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WikiLeaks Tests Donation Pop-Ups For Leaked Material
WikiLeaks has for years relied on donated time and money to publish the scoops that it has; now, concealment writes "As of Wednesday night, the secret-spilling site now shows a 'paywall' to any visitor who clicks on one of its leaked documents, including the 13,374 emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor that it published earlier in the day along with the teaser that the messages regarded presidential candidate Mitt Romney. The pop-up message that blocks access to the site's content shows a video parodying Barack Obama's stump speeches and asking visitors to instead 'vote for WikiLeaks' by making a donation to the site or buying its promotional gear like tote bags and hoodies."
It's hard to pay for hosting with frozen assets.
I have to wonder who at Wikileaks thought that this would be a good idea.
I suspect that the reason they're not getting as many donations as they used to is because if wikileaks got labeled an enemy of the state then people who had donated would be targets. Putting up a paywall isn't going to motivate people to take that risk.
Part of the point of wikileaks is to get maximum exposure for the information, and adding a barrier to entry is going to go against their cause.
Check the blockchain for Wikileaks' bitcoin wallet. I think they'll be able to continue paying for their web hosting.
AdBlock Plus can block the popups using these filters:
wikileaks.org###boost
wikileaks.org###entry
of course what you don't get is any useful information..
Cryptome make a big play of 'hosting things the gvmt tries to hide', but in reality it's mostly badly rendered maps of roads running through area51, unintelligible court transcripts about topics only total paranoiacs worry about, the occasional commercially sensitive dataset, etc.. Nothing of any global note, certainly nothing nearly as useful as the consular docs or stratfor stuff.
I watched how it reacted when Wikileaks got the real scoops, and it was obvious that cryptomes owner would never actually wobble the status-quo, and seemed indignant that anybody else would, especially if infringing on 'his' territory.
My sneaking suspicion is that cryptome was/is run with the full co-operation of your military-cia-fbi-industrial overlords to provide an outlet for paranoid and the tin-foil brigade, without actually doing anything that might hold them to public account.
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
There seems to be a lot of this going around.
Pirate Party Leader Fights Illegal Downloads of Her Book
The fact is that life costs money, and we all want to do what we love as day jobs, because there isn't enough time to fully do anything else. Thus writers, musicians, artists, software writers, etc. need to get paid.
I think the idea of "information wants to be free" applies to information, not information products. The knowledge about how to play a guitar, or write code for a specific operating system, should not be kept away from those who can use it. That doesn't mean they should be entitled to free downloads of all software, music, books, etc.
More like "nag screen":
Update: WikiLeaks has confirmed that the pop-up is intentional, but pointed out via Twitter that visitors can skirt the paywall by sharing a link to the donation pop-up instead of paying, or simply waiting several minutes, as I found.
Of course, this is anathema to the "I want it for FREE and I want it NOW" crowd. My guess is that anyone with the patience to actually read through the Stratfor reports doesn't mind waiting several minutes.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.