
In a weird sneaker-net way we have implemented a human DNS - davewiner
http://scripting.com/stories/2010/12/03/wikileaksOnTheRun.html
======
commieneko
In Soviet Russia ... no wait, seriously ... in Soviet Russia, when they tried
to control copy machines and fax machines, people used typewriters, pen and
ink, and good old sneaker net to create and distribute their samizdat.

~~~
bonaldi
This works both ways. When everyone can see the communiques, the communiques
go offline.

~~~
sedachv
That's exactly what Assange wants to do - make it more inconvenient for people
in power to collude in secret.

What's really working both ways here is the samizdat analogy. Wikileaks is the
next logical step after samizdat in the fight against tyranny.

~~~
bonaldi
Depends on how much you trust them, really. What you call collusion is, for
them, co-operation. There were a lot of powerful internal voices in the
security industry against the kind of online information-sharing that makes a
leak like this possible.

The reason they were overruled was because 9/11 in particular showed how badly
joined up the information services were. Now the pendulum will swing the other
way again, inevitably.

I'm not yet convinced this a great outcome. Shouldn't diplomatic staff be able
to send back accurate assessments of political figures in countries where the
US has interests? If internal comms are sanitised for potential public
exposure, who benefits?

The "taking on tyranny" rhetoric surrounding wikileaks is overheated, too.
Assange is taking on the softest Western governments; the ones who will go
after him with arrest warrants. Were he _actually_ to take on tyranny he knows
he'd end up in a London clinic with radiation poisoning.

~~~
sedachv
"Shouldn't diplomatic staff be able to send back accurate assessments of
political figures in countries where the US has interests? If internal comms
are sanitised for potential public exposure, who benefits?"

Why do you think Wikileaks is only about the US? Right now the cables leaked
out are from the US, but the point is to do this to every government. Everyone
opposed to statism and nationalism benefits.

"Were he actually to take on tyranny he knows he'd end up in a London clinic
with radiation poisoning."

Except Litvinenko wasn't interested in revealing state secrets, but in making
schemes with Russian oligarchs. Which is probably why he's the only Soviet or
Russian defector to have died under suspicious circumstances since 1959.

~~~
bonaldi
"Why do you think Wikileaks is only about the US? Right now the cables leaked
out are from the US, but the point is to do this to every government. Everyone
opposed to statism and nationalism benefits."

I think a dog only barks because that's all I've heard it do. I think you're
choosing a "point" that chimes with your hopes, not the facts.

Your "benefits" too need made more explicit. I'm opposed to nationalism and
don't see any short or long-term benefits for me, here. Doing actions contrary
to the welfare of a national state doesn't automatically amount to a benefit
for anti-nationalists.

On the contrary, there are serious questions to be asked about what this will
do to things that actively help nations to work together, such as diplomatic
backchannels. Severing those is no more laudable, and far more potentially
lethal, than when TC posted Twitter's internal emails.

As for 1959, your answer's a little fine in its splitting of the hair -- the
KGB went after plenty in its time, including assisting in the bizarre murder
of Markov, and the "suicide" of Shevchenko's wife. There were also the many
sentenced to death that had to be hidden by the CIA. Lets not start on the
Stasi, either.

If your point was that tyrannies don't murder their citizens for treason,
you'll have a tough sell. That's why actually taking them on is a lot harder
than taking on a government that -- as the cables are showing -- is actually
relatively close to plain-speaking in its dealing with other nations. A lot of
the embarrassment has come from second-hand revelations about what _other_
countries have been lying about.

~~~
sedachv
"Doing actions contrary to the welfare of a national state doesn't
automatically amount to a benefit for anti-nationalists."

I don't know if you've seen this already, but this summarizes Assange's views
well: [http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/julian-assange-
an...](http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/julian-assange-and-the-
computer-conspiracy-%E2%80%9Cto-destroy-this-invisible-government%E2%80%9D/)

"I'm opposed to nationalism and don't see any short or long-term benefits for
me, here."

I see a lot of potential benefits for people currently being murdered in Iraq
and Afghanistan.

"On the contrary, there are serious questions to be asked about what this will
do to things that actively help nations to work together, such as diplomatic
backchannels."

Nations working together towards what? The whole point is that nations work
together for the benefit of those governing them. The only reason you and I
aren't property of god-kings at this point in history is because in the past
people have resisted tribal/nationalist/statist power.

"As for 1959, your answer's a little fine in its splitting of the hair -- the
KGB went after plenty in its time, including assisting in the bizarre murder
of Markov, and the "suicide" of Shevchenko's wife. There were also the many
sentenced to death that had to be hidden by the CIA. Lets not start on the
Stasi, either."

Do you think Africa is a country? How is it splitting hairs to be aware that
"Eastern Europe" isn't a single place?

"If your point was that tyrannies don't murder their citizens for treason,
you'll have a tough sell."

Every country punishes its citizens for treason. Assange isn't a citizen of
the United States. Bradley Manning is.

~~~
bonaldi
"I see a lot of potential benefits for people currently being murdered in Iraq
and Afghanistan."

1\. Expose internal documents. 2\. ???? 3\. Fewer people being murdered in
Iraq.

Going to need to spell out 2 here, because nothing wikileaks has done so far
has done anything to stop those deaths, and isn't likely to. Assange's, yours
and Winer's stances all assume that the states involved won't change their
methods in response to informational insecurity, and will instead continue
business as usual. This is a strange assumption.

"Do you think Africa is a country? How is it splitting hairs to be aware that
"Eastern Europe" isn't a single place?"

It was you who took my allusion to Litvinenko and turned into it something
exclusively exclusively about Russia. My point was, and remains, that
tyrannies murder to protect themselves, and high-minded rhetoric about
bringing them down comes to naught when you just pick on the soft targets.

