Back in 2010 I did a quick and dirty review of where Irish political parties were hosting their websites.
Back then I was curious since so many of them were talking about “the knowledge economy”, yet so few of them actually hosted their own websites in this country.
Six years later things have changed. But what has also changed is the privacy regime. While back in 2010 people and companies could rely on Safe Harbor when the shipped data back and forth between Ireland and the US, in 2016 that’s no longer possible.
https://twitter.com/daraghobrien/status/694468333572341760
Daragh O’Brien’s tweet got me thinking, so I thought it was time I update my previous review.
A couple of notes:
- the list of political parties is based on the one here
- it only looks at the political parties, not independents
- it only looks at the parties’ main website
So here’s what I found today (parties in no particular order). Compared to 2010 things are a lot more Irish now (yay!) with most of the parties hosting all or part of their content in Ireland. Those parties using CloudFlare make it very hard to work out where their sites are hosted, so I’ve also checked email in those instances to give some kind of indication as to where their sites “live”.
- Fine Gael – finegael.ie – Ireland
- Fianna Fáil – fiannafail.ie – Ireland
- Labour – labour.ie – unclear – using CloudFlare – mail appears to be “in-house”
- Sinn Féin – sinnfein.ie – unclear – using CloudFlare – mail with Google
- Anti-Austerity Alliance / People Before Profit – antiausterityalliance.ie– US
- Renua Ireland – renuaireland.com – UK
- Social Democrats – socialdemocrats.ie – using Cloudflare – mail with Google
- Workers and Unemployed Action – don’t appear to have their own domain name – appear to be using a wordpress.com site so hosted in the US
- Identity Ireland – identityireland.org – US
The domain usage is quite interesting.
Of the 9 parties I checked 6 of them are using a .ie domain name as their primary web address. 1 party doesn’t appear to have its own domain name at all, which is kind of odd in 2016. 1 party is using a .com and 1 party is using a .org.
Both Renua and Identity Ireland have .ie domain names, but they point at their .com or .org web address.
None of the above will give any indication of which services the parties are using during the election this year, and I haven’t looked at individual candidates or independents.
Okay while the accuracy of Whois information is questionable, I’ve done a little more digging (Tech Pun Intended!)
Labour.ie
$whois labour.ie
… snip
person: ANU Internet Services Ltd.
nic-hdl: AH12-IEDR
source: IEDR
ANU Internet Services appear to be a UK registered company but operating within the Irish market.
Following the logic that the in general (Unless you know all about DNS and stuff) most Irish organisations use the same tech-c as their hosting provider a quick look at Netcraft shows the WWW host history for the zone (For the reader whom does not know, basically its a record of what the server was running and its IP address, as it changes over time you can see where it went)
http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.labour.ie
So we can almost say with certainty the following;
There is a high likelihood that Labour.ie are hosted on ANU, whom state their “datacenters” are in Amsterdam or the US. The last know IP which was Jan 2015 appears to be assigned to Digiweb, whom prob provide space to Anu whom in return rent it to Labour.
SinnFein
Registered to a member of their media department. Interesting that their WHOIS record states they are “Statutory Body” whereas Labour are an “Unincorporated Association”
This took me a while, as server history with netcraft did not go far back (It used to).
So I got to looking at the source code for hints of common things. turns out I could have just read their site! Down at the bottom a nice “Website powered by Phoenix Media Group” appeared with a nice link.
Turns out that Phoenix Media Group also have a staff member with the same name as the Tech contact for the sinnfein.ie zone. Some social media searching would lead to a positive indicator that the photo of the staff member is that of the same member of their media department.
Turns out Phoneix Media Group are using Pair networks (US). Well impressed to see FreeBSD being used for their site.
Again, nothing conclusive here, but you could form an impression of where hosting may take place.
Social Democrats
Well new party, not much in terms of history. Source code time! Ohh look, a link to donate which then redirects to a nationbuilder.com page.
Their site be wordpress, however Nation Builder provide a platform for managing members etc. So it may be safe to say that at the very least your donation is being processed via the US (Or CostaRica as server history for http://socialdemoc.nationbuilder.com/ shows its CloudFlare Latin America)
Okay so now I am bored and woken up time to do real work.
Hi Michele,
Just to clarify, labour.ie – and all Labour related sites – are hosted in an Irish based datacentre on boxes managed for us by ANU. A reminder that ANU used to be based in Westport and we have been dealing with them since 1997.
We use Cloudflare to deal with on-going DDOS attacks.
Take care
– Tom Duke, Digital Revolutionaries
Tom
Thanks for clarifying.
I suspected as much, but with Cloudflare in the mix it’s impossible to know for sure 🙂
Thanks for your comment
Michele