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With World Watching, Wikileaks Falls Into Disrepair
JDRucker writes "Supporters are concerned. Very concerned. Would-be whistle-blowers hoping to leak documents to Wikileaks face a potentially frustrating surprise. Wikileaks' submission process, which had been degraded for months, completely collapsed more than two weeks ago and remains offline, in a little-noted breakdown at the world's most prominent secret-spilling website."
Wikileaks provides an extremely useful service, one which is only possible on the Internet, considering its widely accessible scale. Here's to hoping things get straightened out -_-;;
Living With a Nerd
Manning got caught whistle blowing because he was tooting his own horn.
If you leak shit, stfu about it. While I don't agree with Manning on leaking the cables, the video was a little more understandable. I have also lost a lot of respect for Wired and their coverage of this. They are far too involved and it looks like a serious conflict of interest.
Either lack of funding, or fear of repercussions. I personally don't know what is worse, having the world's government spooks on your ass for propagating their no-no's publicly, or having Islamic radicals after you for propagating 'heresy'. Either way, people want you dead.
They are either afraid of, or in cooperation with the groups whose documents they leak, or are truly out of funds. I am placing my faith of judgement in one of the former.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
the list of which bankers, world leaders, and radio hosts are lizard people from other planets.
now you'll never know.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Taken from wikileaks' Twitter at http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/17498238199 is this:
"Wired's war on WikiLeaks continues. See comment by 'mpineiro' http://bit.ly/aZm4US"
Not so quick to judge Wired's coverage at face value...
Wikileaks lost the majority of their credibility in January when they decided to stop actually being a decent site and instead beg for donations for a few months.
Right, anyone that won't work for free is not to be trusted.
Nice job quoting an article with more spin than a v8 unicycle.
For those who actually follow these things thou, it's important to note that Kevin Poulsen (of Wired) is the same Journalist (and I use the term loosely) posting the edited chat excerpts from conversations between whistleblower Bradley Manning and wannabe hacker/cum police informant Adrian Lamo.
So much for an actual story.. moreso just Wired trying any attempt it can to bring down Wikileaks.
(Protip: Reading the comments on the wired story alone give you most of the information publicly available on the Poulsen/Lamo lovefest)
Wikileaks lost the majority of their credibility in January when they decided to stop actually being a decent site and instead beg for donations for a few months.
You're right. They should have just shut down in January instead of waiting until now to run out of money. Do you see the problem with your logic here?
I uploaded the President's Book of Secrets to Wikileaks three weeks ago. Does this mean that the NSA has it now, along with my IP address and Chat Roulette screen-grabs?
the list of which bankers, world leaders, and radio hosts are lizard people from other planets.
now you'll never know.
Let me make an educated guess - All of them?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Yes, the webmasters should have to pay for the site out of their own pocket. Seriously? It's like PBS. Everyone loves them until they start asking for money so they can actually RUN.
http://CryoLANparty.com/ A lan I'm staff on!
Kids these days.
Wikileaks lost the majority of their credibility in January when they decided to stop actually being a decent site and instead beg for donations for a few months.
Since, as we all know, servers and bandwidth are free, particularly for a site that gets shit-hammered with traffic.
Freedom is not free. I don't see any problem with wikileaks or wikipedia or any other site asking for donations to pay the bills
.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Do you -need- a website though? What about an archive of the site and all those things hosted throughout the world via torrents and the like? Etc. If the Wikileaks owners really felt so strongly about their duty they should be doing things to make things work rather than just shutting down and complaining.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
"With World Watching, Wikileaks Withers Woefully While Walruses Wrangle Wrapped Wrens"
Although Leaking in some sense is an good thing when you are talking about dealing with the extremist of the world, leaking can also be, and more often is, done for less honorable reasons. 30 years ago the politicos and the media, especially the Main stream media were MORE trustworthy. Now I question the reason why anything is leaked. politicos, media types, governmental employees, people with an axe to grind, liars, cheats, thieves, criminals defense lawyers, and people that just do not like some policy use "leaks" as a way of getting information, often un-vetted, or purposely false and vicious. out in the public eye. Even the person(s) that ran wikileaks is not above doing this if it were to meet their personal agenda.
Apparently they're just upgrading:
http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/17461648435
And even if Wikileaks was to disappear, there's always Freenet if you want to leak something:
http://freenetproject.org/
Of course, you'd have to check your own data to make sure there's no metadata that can be used to identify you. But Freenet covers the anonymous distribution angle.
Uh... Not everyone. I think PBS is a waste of money. It was originally sold to the congress as an alternative to the 3 TV networks. There are now hundreds of alternatives so the tax dollars still being paid to PBS are a legacy to a problem which was fixed long ago.
