Infowar

2010-12-07T13:03:00+00:00

Unless you have been living under a rock the last week you cannot have missed the latest wikileaks data dump. This iteration of leaks had lead to what could possibly be described as the Internets first Infowar. Aside from the predictable Denial of Service attacks there has also been political pressure on hosting providers and sources of funding for the organisation. The most effective act so far was EasyDNS dropping support so wikileaks.org no longer resolves to IP address. This makes it a lot harder for non-technical people to find the raw data even though the servers are still up.

The response has been predictable, the Wikileaks site has now been massively mirrored making suppression of the data a game of whack-a-mole. It's also trivially simple to setup a redirect to Wikileaks' real IP address.

Perhaps realising that technical measures aren't going to stop the spread of information there has also been an intense focus on Wikileaks founder and front-man Julian Assange. By far the most public face of the organisation he has faced calls for extra-judicial assassination as well as rather nonsensical treason charges. This includes the rather unprecedented Interpol involvement resulting in his arrest for questioning on rape allegations. It's certainly the story that keeps on giving.

There are some problems with the current raging war. The mirroring system used by wikileaks is akin to giving some random unidentified stranger the keys to your front door. Without a domain name they can't effectively use SSL so you can be positive the site your talking to is Wikileaks and not some false flag operation. Without digital signatures for the mirrored data you can't be sure that what your reading hasn't been tampered with by that host. It will be interesting if they ever mirror the site on Freenet and we can find out exactly how censorship resistant it is. However these are all peripheral to the main story. We are watching Internet history unfold.

A few paragraphs

2010-07-26T10:33:00+01:00

There are a number of potential topics for blog posts swirling in my brain which I'm not going to have time to write. I shall therefor attempt to address each on in paragraph form (Twitter style is a little too brief for me).

We were at Maelstrom this weekend. We splashed out for a van so we could take our proper IC tent to the event which we also slept in. Although our normal sleeping tent is quite spacious the IC tent is a lot more so and benefits from not broiling you in your sleeping bag when the sun rises.

I tried Google's Navigation mode on my software pimped up Hero. I can see why the shares in TomTom and Garmin shares fell so sharply on it's announcement. I particularly liked the street view picture that's presented at the end of the journey for extra confirmation. I predict the era of the dedicated GPS road navigation unit is coming to an end - to be replaced by multi-functional smart phone type data pads.

I awoke this morning to the latest Wikileaks data dump as reported by the Guardian. I can understand why the armed forces are upset about this but it's really an OpSec fail on their part that someone can extract that much data from their systems. Going after Wikileaks will ultimately be a futile exercise. Also baring a live twitter feed of current manoeuvres I'm not sure there should be an expectation of secrecy for historical military data. Transparency is coming to government which I think is a good thing, why not the military? At the same time we need to take some steps to educate the public on the limits of data. If people consider an entry in a database as equating to actual truth on the ground they are going to find themselves disappointed.

We watched the latest Grand Moff/Gatiss collaboration on TV last night. Although the final third had us shouting at the TV for the slowness of the protagonists to put two and two together overall we liked it. The text overlays were fun and the writing has done a good job of bringing the characters forward into the 21st century. We shall be watching the rest of the series.

Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn - wikileaks

Infowar

A few paragraphs