Thanks to ‘Dig’ for these two important stories. Founder of Wikileaks, the website attempting to break all world records for treason, has been denied asylum in Sweden, but granted it in Ecuador. The website also appears to be under DDOS attack. I’m shocked it took this long. The question remains, how much can he afford? The cost of protecting a web site from a meaningful DDOS attack can be quite high.
From BBC
Ecuador offers Wikileaks founder Assange residency
The Wikileaks founder is facing sexual assault allegations in Sweden – accusations that he strenuously deniesEcuador has offered Julian Assange, the founder of the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks, residency in the country.
Deputy Foreign Minister Kintto Lucas said his country’s government wanted to invite Mr Assange to Ecuador to give him the opportunity to speak publicly.
He said Ecuador was concerned about some of the alleged American activities revealed by Wikileaks.
Earlier this year Sweden refused an application from Mr Assange, who is Australian, for residency there.
“We are open to giving him residency in Ecuador, without any problem and without any conditions,” Mr Lucas said.
“We are going to try and invite him to Ecuador to freely present, not only via the internet, but also through different public forums, the information and documentation that he has,” he said.
Mr Lucas added: “We think it would be important not only to converse with him but also to listen to him.”
Wikileaks says it has more than 1,600 cables that originated from the US embassy in the Ecuadorian capital, Quito, the contents of which have not yet been disclosed.
Mr Lucas said Ecuador was “very concerned” by information revealed by Wikileaks linking US diplomats with spying on friendly governments.
He said the offer to Mr Assange would not affect relations between Ecuador’s left-leaning government and the US.
On Monday, the authorities in Australia said they were looking into whether Mr Assange had broken any laws there.
Brazilian revelations
The Spanish paper El Pais says that, according to a secret cable released by Wikileaks, US intelligence operatives wanted to know whether the Argentine president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, was taking medication to deal with her “nerves and stress”.
There is more at the BBC link please click through the top link for the rest. Meanwhile, Wikileaks is experiencing a DDOS attack of TEN GIGABYTES/SECOND. This is not a trivial thing.
WikiLeaks under new cyber attack: Twitter feed
WikiLeaks said in a Twitter message on Tuesday that it was under a new cyber attack after a similar incident at the weekend just before the website began releasing secret US diplomatic cables.
“We are currently under another DDoS attack,” WikiLeaks said on its official Twitter feed.
DDoS stands for distributed denial of service. Classic DDoS attacks occur when legions of “zombie” computers, normally machines infected with viruses, are commanded to simultaneously visit a website.
Such a massive onslaught can overwhelm servers, slowing service or knocking it offline completely.
A later message on the WikiLeaks twitter said “DDoS attack now exceeding 10 Gigabits a second.”
On Sunday, just as it began the release of some 250,000 US embassy cables, WikiLeaks said on Twitter the website had come under a DDoS cyber attack.
But it insisted El Pais, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, The Guardian and the New York Times would go ahead with the publication of the first of such documents even if the WikiLeaks website was down.
WikiLeaks later circumvented the attack by creating a sub-website — http://cablegate.wikileaks.org — as its main website — http://wikileaks.org — became inaccessible after the attack.
As of 1600 GMT on Monday, both websites were still online.
© 2010 AFP
This story is sourced direct from an overseas news agency as an additional service to readers. Spelling follows North American usage, along with foreign currency and measurement units.
The man has broken a lot of laws and should be arrested for espionage, I say espionage and not treason because he isn’t an American citizen and thus can’t commit treason against us. However in the many columns I have read about this mess the ones I find the most interesting are those that say Obama orchestrated the leaks to damage Hillary so she can’t run against him in 2012. Other then that the information released is interesting but generally know to anyone with brains.
The only thing that shocks me is the reaction of people about the idea that the US diplomats are working to get information about the diplomats and leaders of foreign nations! I thought that was their job?
As ye sow, so shall ye reap. I have no sympathy for this full of himself. pompous fool.
And he is hiding from Sweden who wants him on rape charges, nice guy isn’t he?