If your goal is to /really/ spread around leaked documents for the benefit of mankind, you will find a way to do it regardless. Complaining that people aren't giving you enough money and taking down a site is simply babyish. Yes, you aren't going to become a millionaire* by doing it, but if you are /really/ doing it for the benefit of mankind, you will do it for free and find ways to make it work.
*Assuming you don't get a list of future lottery numbers or something
Except that it really does cost money to run a server, pay for bandwidth, pay for lawyers, etc.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
the list of which bankers, world leaders, and radio hosts are lizard people from other planets.
now you'll never know.
Let me make an educated guess - All of them?
You'd be surprised. Note that he left "garbage collectors" off of that list...
I've said too much already.
Or sabotageeee?
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Right, not a perfect example, and I agree with you, but you understand the analogy?
http://CryoLANparty.com/ A lan I'm staff on!
Torrents die, something like that very quickly too, due to it's taboo nature. And they're not going to starve themselves so they can pay for the site, that'd be stupid.
http://CryoLANparty.com/ A lan I'm staff on!
Such a sad thing.... Not.
Indeed. They should be asking for donated server administration, bandwidth, and legal services. Not for cash.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Running a community based on donations, it doesn't hurt to feign sickness every now and then. That being said, from a technical standpoint, there's no reason why most of the stuff on wikileaks cannot be torrented, therefore I don't understand why it costs so much to run it.
So why is it that The Pirate Bay which comes on even more legal fire than WikiLeaks can stay afloat with minimal down time?
Yes, such things cost a bit of money, but this is the internet, distribute things via torrents and other ways, use other servers, etc.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I have documents showing that the NSA has consipired to weaken the security of Wikileaks. Unfortunately, I'm unable post them to Wikileaks at this time.
Well, when you run out of money to pay bills, there really isn't a whole lot else to do. I'm sure the bandwidth provider doesn't give a flying fuck about the good of humanity until it's been paid "enough" money to keep the site up.
PB only upsets entertainers.
WL upsets people with real power. People who can make you disappear. People who are willing to do really bad things (TM) to you.
They could have failed to get the SSL or someone could have made them fail to get the SSL.
I don't care if they ask for money. It's an easy way for those of us without free servers and admin time to help out (and yup I've donated).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
the one called wikipedia. it's an open collection of interested individuals
(for absurdity, here's the wikipedia article about wikipedia:)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia#Community
and it works
what about wikileaks?
its run like the illuminati:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks#History
and its a wheezing barely functional wreck
of course, editting a wikipedia article does not expose you to the kind of danger that vetting a wikileak does, but obviously, there is a lot of eager flesh out there that would LOVE to get involved and help wikileaks, in any capacity asked of them
how do you harness that enthusiasm? and how do you harness that enthusiasm in such a way that wikileaks is not compromised, and the enthusiasts are not harmed? its very challenging. you have to shield the newbs from mortal danger, and keep out the saboteurs. and still maintain a functional base of operations, somewhere, out there in teh intarwebs
but if wikileaks is to continue functioning, it has to broaden its base of operations
i'm not saying that's easy, because of the nature of what wikileaks is. but i am saying that that is the only way forward, however difficult that path is
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
if you are /really/ doing it for the benefit of mankind, you will do it for free and find ways to make it work.
Something is wrong here. Isn't someone doing something for the benefit of mankind (us) the EXACT kind of person that we (mankind) would want to be a millionaire and give our resources (money) to support? The world doesn't run on magic yet, certainly not web servers.
I seriously have to take issue with that. If all of the others are for-profit, you will never get what you want... only what they tell you we want. "Reality TV" is a classic example of them telling us what we want. I haven't watched TV since.
On the other hand, PBS provides intellectual stimulation that is simply not available elsewhere. What is there for kids to watch as they grow up? What did you watch growing up? PBS is indispensable and we need at least one more of them, not less of them. Where are the Science shows that we all still love today? Will we see "Nova" anywhere else? The history channel has boiled down to "the war clips channel" and the others like Nat'l Geographic and the like? Well, gotta pay to get access to those... where's the free TV?
Kinda like this: http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Special:Support
?
Yo Grark
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
The difference is that what TPB is doing is pretty much illegal in their jurisdiction, what WikiLeaks is doing is pretty much legal. And really, all they need to do is post if something odd is happening and then the media will take it up which influences the masses. No government can stop all of its citizens and if the message is out there, the citizens will revolt.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
If sabotage, great. Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch, and much less extreme than my own desire to walk into their server room and toast everything and everyone there with a flamethrower. These doofuses probably got some soldiers killed.
