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‘Chaos’ at WikiLeaks Follows Assange Arrest
Amplify’d from www.wired.com
‘Chaos’ at WikiLeaks Follows Assange Arrest
The arrest without bail of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Tuesday has left the organization in a state of uncertainty, despite transition plans laid out prior to his surrender to British police, according to one dispirited WikiLeaks activist who spoke to Threat Level on condition of anonymity.
Assange left Icelandic television journalist Kristinn Hrafnsson in charge of the group in his absence, the activist said. But now the embattled organization’s secrecy and compartmentalization are apparently hindering its operations.
Specifically, midlevel WikiLeaks staffers have been mostly cut off from communicating with hundreds of volunteers whose contact information was stored in Assange’s private online-messaging accounts, and never shared with others.
“There is an ongoing plan, but that plan was only introduced to a few staffers — key staffers,” explained the source. “We are experiencing chaos.”
WikiLeaks was scrambling to produce a statement in a dozen languages Tuesday to address Assange’s arrest.
Assange appeared in Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London Tuesday. The judge cited Assange’s itinerant lifestyle and denied him bail, despite the fact that he turned himself in.
The arrest came nine days after WikiLeaks began publishing from its cache of more than 250,000 leaked U.S. State Department diplomatic cables, which are trickling out at a rate of about a hundred a day.
That publication schedule will continue uninterrupted, according to a tweet on WikiLeaks’ Twitter feed following Assange’s detention. “Today’s actions against our editor-in-chief Julian Assange won’t affect our operations: We will release more cables tonight as normal,” read one message. A second tweet added: “Let down by the UK justice system’s bizarre decision to refuse bail to Julian Assange. But #cablegate releases continue as planned.”
Assange “is accused by the Swedish authorities of one count of unlawful coercion, two counts of sexual molestation and one count of rape, all alleged to have been committed in August 2010,” British police said.
Assange indicated in court that he would fight extradition to Sweden, according to reports. He is set to appear in court again Dec. 14.
Charismatic and driven, Assange has been WikiLeaks’ public face and prime mover for four years. It was Assange who personally managed the site’s most important leaker — Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, according to Manning’s conversations with the ex-hacker who turned him in.
And when Assange’s autocratic leadership style was challenged by some staffers last year, he described his importance to the organization in no uncertain terms. “I am the heart and soul of this organization, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organizer, financier and all the rest.”
His absence, says the source, is being felt acutely. “The organization will most likely start to fall apart now.”
Photo: Kristinn Hrafnsson of Wikileaks
Lennart Preiss/AP
Kevin Poulsen is a senior editor at Wired.com and editor of the award-winning Threat Level blog. His new book on cybercrime, KINGPIN, comes out February 22, 2011 from Crown.
Follow @kpoulsen on Twitter.
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Tubeify Turns YouTube Into Slick Video Jukebox
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Tubeify Turns YouTube Into Slick Video Jukebox
A new streaming music service called Tubeify turns YouTube into an easy-to-use video jukebox.
“I tried to make it feel more like a traditional desktop music player, think iTunes or Spotify, but still web-based so you can use it anywhere,” said Tubeify creator Tomas Isdal in an interview with TorrentFreak. “Then I fixed the annoying parts of YouTube and added stuff that I always wanted in a music player.”
Isdal’s wish list resulted in a free music player with a user-friendly interface. Since Tubeify subjects users to YouTube’s hit-and-miss audio quality, it might feel a little like a poor-man’s Spotify. But it’s addictive enough to waste a few hours exploring.
With search functionality handled by the Last.fm API, Tubeify allows for quick assembly of playlists, which can be shared. The web-based service also taps into Billboard.com’s API to serve up lists from the current music charts; a cool “time travel” feature lets you explore chart-topping songs from any particular week since 1964. (Wired.com has a particular fondness for the sixth week in 1981.)
Get a Tubeify invite now and give the service a try.
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Righthaven Expands Troll Operation With Newspaper Giant
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Righthaven Expands Troll Operation With Newspaper Giant
Copyright troll Righthaven, which sues blogs and websites for posting newspaper content without permission, is making good on its promise to expand its reach, and is now working on behalf of the nation’s second-biggest news chain.
Las Vegas–based Righthaven was formed this spring for the sole purpose of acquiring copyrights and suing to financially benefit from allegedly misappropriated intellectual property. It has filed more than 180 suits on behalf of Stephens Media’s Las Vegas Review-Journal, and has now begun suing on behalf of Denver-based MediaNews Group, which owns the San Jose Mercury News, the Denver Post and about two dozen other outlets.
Righthaven’s initial lawsuit on behalf of the Denver Post, first reported by the Las Vegas Sun, came three weeks after the paper published online a “notice to readers about Denver Post copyright protections.” The five-paragraph notice said the newspaper’s work “is illegally reproduced everyday on websites across the country.” The company wrote it was acceptable for blogs to “reproduce no more than a headline and up to a couple of paragraphs or summary of the story.”
