Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
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!
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
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.
So wikileaks response is an outright attack on the reporter of the article, without even the slightest attempt to dispute a single fact in it? For a site like Wikileaks, this type of behavior is beyond unacceptable.
When the video of the US air-strike spread across the globe I started the waiting game to see what kind of shit would be thrown at Wikileaks... It was obvious that this could not be allowed to continue, since they were doing exactly what they should: finding and publishing the truth, and I have to say better than most journalists.
I guess other journalists don't take kindly to people doing their jobs better... WIRED: "They took our jobs!'
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
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.
Which doesn't change the facts of the Wired article at all...either submission forms work, or they don't. It's an easy question.
Attacking the source of a factual article is a bit...unseemly.
And the worms ate into his brain.
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
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.
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!
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...
When the video of the US air-strike spread across the globe [...] they were doing exactly what they should: finding and publishing the truth,
So editing and editorializing the promoted version of the video to make very strong untrue implications (the group had no weapons, the air-strike people knew that was they said looked like a RPG was actually a tripod, etc) is "doing exactly what they should"?
Wikileaks is primarily an anti-establishment propaganda group, that has chosen to operate by means of (sometimes misrepresented) leaked information. The public benefit of the leaks is only incidental to their purpose. This can be seen by their very public actions.
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.
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.
Can you cite a good reason why a murderous establishment with ties to drug running, toppling democratically elected governments, assassination, torture, unlawful imprisonment, human trafficking, and many other horrible things SHOULDN'T have a fervent anti-establishment organization looking to expose its wrong doing?
You're acting like the establishment is some poor, maligned soul who is just misunderstood. Yeah, they're misunderstood all right. The majority of folks actually believe the establishment is there to help and look out for them, not use them as a disposable resource for the enrichment and centralization of their own power.
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
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".
Wikileaks IS an anti-establishment propaganda group. As such they provide a very important counterbalance to all the pro-establishment propaganda we are saturated with on a daily basis. Why is it that no one complains when the US government deliberately omits information (or flat out lies) to win public opinion?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The article contains one correct fact: The submission form is down. Apart from that, it's basically a bunch speculation based on basically nothing.
Clever signature text goes here.
I can think of some doofuses who got a whole bunch of soldiers killed. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and yes Barack Obama.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Ya I think people need to separate "factual" and "true". It is perfectly possible to have something where the entire content is composed of facts, there are no lies or made up information, and yet have it not be true. The reason is that you can selectively choose what facts you present, what ones you ignore, and use that to editorialize something that is different than the whole picture. So while their information may be factual, the overall picture is not true.
I saw someone on /. who talked about how Bill Orielly does that. He doesn't tend to lie, to make up things outright. Rather, he tends to have a conclusion that he likes and he then works to find facts to fit it. He picks and chooses what he presents, showing only facts in support, nothing that would refute it. As such it isn't as though he's just making shit up, just that he's misrepresenting the truth of the situation.
Well, the same shit can easily be true here, especially in a war zone. Different rules apply in war. That isn't just a pithy saying, it is literally true at a national and international level. There are different laws covering conduct in combat from civilian peacetime conduct.
So while the helicopter pilots may well have been callous and uncaring, that doesn't mean their actions were illegal. To judge that, you need to see the situation in full, and also to have a good understanding of the rules of engagement in that situation. As with anything liek that, the question isn't what you feel, the question is a matter of law.
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.
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.
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.
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.