What about an archive of the site and all those things hosted throughout the world via torrents and the like? Etc..
For some reason I don't like the idea of donating my IP to a swarm full of the stuff that wikileaks has..
Uh... Not everyone. I think PBS is a waste of money. It was originally sold to the congress as an alternative to the 3 TV networks. There are now hundreds of alternatives so the tax dollars still being paid to PBS are a legacy to a problem which was fixed long ago.
No, because we need a non-commercial voice on the public airwaves. We've essentially given away our public bandwidth to big corporations. We should maintain at least one commerce-free public station. Corporate interests are not our interests.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Yes, but you have to call into question if they are really doing it for the benefit of mankind if they won't do it for free. If they don't want to do it for free, get off their moral "high horse" and start being honest that you are doing things for a profit.
All of the Wikileaks stuff makes it sound like they are doing this purely out of the goodness of their hearts, if they really were doing something out of the goodness of their hearts they would do it no matter what the cost really was and find ways of distributing their content other than via "conventional" means.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Time wounds all heels.
Destroy me and I will become more powerful than you can imagine.
To lie means that one day you will be caught in your lies, the longer it takes the worse it will be.
Karma is a bitch.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
I think citizens will only revolt when it becomes apparent that the message is being stifled, not when the message is "out there." And by stifled, I mean with soldiers (real ones, not police in fancy armor) in the streets shooting people. The general trend in Western societies is to just assume that we're fine, that all is as it should be, and when people complain to say "why don't you go to North Korea or something and then try saying that!". I think the difference between Iran and America isn't that our government is less corrupt, but that our citizens have become more corrupted with crap like American Idol and/or Facebook. Our protests are totally lame and half-hearted. The people who talk the most about revolution have beer guts too large to allow them fit in a fox hole, and age degenerating their eye sight, so they probably can't shoot very well either. Wikileaks is almost irrelevant in the face of cultural apathy. It really almost doesn't even matter if WikiLeaks were flourishing because only the people who are inclined to care would, and there aren't nearly enough of them to cause any major changes.
Troll much?
The awards list alone should be enough to counter your argument that there is a comparable alternative.
Tax dollars account for less than %1 of the operating costs of PBS.
There are NO commercial alternatives for truly important investigative reporting such as FRONTLINE, no commercial childens programming comparable to Sesame Street, no commercial news broadcasts that are willing to do more than a sound bite on any topic other than the PBS World Report.
The problem with torrents is that anyone can see the IPs getting the files, and in some cases it may be as important to protect the source as it is to protect those wanting information. If you can imagine an oppressive regime trying to stop the spread of some information would likely try to find the individuals in possession of the information... which would be anyone that connected to the torrent.
Since Wikileaks got sideways with the US military a few weeks back could it just be that they can not maintain their site right now due to fear?
If the bandwidth provider's top priority is maximizing cash input from whatever source, they would be the wrong bandwidth provider for this project.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
Watching one episode of NOVA should change your mind. All the costs of PBS to the public/donations are worth it to keep just to keep that show alive. If you are still not convinced we can refund your geek card - but not your tax payer money. We need that.
And really you aren't going to "starve" yourself, perhaps you need to take up a job then donate the money made to your site, etc.
Ah, yes, take up a job to pay for your world-power-outing website. Grand idea, old chap! Now that the admin's name is known to people who can disappear him, why not put him at the mercy of the tax system? Or, better still, have him do a series of under-the-table odd jobs which I'm certain won't ever compromise his identity in the form of stings or other undercover activities by government spooks masquerading as not-government-spooks! And after all that, he'll easily have the time to run his website, analyze the data coming in, and make informed decisions on it!
Face facts. Things cost money. By extension, websites cost money. No money, website dies. Torrents die, faster if they aren't kept around on websites. The Man On The Street(tm) doesn't know what Wikileaks is. If they've heard they name, they probably think it's just Wikipedia. Blind devotion to some ambiguous "duty" to inform the people is stupid and pointless if said devotion leads to your website getting shut down, you getting killed, or you getting disappeared and nobody knowing who you were or what you did. All what that would do right now is martyr him to a bunch of conspiracy theory nuts, and nobody would care. Way to go.
If I were running a company dealing exclusively in secrets, I wouldn't trust anyone who came forward to donate their time toward handling said information to not be a mole.
Regardless, no mater how much time gets donated, they would still need at least some capital.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
Such a request would border on extortion.
