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Wikileaks Needs Help, and Not Just Money
st1d writes to tell us that Wikileaks has put out a call for help. However, instead of just asking for money, they have also suggested technical and legal avenues for support. In the site's short life, Wikileaks has been at the center of many breaking scandals and investigations. "Wikileaks is currently overloaded by readers. This is a regular difficulty that can only be resolved by deploying additional resources. If you support our mission, you can help us by integrating new hardware into our project infrastructure or developing software for the project. Become patron of a WikiLeaks server or other parts of our technology, adding more pillars to the stability and balance of the WikiLeaks platform. Servers come trouble-free and legally fortified, software is uniquely challenging. If you can provide rackspace, power and an uplink, or a dedicated server or storage space, for at least 12 months, or software development work for WikiLeaks, please write to wl-supporters@sunshinepress.org."
For once, the article submitter isn't lying!
Freenet has been slow and hard to use in the past, but its improved quite a bit. It is the obvious platform for something like Wikileaks. Of course, there is nothing to prevent people from mirroring content on the web (since installing Freenet, like any piece of software, is a hassle). But at least there will be an unimpeachable backup of all data on Freenet.
Some things have no business being leaked or their leaking can lead to unintended consequences.
Perhaps. On the other hand, stuff that should get leaked but doesn't can also have negative consequences. It cuts both ways, my friend, and the problem is that government, for one, too often uses the mantra of "national security" to hide its nastier activities. The private sector is rarely any better, mainly because in both cases they know the odds are they'll get away with it. Me, I think it's better to err on the side of caution, and let a little fresh air in now and then. If those whose deeds need covering-up know that a very public exposure is just a mouse-click away ... maybe they'll be less inclined to perform those deeds in the future. Maybe that qualifies as an unintended consequence, but if so, I'm all for it.
I post this in the expectation group-think will mark the comment down as a "troll"
Yep.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Who would waste a mod point on an Anonymous Coward?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Who would waste a mod point on an Anonymous Coward?
The editors?
(they have infinite points, and per the FAQ they are not shy about using them...)
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Wikileaks are asking for help at a time when people are financially struggling. If the aspects of the internet that enhance personal freedom depend on people committing their time and resources, this is a dangerous time.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Wouldn't "The Cloud" solve all of WikiLeaks problems?
I'll host one image for them, no larger than 128x128px off my own web server on a DSL line. I know it's not much but it's all I can offer in today's recessionary times
I downloaded ba-038-air-traffic-control-tape.wmv from wikileaks and distributed it to a few co-workers and friends. I don't have the resources to run a full mirror but I would be happy to mirror that file. If wikileaks had the ability to point to mirrors for specific files and verify the MD5s of the files on an ongoing basis then some load could be taken off their servers.
I suppose a sneaky mirror host could serve different files to different IP addresses though but I can't immediately see a reason for that.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Theres nothing funny about racist jokes. Leave that junk on 4chan and Digg.
Since when does being a Socialist mean 'someone who has a different opinion than me'?
good idea but unfortunately the 'unwashed masses' only support HTTP, and if the unwashed masses don't have any access to this information then it loses credibility and becomes more of a geek conspiracy theory group. As we all know its very hard to get something done if the unwashed masses don't realise the problem and are therefore unwilling to support you.
You know, the people who think that the only way to get an iPhone is to buy it locked (if they even understand the concept of a SIM-lock) and on a long contract with a huge telco.
Jokes based on racial stereotypes can be funny, but the GGP's comment wasn't a joke at all, it was just a nonsensical statement with something about Native Americans.
Me, I think it's better to err on the side of caution, and let a little fresh air in now and then. If those whose deeds need covering-up know that a very public exposure is just a mouse-click away ... maybe they'll be less inclined to perform those deeds in the future. Maybe that qualifies as an unintended consequence, but if so, I'm all for it.
Does the "fresh air" resulting from my publishing that you like to wear women's clothing and are having an affair with a male cubicle mate make you less inclined to indulge that behaviour? Organisations, just like people, have dirty laundry. Airing it doesn't necessarily mean that any good will come out of doing so, save for those enjoy dirt and profit from it.
My definition of "erring on the side of caution" involves discretion and reasonableness. Yours takes the form of a zero-tolerance policy that, by definition, precludes any such requirements, or any thinking generally.
it was just a nonsensical statement with something about Native Americans.
