Europarliament Scolds Visa, MasterCard, PayPal For Killing WikiLeaks Donations; Initiates Regulation. Today, the European Parliament ordered new legislation to regulate credit card companies’ ability to refuse service. This regulation follows the unilateral and rightless cutoff of donations to WikiLeaks, as well as similar trampling on small entrepreneurs.
The Pirate Party took the initiative to the new regulation. It has become an increasingly large problem that Visa, MasterCard, and Paypal control the valve to any money flow on the planet. Today, the European Parliament established this as a clear problem, and initiated regulation of the companies, limiting and strictly regulating their right to refuse service. The European Parliament adopted the following passage today as part of a larger report, requesting legislation to be drafted on the matter, having the crucial text inserted by Pirate MEP Christian Engström: 32. While this may seem like vague political language, this is a clear request for legislation to be drafted on the matter which will eventually come to a vote. WikiLeaks suspends publishing to fight financial blockade. Julian Assange, co-founder of WikiLeaks, has announced that the whistleblowing website is suspending publishing operations in order to focus on fighting a financial blockade and raise new funds.
Assange, speaking at a press conference in London on Monday, said a banking blockade had destroyed 95% of WikiLeaks' revenues. He added that the blockade posed an existential threat to WikiLeaks and if it was not lifted by the new year the organisation would be "simply not able to continue". The website, behind the publication of hundreds of thousands of controversial US embassy cables in late 2010 in partnership with newspapers including the Guardian and New York Times, revealed that it was running on cash reserves after "an arbitrary and unlawful financial blockade" by the Bank of America, Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and Western Union. WikiLeaks said in a statement: "The blockade is outside of any accountable, public process. It is without democratic oversight or transparency.
WikiLeaks Planning Legal Action Against PayPal, MasterCard & Visa. Downed By Its DNS Service Provider. WikiLeaks has been struggling to fend off a DDoS attack ever since it started releasing secret embassy cables, and now it lost one more ally: its DNS services provider, EveryDNS.net. According to a statement from EveryDNS.net, the services were terminated as the DDoS attack on WikiLeaks started to be a threat to the service itself and its other users. "EveryDNS.net provided domain name system (DNS) services to the wikileaks.org domain name until 10PM EST, December 2, 2010, when such services were terminated (...) The interference at issues arises from the fact that wikileaks.org has become the target of multiple distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks. These attacks have, and future attacks would, threaten the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure, which enables access to almost 500,000 other websites," the statement read.
This has effectively wiped WikiLeaks off the Internet, meaning it is now completely inaccessible. [via SkepticGeek] Online Speech is Only as Strong as the Weakest Intermediary. Co-authored by Rainey Reitman and Marcia Hofmann The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees freedom of expression against government encroachment — but that doesn't help if the censorship doesn't come from the government. The controversial whistle-blower website WikiLeaks, which has begun to publish a trove of over 250,000 classified diplomatic cables, found itself kicked off of Amazon's servers earlier this week. WikiLeaks had apparently moved from a hosting platform in Sweden to the cloud hosting services available through Amazon in an attempt to ward off ongoing distributed denial of service attacks.
According to Amazon, WikiLeaks violated the site's terms of service, resulting in Amazon pulling the plug on hosting services. However, news sources have also reported that Amazon cut off WikiLeaks after being questioned by members of the staff of Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman. But a web hosting company isn't the government. WikiLeaks on Amazon. Closing Amazon Account. Amazon’s WikiLeaks Response Threatens Cloud Computing. Dr Joseph Reger: “Cloud-computing’s reputation has been damaged.” Amazon’s removal of WikiLeaks from its servers threatens the future of cloud computing and jeopardizes the huge potential growth of its adoption, according to a leading industry figure. Dr. Joseph Reger, Chief Technology Officer for Fujitsu Technology Solutions, said that Amazon’s reaction shows the need for an industry-wide approach to service level agreements and codes of practice: “The provider simply cut off cloud services for WikiLeaks—that is, its server capacity, which made WikiLeaks inaccessible on the internet.Amazon’s reason: WikiLeaks violated its terms and conditions.
This is bad news for the new IT paradigm of cloud computing. If a provider can terminate its service that easily, then it is doing exactly what skeptics expect, putting the security and availability of cloud services into question.Amazon may be able to prove its accusation—but it still leaves a bad taste. Industry-level standards needed Dr. Mr. Wikileaks is back on Amazon's servers.
