The Economy of Wikileaks

StefanBerlin writes "Wikileaks is fast becoming one of the most politically important platforms on the Web. In this interview Julian Assange, the spokesperson, talks about its current situation and about the financial and economic background of Wikileaks. He also talks about why they cancelled the planned auction of the emails of Hugo Chavez's former speechwriter in Venezuela, and about Wikileaks' plans for a subscription model that could possibly solve the site's financial problems once and for all."

Comments

Discussion system like slashdot.

[lazy_nihilist]

What wikileaks also needs is a good discussion system for each story/leak. That way the audience also can directly participate.

Re:Discussion system like slashdot.

[Philip_the_physicist]

Whilst I happen to prefer using a newsreader to a web discussion interface, the /. system is probably the best blog comment system I have come accross. The content of the comments (and sometimes the quality of the moderation) are less good, and the javascript should be made faster, but the design is good.

Re:Discussion system like slashdot.

[uncqual]

Check out the progressive web site DailyKos.com.

Although I certainly don't agree with a lot of their "content", their comment system is pretty spiffy.

The whole moderation thing is handled differently and the result of it is binary - "Hidden - REALLY, YOU CAN'T SEE IT" or, well, "Not Hidden", but that's really an editorial decision. Their decision is probably appropriate for their site, not so much for /.. (So, what is the correct way to end a sentence that doesn't ask a question but ends in /.? To put a double period results in a drooling slash...)

Their site is much faster and more obvious than /. and I'm sure the whole moderation level you want to see could easily be incorporated.

Their 'search for comments by xxx' function sucks, but hopefully that will be spiffed up in the upcoming DK4 version.

Re:Have they

[Iguanadon]

That's a harsh way to put it. I would call it more of a "Protective Services" product.

You know, it would be terrible if this article came out detailing your illegal business practices...

In all seriousness, I'm curious how they verify submissions. All I could find was "The simplest and most effective countermeasure is a worldwide community of informed users and editors who can scrutinize and discuss leaked documents." What's stopping someone from making up a false story about a political/corporate enemy and submitting it to them?

Re:Subscribers?

[negRo_slim]

What if subscribers simply got to see content before non paying viewers got to see it.

Re:Subscribers?

[Darkness404]

It depends what "sooner" means. If sooner is 1-2 days, perhaps it wouldn't be too bad, but a week or more would have bad effects because of outdated information. The "mainstream" news tends to not focus on one topic too long unless it helps their agenda meaning that an important article might fade from public eyes quicker than it needs to be leaving it lost in a multitude of links.

Charging is a very bad idea

[bl968]

Once they charge for subscriptions then they become a commercial organization and they would most likely be under the gun for more stringent copyright claims and enforcement. They currently benefit from the non-commercial use provisions of the fair use doctrine.

Why not Torrent large files?

[jonwil]

Why not make large (in terms of expected bandwidth use) files available through BitTorrent in order to take load off the Wikileaks servers?

Re:If every...

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it absurd that they extract money for information _I_ leaked. Freaking hell, If I'm leaking they shouldn't be mopping up.

BT for web pages -- easy but not done

[jonaskoelker]

Is there a BT technique that can be applied to web pages?

Sure, can it be that hard?

Give a URI of some resource. Have your web/torrent browser look for peers/seeds who have copies of that resource in some DHT. Ask those who have it to send it to them.

There's absolutely nothing stopping anybody from using BT as the application-layer transport protocol for HTML and other web content.

I'm no expert on P2P networks; maybe other kinds of protocols are better suited.

I think the hard part is making Microsoft implement this in IE, so that everybody will be able to justify switching to this.

Re:BT for web pages -- easy but not done

[shaka]

As you say, the technology doesn't really work well for web browsing as of today, and I think you're correct in that WikiLeaks will implement something like this right now.

I do, however, think that this - or something like this - is the path we will eventually walk down, when the Wiki and the Blog have converged into a WYSIWYG/WYSIWYM capable editing platform for lots of different people and organizations.

I also think that this is where Opera Unite is pointing. DHT, the web and the Internet will be viewed as the same phenomenon 100 years from now, the next step up since the printing press.

Re:Subscribers?

[vlm]

It depends what "sooner" means. If sooner is 1-2 days, perhaps it wouldn't be too bad, but a week or more would have bad effects because of outdated information

No need for an outdated "time intervals" here. Set a bounty. We figure it costs us $X to run this article, and we freely release it to the public when donations total $X, of course if you want to see a neatly watermarked copy right now, simply send a monetary donation of more than $1, up to whatever you think it might be worth, and we'll send you a nice watermarked copy, note we create and deliver your individualized copy in strict order of dollars donated, of course. Oh and by the way here is a snapshot of our current queue with dollar amounts and estimated processing time so you can intelligently balance your desire with your donation. That creates a nice long tail effect where a major TV network journalist will gladly donate the cost of a used car to scoop their competitors, yet a volunteer group or a poverty stricken individual (i.e. a student) in no hurry can get a copy for about the cost of an old fashioned paper newspaper.