There's a lot of hyperbole in your post, but this is true: cultural apathy and self interest to the point of idiocy will destroy western civilization, not terrorists. Now excuse me while I tune in Oprah and watch some Youporn.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
This is on the home page:
Wed, 30 Jun 2010 11:21:29 wikileaks: We are back. Sorry for the inconvenience, minor technical issues that needed to be resolved.
Freedom is not free.
It only costs $1.05, so it shouldn't be that long of a fund raiser.
While I think there is a lot of crap on PBS there is a lot of good stuff to like "Nova", and I really like "This Old House" and "New Yankee Workshop". Also, if you've been paying attention there is a lot of advertising on PBS, it comes in big chunks between the shows in the form of sponsorships. I think that PBS only gets 5 or 10 percent of it's money directly from taxes, but they also get a lot of tax breaks too.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
The awards list [pbs.org] alone should be enough to counter your argument that there is a comparable alternative.
Industry mutual masturbation is not a counter argument, but the rest of your point stands.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
The citizens will NOT revolt when the message is being stifled. The message IS being stifled, have you not been paying attention for the last several... lifetimes?
The citizens MIGHT revolt if you threatened to take away their iPhones or cancel their favorite TV show.
This space available.
Indeed. They should be asking for donated server administration, bandwidth, and legal services. Not for cash.
While pro-bono legal work (I'll concede donated servers would probably be beneficial) is often a lovely way to accomplish short-term tasks and projects, it really pales in comparison to cash when you actually need to accomplish or defend against something significant. The majority of law firms only set aside so many billable hours per year for pro-bono work, and they rarely dedicate that all to one client.
So you either end up with a soup of lawyers without leadership contributing sub-par work, or you end up needing to pay the guys who took your case and no longer have the luxury of ditching revenue on you.
It's not unreasonable to ask for donations in order to continue providing service, especially if your service is intended to be free for the vast majority to use.
bullshit.
I think people don't protest because the only people with a legitimate complaint here are the urban kids getting screwed by the drug war. Pretty much anywhere else... what are you complaining about? There are plenty of details to bitch about, to go support a candidate about, to write letters to the editor. But society is still working. We can still get up, do mostly what we want, go home to our families.
It doesn't effect people. For all that we're invading two different countries right now, the monthly casualties are less than the people who die in car accidents in a single state in the same time.
The scale of things just isn't bad enough to make anyone get out the pitchforks.
When it comes to social/charitable projects, that's more true than you might expect.
The citizens will revolt when:
1) Cheap food is unavailable AND
2) Cheap psychoactive drugs are unavailable AND
3) Cheap entertainment is unavailable
Not before. The elites who control the money of the world know this very well. Nobody is revolting in Peru or even Haiti. Nobody is going to revolt here either. WikiLeaks is a sideshow for the rubes, much like the conservative republican/liberal democrat smackdown that goes on daily.
Of course, even the wealthy have no answers either to oil depletion, the replay of act II of the depression, the gulf oil spill, fussy countries with nuclear weapons or a good solid carrington event.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
If your goal is to /really/ spread around leaked documents for the benefit of mankind, you will find a way to do it regardless. Complaining that people aren't giving you enough money and taking down a site is simply babyish. Yes, you aren't going to become a millionaire* by doing it, but if you are /really/ doing it for the benefit of mankind, you will do it for free and find ways to make it work.
*Assuming you don't get a list of future lottery numbers or something
Except that it really does cost money to run a server, pay for bandwidth, pay for lawyers, etc.
Not to mention evading the US military ;-)
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
PB only upsets entertainers.
Valenti purportedly had mob connections and a lot of powerful friends. It's not like the MPAA couldn't have people wacked, too.
If you stop traffic, there will be blood in the streets -- this has been proven time and time again. Nothing else captures the peoples attention.
Must have been run by the russian spies. They could not focus on it any more after they knew their cover was blown.
This is why it makes me sad to see PBS sliding into being almost just-another-commercial-outlet. Remember when underwriting acknowledgments at the top of the show were a textual/voiceover mention of the company, and not a whole ad-like video segment? And when no PBS station would be caught dead airing show-length commercials and pretending they're shows?
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
I wish I knew how to mod this up. Someone do it for me XD
Freedom is not free. [...] .
That lame bumper sticker slogan has little to do with paying for other people's ventures. Or maybe it does, and I should start requesting donations to stock up my gun cabinet.
I don't think that money for the site is a problem, given that you can get a decent webhosting package (cgi + 2 databases) with unlimited traffic for about 50 USD per year. I'd think it's the time that must be invested to run the site. A site like this cannot run on automatic...
Neither are PBS's. Were it actually neutral, I might support it.
