan 6th. Credits for [Edit: sharing] the link go to the main IRC channel at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, #26c3 at freenode.org

Here's a simple way to contribute - rate and comment on their Knight Foundation application:

http://tinyurl.com/wikileaksknightapp

Full URL: http://generalapp.newschallenge.org/SNC/ViewItem.aspx?pguid=...

anyone know what kind of development work do they need ?

It would be helpful to know what are they looking for - and whether we can contribute, with our specific skillset

If you want to know more about the future of wikileaks, check out this talk from 26C3: http://mirror.fem-net.de/CCC/26C3/mp4-ipod/26c3-3567-de-wiki...

There's a Freenet mirror of Wikileaks. That might help with the technical difficulties.

They should get their own ASN and IP ranges. Then they could start peering and heavily multihoming which would make the site more stable and save them money.

Also varnish cache would help.

It is too bad that they have to shut down access to the entire site to stay alive. I wonder if that will hurt their search engine rankings.

I think its a shame they shut it down as well. I can't say about the search engine ranking, but I doubt it would hurt them too badly if it did.

I image most of their readers reach wikileaks are direct from blogs, news articles, etc.

I if remember correctly they mentioned during the 26c3 talk that they get 40% of their traffic from search engines.

Perhaps they could switch YAWS from Apache? Also maybe a similar wiki-software, like Zotonic.

Well, I sent them email asking what they need for power/bandwidth/rackspace, to add a node usefully.

I doubt I'm the only person on HN who has large amounts of computing resources to spare. I suppose we'll see what's required to help.

I shot them an email about what they needed programming-wise. No response so far. Not terribly productive in getting help.