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Leaked US cables reveal sensitive diplomacy (AP) : Technet |
- Leaked US cables reveal sensitive diplomacy (AP)
- Keys, Lady Gaga to sign off Twitter for charity (AP)
- 2010 Reliability and Service Survey: Desktops (PC World)
- 2010 Reliability and Service Survey: Smartphone and Wireless Providers (PC World)
- PayPal Sees Black Friday Payments Climb 27 Percent (PC Magazine)
- NJ anti-Facebook pastor to resume job in 90 days (AP)
- 2010 Reliability and Service Survey: HDTVs (PC World)
- 5 of the Best New User Experiences of 2010 (Mashable)
- New Angry Birds to land on Android for Xmas; plush toys coming soon (Appolicious)
- Apple Bans Android Magazine From App Store (PC Magazine)
- WikiLeaks says was denial-of-service attack victim (AP)
| Leaked US cables reveal sensitive diplomacy (AP) Posted: 28 Nov 2010 08:28 PM PST WASHINGTON – Hundreds of thousands of State Department documents leaked Sunday revealed a hidden world of backstage international diplomacy, divulging candid comments from world leaders and detailing occasional U.S. pressure tactics aimed at hot spots in Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea. The classified diplomatic cables released by online whistle-blower WikiLeaks and reported on by news organizations in the United States and Europe provided often unflattering assessments of foreign leaders, ranging from U.S. allies such as Germany and Italy to other nations like Libya, Iran and Afghanistan. The cables also contained new revelations about long-simmering nuclear trouble spots, detailing U.S., Israeli and Arab world fears of Iran's growing nuclear program, American concerns about Pakistan's atomic arsenal and U.S. discussions about a united Korean peninsula as a long-term solution to North Korean aggression. There are also American memos encouraging U.S. diplomats at the United Nations to collect detailed data about the U.N. secretary general, his team and foreign diplomats — going beyond what is considered the normal run of information-gathering expected in diplomatic circles. None of the revelations is particularly explosive, but their publication could prove problematic for the officials concerned. And the massive release of material intended for diplomatic eyes only is sure to ruffle feathers in foreign capitals, a certainty that prompted U.S. diplomats to scramble in recent days to shore up relations with key allies in advance of the disclosures. The documents published by The New York Times, France's Le Monde, Britain's Guardian newspaper, German magazine Der Spiegel and others laid out the behind-the-scenes conduct of Washington's international relations, shrouded in public by platitudes, smiles and handshakes at photo sessions among senior officials. The White House immediately condemned the release of the WikiLeaks documents, saying "such disclosures put at risk our diplomats, intelligence professionals, and people around the world who come to the United States for assistance in promoting democracy and open government." It also noted that "by its very nature, field reporting to Washington is candid and often incomplete information. It is not an expression of policy, nor does it always shape final policy decisions." "Nevertheless, these cables could compromise private discussions with foreign governments and opposition leaders, and when the substance of private conversations is printed on the front pages of newspapers across the world, it can deeply impact not only U.S. foreign policy interests, but those of our allies and friends around the world," the White House said. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley played down the spying allegations. "Our diplomats are just that, diplomats," he said. "They collect information that shapes our policies and actions. This is what diplomats, from our country and other countries, have done for hundreds of years." On its website, The New York Times said "the documents serve an important public interest, illuminating the goals, successes, compromises and frustrations of American diplomacy in a way that other accounts cannot match." In a statement released Sunday, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said, "The cables show the U.S. spying on its allies and the U.N.; turning a blind eye to corruption and human rights abuse in 'client states'; backroom deals with supposedly neutral countries and lobbying for U.S. corporations." Their release — the first in a series of planned releases over the next few months — "reveals the contradictions between the U.S.'s public persona and what it says behind closed doors," Assange said. The documents were again available on the WikiLeaks website Sunday afternoon. The site was inaccessible much of the day, and the group claimed it was under a cyberattack. But extracts of the more than 250,000 cables posted online by news outlets that had been