That nasty judge. The registrar had no choice but to remove the entries it has for wikileaks.org so people couldn’t get to the site anymore after his ruling. Well, you can add your own entry, locally to any system so you can always get to wikileaks.org. How? Well you need to change a file called “hosts”

In Windows, the hosts file is found in your Windows directory. To be precise it’s Windows\System32\Drivers\Etc (assuming your windows installation is in windows. If it’s in WINNT or something, then just change the path accordingly.)

In Linux or Unix, this file is normally found in /etc (the etc directory in root.)

In Mac OSX you can find the file in either /private/etc or, like Unix, the /etc directory.

So you know where the file is, now what? Open it up in the text editor of your choice and edit the file. The easiest way to open it, as it doesn’t have an extension (like .txt) is to open the the text editor first - notepad, vi or whatever - then navigate to your folder of choice and open it. Now, I think a quick networking 101 is required:

A domain name, such as google.com, is just a name pointing to an IP address. The domain names are just there for our benefit, not the internet’s, the server’s or the router’s. Just for us - after all It’s much easier to remember a catchy name like skymonkey.org, than it is to remember a string of numbers. So that’s where name servers & DNS step in. A name server holds a big list of domain names matched against IP addresses. So when you type in google.com in your browser, the first thing it does is get in contact with a nameserver and try to make sense of it - to convert it to something the browser, rather than you, understands. The nameserver will either return the IP address associated with google.com, or direct the browser to the next place that it thinks will know. And so on, until the browser has an IP address to connect to. The connection happens and you view google.com, or skymonkey.org in all it’s glory. So how does this hosts file fit in with the scheme of things then?

The hosts file you see before you (hopefully), is the first thing your computer looks at when trying to resolve domain names. Before it will go to a nameserver it will check it’s own hosts file for any entries there. If it finds a positive match for a domain name you’re looking for then bingo, it will serve that IP address up first. Now if you know that a certain registrar in America has removed the entries for a certain domain name, you can use your new-found knowledge to add you own entries for - er-hum, shall we say “wikileaks.org”

So the data to add? Probably the simplest part. Go to the bottom of the file and create a new line (just hit return or whatever.) Then type in the following IP address: 88.80.13.160 hit the tab key, or hit the space bar (to create a gap) and then type www.wikileaks.org

And that is it! All done. Save the file - open up your browser of choice and type wikileaks.org into the address bar. Now sit back and enjoy the smug grin on your face as you realise the system hasn’t stopped you or others from exercising your freedom of speech.