You are all fools, wikileaks was a honeypot founded by the AUS-UK-USA intelligence alliance to detect, find and neutralize intelligence leaks. What better way to trap a leak then to provide a central, web-spanning outlet for the material? Since 99.99% of the material leaked is of no important, nothing happens. When something *important* is leaked, *shazaam*, they are dealt with.
Industry mutual masturbation is not a counter argument, but the rest of your point stands.
Yes, television industry groups hand out television awards. It seems that the International Maple Syrup Institute didn't have the time or inclination to do so. That's a shame, given that their obvious lack of bias would more than make up for their ignorance of the subject matter.
Not by accident that Reporters Sans Frontiers has launched an "anti-censorship shelter" online, consisting of VPN, onion routers and training docs. Sound familiar?
Wikileaks is essentially a pilot project. They have demonstrated the need. The day-to-day work will be picked up by long running groups with funding models and full time staff and a CEO who doesn't go out his way to piss off every anti-secrecy activist who so much as murmur reservations about their comprehensive lack of transparency.
http://en.rsf.org/reporters-without-borders-unveils-25-06-2010,37809.html
Freedom isn't free. And I don't have a problem with sites providing leaks until they add enough spin that you could launch yourself into orbit on it. If they simply posted raw info, and allowed people to decide that'd be great. The second they start adding "what we think" information they can die and suffer for their own stupidity.
Om, nomnomnom...
Lizard people are a fake idea implanted into victims of monarch programming.
Ha! If anything, PBS is more necessary now than it was before. With all of the big corporate entities buying and merging, your radio, newspaper and television media is increasingly controlled by fewer and fewer people. Or are you one of those people that think that corporations are more benevolent and altruistic than your government? At least in government there's always the threat that a politician will lose his or her job if they displease the people. With a corporate entity, they don't have to appease anyone as long as they make money.
Taxpayer-funded national broadcasters, like ABC (Australia), BBC or CBC can be critical of the government in a way that corporate broadcasters cannot be critical of their parent company.
I don't see the problem with Wkileaks, frankly. All sites have downtime; people simply mock the famous ones when they are down. I hardly think that downtime is "falling into disrepair".
And how, exactly, is PBS not neutral?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Somebody on /. commented a few weeks back about how the guys behind Wikileaks are living like playboys flying first class and staying in top rate hotels.
They're behaving like many nonprofit 'charities' where the execs running them get 'compensated for their services' well in excess of what's used to help their cause.
Sesame Street stop qualifying as good childrens programming with Oscar turned into a politically correct pussy who is afraid to upset anyone and the Count had his balls cut off. It used to be a good show when it was balanced. Now its just Barney with muppets instead of a fat gay version of Dino, effectively devoid of any nutritional value for children.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Let me know when they take vows of poverty and subsist on small living stipends. I only contributes to charities that do not have highly paid leadership.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Could it be that some people have disproportionately large amounts of money to blow on things like server, bandwidth, lawyers? The guy working for humanity's best interest is the broke guy. How could such a situation ever come to be? impossible.
Could it also be that people are more willing to support TPB through donations than they are wikileaks, for whatever reasons?
By the time you are in a position to care it is to late. When you're spending 20 years in prison for Marijuana possession it is to late to fight for your rights.
I thought masturbation was something, you know... you do to yourself. When someone else does it, isn't that a handjob?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Somebody on /. can say a lot of things. The question is if there's any evidence for it.
Clever signature text goes here.
The most likely cause for a revolution at this time is termination of unemployment benefits for the 10% of the workforce which can't find a job.
Considering the trillions they are throwing away elsewhere, that $100 to $140 billion is pennies on the dollar vs sending the national guard and paying police overtime to maintain order.
There are a lot of graduations below outright revolt. Increase in crime (with resulting increases in policing costs and incarceration costs ($30k a year to house a robber vs $12k to $18k unemployment benefits), protests (increased police costs), riots (increased police and national guard and property damage), vandalism, petty theft, drug abuse, etc.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
According to Wikileaks, this is a load of bunk.
There is a headline on the main page at http://www.wikileaks.org/ which is titled "wired's war on wikileaks continues" and links to the source article for this page. He also claims briefly that they are in the process of "updating."
Just goes to show, ALWAYS check your sources, you never know if there is something strange going on.
Complaining that people aren't giving you enough money and taking down a site is simply babyish.
And waiting and hoping money falls from the skies to pay for servers and bandwidth is living in a fantasy.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Yes, they produced an edited video that demonstrated a point of view. Quelle horreur! That's completely unlike the Washington Post, the IHT, the Economist, the NYT... Ahem.
