Melbourne: Shutting down whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks is proving to be an impossible task, and a concerted, multinational effort to censor it has failed.
There are now more than 500 websites around the world, called 'mirrors', containing the secret US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks, News.com.au reported.
The whistleblower group says the mirrors 'will make it impossible to ever fully remove WikiLeaks from the Internet'.
The mirrors were created by members of the Internet community in response to a campaign in recent days to shut WikiLeaks down.
Amazon confirmed it had stopped hosting the site, after a plea from US Senator Joe Lieberman for organisations to cut ties with the group.
WikiLeaks just signed up with a new hosting company in France, and then the company that operated the website name wikileaks.org cut its ties as well – effectively taking the group off the web.
But a few hours later the group had registered a new website name, wikileaks.ch, in Switzerland.
The group began calling to its followers on Twitter to sign up and 'mirror' the website. By the next day there were hundreds of them, and right now, there’s 507, all listed on wikileaks.ch.
As well as the mirrors, the main site at wikileaks.ch is still active. It appears to be running off the server in Sweden, which has stayed online despite attacks.