WikiLeaks' resilience shows strength of Internet-age lifelines - Washington Post

Over the past several days, the anti-secrecy Web site WikiLeaks has been hit with a series of blows that have seemed to threaten its survival. Its primary Web address was deactivated, its PayPal account was frozen, and its Internet server gave it the boot.

The result: WikiLeaks is now stronger than ever, at least as measured by its ability to publish online.

Blocked from using one Internet host, WikiLeaks simply jumped to another. Meanwhile, the number of "mirror" Web sites - effectively clones of WikiLeaks' main contents pages - grew from a few dozen last week to 200 by Sunday. By early Wednesday, the number of such sites surpassed 1,000.

At the same time, WikiLeaks' supporters have apparently gone on the offensive, staging retaliatory attacks against Internet companies that have cut ties to the group amid fears they could be associated with it. On Wednesday, hackers briefly shut down access to the Web sites for MasterCard and Visa, both of which had announced they had stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks' long-term survival depends on a number of unknowns, including the fate of its principal founder, Julian Assange, who is being held in Britain while awaiting possible extradition to Sweden related to sexual-assault allegations. But the Web site's resilience in the face of repeated setbacks has underscored a lesson already absorbed by more repressive governments that have tried to control the Internet: It is nearly impossible to do.

Experts, including some of the modern online world's chief architects, say the very design of the Web makes it difficult for WikiLeaks' opponents to shut it down for more than a few hours.

"The Internet is an extremely open system with very low barriers to access and use," said Vint Cerf, Google's vice president and the co-author of the TCP/IP system, the basic language of computer-to-computer communication over the Internet. "The ease of moving digital information around makes it very difficult to suppress once it is accessible."

Thus, despite the global uproar over the release of sensitive U.S. diplomatic cables, Assange's Web site remained defiantly intact Wednesday. Over the past week it has continued to publish a steady stream of leaked State Department documents with little visible evidence of injury from repeated, anonymous cyber-attacks or the multiple attempts to cut off its access to funding and Web resources.

By contrast, companies that have pulled the plug on WikiLeaks have suffered publicly, with cyber-attacks rendering their Web sites inaccessible or slow for hours at a time.

While a group of "hacktivists" targeted MasterCard and Visa - part of "Operation Payback," they called it - anonymous assailants have also in recent days attacked PayPal, which severed relations with WikiLeaks citing violations of its terms of service.

Web sites for Swedish prosecutors and a Swedish lawyer have also been hit, as has the banking arm of the Swiss postal service, which said it had frozen Assange's account, and even the Web site of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin.

WikiLeaks' seeming invulnerability is seen by experts as a demonstration of the power of new Web-based media to take on not only governments but also the traditional news media.

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WikiLeaks' resilience shows strength of Internet-age lifelines - Washington Post

Over the past several days, the anti-secrecy Web site WikiLeaks has been hit with a series of blows that have seemed to threaten its survival. Its primary Web address was deactivated, its PayPal account was frozen, and its Internet server gave it the boot.

The result: WikiLeaks is now stronger than ever, at least as measured by its ability to publish online.

Blocked from using one Internet host, WikiLeaks simply jumped to another. Meanwhile, the number of "mirror" Web sites - effectively clones of WikiLeaks' main contents pages - grew from a few dozen last week to 200 by Sunday. By early Wednesday, the number of such sites surpassed 1,000.

At the same time, WikiLeaks' supporters have apparently gone on the offensive, staging retaliatory attacks against Internet companies that have cut ties to the group amid fears they could be associated with it. On Wednesday, hackers briefly shut down access to the Web sites for MasterCard and Visa, both of which had announced they had stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks' long-term survival depends on a number of unknowns, including the fate of its principal founder, Julian Assange, who is being held in Britain while awaiting possible extradition to Sweden related to sexual-assault allegations. But the Web site's resilience in the face of repeated setbacks has underscored a lesson already absorbed by more repressive governments that have tried to control the Internet: It is nearly impossible to do.

Experts, including some of the modern online world's chief architects, say the very design of the Web makes it difficult for WikiLeaks' opponents to shut it down for more than a few hours.

"The Internet is an extremely open system with very low barriers to access and use," said Vint Cerf, Google's vice president and the co-author of the TCP/IP system, the basic language of computer-to-computer communication over the Internet. "The ease of moving digital information around makes it very difficult to suppress once it is accessible."

Thus, despite the global uproar over the release of sensitive U.S. diplomatic cables, Assange's Web site remained defiantly intact Wednesday. Over the past week it has continued to publish a steady stream of leaked State Department documents with little visible evidence of injury from repeated, anonymous cyber-attacks or the multiple attempts to cut off its access to funding and Web resources.

By contrast, companies that have pulled the plug on WikiLeaks have suffered publicly, with cyber-attacks rendering their Web sites inaccessible or slow for hours at a time.

While a group of "hacktivists" targeted MasterCard and Visa - part of "Operation Payback," they called it - anonymous assailants have also in recent days attacked PayPal, which severed relations with WikiLeaks citing violations of its terms of service.