given advance copies of the documents showed deep U.S. concerns about Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs along with fears about regime collapse in Pyongyang. The Guardian said some cables showed King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia repeatedly urging the United States to attack Iran to destroy its nuclear program. The newspaper also said officials in Jordan and Bahrain have openly called for Iran's nuclear program to be stopped by any means and that leaders of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt referred to Iran "as 'evil,' an 'existential threat' and a power that 'is going to take us to war,'" The Guardian said. Those documents may prove the most problematic because even though the concerns of the Gulf Arab states are known, their leaders rarely offer such stark appraisals in public. The Times highlighted documents that indicated the U.S. and South Korea were "gaming out an eventual collapse of North Korea" and discussing the prospects for a unified country if the isolated, communist North's economic troubles and political transition lead it to implode. The Times also cited diplomatic cables describing unsuccessful U.S. efforts to prod Pakistani officials to remove highly enriched uranium from a reactor out of fears that the material could be used to make an illicit atomic device. And the newspaper cited cables that showed Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, telling U.S. Gen. David Petraeus that his country would pretend that American missile strikes against a local al-Qaida group were from Yemen's forces. The paper also reported on documents showing the U.S. used hardline tactics to win approval from countries to accept freed detainees from Guantanamo Bay. It said Slovenia was told to take a prisoner if its president wanted to meet with President Barack Obama and said the Pacific island of Kiribati was offered millions of dollars to take in a group of detainees. It also cited a cable from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing that included allegations from a Chinese contact that China's Politburo directed a cyber intrusion into Google's computer systems as part of a "coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws."
 The Times said another batch of documents raised questions about Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his relationship with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. One cable said Berlusconi "appears increasingly to be the mouthpiece of Putin" in Europe, the Times reported. Italy's Foreign Minister Franco Frattini on Sunday called the release the "Sept. 11 of world diplomacy," in that everything that had once been accepted as normal has now changed. Der Spiegel reported that the cables portrayed German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle in unflattering terms. It said American diplomats saw Merkel as risk-averse and Westerwelle as largely powerless. Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, meanwhile, was described as erratic and in the near constant company of a Ukrainian nurse who was described in one cable as "a voluptuous blonde," according to the Times. The Obama administration has been bracing for the release for the past week. Top officials have notified allies that the contents of the diplomatic cables could prove embarrassing because they contain candid assessments of foreign leaders and their governments, as well as details of American policy. The State Department's top lawyer warned Assange late Saturday that lives and military operations would be put at risk if the cables were released. Legal adviser Harold Koh said WikiLeaks would be breaking the law if it went ahead. He also rejected a request from Assange to cooperate in removing sensitive details from the documents. In a session Sunday with a group of Arab journalists, Assange said, "The State Department understands that we are a responsible organization, so it is trying to make it as hard as it can for us to publish responsibly." He called the Obama administration "a regime that doesn't believe in the freedom of the press and doesn't act like it believes it." The New York Times said the documents involved 250,000 cables — the daily message traffic between the State Department and more than 270 U.S. diplomatic outposts around the world. The newspaper said that in its reporting, it attempted to exclude information that would endanger confidential informants or compromise national security. The Times said that after its own redactions, it sent Obama administration officials the cables it planned to post and invited them to challenge publication of any information they deemed would harm the national interest. After reviewing the cables, the officials suggested additional redactions, the Times said. The newspaper said it agreed to some, but not all. Also Sunday, the Pentagon released a summary of precautions taken since WikiLeaks published stolen war logs from the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since August, the Pentagon has changed the way portable computer storage devices such as flash drives can be used with classified systems, and made it harder for one person acting alone to download material from a classified network and place it on an unclassified one. ___ Associated Press staffers Anne Gearan in Washington, Juergen Baetz in Berlin, Don Melvin in London, Angela Doland in Paris, Robert H. Reid in Cairo, Brian Murphy in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Mark Lavie in Jerusalem and Nicole Winfield in Rome contributed to this report. ___ Online: |
