Posts by Sacha
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to Seriatim,
of whom I've never heard) is clearly... I can only presume
Sterling logic there
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Guardian analyses cables about Copenhagen climate change negotiations and the US pushing of a weaker accord.
Negotiating a climate treaty is a high-stakes game, not just because of the danger warming poses to civilisation but also because re-engineering the global economy to a low-carbon model will see the flow of billions of dollars redirected.
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After the Copenhagen summit, further linking of finance and aid with political support appears. Dutch officials, initially rejecting US overtures to back the accord, make a startling statement on 25 January. According to a cable, the Dutch climate negotiator Sanne Kaasjager "has drafted messages for embassies in capitals receiving Dutch development assistance to solicit support [for the accord]. This is an unprecedented move for the Dutch government, which traditionally recoils at any suggestion to use aid money as political leverage." Later, however, Kaasjager rows back a little, saying: "The Netherlands would find it difficult to make association with the accord a condition to receive climate financing."Wonder if McCully's aligining of NZAID with political objectives has produced any similar linkages?
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Murdoch's The Australian magazine gets all defensive about Twitter in the wake of suing an academic for tweeting a conference presentation by a journalist about the rag's editorial position on climate change. How dare those Greens supporters not repeat our party line through new media channels we can't control!
Clearheaded readers would find it ridiculous to conclude that The Australian does not believe in climate change. Long before Kyoto, we were convinced by the evidence that the climate was changing and have argued consistently in favour of a market-based mechanism to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
Unlike the Greens, however, we take a mainstream, techno-centric approach, which contends that the solution will require human ingenuity, informed by science, using the many tools available in a modern, industrial society. The Greens on the other hand take an eco-centric approach, asserting that the imminent and unavoidable catastrophe requires a radical reorganisation of our society and economy.
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The hothouse environment of Twitter has become a breeding ground for falsehoods that quickly become received wisdom with repeated telling. Twitter's broken promise was that it would widen debate by connecting citizens on this vast continent in all their glorious diversity. But tweeters, like the rest of us, gravitate towards like-minded souls, splitting the twitterverse into discrete affirmative conversations in which truth is the first casualty and conspiracy theories flourish. The assumption of some social networkers that libel laws do not apply to them may soon be tested in the courts unless an alternative settlement can be found to a dispute between the editor-in-chief of The Australian and a Canberra academic. The Australian welcomes fair criticism, and indeed is happy to publish it, but falsehoods should never be disguised as comment and cannot go uncorrected. If new media aspires to compete with traditional broadcasters and publishers, it must abide by the same civil codes .
Ultimately, what is at stake, however, is not the reputation of The Australian. Unlike Twitter, our commercial model means we have to demand a daily investment of money as well as time from a cross-section of intelligent readers, an imperative that keeps us grounded in mainstream values.
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Talking Points Memo reporting official ban on US government employees accessing WikiLeaks.
"...classified information, whether or not already posted on public websites or disclosed to the media, remains classified, and must be treated as such by federal employees and contractors, until it is declassified by an appropriate U.S. Government authority."
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And the cables are at http://213.251.145.96/cablegate according to John Perry Barlow
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US-based DNS company says DDOS attacks forced it to ditch Wikileaks. h/t Juha Saarinen
Everydns.net said that the attacks – which have been going on all week, and led the site to temporarily host its services on Amazon's more resilient EC2 "cloud computing" service – "threaten the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure, which enables access to almost 500,000 other websites".
WikiLeaks was given 24 hours' notice of the termination, and everydns said: "Any downtime of the wikileaks.org website has resulted from its failure to use another hosted DNS service provider."
Twitter suggesting manual IP address of 88.80.13.160 until WikiLeaks secure another DNS service.
or 213.251.145.96
or 46.59.1.2 -
Rebecca MacKinnon considers some implications of Amazon's actions (yet misses the extra leverage that homeland security laws offered Lieberman over them). h/t Robert O'Brien
What is troubling and dangerous is that in the internet age, public discourse increasingly depends on digital spaces created, owned and operated by private companies. The result is that one politician has more power than ever to shut down controversial speech unilaterally with one phone call.
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This is not the first time Lieberman has demanded that an American internet company take down controversial material. Last time, the outcome was different.In 2008, Lieberman wrote to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, demanding immediate removal of "content produced by Islamist terrorist organizations from YouTube." While YouTube did remove a few videos that violated community guidelines against violence and hate speech, it refused to remove most of them.
Google's lawyers determined that the material Lieberman wanted removed, while upsetting to many Americans, was clearly protected under the First Amendment. "While we respect and understand [Lieberman's] views, YouTube encourages free speech and defends everyone's right to express unpopular points of view," Schmidt wrote in his response.
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But the WikiLeaks Amazon case also highlights a new problem for American democracy -- and ultimately for the future of freedom and democracy more globally. A substantial if not critical amount of our political discourse has moved into the digital realm. This realm is largely made up of virtual spaces that are created, owned and operated by the private sector. -
Hard News: Love you too, man, in reply to Russell Brown,
tended to induce me to shout at the radio
oh how I'll miss him
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Random Play: Alt.Republic: The rolling mall, in reply to BenWilson,
Moving routes is heresy :)
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Random Play: Alt.Republic: The rolling mall, in reply to Sam F,
Can't remember whether the St Lukes store had the Big Fresh trademark creepy animatronic fruits and vegetables, though.
I don't think they were still wiggling hypnotically by the time I first went there - but the store did have a Country singer crooning from the top of a straw-strewn stack more than once. Not sure who that was meant to encourage.