Just as there are "patriotic" hackers trying to take down WikiLeaks, there are many anti-establishment hackers fighting back. One of them, a grouping called "Anonymous" has called on supporters to attack the sites of companies like PayPal for cutting off WikiLeaks. The group has even disseminated a seven-point manifesto on Twitter, pledging to "kick back for Julian."
Oon Yeoh, The Sun Daily
THE sensational WikiLeaks saga offers many lessons. After the publication of just a fraction of the 250,000 secret US documents, it’s very clear that the US government has to rethink its strategy of information sharing. The source of the leaks seems to be a US Army officer, one of about a million people with the security clearance to access such information. The reason so many people have access to such documents has to do with the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The US government decided that information sharing was important and made the diplomatic cables accessible to a wide range of government personnel. It’s now obvious that providing greater access has its drawbacks. New controls and clearance policies have to be drawn up. It’s widely assumed that it’s impossible to suppress information on the Internet. The WikiLeaks saga is testing this premise to the max. Shortly after the publication of some of the documents, the WikiLeaks website experienced a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks where its servers were hit with multiple simultaneous requests for information, causing it to crash. This is widely to be the work of a group of "patriotic" hackers who disagree with what WikiLeaks is doing. In response, WikiLeaks moved to back-up servers provided by Amazon whose cloud computing service allows companies to rent servers. Amazon’s servers were able to resist the DDoS attacks but the company decided to cut off WikiLeaks citing a violation of its terms of service. No matter, WikiLeaks moved its servers elsewhere and the site was up again. But not for long. The company that hosted WikiLeaks’ Domain Name Service – everyDNS.com – decided to cut off WikiLeaks citing concerns that the attacks on its servers would affect other customers. The DNS is what translates a domain name into a number that represents a server on the Internet. Without it, a website won’t show up when someone types in its address. Wikileaks.org went down but soon enough a new one with a new name (wikileaks.ch) emerged. So have hundreds of mirror sites with different domain names. So, the information is out there, just a little harder to find. That’s not the end to WikiLeaks’ troubles. To sustain itself it relies on donations. The payment gateway was provided by PayPal which also decided to cut off WikiLeaks due to violation of its terms of service. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is now accepting direct donations into a Swiss bank account held with the financial arm of the Swiss postal service. It’s not clear how long that will last though; a spokesman for the financial arm of Swiss Post, Marc Andrey, has said it was "reviewing" its relationship with Assange subject to proof that he has Swiss residency, owns property or does business in the country. For sure, this cat and mouse game will go on. "Cut us down," said a message on the WikiLeaks’ Twitter page, "and the stronger we become." Just as there are "patriotic" hackers trying to take down WikiLeaks, there are many anti-establishment hackers fighting back. One of them, a grouping called "Anonymous" has called on supporters to attack the sites of companies like PayPal for cutting off WikiLeaks. The group has even disseminated a seven-point manifesto on Twitter, pledging to "kick back for Julian." The New Yorker’s recent feature article on Assange said that "a government or company that wanted to remove content from WikiLeaks would have to practically dismantle the Internet itself." That’s probably not an exaggeration. As Washington Post’s tech columnist Rob Pegoraro pointed out, even if you could get every single web-hosting company and domain name registrar in the world to refuse to do business with WikiLeaks, the group could still release the documents through BitTorrent and other file sharing services. "The Internet can do a lot of things, but making information disappear is not among them," he says. I’m sure somewhere in England, Raja Petra Kamarudin is smiling.
written by batsman, December 09, 2010 11:00:45
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written by fireduck, December 08, 2010 21:50:49
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written by Motherchell, December 08, 2010 21:30:45
Its a silent revolution which will translate into no votes to get rid of all the evil in the world!!!!!This as been succinctly put by respected John Naughton of the Guardian.[
quote]The most obvious lesson is that it represents the first really sustained confrontation between the established order and the culture of the internet. There have been skirmishes before, but this is the real thing............"Even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable................One thing that might explain the official hysteria about the revelations is the way they expose how political elites in western democracies have been deceiving their electorates....................
The problem is that they cannot face their electorates – who also happen to be the taxpayers funding this folly – and tell them this. The leaked dispatches from the US ambassador to Afghanistan provide vivid confirmation that the Karzai regime is as corrupt and incompetent as the South Vietnamese regime in Saigon was when the US was propping it up in the 1970s. And they also make it clear that the US is as much a captive of that regime as it was in Vietnam................................................................................................................................Which brings us back to the larger significance of this controversy. The political elites of western democracies have discovered that the internet can be a thorn not just in the side of authoritarian regimes, but in their sides too. It has been comical watching them and their agencies stomp about the net like maddened, half-blind giants trying to whack a mole. It has been deeply worrying to watch terrified internet companies – with the exception of Twitter, so far – bending to their will.................Our rulers have a choice to make: either they learn to live in a WikiLeakable world, with all that implies in terms of their future behaviour; or they shut down the internet. Over to them......http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/dec/06/western-democracies-must-live-with-leaks?intcmp=239
Well having said this ----what do we know about US Ambassador's assessment of Najis and his cohorts including reports about the way the Holy Devil Bodohwi was trading with a Nuclear pile??
One can infer that the US prefers a corrupted Govt as Malaysia's . Do the idiots who dance for UMNO realize that the judiciary and the powers that rule Malaysia are all security risks to the Nation's survival????
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In the meantime, there is nothing on the blockage and starvation of Gaza or the sinking of the Cheonan or the provocation that led to the bombing of Korean island. Israel gets away scot free and the US gets to tell off other governments through Assange what it can never do officially. Am I crazy or what?