Google's rumored music service is allegedly going nowhere because Google's hit a wall while negotiating with record labels. AllThingsD's Peter Kafka has sources telling them that talks are "broken" (possibly because Google changed their terms last minute) and that Google is reconsidering plans altogther.
However, Kafka also spoke to record label reps, who think that the process is going along fine and expect to strike a deal soon. He also entertains the possibility that Google will forego music sales, and just launch a streaming locker service that will stream your uploads. [AllThingsD]
Source: Gizmodo
Tampilkan postingan dengan label IT NEWS-Internet. Tampilkan semua postingan
Tampilkan postingan dengan label IT NEWS-Internet. Tampilkan semua postingan
Minggu, 17 April 2011
Google Video Shuts Down, No One Remembers It
Remember back in like 2005 when Google Video and YouTube were going at it? And how YouTube essentially won, only to be bought out by Google anyway? Me either, which is why Google Video being shut down doesn't surprise anyone.
Google Video has been something of a vestigial tail for Google for awhile now. After they acquired YouTube for $1.6 billion in the fall of 2006, the video search engine simply couldn't go anywhere. Users could no longer upload videos to the site by May 2009, even though existing videos worked fine. But really what was the point? Google Video was already cast aside by an unforgiving internet.
The email announcement states that the site will no longer host any videos as of April 29th. Google has invited their users to download their videos and upload them to YouTube to keep them alive if they haven't done so already. So all 5 of you who still watch anything on video.google.com, welcome to 2007. [TechCrunch]
Source: Gizmodo
Selasa, 05 April 2011
Google Said to Be Possible Target of Antitrust Probe After ITA Acquisition
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is considering a broad antitrust investigation into Google Inc. (GOOG)’s dominance of the Internet-search industry, two people familiar with the matter said.
Before proceeding with any probe, the FTC is awaiting a decision by the Justice Department on whether it will challenge Google’s planned acquisition of ITA Software Inc. as a threat to competition in the travel-information search business, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the matter is still confidential.
An FTC investigation of Google, the world’s most popular search engine, “could be on par” with the scope of the Justice Department’s probe of Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) a decade ago, said Keith Hylton, an antitrust law professor at Boston University School of Law. Google “could fight the FTC, but that’s going to cost a lot of money and time.”
The FTC and Justice Department share responsibility for oversight of antitrust enforcement, and the outcome of the ITA deal may determine whether the two agencies will vie for control of a broader probe of Google, the people said. The two agencies sometimes negotiate which will handle major antitrust investigations, with the decision turning on their respective expertise.
The Justice Department may soon announce its decision on Google’s purchase of ITA, said the people familiar with the matter.
Commissioner’s Support
FTC Commissioner Thomas Rosch said in an interview last month he supported a probe of the dominant players in the Internet-search industry, without specifying which companies. Rosch, one of two Republicans on the five-member commission, is the only commissioner to say publicly that such an investigation is in order.
The people familiar with the matter said any investigation of the search industry should concentrate on Mountain View, California-based Google, owner of the world’s most popular search engine.
If consumers don’t like what the company is doing, they can switch to another search engine, said Adam Kovacevich, a Google spokesman.
“Since competition is one click away on the Internet, we work hard to put our users’ interests first and give them the best, most relevant answers to their queries,” he said in an e-mail. “We built Google for users, not websites.”
Google fell $18.59, or 3.2 percent, to $569.09 in Nasdaq Stock Market trading in New York.
Texas and Europe
Cecelia Prewett, a spokeswoman at the FTC, and Gina Talamona, a Justice Department spokeswoman, declined to comment.
Google is facing growing scrutiny from regulators as it bolsters its search business. Officials in Texas and the European Commission have started investigations into Google’s search dominance, while Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine is considering such a probe.
The EU probe is examining whether Google discriminated against other services in search results and stopped websites from accepting rival ads. A complaint from Microsoft last month may expand the investigation to online video and mobile phones.
The state of Wisconsin is weighing an examination of Google’s bid to buy Cambridge, Massachusetts-based ITA, which provides data for airline ticket fares to online travel sites, according to a person familiar with the matter.
‘Long Overdue’
Lawmakers including Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, and Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, have urged the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust to hold a hearing on Google’s dominance of Internet businesses.
Herb Kohl, the Wisconsin Democrat who heads the panel, has said he’s examining Google.
“An investigation is long overdue,” said Gary Reback, an antitrust lawyer with Carr & Ferrell LLP in Menlo Park, California, who represents companies that have complained about Google to regulators here and in Europe. “Every day there are companies who are being hurt by Google’s anticompetitive behavior and we still have arm-wrestling going on in Washington,” he said in an interview yesterday.
It isn’t known whether the Justice Department or the FTC would handle such an investigation because both agencies could claim experience in reviewing Google’s businesses, said Robert Lande, a law professor at the University of Baltimore.
AdMob Purchase
The FTC gained knowledge of Google’s inner workings during its review of the company’s $750 million purchase of AdMob Inc., a mobile ad service. The agency approved that acquisition last year.
