Julian Assange's Swiss bank account closed - The Guardian

According to reports, Scotland Yard had received the paperwork required to arrest Julian Assange over allegations in Sweden. Photograph: Lennart Preiss/AP

The international pressure on Julian Assange increased today after the banking arm of the Swiss post office announced that it had closed the WikiLeaks founder's account because he had given "false information".

"PostFinance has ended its business relationship with … Julian Paul Assange," the bank said in a statement.

"The Australian citizen provided false information regarding his place of residence during the account opening process."

It said that although Assange had given his residence as an undisclosed address in Geneva, he could offer no proof of being a Swiss resident.

WikiLeaks had advertised the PostFinance account details online to "donate directly to the Julian Assange and other WikiLeaks Staff Defence Fund," giving an account name of "Assange Julian Paul, Geneve".

A spokesman for the bank told the Associated Press the account was closed this afternoon, but added that there would be "no criminal consequences" for misleading authorities.

"That's his money, he will get his money back," he said. "We just close the account and that's it."

PostFinance is the latest institution to sever its ties with Assange and WikiLeaks. Last week, Amazon.com withdrew its hosting of WikiLeaks' cables site and the WikiLeaks.org domain was taken offline by Everydns.net. On Saturday, PayPal, which is owned by the auction website eBay, froze WikiLeaks' account, saying it was being used for "illegal" activity.

It was also reported this afternoon that Scotland Yard had received the paperwork required to arrest Assange over allegations of sexual assault in Sweden.

But the Metropolitan police declined to comment on the claim, attributed by Press Association to unnamed sources.

Swedish prosecutors have sent an international arrest warrant to the Met, seeking the extradition of Assange for questioning on allegations – which he strongly denies – of rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion.

Jennifer Robinson, one of his lawyers, said his legal team had heard nothing from the police to suggest that their client's arrest was imminent.

Assange, who is staying in Britain, has come under criticism from politicians in the US and around the world after his site started publishing excerpts from a cache of more than 250,000 secret US diplomatic cables last week.

Another of Assange's lawyers, Mark Stephens, yesterday denounced the extradition warrant as a "political stunt" and said his client would fight deportation to Sweden on the grounds that it could lead to him being handed over to the US, where senior politicians have called for him to be executed.

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MIT: Light Speed Now a Bottleneck in Fastest Networks - PC World

With global networks carrying complex time-sensitive data, the speed of light is actually becoming a significant source of latency, researchers have found.

While today's fiber optics-based networks can shuttle data around the world at the speed of light -- momentarily slowed only by routing and switching -- the vast geographic distances data has to travel can be a factor of delay, especially when the information itself is generated so quickly by computers and is useful only within a very short time period. At least one industry, finance, is starting to chafe at this limit.

"For high frequency trading, light propagation delays are in many cases are the single largest limiting factor to taking advantage of arbitrage opportunities quickly," said study co-author Alexander Wissner-Gross, who a research affiliate of the MIT Media Laboratory and the founder of the Enernetics research consultancy.

As a result, the researchers recommend high frequency trading firms, as well as any organization that deals in complicated time-sensitive global interactions, take a hard look at where they locate their data centers. In other words, location really does matter.

"By positioning an intermediate node, there is the potential to partially skirt that light-speed delay," Wissner-Gross said.

The MIT work was recently published in the Physical Review E scientific journal. The subject, as well as the paper itself, will be the topic of one talk at the High Frequency Trading World conference, being held this week in New York.

High Frequency Trading (HFT) is the financial industry's short-hand term for how they use computers to analyze the market and rapidly buy and sell shares of stocks and other financial instruments. Such firms rarely refine their trading to only a single exchange, so by necessity they route information around the globe to different exchanges.

"There are many types of transaction that fundamentally depend on sources of information from multiple places around the earth," said study co-author Cameron Freer, who is a mathematics researcher at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (and was at MIT when the paper was written). Some finance firms, for instance, may trade against momentary price discrepancies between the London and New York exchanges.