Ever heard of the term "indian giver"?
It's even on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_giver
it was just a nonsensical statement with something about Native Americans.
Ever heard of the term "indian giver"?
It's even on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_giver
Thank you. I was starting to think that Slashdot's collective IQ had suddenly dropped while I was away, but you've restored my faith.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
So IQ is measured by the number of obscure insults you know? Why don't you explain your ideas to the psychologists, I'm sure they'll be glad to finally have a precise definition for intelligence.
It's really funny though. If you make a joke about the mean, bad, imperialist pigdog Americans you get a +5 Funny - but woe on those who dare to play jokes on other racial or cultural stereotypes...
A good education is a bit like a STD - it makes you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and gives you a desire to spread it.
Does the "fresh air" resulting from my publishing that you like to wear women's clothing and are having an affair with a male cubicle mate make you less inclined to indulge that behaviour?
Yes, actually, it probably would. But I agree: for the average citizen that information should remain private. However, public figures have to play by different rules, at least under U.S. law, and if those public figures happen to be people who make decisions that affect me ... you're damn right I want to know about it. I may want to vote against them next time.
Yours takes the form of a zero-tolerance policy that, by definition, precludes any such requirements, or any thinking generally.
The only zero-tolerance around here I see is yours. I made no such statement, and quite deliberately limited my remarks to governments and corporations that do bad things to people. And yes, if a corporation has dirty laundry it should be aired: they have way too much power in most societies as it is, and coverups rarely do any long-term good. The more the business world gets away with murder (in many cases, literally) the more comfortable they're going to feel in continuing their bad behavior. And as for government ... well, that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish but the same arguments apply. The disease of unaccountability is infecting more and more levels of government and corporate leadership, and there's only one way to put a stop to that.
... but don't make shit up. That's just irritating.
So feel free to disagree
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
What does it have to do with anything if its a term? It's still a racist term. Even the wikipedia article says its offensive.
I'm surprised nobody yet thought up a BitTorrent analogue for HTTP - to offload/share traffic from busy sites.
I guess latencies are the problem, but faced with information being not available at all, higher latencies are probably a good compromise.
Sites like Wikipedia or WikiLeaks could definitely benefit from such technology.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Do you need an explanation of this in kindergarten level?
There is 30 people in your class;
Out of those, 29 of them make a joke about 1 of them.
vs
That 1 boy makes a joke out of those 29 people.
Is it a same situation?
In before the "I submitted something secret to wikileak---NO CARRIER---" jokes
I post this in the expectation group-think will mark the comment down as a "troll" and it will come back and bite you bunch of bastards down the line.
Ah yes. The old "if you mod me down, I'll become stronger than you can ever imagine!" ploy. In this case though, you're just crazy.
As for your refugees comment, why would someone want to post the refugee information online where everyone can see it, rather than just send it to whoever is doing the slaughtering? Plausible deniability? Right. Because when sending troops to slaughter refugees, you will care about an email that says "refugees be here".
Face it: the only thing that is useful to be distributed online is something that someone has, but can't do anything with it. Instead, it is distributed for the world to see so that someone, somewhere, can pick it up in full view of everyone watching, and run with it. And that's just not the mode of operation of someone committing a crime.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Making a potentially offensive joke and then complaining about the moderators not getting the humor in it is also being an ass. So is continuing to post when the mass of "offtopic" moderators would prefer you to leave quietly.
BTW, I quite honestly had no idea that your "probably Native American" post was supposed to be funny.
I'm suddenly reminded of a scene an early Simpsons season. It goes something like this.
Homer searches through the couch, while looking for a dropped peanut. He finds a bunch of stuff including a $20 bill. ... 20 dollars!? I wanted a peanut.
Homer Simpson: Awww
Homer's brain: 20 dollars can buy many peanuts!
Homer Simpson: Explain how!
Homer's brain: Money can be exchanged for goods and services.
Homer Simpson: Woo hoo!
So... why not exchange those donations for goods and services?
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
...that I can't afford to be the legal test case for running a Tor exit node or a Wikileaks server, much as I believe in both of these projects. And I would imagine there are many who, while they possess the desire and the technical know-how to engage in such activities, simply cannot be expected to do so without some form of legal immunity (or at least a guarantee of unlimited legal representation). Until that time comes, I simply don't see many people stepping forward with offers of hosting assistance.
Perhaps an effort should be made to secure guaranteed legal representation from the EFF, FSF, and other groups for those who volunteer to run exit nodes, servers, etc.
It's really funny though. If you make a joke about the mean, bad, imperialist pigdog Americans you get a +5 Funny - but woe on those who dare to play jokes on other racial or cultural stereotypes...
When you are an 800lbs gorilla, you have to watch where you sit.
When you are a gnat, it doesn't matter.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The joke is about wikis, which anyone can edit. Reverting is a common action of contention on Wikipedia, hence revert wars, 3RR and all that jazz.
Why is the default reaction to assume racist intent?
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
A career that was ruined because something became publicly available is a career that should be ruined. After all, I'm pretty sure you're not talking about esoteric cases where a worker with a grudge would out an undercover CIA agent.
And your Copenhagen example is retarded. The only possible thing that would destabilize that is either a faked document or a pre-release document. The first will be dealt with best in the open and the second has already happened without wiki-leaks. And guess what - nothing happened.
Yes, I know your type. The type that thinks the plebs should not bother with the real world stuff of back-room deals and black ops and secret sniffing. The type that thinks that the world would be so much better off if everyone would just stop interfering and meddling in their affairs.
Get your grubby hands off of wikileaks and let the rest of the world have the same freedom that those with power and connections have: to communicate without risk.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
If Wikileaks' biggest problem is that it's overwhelmed with readers, wouldn't our simplest and most direct way to help solve the problem be to simply not read Wikileaks?
A career that was ruined because something became publicly available is a career that should be ruined
What if the "something" that became publicly available had absolutely no direct bearing on the career of the person (ie sex scandal)? Could this not be a reason for why the U.S has so many seemingly perfect, dull, boring politicians that are good at playing the game, but bring no dynamicism to the political arena?
I'm the type that understands that sometimes backroom deals are best left in the backroom, and that people should stop interfering and meddling in personal affairs. Context is everything, and your black vs white argument might be right in some situations, but very wrong in others.
I agree that wikileaks needs to exist, and it gives freedom to those of us with less power and connections. Still, the power it has can be wielded wrongly, turning people like you into those that you're railing against. Your argument makes it sound like you would like power more than you would fairness.
I bet your the same kind of person that finds the word blackboard "racist".
Grow up and get a life please. The words black and white are colours, it's only if you choose to attach a racial connotation to it does it become something else.
Please stop trying to see racism everywhere, sometimes a spade is just a spade.
I'm a big fan of Wikileaks. I run a local caching proxy (sorta like a mirror) that I and others access it through, and I certainly would encourage everyone to send a few bucks their way whenever possible (and I do try to follow that advice myself).
However, what comes to my mind when I read about the legal troubles of sites like that is a paraphrasing of a famous Alexander Haig quote: "Let them march all they want, as long as they pay their taxes." Winning back your right to march (or to Wikileak) is commendable, but it is not an end in of itself.
Free speech is only a small part of the battle for liberty, because dissent through speech alone is largely useless in the face of an all-powerful government that has near-total influence over public opinion. Dissenting opinions can not only be hijacked, marginalized, and ignored by the government-licensed media, but individuals can be preprogrammed to ignore them from their early childhood education onward! Tyranny 2.0 finds it more profitable to keep its slaves on longer chains, thus we can have things like the Internet, but those chains are nonetheless there lest you ever venture too far!
The best hope for resistance against such massive concentration of power comes in movements like the Free State Project (google it), which can make further tax resistance and secession movements possible in the future. Partisan democracy is a sham - only through intergovernmental competition can governments be forced to stop treating their citizens as subjects, and start treating them as consumers of their services who actually have a choice!
Here is how it works if there's a sex scandal: you go to a tabloid, dish the dirt, and presto - instant sex scandal. No need for wikileaks. If you want to ruin someone's career because of what they do in their private lives, it's already trivial - you go to the people in their social circle, and drop some not so subtle hints. In the case of the teacher, email the parents some compromising photos, browser history, etc. It's easy, and absolutely requires no Wikileaks.