In fact, what is completely unlike them, Wikileaks published the unedited video at the same time. Unlike establishment journalism, Wikileaks offered source material from which you can form your own opinions.
Given the choice between an organization that offers an opinion and also the unedited information from which they formed that opinion, and one that only offers the opinion while withholding the unedited information, which one do you want to call a "propaganda group"?
I forget what 8 was for.
I don't think that money for the site is a problem, given that you can get a decent webhosting package (cgi + 2 databases) with unlimited traffic for about 50 USD per year.
Can you provide a host that provides that for that much money? Well, looking at just storage and bandwidth I guess there are some that do like iPage but I wonder how reliable they are. Others CNet lists cost more or have limited bandwidht and storage. Aplus.net, the first on the CNet list, has personal websites for $65.45 for the year but storage is limited to 20 GB and data transfer 250GB. HostMySite.com is next with Linux hosting for $13 a month. It's basic plan has 20 GB of storage and 500 GB of monthly data transfer.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Except that a) cryptome seems to have done fine without demanding nearly as much money and Wikileaks is inherently distracting from that good work and b) (on the same page) there are pretty clear accusations that Wikileaks organisers have been pretty wasteful which could just simply be answered with the statement "Wikileaks has a policy to only ever expense the price of an economy class ticket and always choose the cheapest reasonable travel".
Assange seems to be showing the kind of stupidity that discredits Jimbo Wales. All he has to do is clearly publish his expense policy (not too much) and make sure to distribute most of the documents he has as quickly as possible (e.g. by giving them to cryptome) and he will regain much of his credibility.
We should all remember that quite a bit of this could be a false flag operation. Where have those hundreds of middle east diplomatic messages gone? If you do leak to wikileaks, as with anyone else, make sure they don't know who you are and make sure that the documents you leak won't be identified as coming from you.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
No, there's a hefty fuckin' fee.
"Things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler" - Einstein
WikiLeaks is a sideshow for the rubes, much like the conservative republican/liberal democrat smackdown that goes on daily.
Doesn't follow.
If WikiLeaks is just a part of the machine, why is it being targeted and why would it struggle to operate? Just a clever ruse? That's a bit paranoid.
With all of the big corporate entities buying and merging, your radio, newspaper and television media is increasingly controlled by fewer and fewer people.
With the internet it's relatively easy to join the media, the hard part being getting found.
At least in government there's always the threat that a politician will lose his or her job if they displease the people.
Bush only lost his job because of the term limit presidents have. That despite the fact that he started a war many people opposed. I'm still waiting to see those WMDs it was claimed Sadam had. Obama's approval rating isn't good, actually 45% strongly disapprove while 44% approve of Obama's performance as president.
With a corporate entity, they don't have to appease anyone as long as they make money.
Corporate entities, most anyway, only make money when they appease enough to have enough buyers.
Personally as I've been saying for years I want the FCC abolished and people allowed to homestead the airwaves. If I wanted to and could afford it I should be able to start a radio station that is for say model railroad enthusiasts, who were some of the first computer hackers.
Taxpayer-funded national broadcasters, like ABC (Australia), BBC or CBC can be critical of the government in a way that corporate broadcasters cannot be critical of their parent company.
I can't speak about elsewhere but in the US the national broadcasters can be, but aren't always, critical of government. Fox News is pretty critical of Obama, just as it was about Clinton. On the other hand I haven't heard any national news broadcaster, including Fox, ask Bush where all those WMDs Bush said Saddam had are. And with the airwaves homesteaded there could be even more voices to listen to.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
When you think about it, what is even the point of Wikileaks? The entire internet is a forum for the content they were posting. Someone simply had the idea to aggregate these leaks which also means there's a single target to draw the ire of governments and corporations. And not only that, having a single source for this stuff meant it being filtered through the perspective of the people running Wikileaks. I suppose the only benefit Wikileaks provided was a means of revealing information anonymously, but there have to be a million and one ways to accomplish that.
Oh, wikileaks real enough and I'm sure it's a priority for intelligence serfs around the world to shut down. In the end, serfs are serfs and wikileaks is less than a flea on a dog.
Name one of those alternatives where I can get what I get from PBS.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
And how, exactly, is PBS not neutral?
They're biased in favor of the truth, maybe? And the truth, as we all know, has a well-known liberal bias? : - )
Actually, PBS does lean a little to the Left/Liberal side. But the people who get all bent out of shape about that are really complaining because it isn't heavily Right-Wing/Conservative. They can't understand how a straightforward presentation of the facts doesn't, and won't, and can't, always, and in every case, support the way they see things, so when it doesn't, they're sure it's a Godless Commie conspiracy.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Garbage collectors, the real ones, the guys who come around on the truck into which they empty your garbage cans, and do it in whatever the weather is, as long as the truck can get through, are far more important than any of the other categories indicated.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I keep hearing, even from liberals, that PBS 'leans a little to the left.' I'm not saying it doesn't, but I'm still curious what people are basing that on.