MediaNews chief Dean Singleton, also chairman of the Associated Press, did not immediately respond for comment. Sara Glines, a MediaNews vice president, likewise did not return a telephone call.
Steve Gibson, Righthaven’s chief executive, said in a brief telephone interview that “We have a substantial number of clients and business relationships that you’ll be seeing additional activity with.” He said he believes his business model will help the media capitalize on their content.
Its suit on behalf of MediaNews targets lowcountry912.com, a blog on national and local politics. The site did not immediately respond for comment. The blog is accused of running (.pdf) an entire Denver Post column in September, titled “Rosen: A Letter to the Tea Partyers.”
In some of its previous lawsuits, Righthaven sued over the reposting of a few paragraphs from a news article, even when the post was done by a user on a discussion board. Righthaven changed the tactic after suffering a courtroom defeat in a Review-Journal lawsuit last month.
Righthaven has settled more than 70 of its cases out of court. Terms have not been not made public.
Photo: Righthavenlawsuits.com
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Microsoft Builds Online Tracking Blocking Feature Into IE9
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Microsoft Builds Online Tracking Blocking Feature Into IE9
By Ryan Singel
The new feature, called “Tracking Protection,” will be bundled into IE9’s next beta release early next year, and is intended to give users control over what widgets and scripts display — and pull in data — when they visit a given website.
The announcement comes just a week after the Federal Trade Commission castigated the online-ad industry for not regulating itself and dragging its feet on being transparent with users about the data they collect and how they use it.
The FTC also called for browser makers to build a “do not track” feature that, when turned on, would send a “no tracking, please” message to every website you visit. While the FTC lacks the authority to force companies to obey the flag, it called on advertisers to comply, with the veiled threat that it could get the power from Congress, if need be.
IE9’s Tracking Protection feature would work differently, by blocking websites and third-party plug-ins outright. People who wanted the blocks could subscribe to a “tracking protection list.” So, for instance, if the blocking list you subscribe to bans Google’s Analytics tracking service or Facebook’s Like button when you visit a webpage using those features, your browser will simply not load them and pass no information to those companies.
“These are complementary approaches, and different ways to get to the same goal of helping consumers block tracking,” said Dean Hachamovitch, the company’s vice president in charge of IE development. “This path is different in that it actually blocks the tracking now.”
Hachamovitch, along with the company’s top privacy strategist Peter Cullen, announced the feature in a webcast for reporters at the same time Google was unveiling the Chrome web store and Chrome OS. Microsoft has tried to portray itself as better on privacy than Google, which many fear knows too much about them.
Tracking protection lists can be created by anyone and published on the web, using a format that Microsoft is publishing under a Creative Commons license. So, anyone is free to make a list and other browser makers could use the lists as well, without infringing on Microsoft’s intellectual property.
The service will be turned off by default in the browser, but once it is on, users can choose to subscribe to a list, and when the creator updates the list, the browser will automatically sync with it. Lists can include both approved and verboten sites.
Microsoft said it will not ship IE9 with any lists built-in, and hopes to see a wide swath of groups and individuals create lists.
The feature is likely to be controversial for ad and tracking firms, which argue that much of the internet’s free services are dependent upon targeted advertising. Third-party advertising and tracking systems use cookies and JavaScript to watch what users do and read around the web in order to build a profile of interests about you, with the hopes of showing sports fans and knitting fanatics different ads.
Plug-ins from third parties have become increasingly popular in the last few years, and when you visit a news story on Wired.com or the Wall Street Journal your browser will load in ads, cookies, tracking beacons, content, commenting systems and scripts from sometimes dozens of third-parties.
For the most part, these tracking systems don’t know who you are, and simply create a unique ID, such as ADT187423, which it associates with that browser. Data collected over time is used to build up profiles by making guesses about you, to prevent you from seeing the same ad over and over, and to let websites understand how much traffic they get and how loyal their visitors are.
Current tools for preventing such tracking include using opt-out cookies for third-party advertising networks, browser plug-ins and, for hard-core geeks, using the computer’s host list to explicitly block sites they do not want their computer to connect to.
IE9’s new feature is most like the latter, but simplifies the process by making it easy to subscribe to other people’s lists and keep them updated over time.
One other key difference, however, is that when you visit a website, IE9 will pass along the information that you are using a “tracking protection list” to that site, which can then prompt you to unblock certain features, or even decide not to show you a news story until you do.
It’s unclear yet if the new feature will be so easy to use and widely adopted that it creates an arms race between advertisers and users.
History suggests not. Google, for instance, puts links on its display ads that take users to a page that lets them see their advertising profile, edit it and opt out if they like. But Google says that the small percentage of its massive user base who visit the page generally don’t opt out.
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