| Keys, Lady Gaga to sign off Twitter for charity (AP) Posted: 28 Nov 2010 12:50 PM PST Alicia Keys and Lady Gaga take charity work seriously, and they're going offline to prove it. Gaga, Justin Timberlake, Usher and other celebrities have joined a new campaign called Digital Life Sacrifice on behalf of Keys' charity, Keep a Child Alive. The entertainers plan to sign off of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter on Wednesday, which is World AIDS Day. The participants will sign back on when the charity raises $1 million. "It's really important and super-cool to use mediums that we naturally are on," Keys said in a phone interview from New York last week. For the campaign — which also includes Jennifer Hudson, Ryan Seacrest, Kim and Khloe Kardashian, Elijah Wood, Serena Williams, Janelle Monae and Keys' husband, Swizz Beatz — celebrities have filmed "last tweet and testament" videos and will appear in ads showing them lying in coffins to represent what the campaign calls their digital deaths. "It's so important to shock you to the point of waking up," Keys said. "It's not that people don't care or it's not that people don't want to do something, it's that they never thought of it quite like that." The campaign, she said, puts the disease in perspective. "This is such a direct and instantly emotional way and a little sarcastic, you know, of a way to get people to pay attention," said Keys, who has more than 2.6 million followers on Twitter. The foundation, which began in 2003, will accept donations through text messages and bar-code technology, which is featured in the charity's Buy Life campaign. Raised efforts support families affected by HIV/AIDS in Africa and India. "We're trying to sort of make the remark: Why do we care so much about the death of one celebrity as opposed to millions and millions of people dying in the place that we're all from?" said Leigh Blake, the president and co-founder of Keep a Child Alive. "It's about love and respect and human dignity," she added. Keys said recruiting celebrities was difficult because of scheduling, but "once I got people on the phone and I was able to paint the concept for them, everybody was in." Not one person said no, Keys recalled. "I have a feeling that Gaga is going to raise it all by herself," Blake said. Lady Gaga has more than 7.2 million followers on Twitter, and nearly 24 million fans on Facebook. "She's got a very, very mobilized fan base and that's beautiful to watch I think (and) she's able to draw their attention to these issues that are very important, you know, and that people follow it and act." Keys is hoping more people — both famous folks and non-celebs — get involved once the new initiative launches: "It just doesn't have to be just because you're a celebrity or something like that. It can be anybody." Keys, 29, married rapper-producer Swizz Beatz in July. The two had their first son, Egypt, last month. The Grammy winner said that though her life's getting busier, being a mother and wife makes her want to help others even more. "As a human being, you deserve to have a chance at life," she said. ____ Online: |
| 2010 Reliability and Service Survey: Desktops (PC World) Posted: 28 Nov 2010 06:00 PM PST Surprise: Desktops are far less reliable than laptops these days. In this year's version of PCWorld's annual Reliability and Service Survey, 30.7 percent of survey respondents report having had a problem serious enough to render their desktop inoperable. Only 20 percent of laptop owners report such problems. When it comes to support, 1 in 5 desktop users (21 percent) report that their problem was never resolved by the manufacturer (with laptops, the rate is slightly higher at 23.4 percent). The three As--Apple, Asus, and Alienware—topped the desktop category. Alienware's impressive showing is good news for the Dell subsidiary, which builds high-end gaming rigs. Two years ago, Alienware customers reported a higher-than-average number of out-of-the-box problems. But this year they say the company's PCs are highly reliable. (We didn't get enough responses to include Alienware in last year's survey.) Apple had another stellar showing in our survey. Apple desktop users gave