Here's the URL: http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks

Here's a NYT blog item on the controversy. An excerpt:

The records for the site’s I.P. address indicate that it is hosted by PRQ, based in Stockholm. PRQ’s home page offers clues that it’s not just another hosting company. It paraphrases a quote from Mike Godwin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation: “I worry about my children all the time. I worry that 10 years from now, they will come to me and say, ‘Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of speech away from the Internet?’”

As it turns out, PRQ is owned by two founders of the Pirate Bay, the BitTorrent tracker site that is Hollywood’s least favorite online destination. The Pirate Bay guys have made a sport out of taunting all forms of authority, including the Swedish police, and PRQ has gone out of its way to host sites that other companies wouldn’t touch. It is perhaps the world’s least lawyer-friendly hosting company and thus a perfect home for Wikileaks, which says it is “developing an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking and public analysis.”

You have heard, no doubt, of this morning's massive fire on Queen Street West between Bathurst and Portland on the south side (there's video galore attached to this CTV.ca story).

30 people lost their homes and seven businesses have been wiped out.

While I'm sorry for everyone's loss, my personal connections was with Suspect Video.

The loss of Suspect means this city's greatest treasure trove of Takashi Miike movies and other Japanese and Korean fare is now a glop of melted plastic on a charred floor.

Suspect was defiant and uncompromising about its misfit fare. I liked being in there because it was so anti-Blockbuster. A cathedral of the unfettered human imagination, if you will.

Suspect would have gone broke in suburbia. There just aren't enought people out there who appreciate the ouvre of auteurs like Park Chan-Yook or Max Baer.

And now, with its destruction, west downtown Toronto has become incrementally more suburban (just wait until Home Depot builds a big box store just east of the fire site).

Here's hoping Suspect and the other businesses rebuild quickly and help keep downtown T.O. urban.