In 2007, the agency approved Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick Inc., an online advertising company.
The FTC has been bolstering its expertise in technology and the internet. Chairman Jonathan Leibowitz appointed Edward Felten, a Princeton professor known for cracking the music industry’s digital-copyright protection code, as the agency’s chief technologist in November.
Columbia Law School professor Timothy Wu, the author of “Master Switch,” a book about the consolidation of information industries, was appointed senior adviser in February to study consumer protection and competition issues that affect the Internet and mobile markets. Wu coined the term ‘net neutrality,’ which advocates no restrictions on content, sites, platforms or kinds of equipment.
Allegations of Deception
It’s possible the FTC, which handles consumer-protection issues, could begin a probe examining allegations of deception by Google, expanding it into a broader antitrust investigation, Lande said.
On March 30, Google agreed to settle FTC claims that it used deceptive tactics and violated its own privacy policies when it introduced the Buzz social-networking service last year.
Last month, Rosch said if the FTC opens an investigation into the search industry and decides to bring a case, it could rely on powers it used to reach a settlement with Intel Corp. (INTC) last year.
In the Intel case, the FTC invoked Section 5 of the law that established the agency in 1914 to challenge “unfair or deceptive” practices, going beyond what is specifically banned by other federal antitrust statutes.
The use of Section 5 and FTC’s ability to handle its cases through its own administrative processes rather than necessarily going to court, as the Justice Department must, would make it easier for the FTC to pursue Google, said Herbert Hovenkamp, a professor at the University of Iowa College of Law.
Business Practices
The Justice Department also has experience in scrutinizing Google’s business practices.
Since July, the Justice Department has been reviewing Google’s planned acquisition of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based ITA.
As part of that review, the department may decide to impose restrictions on Google, approve the deal outright or challenge it in court, Lande said. The department also could decide to file a broader antitrust case, making an FTC probe unnecessary, although Lande said that was “very unlikely.”
The department in November 2008 threatened to sue Google over its planned alliance with Yahoo! Inc. Google scrapped an agreement to place ads on Yahoo.
“When Microsoft was really dominating the market, Google was complaining there was a violation of the antitrust law,” said Christopher Tang, a professor of business administration at the University of California at Los Angeles. “And now Google is becoming more dominant in the search space, and people are concerned Google is entering too many market places.”
Source: Bloomberg
Before proceeding with any probe, the FTC is awaiting a decision by the Justice Department on whether it will challenge Google’s planned acquisition of ITA Software Inc. as a threat to competition in the travel-information search business, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the matter is still confidential.
An FTC investigation of Google, the world’s most popular search engine, “could be on par” with the scope of the Justice Department’s probe of Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) a decade ago, said Keith Hylton, an antitrust law professor at Boston University School of Law. Google “could fight the FTC, but that’s going to cost a lot of money and time.”
The FTC and Justice Department share responsibility for oversight of antitrust enforcement, and the outcome of the ITA deal may determine whether the two agencies will vie for control of a broader probe of Google, the people said. The two agencies sometimes negotiate which will handle major antitrust investigations, with the decision turning on their respective expertise.
The Justice Department may soon announce its decision on Google’s purchase of ITA, said the people familiar with the matter.
Commissioner’s Support
FTC Commissioner Thomas Rosch said in an interview last month he supported a probe of the dominant players in the Internet-search industry, without specifying which companies. Rosch, one of two Republicans on the five-member commission, is the only commissioner to say publicly that such an investigation is in order.
The people familiar with the matter said any investigation of the search industry should concentrate on Mountain View, California-based Google, owner of the world’s most popular search engine.
If consumers don’t like what the company is doing, they can switch to another search engine, said Adam Kovacevich, a Google spokesman.
“Since competition is one click away on the Internet, we work hard to put our users’ interests first and give them the best, most relevant answers to their queries,” he said in an e-mail. “We built Google for users, not websites.”
Google fell $18.59, or 3.2 percent, to $569.09 in Nasdaq Stock Market trading in New York.
Texas and Europe
Cecelia Prewett, a spokeswoman at the FTC, and Gina Talamona, a Justice Department spokeswoman, declined to comment.
Google is facing growing scrutiny from regulators as it bolsters its search business. Officials in Texas and the European Commission have started investigations into Google’s search dominance, while Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine is considering such a probe.
The EU probe is examining whether Google discriminated against other services in search results and stopped websites from accepting rival ads. A complaint from Microsoft last month may expand the investigation to online video and mobile phones.
The state of Wisconsin is weighing an examination of Google’s bid to buy Cambridge, Massachusetts-based ITA, which provides data for airline ticket fares to online travel sites, according to a person familiar with the matter.
‘Long Overdue’
Lawmakers including Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, and Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, have urged the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust to hold a hearing on Google’s dominance of Internet businesses.
Herb Kohl, the Wisconsin Democrat who heads the panel, has said he’s examining Google.
