WikiLeaks Starts Mass Mirroring Effort 586
A beautiful mind writes "WikiLeaks is asking for hosting space on Unix-based servers. The replication is implemented by a rsync+ssh based push that copies static files to a known path, authenticated via the private half of this public key. The complete website is a few GB in size, making it feasible to replicate on a large scale. The mirror list will be published when the number of independent mirrors reaches 50." Note: wikileaks.ch seems to be down for the moment, but eventually the above links may require that instead of 213.251.145.96. See also this WikiLeaks address finder. And for even more news, try this Twitter search.
Re:Make it static. (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly. I do not like what Wikileaks has done, but even so I can be the devil's advocate, and say that EVERYONE should be pissed at Assange. Those that want the information to be free should be very concerned that Assange wants to release it piece meal, ramp up the drama and attention to him and his site as much as possible, and provide commentary (aka judgment) regarding the information. All this is doing is giving time for him and his site to be taken down. The US may move rather slowly and clumsily over these sorts of affairs, having to check the legality of this and that and get allies involved, etc, but given enough time, there's a good chance they will be able to get Assange on something.
The files should ALL be placed online, in a distributed manner, and be done with. Not be Assange's little plaything to manipulate and play around with. Really, this guy has a major ego / power complex, and it will cost him eventually.
I was going to make a post saying it's rather poor planning to only just now realize the necessity of a de-centralized distribution model... but I think your explanation gets closer to the heart of it. Unfortunately people with the very best of intentions can exhibit the kind of ego you're describing. It doesn't even have to be a deliberate act of self-glorification; it's more like a default state one can overcome.
Re:Make it static. (Score:5, Interesting)
The first real battle of the internet? (Score:5, Interesting)
Could this be the first real battle waged mostly in the digital world? Every free country is out to get this guy and prevent him from getting his word out. The outcome of this will speak volumes for the future for the concept of being able to speak your mind.
( yes, i know there is questions about legality of the data, but that isn't the real issue here )
Re:Why not just release everything? (Score:3, Interesting)
Or buying time to make back-room deals with governments that may not want certain info to be published. You don't know Mr. Assange, just because you think he's on your side doesn't make it so.
As a US Citizen, (Score:2, Interesting)
So, being a US citizen here, and presently in the US, if I offer up a personal box, how much trouble am I in legally?
If I do get 'hauled in' what could I possibly be charged with?
Re:Make it static. (Score:4, Interesting)
Or, simply put, the US may not care very much. I haven't seen anything released that is a big surprise.
Re:As a US Citizen, (Score:5, Interesting)
So, being a US citizen here, and presently in the US, if I offer up a personal box, how much trouble am I in legally?
If I do get 'hauled in' what could I possibly be charged with?
As someone who isn't a US politician, I'm not equipped to fully answer your question. They're the ones with the power. They're the ones whose wrongdoings are being revealed. That's a really grim combination. I'm guessing that you're in exactly as much trouble as they decide and you'll be charged with whatever they feel like. Probably treason or some trumped up terrorism charge.
Understand this: patriotism in the US now means supporting the government, not the constitution.
The only thing you can do to protect yourself is educate as many fellow citizens as possible and vote for anyone who isn't in favor of the idiocy going on. If there are no non-idiot candidates left, frankly it's time to rebel. But that's just my opinion.
This is fantastic (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Make it static. (Score:4, Interesting)
It'd be easy enough to throw a VM like VirtualBox on your machine, assuming you have full control over it. I do it for something that simply wouldn't install on a couple machines I have. You could give him access, and all he/they would have access to is that virtual machine.
There are larger risks though. How long until the feds come knocking on your door. That's not just US based, you could likely have your nations law enforcement seizing all of your equipment. Even if they didn't, I'm sure the DDoS attacks will come back. They may be by some kid in a country you've never heard of, some militant group, or by governments around the world trying to suppress the information. A DDoS from seemingly random locations is a lot easier to pull off and a lot more anonymous than a court order to seize property.
I thought about mirroring his stuff. I actually did, but it's not available to anyone else yet. I can't weigh the continuity of my own sites and freedom, versus the need to get his information of dubious sources out to the general public.
I do believe in free speech, and I believe he should be allowed to run with it. Hell, there are plenty of conspiracy nuts out there, that put up all kinds of anti-government propaganda. The pressures being put against him are only serving to make it clear that there is some truth to what he's putting out there.
Re:Make it static. (Score:5, Interesting)
While true, it is not in wikileaks interest for this to become commonly known. Assange's job is to be the shit-shield for wikileaks, while everybody wastes their time hurling smear campaigns and arrest warrants against him, wikileaks is able to continue it's mission as before.
Do you notice the dozens and dozens of replies to every wikileaks article that follow the general form: "I wouldn't be opposed to wikileaks, but Assange is a [tool/jerk/douche/rapist/spy/...]"? That is wikileaks strategy in action. Since you are in on the truth, feel free to laugh at them :)
Everyone else in the media are compromised. (Score:2, Interesting)
And you have no idea if Assange has been or not. Unless hes your best friend you really don't have a clue.
I also wont go as far as you have in raising him to nearly god like status, as while i agree he has done some good with some of the information he has given us, he has also done some bad. There really are cases where information is better left out of public hands for the time being.
Coincidence? I think not! (Score:5, Interesting)
http://lieberman.senate.gov/index.cfm/news-events/news/2010/12/amazon-severs-ties-with-wikileaks [senate.gov]
"I call on any other company or organization that is hosting Wikileaks to immediately terminate its relationship with them. Wikileaks' illegal, outrageous, and reckless acts have compromised our national security and put lives at risk around the world."
C.f. "There are times when we must all endure adjustment to the Constitution in the name of security."
Coincidence? I think not! [twitpic.com]
I donated dec 3rd via paypal, now pay pal has it (Score:5, Interesting)
Throwing water on a grease fire (Score:5, Interesting)
Obi-Wan's last words apply here.
Re:Make it static. (Score:5, Interesting)
The humorous thing to me, and I'm speaking as an American here, is that the paranoia of the TSA makes a great deal more sense when taken under the context of the WikiLeaks info. If our leadership is this insanely paranoid about other nations, it makes me wonder what they've been saying internally (within our border) about average Americans ("they're all terrorists!"). That's stuff we'll probably never find out, but if it's anything like what's been released...
Like many others, I really wasn't all that surprised with what the WikiLeaks data contained. The releases concerning Iraqi "abuse" were largely just a reflection of the Sunni/Shia split post hand-over and the US forces turning a blind eye (though, really, what could be done once you've officially handed something over?). The more significant abuses (think Abu Ghraib) were fairly well covered by the media and were leaked shortly after discovery; lesser ones, like what was in these leaks, weren't really as bad as some sources claimed. Though, the diplomatic wires were laughable and explain a great deal about what the idiot State Department seems to think of our own allies. Suffice it to say: The only thing that surprises me is how long we kept this under wraps.
Now, ultimately, there's only one person in this world who deserves the justice he'll soon face, and that's the guy who was entrusted with this information who leaked it to Assange. I'm afraid though that this entire effort to arrest Assange is essentially an elaborate witch hunt, because someone, somewhere really wants to shoot the messenger.
I've generally been quite supportive of the US (it's my home after all), but I think we deserve a bit of international embarrassment with the inane antics we've been playing. I can't say we didn't have it coming.
America: We fondle our citizens and make fun of your leaders.
Re:Bravo (Score:5, Interesting)
What I find funny is that a lot of Americans find this leak to be quite a relief. The only people who seem so pissed off about it are those in positions of power. They don't want us to know the truth, and at this point, I'd expect next year to see increasing pressure on things like the COICA and/or other measures to grant the Federal government the ability to censor information. Can't have the people finding out what their leadership is up to! Even some people on the right of the political spectrum here in the US (*raises hand*) are in favor of what WikiLeaks is doing; although, as I see it, you can't pick and choose your battles in pursuit of liberty, transparency, and fairness. That's why I see this as both hilariously entertaining and, generally, a good thing.
It is comedic to me that the Obama administration has only managed to live up to their promise of offering the most transparent administration in history by way of an Australian foreign national leaking secretive wires that were handed over to him.
Re:Make it static. (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree with your assertion of Saudi Arabia. I do, however, feel that you're greatly over simplifying the matter with Hussein. Remember: Many of these individuals were the result of US relations in the area largely due to the USSR and the Cold War. Yes, it came back to bite us, but sometimes such policies are generally short sighted at best. I realize that this is how it appears to be today, but it's often very important to take things into the context of history at the time in which they occurred.
Other than that, I generally agree.
Two or three months ago, I would have dismissed you as mildly angsty. Two years ago, I would have dismissed you as insane.
Today, I feel that you're exactly correct. The biggest problem we have here in the US is that the majority of people don't give a damn about anything, so long as they get a pay check, can put food on the table, and can drive to work in the morning. I was sincerely hoping that the idiocy that occurred with the TSA would shock my fellow countrymen into realizing that our government is pushing us closer and closer toward tyranny. This Thanksgiving holiday proved my hope to be misplaced. No one cares.
We have a Constitution--it's the supreme law of the land--but we're ignoring it, our leaders are trampling it, and our judges are dismissing it as invalid. So yes, you're absolutely right. Americans are losing their civil rights every day. Worse, most people actively and openly express that they feel this is a good thing.
You know what really bugs me, though? I was reading the ACLU's response to the TSA stuff, and someone commented on there: "I don't care what they do as long as I'm safe."
I think that should tell you everything you need to know. This is why I feel the WikiLeaks situation is really quite entertaining. It humors me to watch my leadership squirm.
Re:Make it static. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Make it static. (Score:5, Interesting)
That sounds like a US perspective. I think the cables have all reflected very well on the US, as expected, and confirmed that it's a responsible decent world power.
The scandals we're seeing is more about FOREIGN governments who have been lying to their people. Some of us suspected they lied some of the time, but I don't think we knew about how much, and I don't think we knew about all the instances of it.
I didn't know about Yemen government lying to its people. I didn't know about UK government lying to parliament about cluster bombs. The German news was enough to cause a resignation. Wikileak's Kenyan news a few years ago was enough to cause a revolution, basically -- rioting and protests that led the corrupt government to collapse.
Direct link to new I2P anonymous mirror (Score:5, Interesting)
Unofficial Wikileaks mirror on I2P [wikileaks.mirror.i2p]
Yes, the full link really is that long. That is because I2P does not fully rely on domain names... that b64 string is the site's public key which is also it's address.
* You need the I2P software (a FOSS project and free download) to use both of the above address. *
The announce thread for the I2P mirror is here. [i2p2.de]
Once the info for the new site propagates through the network, you can even access the I2P mirror *without* the I2P software using this URL. [i2p.to] Of course, using this method you won't be anonymous.
A word about I2P: It's a network that provides anonymized IP-like communication using methods similar to Tor, but designed to handle torrents and other large loads efficiently. It is also less centralized than Tor, and taking down even 90% of the nodes (incl original ones) should still leave it running and accessible. It also has facilities for automatically mirroring files and sites. One downside is that configuring your browser to use the I2P Web is a manual process that must be done carefully. Overall though it seems to be pretty impressive.
Julian Assangenitsyn (Score:4, Interesting)
So you thought Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn [wikipedia.org] , Andrei Sakharov http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Sakharov [wikipedia.org] and other Samizdat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat [wikipedia.org] authors were a joke. Gave them Nobel prizes. Now, when you have got your first real samizdat author, you know how it feels.
Re:If Assange is a douchebag, (Score:5, Interesting)
Barack Obama failed to keep his promise of delivering government transparency, just as he hasn't kept his other campaign promises. The way I see it, Wikileaks is holding the government accountable and is delivering on Obama's campaign promise. As a citizen of The united States of America I am glad to see someone run a site like Wikileaks because having this wealth of information available will help dissuade future would-be tyrants from trying to pull off what the douchebags in power have been doing as they pull the wool over our eyes.
Also, isn't the timing of the charges against Assange pretty suspect? A leak was announced, warrants were put out for his arrest. The charges disappeared as the storm subsided. Another major leak was announced, and coincidentally newly released warrants were released. Please; I do not believe in coincidence.
We need whistle blowers and we need this information out in the open so people will open their eyes and consider throwing out ALL of our elected officials, and choose candidates who believe that the Constitution means what it says, and that it's important for ALL to be held accountable - even^H^H^H^Hespecially the "elite" politicians and the corporate execs they're in bed with.
Re: Feudalism, etc (Score:3, Interesting)
I think you're doing yourself a disservice to dismiss feudalism as necessarily leading to inequality or inherently unjust, especially considering the state of modern production technologies and their impact on the working class. For all it's faults, feudalism provides an individualistic economic system realistically capable of providing for all members of a society even in the absence of large-scale trade and finance.
While I agree with your sentiment, and most of your analysis, I'm not sure that we agree on root causes, ie. conspiracy of the elite. A democracy dominated by a working middle class is such an historical aberration that it's important to recognize alternate, more fundamental, explanations for it's decline.
Human work can be separated into two types: productive work and make-work. These should need no definition. Productive work is that which produces capital. Make-work is that which limits the destruction of capital. For most of human civilization, make-work has dominated. In fact, make-work could historically be considered to be the "sine qua non" of human civilization. There has nearly always been a glut of worthless people in all societies who need busy-work to keep them from destroying the tiny bit of progress eeked-out by the rest.
Make-workers gravitate towards low-skilled government-subsidized work such as construction and social services, security and government industries. They built the pyramids. They conquered Europe several times over. They built thousands of miles of transportation infrastructure, mostly by hand. But they consumed many times more resources than they ever saved or produced. They are paid more than they would in a productive position relative to their skills, yet cost less to society than they would if left to their own devices.
The important distinction is that make-workers have very little real political power, aside from their willingness to stop doing busy-work and start destroying things instead. To counter this, societies have developed simple mechanisms for eliminating make-workers who cannot be controlled: wars and prisons. Those who display a tendency to cause destruction are sent to prison. When the prisons fill up or become burdensome, prisoners are sent to war. If they come back with more resources than they left with, they are greeted as heroes. If not, they are ridiculed and minimalized.
In my view, middle-class democratic worker's paradises arise only for a short time [wikipedia.org], as the consumption of newly discovered resources enables make-workers to become productive workers temporarily. They then gain a modicum of political influence, proportional to the value of their work in exploiting the resource as quickly as possible. When the resource is consumed, work loses value, make-work again dominates, and democracy subsides.
The United States arose to exploit the natural resources of the Americas. Workers here had an extremely good deal, and lots of political power, up until the exact moment at which those resources were economically depleted. That was probably more than 20 years ago. It's time to recognize this fact, move on, and establish more efficient modes of production, rather than trying to re-erect a democratic worker's paradise without the resources to support one.
Re:I donated dec 3rd via paypal, now pay pal has i (Score:2, Interesting)
I just cancelled my PayPal account, in future my money will go elsewhere.
I have been disgusted by PayPal's actions with respect to WikiLeaks and your post reminded me that I have a PayPal account.
The reason given was Other: WikiLeaks.
The problem with corporations (and why corporate citizenship is a frightening concept) is that corporations, by their very nature, have not sense of citizenship or loyalty. Corporations will never stand in support of such important things as our bill of rights, freedom of speech, etc. unless they feel it helps their bottom line.
If attacking a company's bottom line is the only way to make them behave as good citizens, then so be it.
Re:Make it static. (Score:5, Interesting)
... And most of the info coming out doesn't hurt the US as much as Assange would like it to. ...
There seems to be a general assumption that Assange is Quixotically tilting at the US. That's not my perception at all.
WikiLeaks has been given some interesting documents for publication and they are making them public, as per the wishes of the donor! It just so happens some of them are about the US.
Now if people were to suggest that the donor of the US Specific documents was having a go at the US there may be a better case for it, but much like all the fuss in the UK over the MPs Expenses malarky, I could equally validly suggest that having seen the cancer of corruption within the government(corporation, whatever) it is the whistleblower's duty as a citizen(employee, whatever) to provide the sharpest knife to allow the corruption to be cut out!
Indeed, given the knowledge that there is something rotten in your government it could be considered treason if you didn't do something about it!
We, as the public, should stop focusing on Assange as a figurehead (who set himself up as such because of the effort being expended by those outed to discover the people behind WikiLeaks and he thought it better to provide a target than have them discover their own!) and rather concentrate on the information WikiLeaks provides.
Well done to WikiLeaks! In general, you are providing a valuable service to every nation affected because that dirty laundry needs airing and the longer it is allowed to fester the worse it will smell!
Re:As a US Citizen, (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm intrigued- I've got a question that's been bugging me ever since the Wikileaks drama started, and I'm interested if anyone can shed any light.
Wikileaks is basically filling the same role as a newspaper- someone has sent them classified documents, now they're publishing them. If a government wants to stop a newspaper publishing something, they usually apply for an injunction order in a civil court. Failure to comply with injunctions can result in criminal charges, such as contempt of court.
Why has the US government not applied for an injunction on Wikileaks? The site hasn't actually done anything wrong yet; disobeying an injunction would be something they could actually nail them with. Why on Earth have we gone straight from "we don't like it" to "murder him in his sleep" without any intermediate legal steps?
Injunctions would presumably be easier to get than trying to smear Assange with sexual offences or take the site down with DDOS attacks. If Wikileaks were a newspaper it would certainly have been the first move by the government, instead of trying to strong arm them with illegal and semi-legal attacks.