Personally, I think conservatives find the very idea of a publicly owned broadcast system communistic and repugnant.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The more I look into the relationship between Lamo and Wired, the bogus Auspergers story, etc, the more I am coming to believe that this entire affair is a PR snowjob. WikiLeaks has bloodied the nose of the American Military War Machine, and they have used their leverage over ex-con-hacker-types to smear the organization. They appear to be trying to kill the credibility of WikiLeaks before the release of any further material, and might possibly be interfering with them in a technical manner as well.
The whole thing stinks to high heaven, and we can only hope and pray that everything works out. This is a situation where 'the Man' needs to lose. Go go 'little guy'!
Meanwhile we need a real reporter with actual sources to dig deep and blow the lid off of this poorly disguised farce.
Given the sensitivity of the site, I wouldn't recommend downloading files from them without Tor, much less uploading them.
In my opinion the wikileaks site should only contain a Tor link to the hidden site and instructions for setting up Tor, which everyone should install anyway.
But... the future refused to change.
The US Gov is undermining CREDIBILITY of Wikileaks, to discourage leakers.
You ARE familiar with the 2008 Army Counterintelligence Agency report, which specifically calls to discredit Wikileaks through disinformation and propaganda, are you not?
The HIGHLY suspect connection of Manning with Greenwald STINKS of a PsyOp, then, hot on the heels comes this tidbit. Where from? Oh! DangerRoom on Wired.com.
I think we can now see wired.com as another polluted information channel, co-opted by the spooks. Leak meaningless true tidbits on intelligence and surveillance to establish/maintain credibility - then use this established route for the insertion of disinformation messages.
The next stage is to plant doubts about Wikileaks among its advocates, who will begin to speculate if the project is not a honeypot, designed to attract and expose leakers.
"To live outside the law, you must be honest."
-- Bob Dylan
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
I keep hearing, even from liberals, that PBS 'leans a little to the left.' I'm not saying it doesn't, but I'm still curious what people are basing that on.
Personally, I think conservatives find the very idea of a publicly owned broadcast system communistic and repugnant.
Listen to Public Radio with your objective hat on (or pretend you're a conservative), and you'll see that commentators take off-hand jabs at socially or economically conservative politicians in the same way you just did. It would be fine if there was a point/counter-point banter, but the statements get glossed over as the bad jokes they are, with nary a "whoa, that's a broad generalization!"
Can you provide a host that provides that for that much money?
Yes. :-) Have a look at hosteurope.de (website only available in english, so I'm posting a google-translation link).
2GB Webspace, 2 MySQL databases, PHP 5, Python, Ruby, CGI-scripts, traffic-flatrate, EUR 15,- (USD 18,-) setup, EUR 3,50 (USD 4,34) per month.
Or: EUR 13 (USD 16) per month for a virtual linux server with unlimited traffic and 50GB diskspace.
And before you have to ask: I'm just a satisfied customer...
Examples?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Oh, and an off-hand jab? This?
Personally, I think conservatives find the very idea of a publicly owned broadcast system communistic and repugnant.
How is that a jab at all? It is not negative. Is it even untrue? Have conservatives embraced communism while I wasn't looking? Is it bad to say they don't like it? Do they not look at PBS that way? Maybe they don't, but stating that I think they do is hardly negative. I bet conservatives don't like terrorists, either. Is that insulting to conservatives?
Seriously, if conservatives find what I just said insulting, that certainly explains why they don't like PBS: because they take offense at hallucinatory insults. There, do you see? That was slightly insulting to conservatives, implying they take offense at completely non-offensive things. Do you see the difference?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I think people don't protest because the only people with a legitimate complaint here are the urban kids getting screwed by the drug war.
And the sub-urban kids, and the rural kids, and the adults, and the taxpayers.
Everybody is screwed by the drug war except those who are profiting from it (weapons and police gear manufacturers, prison corporations and companies that use their (slave) labor, big pharma) and even in many of those cases it's just the officers of the companies that are doing well, as the employees often get crap pay and crap benefits and crap advancement opportunities.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Read Brave New World. It describes this situation perfectly - where the population is being subdued by pleasure. Huxley's solution was to ship off all the scientists to an island - who wants to start packing?