“An investigation is long overdue,” said Gary Reback, an antitrust lawyer with Carr & Ferrell LLP in Menlo Park, California, who represents companies that have complained about Google to regulators here and in Europe. “Every day there are companies who are being hurt by Google’s anticompetitive behavior and we still have arm-wrestling going on in Washington,” he said in an interview yesterday.
It isn’t known whether the Justice Department or the FTC would handle such an investigation because both agencies could claim experience in reviewing Google’s businesses, said Robert Lande, a law professor at the University of Baltimore.
AdMob Purchase
The FTC gained knowledge of Google’s inner workings during its review of the company’s $750 million purchase of AdMob Inc., a mobile ad service. The agency approved that acquisition last year.
In 2007, the agency approved Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick Inc., an online advertising company.
The FTC has been bolstering its expertise in technology and the internet. Chairman Jonathan Leibowitz appointed Edward Felten, a Princeton professor known for cracking the music industry’s digital-copyright protection code, as the agency’s chief technologist in November.
Columbia Law School professor Timothy Wu, the author of “Master Switch,” a book about the consolidation of information industries, was appointed senior adviser in February to study consumer protection and competition issues that affect the Internet and mobile markets. Wu coined the term ‘net neutrality,’ which advocates no restrictions on content, sites, platforms or kinds of equipment.
Allegations of Deception
It’s possible the FTC, which handles consumer-protection issues, could begin a probe examining allegations of deception by Google, expanding it into a broader antitrust investigation, Lande said.
On March 30, Google agreed to settle FTC claims that it used deceptive tactics and violated its own privacy policies when it introduced the Buzz social-networking service last year.
Last month, Rosch said if the FTC opens an investigation into the search industry and decides to bring a case, it could rely on powers it used to reach a settlement with Intel Corp. (INTC) last year.
In the Intel case, the FTC invoked Section 5 of the law that established the agency in 1914 to challenge “unfair or deceptive” practices, going beyond what is specifically banned by other federal antitrust statutes.
The use of Section 5 and FTC’s ability to handle its cases through its own administrative processes rather than necessarily going to court, as the Justice Department must, would make it easier for the FTC to pursue Google, said Herbert Hovenkamp, a professor at the University of Iowa College of Law.
Business Practices
The Justice Department also has experience in scrutinizing Google’s business practices.
Since July, the Justice Department has been reviewing Google’s planned acquisition of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based ITA.
As part of that review, the department may decide to impose restrictions on Google, approve the deal outright or challenge it in court, Lande said. The department also could decide to file a broader antitrust case, making an FTC probe unnecessary, although Lande said that was “very unlikely.”
The department in November 2008 threatened to sue Google over its planned alliance with Yahoo! Inc. Google scrapped an agreement to place ads on Yahoo.
“When Microsoft was really dominating the market, Google was complaining there was a violation of the antitrust law,” said Christopher Tang, a professor of business administration at the University of California at Los Angeles. “And now Google is becoming more dominant in the search space, and people are concerned Google is entering too many market places.”
Source: Bloomberg
Mark E. Zuckerberg
Updated: Jan. 3, 2011
Mark Zuckerberg is the co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, the world's largest social network with nearly 500 million users around the world.
The start-up, born in a Harvard dorm room in 2004, has become an essential personal and business networking tool in much of the wired world.
As Facebook has matured, so has Mr. Zuckerberg, who was born May 14, 1984. He has traded his disheveled, unassuming image for an ever-present tie while visiting media outfits like "The Oprah Winfrey Show." And he says Facebook's most important metrics are not its membership but the percentage of the wired world that uses the site and the amount of information -- photographs, news articles and status updates -- zipping across its servers.
A new movie about the tumultuous origins of Facebook, "The Social Network," opened in October 2010. Facebook strenuously, and Mr. Zuckerberg more quietly, asserted that the portrayal of the company's founding is fiction. And Mr. Zuckerberg disputed the characterization of him in the film, though in a New Yorker magazine profile, he acknowledged having indulged in a bit of sophomoric arrogance.
Shortly before the film's opening, the real-life Mr. Zuckerberg made headlines by donating $100 million to improve the long-troubled public schools of Newark, N.J.
In 2009, Mr. Zuckerberg's stake in Facebook, which is not publicly traded, was valued at $2 billion, making him the world's youngest billionaire. The next year, when Facebook was valued at $23 billion, Forbes put his share at $6.9 billion. An investment by Goldman Sachs in January 2011 set the value of the company at $50 billion, putting Mr. Zuckerberg in a league with the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who are reportedly worth $15 billion apiece.
Mr. Zuckerberg grew up in Westchester County, N.Y., dropped out of Harvard to build the company and now lives in California. During its rise, he fended off numerous offers to sell Facebook, and in late 2010 discouraged speculation that it might go public anytime soon.
FACEBOOK'S ASCENT
Facebook's rise has been marked by several controversies. Three other Harvard students maintain that they came up with the original idea and that Mr. