Cyberattackers Focus on Enemies of WikiLeaks’s Assange

A small army of activist hackers orchestrated a broad campaign of cyberattacks on Wednesday in support of the beleaguered antisecrecy organization WikiLeaks, which has drawn governmental criticism from around the globe for its release of classified American documents and whose founder, Julian Assange, is being held in Britain on accusations of sex offenses.

Targets included Mastercard.com, which stopped processing donations for WikiLeaks; Amazon.com, which revoked server space from the group; the online payment service PayPal, which cut off its commercial cooperation; the lawyer representing the two Swedish women who have accused Mr Assange in the sex case; and PostFinance, the Swiss postal system’s financial arm, which closed Mr Assange’s account after saying he provided false information by saying that he resided in Switzerland — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Don’t shoot messenger for revealing uncomfortable truths

In 1958 a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide’s The News, wrote: In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win.

His observation perhaps reflected his father Keith Murdoch’s expose that Australian troops were being needlessly sacrificed by incompetent British commanders on the shores of Gallipoli. The British tried to shut him up but Keith Murdoch would not be silenced and his efforts led to the termination of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.

Nearly a century later, WikiLeaks is also fearlessly publishing facts that need to be made public — via redwolf.newsvine.com

US condemns Rudd

The US regards the Foreign Affairs Minister, Kevin Rudd, as an abrasive, impulsive ”control freak” who presided over a series of foreign policy blunders during his time as prime minister, according to a series of secret diplomatic cables.

The scathing assessment, detailed in messages sent by the US embassy in Canberra to the secretaries of state Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton over several years, are among hundreds of US State Department cables relating to Australia obtained by WikiLeaks and made available exclusively to the Herald. — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Foodtubes Proposes Underground ‘Physical Internet’

A group of academics is proposing a system of underground tunnels which could deliver food and other goods in all weathers with massive energy savings.

The Foodtubes group wants to put goods in metal capsules 2m long, which are shifted through underground polyethylene tubes at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour, directed by linear induction motors and routed by intelligent software to their destinations — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Twitter Appears to Censor Wikileaks-Related Trends

I’m (was?) a Twitter user. This past week I found it utterly weird that none of the words #wikileaks, #cablegate, #cables, #Assange were actually trending. I even tweeted about this 5 days ago. Today, my fears of secret censorship seem to be coming true. It appears that Twitter is censoring all these words, so they don’t appear in the (much-used) Twitter trends list. Update 1: A Twitter staffer replied to the blog post saying that their trending algorithm doesn’t always result to the most popular terms. Update 2: More investigation about what might be going on — via redwolf.newsvine.com