Wikileaks Needs Help, and Not Just Money 134
st1d writes to tell us that Wikileaks has put out a call for help. However, instead of just asking for money, they have also suggested technical and legal avenues for support. In the site's short life, Wikileaks has been at the center of many breaking scandals and investigations. "Wikileaks is currently overloaded by readers. This is a regular difficulty that can only be resolved by deploying additional resources. If you support our mission, you can help us by integrating new hardware into our project infrastructure or developing software for the project. Become patron of a WikiLeaks server or other parts of our technology, adding more pillars to the stability and balance of the WikiLeaks platform. Servers come trouble-free and legally fortified, software is uniquely challenging. If you can provide rackspace, power and an uplink, or a dedicated server or storage space, for at least 12 months, or software development work for WikiLeaks, please write to wl-supporters@sunshinepress.org."
Freenet (Score:5, Interesting)
Freenet has been slow and hard to use in the past, but its improved quite a bit. It is the obvious platform for something like Wikileaks. Of course, there is nothing to prevent people from mirroring content on the web (since installing Freenet, like any piece of software, is a hassle). But at least there will be an unimpeachable backup of all data on Freenet.
Re:Freenet (Score:4, Interesting)
TOR is already proven to be pretty unreliable since the exit node can sniff all the traffic, have enough exit nodes and you can track your target.
Re:Freenet (Score:4, Interesting)
Why not that of which we do not speak?
It's distributed world wide, mirrored about everywhere, everyone has access to it, it's fast as hell (maxes out my connection), you can post massive binaries to it, text files. Most places have up to 400 day retention now. It would be trivial to setup a script to repost stuff every 100 days. Put everything in a 7za and it shouldn't take up too much space.
If the RIAA/MPAA hasn't figured out how to touch it, I doubt many will.
I'll donate bandwidth (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I donated money (Score:2, Interesting)
it was just a nonsensical statement with something about Native Americans.
Ever heard of the term "indian giver"?
It's even on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_giver [wikipedia.org]
Thank you. I was starting to think that Slashdot's collective IQ had suddenly dropped while I was away, but you've restored my faith.
Re:Torrents (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm surprised nobody yet thought up a BitTorrent analogue for HTTP - to offload/share traffic from busy sites.
I guess latencies are the problem, but faced with information being not available at all, higher latencies are probably a good compromise.
Sites like Wikipedia or WikiLeaks could definitely benefit from such technology.
Re:Freenet (Score:3, Interesting)
"High-Traffic Colluding Tor Routers in Washington, D.C., and the Ugly Truth About Online Anonymity"
http://cryptogon.com/?p=624 [cryptogon.com]
As for tracking scripts see this post
http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-12691-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=31021&messageID=574848&start=-1 [zdnet.com]
Re:Irresponsible (Score:5, Interesting)
A career that was ruined because something became publicly available is a career that should be ruined
What if the "something" that became publicly available had absolutely no direct bearing on the career of the person (ie sex scandal)? Could this not be a reason for why the U.S has so many seemingly perfect, dull, boring politicians that are good at playing the game, but bring no dynamicism to the political arena?
I'm the type that understands that sometimes backroom deals are best left in the backroom, and that people should stop interfering and meddling in personal affairs. Context is everything, and your black vs white argument might be right in some situations, but very wrong in others.
I agree that wikileaks needs to exist, and it gives freedom to those of us with less power and connections. Still, the power it has can be wielded wrongly, turning people like you into those that you're railing against. Your argument makes it sound like you would like power more than you would fairness.
Re:Freenet (Score:3, Interesting)
TOR is already proven to be pretty unreliable since the exit node can sniff all the traffic, have enough exit nodes and you can track your target.
Even without compromising or joining up exit nodes, deanonymizing (see: 1 [ckers.org] 2 [dewinter.com]) is a problem for the uninformed users of onion routing and proxies.
Distributed Hosting (Score:3, Interesting)
I've often wondered if it is possible to involve the community in hosting websites like Wikileaks and Wikipedia. A large part of the cost these organizations have is the hardware and bandwidth required to serve the content. However, this content is mostly static. It seems to me it ought to be easy to set up an extensive mirroring system for such content. It also seems to me that it ought to be able to set up a system where people can contribute a bit of disk space and other computer resources and form part of a sort of distributed hosting system. I think Freenet does something like this, and even optimizes things by moving frequently requested content closer to where it is being requested.
Can we set up such a system for the worldwide web? Is there any existing software package that makes this possible? Can we write one? Or can we perhaps modify open source web browsers so that distributed hosting can really work?
I think I speak for many others when I say that I have plenty of disk space, bandwidth, and CPU cycles available, but my capacity to support worthy causes financially is rather limited. So if I could contribute my computer resources, I think I could help out a lot more then I can by making donations. So if we have the technology to make that possible, let's start using it! And if we don't have the technology, let's build it!