Wikileaks publishes US cables, US persuades Mastercard to cease working with them, hackers in V for Vendetta masks perform DDoS on Mastercard and my Rowdydow payment merchant falls over. Thanks Julian.

:C

Some things are bigger than Rowdydow? Who'd have guessed?

Perhaps this whole thing was done to reduce my xmas sales :C

You don't happen to use Sagepay do you?

Their payment services keep dying here. It's not good, especially when their payment server isn't transactional, which means if we don't receive a response within the timeout period, we don't know if the transaction actually went through or not and have to check them all manually.

Boo.

Is it all still on its arse then?

I think VISA are currently still under attack from Anonymous.

The sale of a bit o' slap doesn't matter WHEN THERE'S A WAR ON, STAEVE!

RowdyDow is just collateral damage. Think of it as friendly fire, if you prefer. We're all in this together, and together we will win. We just have to accept that there will be some casualties.

And as long as I'm not one of them, it's all good.

Edit: added rogue comma, to help Mr Wix.

I thought the war as on terror. Is steave a terrorist?

No, he's an abstract idea. They're the best things to wage Wars on.

No, he's collateral damage. You have to accept some losses for a win.

 

And the war is on The Man trying to silence The People. Freedom of speech, and open access to knowledge, that's what we're fighting, and Staeve's business is dying, for.

I thought Steve was just a trick of the light - didn't realise he actually existed.

So why did you say the war was on steave?

 

Mean what you say and day what you mean.

I'm terribly sorry, I missed out a comma. I should've written "THERE'S A WAR ON, STAEVE!"

 

I shall go back and rectify forthwith and withforth. Or with commas. And since I have plenty, have a few now, on me. k?

 

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Some have floated the possibility this could be a false flag operation, but please, carry on...

In due course Julian Assange will be found guilty of a substantial offence and given a lengthy custodial sentence; maybe not for the rape charges but for something, sometime.

Two interesting consequences will flow from that action: firstly, Assange himself will be faced with the question of whether to release the key to insurance.aes256. If that document contains data previously released by Wikileaks but without anonymising redactions (as many have theorised) then he risks completely discrediting Wikileaks by clearly risking agents' and informers' lives. If it contains something new, who knows?

The second consequence is that Wikileaks will almost inevitably restructure & remarket itself on a much less individual, more democratic basis and that, I think, can only be a good thing. Assange is a very interesting, a very clever and a very principled man. But none of those characteristics necessarily make him a wise man or a good man. In some regards it would be better for Wikileaks role as an organ if free speech if he was no longer actively associated with it.

This bit puzzles me.

Are there actually diplomatic cables that say "Mr X Y at Z is a US informer"?

Why are there such messages? It seems the number one rule for keeping someone's identity secret is to not refer to their actually identity. That's surely why there's codenames and similar things.


(There's also the question that if these documents were apparently so readily available within the US gov, how do we know the "bad guys" hadn't already obtained them; by bribing an employee or sending in a spy or whatever?)



Without a crazy uh... "news magnet"(?), do you think it'd get as much attention?

Certainly it might not have reached mainstream (who's heard of Cryptome? They've been around ten years longer.)

Since drawing people's attention to this stuff is at least as important as releasing it in the first place, it needs some kind of figure-head to help stuff make the news?

Heh, and on Cryptome, this is interesting:



They back up their position by offering names of suspected MI6 agents, (and probably other stuff; haven't looked much).

That list is five years old, so maybe there was a fuss at the time, but I certainly haven't read anything recently that contrasted WikiLeaks against Cryptome, and credited WL for actually doing anonymising.

http://twitter.com/#!/wikileaks/status/13227924597514240

 

odd!

Bear in mind that the 'Insurance' file documents may not be taken primarily or at all from the cable leaks. They've had stuff from scores of different sources which might include highly classified forms of communication.

And you have a point about the 'news magnet'. There is inevitably a trade-off between personality & publicity. Hopefully, if Assange is taken out of the equation, Wikileaks can ride on its notoriety for a good while, without fuelling it by any means other than supplying important content.

Of course, the other option is for unhappy ex-wikileakers to break away and start OpenLeaks.

The cynic in me wonders if the new group is trustable, but then again, the more independant organisations of this type, the better... maybe?