What do you actually need Wikileaks for? Stuff that a) will get you in trouble with people in power, AND b) that you don't know exactly who would be interested in and who would be able to make use of the document. I.e. stuff that has nothing to do with what porn you browse.
You're right on one topic: Wikileaks is not an arbiter of truth, justice or good taste. But it's not supposed to be. That's up to the rest of the world.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I'm surprised nobody yet thought up a BitTorrent analogue for HTTP - to offload/share traffic from busy sites.
It wouldn't be difficult to put a torrent backend on HTTP, wherein the URLs would actually just be trackers for the peers, but dynamic content obviously couldn't be served in any practical manner this way. And usually serving static content is just a solved problem - bandwidth is cheap (until someone DoS's S3, anyways).
It wouldn't be difficult to put a torrent backend on HTTP, wherein the URLs would actually just be trackers for the peers, but dynamic content obviously couldn't be served in any practical manner this way. And usually serving static content is just a solved problem - bandwidth is cheap (until someone DoS's S3, anyways).
It's called a Content Delivery Network, and they have been in use transparently for over a decade. If you didn't notice, that's good. A full P2P CDN could be made to work, but has many awkward deployment issues (e.g., most of the downloading endpoints really don't have a lot of upstream bandwidth) so the traditional model is likely to persist since it's a proven model at both technical and business levels.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Both missing the point. A racist joke is a bad thing because it neglects who someone is in favour of a false generalisation. It may be worse when a majority make it about a minority, because unlike the other way around it suggests there will be an accompanying abuse of power which is even worse than just insults. The poster that says that the acceptability of such comments is dependent on whether its a minority member making jokes about the majority (acceptable) or a majority member making jokes about a minority (unacceptable) is presenting a false view. It's not okay by most of us whichever way the racism goes. Why is that? Because if one is not racist, then one does not see it as a case of one ethnicity making jokes about another ethnicity, because people are not defined by their race. What makes it okay for individual A to make insulting comments about individual B? They are individuals. The actions or positions or numbers of the ethnicities they belong to have no effect because A does not gain any special privilege to insult people based on their ethnicity, and B should not be unwillingly appointed a suitable target for your opinions about an entire ethnic group that he happens to belong to. People are people. Treating them as representatives of people they aren't (the rest of their ethnic group) is prejudice.
The very notion of applying different standards to an individual because of their race is inherently racist. Saying someone gets less right to be offended by an insult because you think their race is privileged is racist - you're treating them, against their volition, as a component of an arbitrary race, rather than as the individual they are.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I've often wondered if it is possible to involve the community in hosting websites like Wikileaks and Wikipedia. A large part of the cost these organizations have is the hardware and bandwidth required to serve the content. However, this content is mostly static. It seems to me it ought to be easy to set up an extensive mirroring system for such content. It also seems to me that it ought to be able to set up a system where people can contribute a bit of disk space and other computer resources and form part of a sort of distributed hosting system. I think Freenet does something like this, and even optimizes things by moving frequently requested content closer to where it is being requested.
Can we set up such a system for the worldwide web? Is there any existing software package that makes this possible? Can we write one? Or can we perhaps modify open source web browsers so that distributed hosting can really work?
I think I speak for many others when I say that I have plenty of disk space, bandwidth, and CPU cycles available, but my capacity to support worthy causes financially is rather limited. So if I could contribute my computer resources, I think I could help out a lot more then I can by making donations. So if we have the technology to make that possible, let's start using it! And if we don't have the technology, let's build it!
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
It makes no difference, Mister Mature. Numbers do not make right. A joke playing on a racial stereotype is exactly that, regardless of the race in question (it would actually be racist to suggest anything else - racism, after all, is treating people differently because of their race, but wait, you can't be racist or sexist to white males). You can deal with "racist" jokes the same as you deal with other jokes, or you can oppose them all, or you can prefer "racist" jokes about one race over others, in which case you are a racist hypocrite yourself.
A good education is a bit like a STD - it makes you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and gives you a desire to spread it.
It's called a Content Delivery Network
Who cares. The point is that whether free web can be user support or it has to rely on large businesses (which operate backbones).
Problem of CDNs in the context is obvious: WikiLeaks can't use them for political reasons and CDNs likely to refuse serve WikiLeaks for the vary same political reasons.