the company above-average ratings in all five of our reliability measurements, and in all four of our service measurements. And when Apple desktop owners do have problems, they're generally satisfied with the company's response. Just under 9 percent of Apple desktop users in our survey report their problem was never resolved by the company's support team, a figure significantly lower than the 21 percent industry average we found. HP, the largest seller of PCs in the United States, disappointed again this year, showing up at the bottom of the rankings for the reliability of its home desktops, and for its ability to support them. Dell, the second-largest seller of home PCs in the U.S., also earned poor marks in these areas. We discuss Dell and HP's general poor performance elsewhere. But saying that Dell and HP performed poorly in the home PC market doesn't tell the whole story. Both companies profit more from their business computer lines. So this year we separated Dell and HP business and home users in the laptop, desktop, and printer categories, in order to compare the satisfaction levels of the vendors' corporate and consumer customers. Not surprisingly, we found that Dell and HP business customers are far happier than Dell and HP home computer owners. Dell's professional PC users tell us that the manufacturer's support is relatively good at resolving problems, while its home customers say that Dell's problem-solving skills are mediocre at best. Similarly, the owners of Compaq and HP business notebooks seem far happier about the reliability of their machines than the owners of HP consumer laptops. Dell's desktop business systems earned one above-average grade and eight average grades in our nine reliability and service categories. Home desktops fared far worse with six below-average scores. The Tech Brands You Can Trust." In the main story of this package, we dig further into the question of why the two companies' home PC customers seem to fare so much poorer in both the quality of their machines and the quality of the support they receive. After reading this article, you may want to jump to PCWorld's Facebook page, where readers can add their own stories of product reliability and vendor service. |
| 2010 Reliability and Service Survey: Smartphone and Wireless Providers (PC World) Posted: 28 Nov 2010 06:00 PM PST Apple fans love the iPhone, but they're not particularly thrilled with AT&T, which at press time was the exclusive iPhone carrier in the United States. Readers rate AT&T last in voice call quality and data speed, while Verizon Wireless is the overall favorite. John Moncure, an iPhone 3G owner in South Carolina, says AT&T's 3G service is unreliable where he lives. "Sometimes walking from one side of the house to the other--and I live right downtown in the county seat--I lose connectivity," says Moncure, headmaster of a Montessori school in Camden, a small town of 7000 people. "I like the iPhone, it's a good machine. If it were available with all the providers, I would pick the provider that gave me the best service--and I don't think that's AT&T, not out here," he adds. Research In Motion (RIM) should take note that BlackBerry users aren't a happy lot either. RIM's widely used smartphone received below-average grades in nearly every reliability and usability category, although BlackBerrys arrive with few out-of-the-box problems. Nearly 1 in 3 BlackBerry users report at least one significant problem with their phone, compared with roughly 1 in 5 Motorola handset users. RIM has another serious issue to contend with: Younger consumers in their twenties tend to favor phones from Apple, HTC, and vendors that use Google's Android mobile operating system, according to a recent Yankee Group study. RIM's demographic skews a little higher--in the 30-plus range--mostly because a BlackBerry "tends to be used a lot in work environments," says Yankee Group mobile analyst Carl Howe. T-Mobile deserves kudos for its customer support. While the fourth-place wireless carrier's overall service rating is very close to its competitors' scores, the company excels in phone support, readers report. T-Mobile's average hold time is 4.6 minutes--significantly lower than the others, which have times ranging from 5.2 minutes (AT&T) to 6.1 minutes (Verizon). And 84 percent of T-Mobile customers report that they're satisfied with the voice call reliability of the carrier's network, second only to Verizon's 86.7 percent. (AT&T was a distant fourth with 72.8 percent, no doubt an indication of the dropped-call problems many iPhone users have reported.) We should also note that Motorola takes the honors in phone reliability. After reading this article, you may want to jump to PCWorld's Facebook page, where readers can add their own stories of product reliability and vendor service. The four charts below summarize our survey's findings on smartphone reliability by brand, wireless carriers' customer service, smartphone ease of use by brand, and satisfaction with wireless network service. For more on the measures used in the charts and the survey methodology, see "The Tech Brands You Can Trust ." |