Wikileaks is back on Amazon's servers, barely two weeks after the company said it would stop hosting Wikileaks in a move many suspect was a result of pressure from Western governments. The turn-around came about when Danish newspaper Politiken chose to mirror content from the web whistleblower on its own website. For that, Politiken purchased server space in Amazon's cloud centre, which Wikileaks was thrown out of less than two weeks ago.
"Our choice of Amazon came about by chance, although I can well see that it looks a little odd," Per Palmkvist Knudsen, CIO at media group JP/Politiken Hus, told Computerworld Denmark "There is no political motive or revenge behind having our Wikileaks mirroring running on Amazon's servers," he continued. The company chose to host the Wikileaks mirror on Amazon's European servers because it was the simplest option, said Knudsen. "Amazon was fast and easy. "More generally, we test various cloud providers when there is a reason for it. PayPal statement regarding WikiLeaks. Then What Can I Buy With My Credit Cards and PayPal? PayPal Freezes Account of Group Raising Money for Bradley Manning. PayPal has frozen the account of a group that has been raising money for the legal defense of accused WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning, citing a failure to meet PayPal’s requirement for nonprofit groups.
According to Courage to Resist, a military veterans advocacy group that has been raising donations for Manning’s defense, PayPal froze the account after the group refused to link its PayPal account to its checking account, which would give the online payment provider access to funds in the checking account. “We exchanged numerous e-mails and phone calls with the legal department and the office of executive escalations of PayPal,” said Jeff Paterson in a press release.
“They said they would not unrestrict our account unless we authorized PayPal to withdraw funds from our organization’s checking account by default. [PayPal has since unfrozen the account. “It’s pretty normal practice to be honest,” said PayPal spokesman Anuj Nayar. Manning’s defense is expected to cost about $115,000. New Questions About Why #Wikileaks Isn’t Trending On Twitter. Update | Click here for an update to this post. The more I dig, the more I think something weird is going on here. A week ago I wrote a piece on why the hashtag #Wikileaks wasn’t appearing on Twitter’s trending topics lists, concluding that Wikileaks’ failure to trend was an artifact of an actually-quite-reasonable-really algorithm, and shouldn’t be taken as evidence of anything nefarious. Okay. That was then. But in the intervening week, Wikileaks has seen a truly staggering amount of traffic on the site, and still hasn’t trended once. How staggering? Back in the summer, the title of the movie Inception peaked at 0.4% of Twitter traffic, soon stabilizing at about half that.
Want more? And here’s my favorite … on five separate occasions in the last week, including eight hours on Friday and two hours on Saturday, “wikileaks” was getting more traffic than “twitter.” Okay. No. Not exactly. For another thing, not all tweets are equal in Twitter’s eyes. So does that settle it? Like this: Still More Questions About Why Wikileaks Hasn’t Trended On Twitter. Feel free to follow Student Activism on Twitter or Facebook, if you like. You can also read this essay in German, if you like. December 8 Update: Twitter released an official statement on the Wikileaks trending controversy this afternoon. I’ll have a full response soon, but for now I’ll just say that it doesn’t seem to me that it fits the data I’ve presented here. December 11 Update: This has been an absurdly busy week in the world of things-this-blog-is-interested-in, but here it is at long last: How Twitter Kept Wikileaks from Trending, and Why.
Okay, this is a little ridiculous. A week ago, I wrote a piece dismissing the idea that Twitter was actively working to keep Wikileaks out of its trending topics lists. Now I’ve gone back and compared long-term traffic patterns for “Sundays,” one of today’s big global trending topics, with those of “Wikileaks,” and I have to say I’m kind of flabbergasted. Here. (click each chart to view full size) Why is this significant? Let me repeat that. MasterCard pulls plug on WikiLeaks payments.
MasterCard is pulling the plug on payments to WikiLeaks, a move that will dry up another source of funds for the embattled document-sharing Web site, CNET has learned. "MasterCard is taking action to ensure that WikiLeaks can no longer accept MasterCard-branded products," a spokesman for MasterCard Worldwide said today. That further limits the revenue sources for WikiLeaks, which has seen its finances systematically attacked in the last few days, as the Swiss authorities shut down a bank account used by editor Julian Assange, and PayPal permanently restricted the account used by the group.
WikiLeaks has responded with an increasing number of fund-raising requests that urge supporters to "KEEP US STRONG. " Assuming that MasterCard blocks payments, the only easy way to donate electronically would be with a Visa credit card through a Web page hosted by Iceland-based DataCell.com. MasterCard said it was cutting off payments because WikiLeaks is engaging in illegal activity.