Web sites for Swedish prosecutors and a Swedish lawyer have also been hit, as has the banking arm of the Swiss postal service, which said it had frozen Assange's account, and even the Web site of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin.

WikiLeaks' seeming invulnerability is seen by experts as a demonstration of the power of new Web-based media to take on not only governments but also the traditional news media.

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Factbox: Who is Liu Xiaobo? - Reuters

n">(Reuters) - China's official media accused the West of "launching a new round of China-bashing" ahead of Friday's awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to jailed dissident Liu Xiabao.

Here are some facts about Liu.

LIU AS DISSIDENT:

* Liu was prominent in the 1989 pro-democracy protests centered on Tiananmen Square that were crushed by armed troops, and was jailed for 20 months.

* In 1995, Liu orchestrated several daring petitions to parliament by groups of dissidents and intellectuals. He was held for more than seven months without formal charges.

* On September 30, 1996, Liu and veteran pro-democracy activist Wang Xizhe issued a statement urging the communist authorities to honor a promise in 1945 to give people religious freedom, freedom of the press and speech, and the freedom to form political parties and hold demonstrations.

* They demanded that Communist Party chief Jiang Zemin be indicted for violating the constitution for saying the Chinese army was under the "absolute leadership" of the party instead of the state.

* Within weeks, Liu was sentenced to three years in a labor camp.

MOST RECENT CONVICTION:

* In December 2008, he helped to organize the "Charter 08" petition, which called for sweeping political reforms. It was published on the 60th anniversary of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

* He was detained almost immediately and held for six months under house arrest.

* A group of prominent foreign academics, lawyers and writers including several Nobel laureates wrote to Chinese President Hu Jintao asking for Liu's release.

* In December 2009, Liu was jailed for 11 years for "inciting subversion of state power" for his role in the petition and for online essays critical of the Communist Party.

* The case and unusually harsh sentence drew protests from Western governments and rights activists at home and abroad.

* In May, Liu was moved to Jinzhou Prison in Liaoning, his home province.

LIFE DETAILS:

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Suicide gun killed ronni - New York Post

Slain Tinseltown publicist Ronni Chasen was gunned down in her Mercedes in an apparent botched robbery by a bike-riding ex-con who later blew his brains out with the same gun, cops revealed yesterday in the case's latest plot twist.

Ballistics tests show that the gun Harold Smith used to commit suicide last week matched the weapon from the Nov. 16 Chasen murder, Beverly Hills Police Chief David Snowden said.

"We believe that Mr. Smith acted alone" in killing Chasen, 64, said Snowden, while repeatedly pointing out the case remained open. "We don't believe it was a professional hit."

Splash News; Getty Images (below)CRUEL FATE: The gun that Harold Smith (above) used to kill himself matches the one used last month on Hollywood publicist Ronni Chasen, who was shot before crashing her Mercedes, police said.

Sgt. Michael Publicker added, "This was a random act of violence."

"With Mr. Smith's background, we most likely believe it was a robbery gone bad . . . Through the interviews and the information received, we believe he was at a desperate moment in his life, and was reaching out and doing desperate measures."

"It does not appear at this time that there's any connection between the two," Publicker said. "We believe that he was intending to rob her . . . We believe that his mode of transportation was by bicycle."

One scenario that cops are eyeing is that the lowlife Smith, 43, shot the well-coiffed Chasen several times through her car's passenger window, but had no chance to rob her because she hit the gas and sped off, Publicker said. She crashed a short distance away.

The stunning disclosure demolished a slew of often wild theories floated since Chasen was shot at around 12:30 a.m. as she drove home from the premiere of the movie "Burlesque."

Those include suggestions that the native New Yorker was the victim of a professional hit man or a drive-by gang shooting.

On Dec. 1, Beverly Hills cops visited a low-rent Hollywood apartment building after receiving a tip from "America's Most Wanted" that Smith, who had recently been evicted, bragged to neighbors about killing Chasen.

Smith, who served a decade in prison for robbery, whipped out a gun and shot himself after seeing cops.

Some news reports suggested Smith, whom cops had referred to only as "a person of interest," was lying, and killed himself because he feared going back to prison for a string of unrelated robberies. It was believed unlikely he would have been cycling through Beverly Hills in the middle of the night.

There were also reports several days ago that claimed ballistics tests on his gun -- whose make and caliber have still not been disclosed -- showed no connection to the Chasen murder.

But cops yesterday dismissed those accounts as being based on "erroneous information," and cited interviews and other undisclosed evidence to go along with the ballistics test to back up the latest theory of the Hollywood mystery.

Investigators are "probably 60 to 70 percent done with the probe," Publicker noted. "We want to eliminate every possibility that any other people were involved."

"There is a lot of information that still needs to be obtained," he said.

The unidentified tipster who called "America's Most Wanted" to report that Smith was claiming to be involved in Chasen's slaying may still get reward money in excess of $100,000, police said.

dan.mangan@nypost.com

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Apple's Steve Wozniak: 'We've lost a lot of control' - CNN

Wozniak: Past rebels, future programmersApple co-founder Steve Wozniak has hesitations about a tech-dominated societyWozniak carries five to 10 cell phones but expresses frustrations with unreliable productsHe has hand-picked several artifacts for an upcoming exhibit at the Computer History Museum

Mountain View, California (CNN) -- The world has mostly caught on to Steve Wozniak's vision of having a computer in every home. But this digital lifestyle can sometimes turn rotten, he said last week.

Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs and designed, programmed and built some of the world's first personal computers, laments the byproducts of a culture that's always connected to electronics.

Leading a tour through an exhibit of computer artifacts -- including giant supercomputers and Atari game systems -- that opens next month at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Wozniak paused to criticize the stranglehold technology has on our lives.

"We're dependent on it," he said at the museum, which holds one of the world's largest collections of vintage computers and sits about six blocks from Google's headquarters. "And eventually, we are going to have it doing every task we can in the world, so we can sit back and relax."

Wozniak's musings have undertones of science-fiction, drawing parallels between the internet and robots bent on taking over humanity.

"All of a sudden, we've lost a lot of control," he said. "We can't turn off our internet; we can't turn off our smartphones; we can't turn off our computers."

"You used to ask a smart person a question. Now, who do you ask? It starts with g-o, and it's not God," he quipped.

Earlier that day, Wozniak said the biggest obstacle with the growing prevalence of technology is that our personal devices are unreliable.

"Little things that work one day; they don't work the next day," he said enthusiastically, waving his hands. "I think it's much harder today than ever before to basically know that something you have ... is going to work tomorrow."

Reciting an all-too-common living-room frustration, Wozniak told a story about the countless hours he spent trying to troubleshoot his media player, called Slingbox.

"There is no solution," Wozniak said of tech troubles. "Everything has a computer in it nowadays; everything with a computer is going to fail. The solution is: kill the people who invented these things," he said with a smile.

Joking aside, by that logic, Wozniak should be target No. 1 on that hit list. He developed the Apple I, a hobbyist computer, and its more mainstream successors. His work jump-started the personal computer revolution.

As it happens, the museum exhibit is called "Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing." Wozniak, one of 52 fellows at the museum, was asked to hand-pick eight items on display.

"It's transformed our lives," Computer History Museum CEO John Hollar said of the personal computer. "It's transformed our cultures."

Wozniak, 60, the computer whiz whose Apple shares easily sustain his Segway-riding lifestyle, retired from full-time employment at Apple in 1987. But "the Woz" has remained in the spotlight, thanks to a turn as a "Dancing with the Stars" contestant in 2009 and a much-publicized relationship with comedian Kathy Griffin.

Last month, he appeared in London for the auction of a rare Apple I computer that sold for $213,000. One was also on display at the Computer History Museum.

During Wozniak's short-lived run on "Dancing with the Stars," gossip bloggers noted his short, portly frame and compared him to a teddy bear. In person, he comes off as kind, humble and patient -- although one of the few things that test his patience, it seems, is computers.

Despite his frustrations with gadgetry, Wozniak is still a gearhead. He says he carries five to 10 cell phones around with him at a given time. Sometimes he'll set up half a dozen of them, along with standalone GPS units, on his car's windshield, all navigating him to the same spot.

On Thursday, he had three: two iPhones (including an elusive white model that has yet to be sold in stores) and another running Google's Android operating system.

He is a voracious news consumer whose days are engrossed in "thousands of tech headlines." And Wozniak recently made headlines of his own.

In one, he compared Android to Microsoft's Windows and said that Google's system would eventually dominate the smartphone market. He echoed this sentiment to CNN.

"Apple likes to sit and control the whole user experience better, and it's a tradeoff," Wozniak said. "The Android platform might have the greater market share, but individually as a company, I'm sure Apple will probably wind up on top in mobile phones."

Wozniak also created some blogosphere buzz when he was quoted as saying Apple had acquired language-software maker Nuance, a tip that turned out to be incorrect. Last week, he made repeated mention to the similar company that Apple actually did buy, called Siri.

Wozniak appears most excited about these types of software, which interpret what you're saying and translate that into actions readable by computers.

"Eventually, we might just be wearing our computers like a watch and speaking to them," he said. (He's already there; he wears a touch-screen iPod Nano with a band around his wrist.) "Every step of the way, things get less in our way. It's less like the technology is there. It's more like our thoughts go directly into the actions that we want."

That's the ideal future, he said.

Technology romanticism aside, Wozniak says his favorite device is a laptop: the MacBook Pro.

His hesitations about the world's reliance on computers sometimes fade into fond memories of the early days of computing. The first Apple computer was a homebrew distributed for free.

"I didn't design this computer to make a lot of money," Wozniak said later when the tour stopped in front of the original Apple computer, a wooden and silicon contraption that's rough around the edges. "I wanted to accelerate the world's advancement in the social revolution that it would cause. So I gave away my designs for free.

"But eventually, Steve Jobs came and said, 'Why don't we build it for (consumers)?'" he continued. That was after his then-employer Hewlett-Packard "turned me down five times on the idea," he said.

Whether computers work all the time or not, the formula certainly worked to make Apple a wildly successful business. And it gives Wozniak time to observe the revolution he helped make.

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