The difference P2P (or "user-supported cloud") makes is that the CDN is fully user supported thus can be apolitical.
Yeah. I figured it. The problem in the case with BitTorrent is that it doesn't have decentralized search like eMule's Kademlia. I do not think they support file modification timestamps, but that is trivial technicality. Otherwise, as long as a P2P network supports decentralized search and clients can do automatic content expiration, it can be used as a simple mirror service for web pages.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
You got it the wrong way round.
No, I got it precisely correct.
Read up on what happened to Lemuel Gulliver when he didn't pay attention to where he sat.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
bittorrent is GREAT for helping distribute some official file.. but for anything 'underground' it's awful - even with the trackerless torrent hack .
Nobodies talking about something underground. There is nothing 'underground' about how WikiLeaks operates - it is just way to political meaning that it might become a target .
Why has everyone moved to torrents when something like gnutella would be far more appropriate?
Gnutella is good for small stuff, but even at MB sizes, lack of proper check-summing oftentimes results in a corrupt download. Also it is susceptible to poisoning attacks most of all P2P networks. And depends on central specilized servers to do searches.
It's like eDonkey/eMule/Kad and BitTorrent learned from Gnutella how NOT to do P2P.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Latency would be an issue, but coherence and caching would be bigger issues. For almost anything beyond Web 0.5, you'll have the pages updating semi-frequently (blogs getting comments, forums getting posts, widgets receiving tweets, people editing content), so it'd be hard to have someone "seeding" one of the pages they just visited, since their version will be out of date in short order. Then you throw in the unique content problem - you can't seed me my Facebook page, because you and I see totally different things when we look at our friends lists - and that's the ballgame. Even normal wikipedia pages have to show different things depending on whether I'm anonymous, a logged-in editor, or an administrator.
BitTorrent also would suck for webpages because most people don't leave them open long. What're we gonna do, have them seed it after they closed the page? Also people's upstreams are usually really limited relative to their downstreams, so it would take major network-level changes to accommodate such a protocol on a mass-market scale.
It'd work great for rarely-changed, fairly small, totally static HTML content, but that's not the content that's expensive to serve in the first place.
Theres nothing funny about racist jokes. Leave that junk on 4chan and Digg.
I disagree. And let me point out that, as someone of Greek extraction, I personally have been the butt of many jokes over the years ("... so the Jew bent over, and the Greek disappeared", yeah I know, that's an oldie, but it manages to slam Jews, Italians and Greeks simultaneously.) I'm also part Irish, and if you have any awareness of ethnic humor at all you'd know how much ribbing I've taken from that part of my typically American polycultural background. "What do Irish do on their first date? Get drunk and have sex. What do the Irish do on their second date? Get drunk and have sex", etc., etc. Etc. Still, I accept them with good humor and in the spirit in which they were told. That's because I've found that people with high horses often fall off of them.
The way I look at this, if you're so goddamn proud of your heritage that you just can't stand to see anyone poke fun at it, well, you are the one with issues. In fact, maybe you aren't so proud of your background as you want other people to believe. Yes, it's true sometimes such "jokes" are told with mean-spirited intent: the best response then is to laugh uproariously and say to the teller, "Good one!", and file it away for future use. I've picked up quite a few that way.
Heck, I've got a fine collection of Greek and Irish jokes somewhere on my network here, and some of them are truly hysterical. My family and friends have all told them and laughed at them (and each other.) I'm also part German and if any of you have some good German jokes I'd appreciate your passing them along.
So it simply is not true that "racist" jokes are never funny. They're just not funny to certain people, and I feel sorry for them, because if you can't laugh at yourself then you have something wrong with you. Humor, racist or otherwise, is a powerful binding force that crosses racial boundaries like nothing else, if we let it.
Also, it's worth pointing out that the bulk of what human beings find "funny" is at someone else's expense, whether race is involved or not. That's just the way it is. Don't believe me? Just ask Moe, Larry or Curly (or Shemp, if you prefer.) Maybe the whole human race is mentally ill at some level, but trying to pretend that we don't find the discomfiture of others humorous at times is just denying what is. Such denial makes some individuals feel superior, I've noticed, but in reality they're just insecure and uptight.
The world is, and always will be, full of things that will offend us all at different times and different places. Learning to handle such affronts with grace and dignity is a major part of growing up.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.