~~~
sedachv
"Assange's, yours and Winer's stances all assume that the states involved
won't change their methods in response to informational insecurity, and will
instead continue business as usual. This is a strange assumption."

Please read Assange's manifesto, I posted the link for a reason. The whole
point of Wikileaks is to force states to "change their methods in response to
informational insecurity" and make their functioning less efficient. Armed
revolution isn't popular these days, and this is a bloodless, scalable, and
morally unassailable (well, for normal people's morals, anyway) way to attack
the functioning of a government.

\------

Also, I just learned about this:
[http://www.boingboing.net/2010/12/03/wikileaks-cables-
rev.ht...](http://www.boingboing.net/2010/12/03/wikileaks-cables-rev.html)

Let's see what the outcome will be.

~~~
bonaldi
I read the manifesto; it's troubling for people who, like me, are in support
of the general principle of greater transparency but don't support an
ideological reading of the US as an authoritarian conspiracy.

As for "morally unassailable", that's a ridiculous assertion. HN can't even
decide whether or not TechCrunch was right to publish the Twitter emails; this
is at a much more morally complicated level. The potential to put people in
harm's way is being used by politicians as a stick to beat WikiLeaks, but
nonetheless there's something to it.

When Amnesty International says you're putting people in danger, there's more
than just hype to it.

------
sudont
Well, they can always just twitter their current IP...

And if their servers are shut down, create checksummed files released into the
bittorrent cloud.

Eventually this will either end sanely, or in another Great Firewall.

~~~
eldenbishop
Twitter would make a fine DNS actually.

~~~
wmf
History of unreliability, check. Centralized, check. Business model that has
nothing to do with replacing DNS, check. Will probably give in to the US
government without a fight, ?

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wwortiz
I think there is some lack of technical knowledge with the people who are
running wikileaks as they are still using the same free dns service with a new
domain rather than switching to another dns that might be able to handle their
traffic (DDOS) with a known domain name.

(everydns.net is the dns service they are using)

~~~
qjz
Since moving a host to another IP address practically requires temporarily
setting a low TTL (which may have been what actually caused the DDoS),
creating an entirely new domain with a high TTL is a reasonable (albeit
desperate) attempt to reduce the load on the authoritative nameserver. I doubt
it's a lack of technical knowledge as much as it is lack of resources in what
amounts to a perfect storm (hot potato content, inherent DNS weakness,
scalability during surge of popularity, etc.).

~~~
wwortiz
I was coupling it with the fact that they used the same dns service that
previously dropped them.

------
Abid
"Amazon cuts them off, then says the Lieberman call had nothing to do with it.
We have no reason to doubt Amazon. It's consistent with their philosophy of
not taking sides in political battles."

Seriously? Is there some memo addressing this self-evident truth that I
missed? What Amazon did was politically expedient. That doesn't mean they
didn't take sides.

~~~
jerf
"We have no reason to doubt Amazon" != "It is clearly obvious that their
stated motivation is true." It's a claim that there isn't a lot of evidence
for the claim that Amazon has bowed to politics in the past, which is not the
same as saying that they didn't this time. I do not have enough evidence to
judge the claim myself, I'm just observing what you're reading the text as is
not what it says.

I would also point out that large service hosts also have a vested interest in
resisting government intrusions, because it's bad for Amazon to have a
reputation of trashing your service every time some government somewhere
burbles something to them. Exactly how "expedient" this is overall is actually
a tricky thing to judge and the evidence isn't all one-sided. Again, I don't
have enough information to judge.

------
guelo
What I don't understand is EveryDNS's claim that the DDoS was affecting them.
Why would the bots be making repeated DNS requests? It seems like an efficient
bot would cache the IP in order to speed up the flood.

~~~
wmf
Is the DoS targeted against WikiLeaks or EveryDNS? Attackers have been known
to target DNS servers instead of HTTP servers if that's the weakest point.

------
pyre
Saying that a torrent can't be DDoS'd is wrong. The tracker can be DDoS's and
DHT doesn't seem (at least to me) to be as good at distribution as using a
tracker.

~~~
cryptoz
I'm sure that there are at least 10 - 20 _different_ trackers, though, that
are tracking this torrent. If they all disappear, more will pop up.

~~~
borism
the problem with official cablegate torrents is that there are very few
trackers in them and DHT is reportedly disabled. Not sure why they did it this
way.

------
Estragon
At the end a respondant mentions a torrent offering the wikileaks information.
Anyone got a link to it? I am having trouble finding it.

~~~
Estragon
Found it: [http://www.alivetorrents.com/torrent/9087183/wikileaks-
cable...](http://www.alivetorrents.com/torrent/9087183/wikileaks-
cablegate-20101203-mirror)

~~~
Groxx
size: 8.50mb

I doubt that's all of it.

~~~
Estragon
No, it's about 0.25% of it by number of cables released, to be precise.

------
known
<http://bit.ly/WiKiLeaks>

------
known
<http://goo.gl/fGrjo>