Typically it takes about 50 milliseconds to send a message from New York to London. Placing a server in between the two could cut the speed of communication in half, Wissner-Gross reasoned, which may be enough time to take advantage of some momentary pricing discrepancy. The hyper-competitive finance industry will continue to cut transaction times wherever possible, which will make light-speed delays more pronounced in the years to come, the paper argues. Light travels at 299,792,458 meters per second, or about approximately 186,282 miles per second.

"As financial trading moves to higher frequencies , it will be more and more useful to organize both networks and the computers that sit on them in unique geographic ways that take advantage of the geographic positions of various stock exchanges in order to coordinate light speed trading between them," Wissner-Gross said.

The researchers came up with a general formula that an organization can use to derive the best location to sit in between multiple sources of information. They did not take into account delays inherent in networking due to equipment latencies, assuming an organization could factor these numbers into their own equations.

Using this formula, the researchers also triangulated the best locations in the world for locating servers that do high frequency trading across 52 exchanges worldwide. A few of the prime locations include spots in the middle of the ocean, or in small countries with as-of-yet underdeveloped communications infrastructures.

Ultimately, this sort of work may bring about new data center hotspots around the globe, the researchers predict. "Geography may be viewed as a new type of natural resource," Wissner-Gross said.

Freer maintains that this work would have implications for other organizations in addition the hyper-fast financial market.

"Any application where it is important for you to coordinate in multiple locations in a low latency way, and the reason you need those latencies because situations can change rapidly at those locations. Our treatment is quite flexible and deals with a large class of systems that are fluctuating in multiple locations and where coordination is necessary," Freer said.

Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com

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US steps up pressure on China to rein in North Korea - Washington Post

The United States has stepped up diplomatic pressure on China by accusing its leaders of "enabling" North Korea to start a uranium-enrichment program and to launch attacks on South Korea, a senior U.S. administration official said this weekend.

In response to the North Korean moves and apparent Chinese acquiescence, Washington is moving to redefine its relationship with South Korea and Japan, potentially creating an anti-China bloc in Northeast Asia that officials say they don't want but may need.

In meetings with their Chinese counterparts in Beijing and in Washington since North Korea launched a deadly artillery barrage at a South Korean island on Nov. 23, U.S. officials have charged that China is turning a blind eye to North Korean violations of U.N. Security Council resolutions, international agreements and a 1953 armistice halting the Korean War that China helped to negotiate.

The accusations mark a further deterioration of the tone and direction of the U.S. relationship with Asia's emerging giant and come as both countries prepare for a second summit next month between President Obama and his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao.

"The Chinese embrace of North Korea in the last eight months has served to convince North Korea that China has its back and has encouraged it to behave with impunity," said a senior administration official speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. "We think the Chinese have been enabling North Korea."

The Korean Peninsula, the official added, has catapulted to the "top of the security agenda when President Hu comes here . . . and the Chinese are aware of it."

Obama called Hu on Sunday night to discuss North Korea and urged China to help send a clear message to Pyongyang "that its provocations are unacceptable," the White House said Monday.

"The president emphasized the need for North Korea to halt its provocative behavior and to meet its international obligations," the White House said. "The president condemned the North Korean shelling of a South Korean island on November 23 and its pursuit of a uranium enrichment program in defiance of its obligations." It said Obama "also highlighted the American commitment to the security of our allies in the region."

The White House statement said Obama and Hu agreed on the importance of working together toward the "shared goals" of peace and stability in Northeast Asia and the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. But it made no mention of Hu's response to Obama's complaints about North Korea."

A Chinese statement on the phone call said Hu "regrets the loss of lives and property" in the North Korean shelling last month. It was the first such comment from Hu about the attack, but it echoed an earlier North Korean expression of regret for killing civilians.

The U.S. exasperation with China over the Koreas has been evident since June, when Obama accused China of "willful blindness" in remaining silent over North Korea's suspected sinking of a South Korean warship in March. But the administration's position now that China is in effect partially to blame for the problems is new.

At a meeting Monday with the foreign ministers of Japan and South Korea, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton hopes to begin the process of tightening the three-way relationship, as a response to the persistent North Korean provocations and China's inaction. The United States and South Korea announced Friday the successful renegotiation of their free-trade agreement, which will be as important strategically as it is economically to the U.S. presence in the region.

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