| PayPal Sees Black Friday Payments Climb 27 Percent (PC Magazine) Posted: 27 Nov 2010 08:14 AM PST |
| NJ anti-Facebook pastor to resume job in 90 days (AP) Posted: 28 Nov 2010 05:04 PM PST |
| 2010 Reliability and Service Survey: HDTVs (PC World) Posted: 28 Nov 2010 06:00 PM PST Wander the television aisles at any consumer electronics store, and you'll see far more LCD sets than plasma sets. While the TV industry has pretty much standardized on LCD displays, which have a brighter picture and use less energy than plasmas, that doesn't mean that plasma is suddenly unpopular among its fans. Panasonic, one of the last plasma TV holdouts, topped a tightly packed group of HDTV manufacturers in our survey, edging out LG and Sony. While Panasonic's support is average, its plasma sets are very reliable and have few serious problems, readers say. In general, HDTV sets have a high level of reliability. For instance, just 8.5 percent of HDTV users report a significant problem with their sets, compared with 30.7 percent of desktop and 25.9 percent of laptop users. However, not all HDTV brands are equally reliable. Although just 1 in 20 Panasonic users report encountering a major glitch with their TVs, 1 in 4 Viewsonic TV owners in our survey report having such an issue. Russ Rizzuto owns a 50-inch Panasonic plasma and says he would "definitely" buy another. Since he hasn't had a single problem with the set, he hasn't had to contact the company's tech support. "I watch a lot of sports, and that's one of the reasons I wanted to go with the plasma," says Rizzuto, a sales executive in San Clemente, California. Mitsubishi users have few out-of-the-box issues; only 1.8 percent of them report a problem on arrival, on a par with the industry average. However, a surprisingly high 21.2 percent--more than twice the average--report at least one significant problem with their sets. Many of these gripes, though, pertain to the high cost ($90 to $300) of the replacement bulbs that Mitsubishi uses in rear-projection TVs. JVC, meanwhile, after rising to the middle of the pack a year ago, has slipped back toward the bottom, its users reporting a higher-than-average number of severe problems this year. After reading this article, you may want to jump to PCWorld's Facebook page, where readers can add their own stories of product reliability and vendor service. The chart below summarizes our survey's findings on HDTV reliability, by brand. For more on the measures used in the chart and the survey methodology, see "The Tech Brands You Can Trust." |
| 5 of the Best New User Experiences of 2010 (Mashable) Posted: 28 Nov 2010 09:49 AM PST As part of the ongoing Mashable Awards, we're taking a closer look at each of the nomination categories. This is "Best Website User Experience." Be sure to nominate your favorites and join us for the Gala in Las Vegas! When it comes to user experience, designers and developers must do much more than present their users with a "pretty face" web page. The user experience (UX) of a site or app involves much more than looks; the UX is something that lingers on after the user has left your site. It lies in ease of use, perceived value, whether desired goals were achieved and so much more. The user interface (UI) is only part of that larger experience, but it can contribute much to a user's impression of the app. In writing about the best web designs of 2010, form and function each played a large role in determining our choices. But when we think about user experience, function takes absolute precedence. What sites and apps were the most interesting, the most useful, the most innovative of the past year? In this post, we examine five groundbreaking new UX/UIs from 2010 and discuss how each one expands our expectations of the user experience.
1. QuoraOne of the earlier launches this year, Quora was a buzz-heavy private beta service in 2009. As a product of some of the best design minds at Facebook, the site was almost guaranteed to have an excellent UX from the start. We love Quora's elegant interactions. It looks simple; it prompts instant and easy engagement; and it takes the hide-and-seek elements of a Q&A site away, leaving the user with a trove of relevant information at his or her fingertips. We're not the only ones who love Quora's design. For a bit of meta navel-gazing, read this Quora Q&A on why people like Quora's design. Initially, another thing that made Quora's UX so excellent was the quality of its membership. Have a question about Facebook? A Facebooker would likely answer it. Questions about venture capital? Here are some actual investors to talk to you. Marketing? Ad execs were on the site, too.
