
Yanukovych leaks - mxfh
http://yanukovychleaks.org/
======
danohuiginn
One of the participants here.

It's been a crazy few days. We have documents drying in the former president's
sauna, prosecutors waiting for each file to be scanned before confiscating it,
and an incredible group of journalists working night and day to save as many
documents as possible.

A few articles with more background:
[http://gijn.org/2014/02/25/yanukovychleaks-org-how-
ukraine-j...](http://gijn.org/2014/02/25/yanukovychleaks-org-how-ukraine-
journalists-are-making-history/)
[http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/25/ukrainian-
journa...](http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/25/ukrainian-journalists-
launch-yanukovychleaks/) [http://gijn.org/2014/02/27/yanukovychleaks-update-
the-projec...](http://gijn.org/2014/02/27/yanukovychleaks-update-the-project-
is-becoming-bigger/)

~~~
moneyries
hey there - i'm a reporter w/ @mashable, wondering if you might be free for to
do a quick Q&A? sorry to barge in on the thread but this is super interesting
to me personally. - @moneyries / moneyries at gmail.

~~~
Sprint
Please let them do their important real work instead of your pseudo-journalism
about social media.

~~~
leobelle
Holy cow Sprint, that is a really vicious reply, and totally unwarranted.

~~~
Sprint
It is harsh but I stand by it. Take a look at mashable.com and maybe you will
understand my aggression.

~~~
untog
Mashable reports a wide variety of stuff these days, like this current top
story:

[http://mashable.com/2014/02/27/russia-protect-ukraine-
yanuko...](http://mashable.com/2014/02/27/russia-protect-ukraine-yanukovych/)

~~~
Sprint
Of course! Anything that brings visitors who you can serve ads to is good
content. Re-wording AP releases or stories from news websites does not take
much time.

~~~
moneyries
It's okay. News websites are easy to knock. Truth is we have spent months
following this story and have a reporter on the ground in Kyiv. This is a
sampling: [http://mashable.com/category/ukraine-
protests/](http://mashable.com/category/ukraine-protests/). More here:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=ukraine+site%3Amashable.com&...](https://www.google.com/search?q=ukraine+site%3Amashable.com&oq=ukraine+site%3Amashable.com&aqs=chrome..69i57.2719j0j7&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=119&ie=UTF-8).

------
danso
I'm not ignorant of the needs and concerns of self-promotion in order to build
a popular campaign...but I hope they have a technical advisor who will, at
some point, inform them about the technique of OCR and how a large hashtag-
watermark can obstruct such a technique.

Also, minor detail, but the images should also be rotated to their proper
orientation. Crowdsourcing data collection has to be as frictionless as
possible, and this is an easy fix.

Depending on how many actual documents there are (i.e. how many pages are in
those 200 folders), it might be worth it to go the route of ProPublica's "Free
the Files" project, in which they built a mini-app that let people voluntarily
transcribe the important fields in each document:

[https://www.propublica.org/series/free-the-
files](https://www.propublica.org/series/free-the-files)

Their Al Shaw wrote a piece about designing for efficient crowd-sourcing:

[http://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/casino-driven-
design](http://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/casino-driven-design)

They even open-sourced the Rails plugin for it:

[http://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/transcribable-free-
the-...](http://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/transcribable-free-the-files-to-
go)

~~~
danohuiginn
> the images should also be rotated to their proper orientation

there's a rotate button when you click through to the detail page. We're
tracking where images get rotated to, and setting the orientation according to
that. It's still a bit buggy, but we're getting there

> the technique of OCR and how a large hashtag-watermark can obstruct such a
> technique

We're running OCR over non-watermarked versions. We're hoping to have a search
function up later today

Thanks for the links -- we'll look at them, and see what we can use

~~~
Alekanekelo
> there's a rotate button when you click through to the detail page.

When rotating some of the images (for example Img 999) it seems to cut the
edges of the image off and clicking to zoom doesn't help.

------
lifeisstillgood
This is one of those Walls coming down moments for me.

I have banged on about how governments and states are losing their privacy as
much as individuals - and whilst this is happening _after_ a political crisis,
it is increidble to see a few determined hackers and some simple off the shelf
equipment is throwing open the doors to a hidden state. Truly eye-opening, and
something we should look for in our nice safe democracies.

PS Plus I know a few Ukrainians and hope that this can get resolved with no
further bloodshed.

------
nailer
They could crowdsource finding interesting stuff - eg, the Guardian had an app
where members of the public were show random expense reports from politicians,
and could flag unusual/odd expenses.

~~~
danohuiginn
That's definitely the plan. We've been working flat out on this for the past
few days, and the immediate priority is getting the documents preserved. [many
of them were waterlogged, and have to be separated and dried in the
presidential sauna]

But crowdsourcing is certainly going to happen

~~~
brador
What if some of the documents contain private information of non-involved
individuals? Any steps being taken to protect their details?

~~~
danohuiginn
Good question -- this is definitely an issue we need to wrestle with.

For now, the vast bulk of the documents going up are business papers involving
Yanukovich's companies and the management of his estates. I think those are
fair game. But we'll get into murkier areas as time goes on.

For now, if you see something that you think shouldn't be public, drop an
email to yanukovychleaks@gmail.com and we'll look into it.

~~~
nyrina
Isn't that a bit too late at that point in time?

Once something has been on the internet...

------
ChuckMcM
I think this is awesome, I worry about it triggering a Russian response if
there is something in there which ties back to the Putin administration.

What I really like is way in which Ukraine is going about this, unlike the
Mideast (Egypt comes to mind), where it seems the only things the people who
took over cared about was exacting retribution on the former government,
rather than having "Make a stable and just government" as their first
priority, and "Investigate and punish any crimes that may have occurred" as
their second priority.

~~~
mladenkovacevic
The first thing this new "government" did before doing anything else was
repeal a law that allows regional rights to minority languages (Russian
included) and demanded that the International Criminal Court charge the
democratically elected Yanukovich with crimes against humanity.

They are only now trying to name an interim government. As far as how stable
this government will be that is left to be seen, but if the US was willing to
invest some resources in supporting the revolution and several of the
candidates being named this week, as the assistant secretary of state Victoria
Nuland seems to suggest in this intimate conversation
([http://www.bbc.com/news/world-
europe-26079957](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957)), perhaps
they'll be willing to bail out Ukraine's economy?

------
rocky1138
This should really be served with https.

~~~
krenoten
Why? Any snooper still sees a DNS lookup for this domain followed by a
connection to it. This is not such a dynamic site - it's fairly obvious what
you will be accessing.

~~~
bdamm
A site like this can have interesting corners not easily found. The knowledge
that you know about such corners could itself be used against you. That's a
good reason to serve it up as https.

~~~
krenoten
That's a good point. You've convinced me :)

------
rogerthis
I'll take the images to the priest of the catholic ukranian parish I attend...

------
jmnicolas
This is in Russian (or Ukrainian) ... are the HN readers supposed to read
fluently Cyrillic ?

~~~
rocky1138
It is English, as well. Look at the right-hand side of the screen.

~~~
DominoTree
I'm pretty sure he meant the actual documents and not the header text.

------
chatman
This doesn't belong here at Hacker News.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
Would you like to instead:

    
    
      talk about how to pivot yanukovychleaks.org to a billion dollar startup idea.
    
      Critique their choice of web framework.
    
      Talk about how to optimize bandwidth usage.
    
      Critique other design choices, usage/non-usage of CSS
    
      Discuss SEO strategies?
    
      Other?

~~~
ansimionescu
I wish there were more JavaScript posts. Did you know you can do functional
programming with it?! /s