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
Are we discussing PBS or are we discussing NPR?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
There's two reasons that this video wasn't released to the public:
1) The government doesn't make a habit of releasing all information they have. You can chalk this up to paranoia or the like and there might be some truth, but the larger part is simply there's too much. The government generates a staggering amount of data of all forms, most of it useless. Thus releasing it all would be a nightmare to deal with. I mean remember that the camera on this copter is always running, as it is on all of them. Then think about the logistics of collecting all that data (they don't store it for long, it is just for mission review) and getting it out where the public can get at it. Then multiply it by the many orders of magnitude more stuff the government cranks out. It just isn't doable. Hence the FOIA and so on. You ask the government for the info you want, they have a look see and give it to you if it is available and not classified.
2) Everything relating to an active military operation is classified by default. The reason is because you have to assume your enemies have the Internet and watch the news. You don't want to leak something, only to find out it proved really valuable to them later. Ask Yamamoto how well it worked out having the enemy know what you were doing (if you are unfamiliar, he was the CIC of the Japanese Navy during WWII and lost the battle of Midway, and later his life, because the US cracked the code his forces used to communicate). So by default, military information for an active battle is classified. It can be reviewed later for declassification.
Now, I'm not saying that means that the government's reasons outweigh the public's right to know. However if you believe the public's right to know is more important than certainly it has to be the whole, unedited, uneditoralized tape. If we need to know the truth of the situation, we need to know all of it. To me, it really smacks more of propaganda. There is a situation that is morally ambiguous and perhaps legally questionable (though it doesn't seem so, no charges are being brought against the helicopter pilot and gunner), but it is cut and released in such a way to try and make them look like the bad guys. That isn't right.
As a simple example of how editing can change meaning, watch "unnecessary censorship" by Jimmy Kimmel. He takes regular statements from TV and film and bleeps out words. Your brain fills in the curse word that would presumably go there because of the bleep, and the meaning is drastically changed, to be very funny. All that was done is editing, yet meaning and perception were changed in a big way.
Reporters Sans Frontiers/Reporters Without Borders are primarily funded by the US government [zcommunications.org] through the National Endowment for Democracy which was founded during the Reagan administration to channel funds to organizations abroad that would support US foreign policy. Sometimes this funding is direct [ned.org], sometimes it is conducted through the international arms of the US Democratic Party or Republican Party [counterpunch.org].
I'm sure that the US government would much prefer that whistleblowers send any leaked video of massacres by US troops or State Department cables to this new site rather than Wikileaks [wikileaks.org]. The only way it would be easier for them to discover the identity of the whistleblower would be if the leak went directly to the CIA with a return address.
It appears to me that this new Reporters Sans Frontiers project is a honeypot intended to catch would-be whistleblowers.
It does shoot down your post. In it you said Lamo was not a journalist, whether he was or not he did claim to be one.
as the first thing I said was that the Shield Law has absolutely ZERO impact on this case, as it protects Journalists from being forced to identify sources, but does nothing to prevent them from voluntarily giving up their sources.
True but that is not what my post was about. My post was to point out Lamo did in fact claim to be a journalist, and as such he could protect his sources.
Oh and nice effort at Godwin-ing the thread. Associating me with the NAZI's doesn't weaken my points.
Another mind reader who can't read my mind. I did not attempt any effort at "Godwin-ing the thread". I simply pointed out that like many Germans you refuse to look at facts, and the fact is is Lamo told Manning he was a journaist. If you can not understand that I see no reason to continue, why when you don't understand?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Can you provide a host that provides that for that much money?
Yes. :-) Have a look at hosteurope.de (website only available in english, so I'm posting a google-translation link).
2GB Webspace, 2 MySQL databases, PHP 5, Python, Ruby, CGI-scripts, traffic-flatrate, EUR 15,- (USD 18,-) setup, EUR 3,50 (USD 4,34) per month.
Or: EUR 13 (USD 16) per month for a virtual linux server with unlimited traffic and 50GB diskspace.
Okay, thanks. I see that that's in Germany but as Wikileaks is international it could held there. Does Germany have safeguards for leakers though? Recently Iceland passed a law just for this. Iceland Votes "Já" To Proposed News Haven. Cheap rates doesn't matter if a host has to allow the government to know who sends leaks to Wikileaks.
And before you have to ask: I'm just a satisfied customer...
I wish the US had such low bandwidth costs. T1 lines costs hundreds of dollars.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I'll second that warning: Reporters Sans Frontiers/Reporters Without Borders are exactly the sort of people that whistleblowers need to avoid.
Putting a brave title on an organization does not make it good or trustworthy.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
It also gives you bad karma