2. HipmunkOne thing we loved about Hipmunk from the start is that it took a traditionally bad user experience -- airline flight search -- and made it into a good one. This startup reimagined the most important element of online flight search: how results are displayed. It took a convoluted, multi-entry/multi-exit process and made it simple to behold and linear to walk through, creating a user experience that is far from the stress-inducing nightmare flight search once was. The company has also hinted it will be turning its eyes toward other types of travel services soon, possibly hotel search. We can't wait. To get the big picture, check out the video above, and the excellent interview blogger Robert Scoble conducted with Hipmunk co-founder Steve Huffman.
3. Seesmic Desktop 2Seesmic launched a new iteration of its popular desktop app just a couple months ago. Dubbed Seesmic Desktop 2, the application also included an entire marketplace of plugins, making SD2 an all-in-one social media access point -- a great set of features for run-of-the-mill social media narcissists, as well as businesses that need more control and monitoring tools for their web efforts. Seesmic's Silverlight-built, Mac- and Windows-compatible product also came wrapped in a gorgeous and functional UI with elegant and subtle details, making it a joy to behold as well as a pleasure to use. During some turbulent times for third-party applications, Seesmic founder Loic LeMeur proved his very salient point: If you make a great product, build in great functionality, and give users a great experience, you can still build a business on someone else's platform.
4. FlipboardFlipboard launched this year as one of the first iPad apps that sought to reimagine social media for a new form factor. The tablet gave designers and developers a chance to think about lean-back, glossy, high-end design experiences. Of course, magazines had a heyday; their content is already almost a perfect fit for the iPad. But when you think about social media content -- those messy, spaghetti-like, intertwining and overlapping feeds of drama, irrelevance and the occasional gem -- you begin to see what a challenge the makers of Flipboard had on their hands. Could social media be both beautiful and functional on a tablet? Flipboard integrates personalized Twitter and Facebook feeds to build a social magazine for each user. In an initial review we called it "gorgeous and a pleasure to use," and the app has continued to rack up the platitudes from social media junkies around the web. Its core value proposition is more than just its beautiful, mag-like design; it makes the experience of reading social feeds simpler, faster and better.
5. RokuWithout a doubt, 2010 has been the first big year for Internet-connected living room devices. We've seen cool things in the past from PlayStation, Xbox and Boxee; however, 2010 brought something new: affordability and ease of entry. Roku's set-top boxes start at just $60; already priced to win. Each model also comes with built-in WiFi and they are easy to install -- they practically set themselves up. They connect to some of the most popular Internet content providers, including Netflix, MLB.tv and now Hulu, as well. The Roku UI is simple, clean, bright and intuitive; it reminds us of the more user-friendly gaming interfaces, like that of Nintendo's Wii. It's a design language that says, "I'm not technical; I'm fun." Very quickly, the design itself fades into the background and the content becomes all the user notices. In a word, Roku's UX is amazing because it makes something that was supposed to be complicated and scary (bringing Internet content to the living room) inexpensive, easy and a pleasure to use.
What Are Your Picks?Those are five of our favorite user experiences from 2010; we'd love to know what impressed you this year. In the comments, tell us about the apps, devices and websites that you've loved using throughout 2010 or nominate them for a Mashable Award.
