Month: December 2010

It’s been an exciting week for Wikileaks. After Wikileaks released thousands of thousands of US diplomatic cables, an unknown hacker attacked the Wikileaks website using a DDOS technique. Shortly after the attacks began, the Wikileaks website jumped over to the Amazon EC2 service. Rather than paying up front for the service, users pay by the usage. This allowed Wikileaks to evade the DDOS attacks.

A few days later, we find Amazon dropping Wikileaks from their service. Early reports stated that this was because of pressure from the government. Amazon debunks these claims in a short blog post, which begins:

There have been reports that a government inquiry prompted us not to serve WikiLeaks any longer. That is inaccurate.

There have also been reports that it was prompted by massive DDOS attacks. That too is inaccurate. There were indeed large-scale DDOS attacks, but they were successfully defended against.

Amazon goes on to explain why Wikileaks got let go:

We’ve been running AWS for over four years and have hundreds of thousands of customers storing all kinds of data on AWS. Some of this data is controversial, and that’s perfectly fine. But, when companies or people go about securing and storing large quantities of data that isn’t rightfully theirs, and publishing this data without ensuring it won’t injure others, it’s a violation of our terms of service, and folks need to go operate elsewhere.

After losing their EC2 hosting, Wikileaks also lost their DNS. EveryDNS.net, which provided DNS services to the WikiLeaks.org domain, terminated them. EveryDNS says they did so because the WikiLeaks domain somehow threatened their infrastructure.

With no DNS and no hosting, Wikileaks was forced out of the country. They tweeted today that they’ve moved to Switzerland, and can be found at Wikileaks.ch.

via SkepticGeek, CNN

Earlier this month, Clearwire was cutting back in order to save revenue. The company behind the 4G network that powers Sprint is definitely having some money problems. Now, they are planning to sell more than $1.1 billion in debt in order to keep their heads above water. When the announcement came out, Clearwire stock fell 6.6 percent. Some investors are concerned about the cost of the debt while others are just disappointed that Clearwire couldn’t raise more.

On the other hand, Sprint shares rose 5 percent. This is presumably because investors see this as a sign that Sprint won’t have to bail out Clearwire by raising it’s investment. They already own 54% of the company. Clearwire is struggling to expand their 4G network while also trying to figure out how it will pay for these costs. Some estimates say they need $3 billion to build a network that competes with competitors like Verizon.

“A billion is nice. It gives them breathing room in the near term,” said BTIG analyst Walter Piecyk. “It obviously increases their negotiating position because they’re not as desperate for cash.”

via Reuters

Amazon has dropped Wikileaks like a hot potato after reports that staffers from the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee questioned their relationship. Shortly thereafter, Senator Lieberman issued the following statement:

This morning Amazon informed my staff that it has ceased to host the Wikileaks website. I wish that Amazon had taken this action earlier based on Wikileaks’ previous publication of classified material. The company’s decision to cut off Wikileaks now is the right decision and should set the standard for other companies Wikileaks is using to distribute its illegally seized material. 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. No responsible company – whether American or foreign – should assist Wikileaks in its efforts to disseminate these stolen materials. I will be asking Amazon about the extent of its relationship with Wikileaks and what it and other web service providers will do in the future to ensure that their services are not used to distribute stolen, classified information.

Wikileaks posted the following update on Twitter in response to this chain of events:

WikiLeaks servers at Amazon ousted. Free speech the land of the free–fine our $ are now spent to employ people in Europe.

For Amazon’s part, there are many reason’s why they would want to disentangle themselves from Wikileaks, both technical and political. The terms of service for the Amazon Web Service clearly states that they have the right to refuse service at will. ReadWriteWeb offers the most obvious reasons for Wikileaks getting let go.

A DOS attack on Wikileaks could affect other sites hosted on the same servers, so it’s possible Amazon.com dropped Wikileaks for this reason. But since the site has drawn the ire of the United States government, and congressional Republicans are calling on Wikileaks figurehead Julian Assange to be be prosecuted for espionage, it’s possible that Amazon.com dropped the site out of concern for its content.

via ReadWriteWeb, Talking Points Memo

Bill Clinton, with the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), has teamed up with HP to help infants with HIV. Today is World AIDS Day. Yesterday, HP announced an initiative that would help these infants by building five data centers in Kenya. These data centers would be instrumental in speeding up diagnosis response times from several months to just a few days.

“Almost 10% of women in Kenya have HIV,” Gabi Zedlmayer, HP’s Vice President of its Office of Global Social Innovation, tells Fast Company, adding that that means 120,000 Kenyan infants are exposed to HIV annually either by contracting it from their mother or breastfeeding. Timely and appropriate medical attention is crucial for infants infected with HIV: “If they don’t get treatment in time,” says Zedlmayer, “half of HIV patients will not see their second birthday.”

HP’s goal is to reach 70,000 of the infants infected within the first year of the program. Foursquare is also working to help raise awareness today. They’ve teamed up with (RED) to help “turn the world red with awareness.” Today, your Foursquare check-ins can me much more than a mayorship.

This campaign is even more important because we’re so close: with current treatments, we can virtually eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV within five years, creating the world’s first AIDS free generation. When you shout #turnRED with your check-in and broadcast it to Twitter, it’ll turn your section of the (RED) map a bit more red (and you’ll earn a (RED) badge to help spread awareness further). Hopefully, all together, we can raise awareness for a healthier future.

via Foursquare Blog

Alicia Keys and a host of other celebs are also working to raise awareness today by not saying anything, at least online. As we previously reported, “celebrity social networkers such as Usher, Jennifer Hudson, Janelle Monae and Serena Williams will sign off of their social networking accounts until the charity raises $1 million. To express the gravity of the situation, many celebrities have joined an ad campaign where they’re being photographed in coffins.”

The long-delayed venture—Google executives had said they hoped to launch this summer—recently has cleared several technical and legal hurdles, people close to the company say. It is set to debut in the U.S. by the end of the year and internationally in the first quarter of next year, said Scott Dougall, a Google product management director.

“Google is going to turn every Internet space that talks about a book into a place where you can buy that book,” says Dominique Raccah, publisher and owner of Sourcebooks Inc., an independent publisher based in Naperville, Ill. “The Google model is going to drive a lot of sales. We think they could get 20% of the e-book market very fast.”

Rosa Parks sparked our freedom movement when, on this day 55 years ago, she refused to give up her seat to a white passenger. Tired of giving in, the then secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) started a chain of events leading to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. She became an “international icon of resistance to racial segregation” and collaborated with civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr, which help launch him to prominence in the civil rights movement.

To commemorate this event, Google has a fresh new doodle up on their homepage. It features what appears to be a city bus with kids of various races exiting the bus and skipping away while holding hands. This doodle is not animated, so you’ll have to use your imagination a little.

Parks eventually received many honors ranging from the 1979 Spingarn Medal to the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal and a posthumous statue in the United States Capitol’s National Statuary Hall. Her death in 2005 was a major story in the United States’ leading newspapers. She was granted the posthumous honor of lying in state at the Capitol Rotunda. via Wikipedia

This past October, Google used their homepage to say Happy Birthday to Dizzy Gillespie, a pioneer in bebop and jazz music with a distinctive horn and super-human cheeks.