The Mashable Awards Gala at Cirque du Soleil Zumanity (Vegas) |
| New Angry Birds to land on Android for Xmas; plush toys coming soon (Appolicious) Posted: 28 Nov 2010 01:24 PM PST |
| Apple Bans Android Magazine From App Store (PC Magazine) Posted: 28 Nov 2010 04:44 AM PST A magazine app from Danish company Mediaprovider has been rejected from Apple's App store because it featured exclusive content about the Android operating system, Media Watch has said. Although Google's platform is in competition with Apple's, it stirs up accusations that Apple's censorship is too far-reaching and hypocritical. There's already an Android news app available in the App Store called Androidworld Reader, as well as various apps that have content about other operating systems. But Mediaprovider's Brian Dixen told Media Watch that his app, Android Magasinet, was rejected primarily for its Android-focused content. "It's funny really because I don't think we would sell many magazines on Android through Apple App Store, but the question is where this is going," said Dixen, who thinks that Apple is too heavy-handed with its censorship. Dixen has had other apps published in the App Store with no problem, he said. Both iPhone Magasinet and Gear, apps that deal with iPhone info and news about consumer electronics respectively, are both available for download. Apple also blocks all apps that contain any kind of nudity, even those that are educational. This isn't the only area in which Apple has been criticized for its censorship. The iPhone ignores all language that Apple has deemed foul in text messages as well. Apple confirmed on Monday that its App Store now has more than 300,000 apps. That means that since the store's inception in 2008, more than seven billion apps have been downloaded. Both Apple and Google helped boost smartphone sales this year. Worldwide mobile device sales are up 35 percent this quarter. The Android platform is the number two operating system with about a 37 percent share of the market. iOS comes in at number three with about 16 percent of the market. |
| WikiLeaks says was denial-of-service attack victim (AP) Posted: 28 Nov 2010 05:00 PM PST The online website WikiLeaks on Sunday blamed the temporary outage of its site on a denial-of-service attack by unknown hackers trying to prevent its release of hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. State Department documents. WikiLeaks said on Twitter early Sunday that its website was "under a mass distributed denial of service attack" but promised that Spain's El Pais, France's Le Monde, Germany's Der Spiegel, Britain's Guardian newspaper and The New York Times "will publish many US embassy cables tonight, even if WikiLeaks goes down." WikiLeaks had given the media outlets prior access to the diplomatic cables to publish in conjunction with their Sunday release on its site. There was no reason to doubt WikiLeaks' claim; the website was inaccessible for much of Sunday, though several hundred cables were posted on its site by late afternoon. The cables, many of them classified, offer candid, sometimes unflattering assessments of foreign leaders, ranging from U.S. allies such as Germany and Italy to other nations like Libya, Iran and Afghanistan. In a typical denial-of-service attack, remote computers commandeered by rogue programs bombard a website with so many data packets that it becomes overwhelmed and unavailable to visitors. Pinpointing the culprits is impossible because the Internet's structure does not allow for the tracing back of the data packets used in such attacks, computer security expert Bruce Schneier told The Associated Press on Sunday. Hackers have used denial-of-service attacks over the years to target corporate and government websites. Last month political bloggers in Vietnam said they were victimized by cyberattacks designed to block their websites to stifle government dissent. Other targets have included U.S. and South Korean government websites in 2009 and computer networks in Estonia, which were crippled for nearly three weeks in 2007 by what were believed to be Russian hackers.
James Lewis, a cybersecurity expert and a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said it's unlikely the U.S. or some other government would use denial-of-service attacks against WikiLeaks. His best guess is it's "a bunch of geeks who've decided they're annoyed with WikiLeaks." "Denial of service is usually the amateur's approach," he told the AP on Sunday. "Usually it's the hacker community ..." Lewis said he's never heard of the U.S. trying to attack a website like this. "Usually they're more interested in exploiting, that is getting into WikiLeaks to figure out what's going on. Or they're interested in doing some kind of damage, and denial of service really doesn't do any damage." Such an attack would only stall WikiLeaks, not prevent the information from being released. Schneier also said he seriously doubts any U.S. government agency would be involved in such an attack because it amounts to a mere "nuisance" and could not stop Wikileaks from releasing the diplomatic cables. He notes that there are many ways to distribute information online. An encrypted file that was made available online using BitTorrent file-sharing technology in late July is believed to hold the cables. All Wikileaks would need to do to unlock the file is distribute the key. ___ AP Technology Writer Frank Bajak contributed to this report from Bogota, Colombia. AP Business Writer Chris Kahn contributed from New York. |
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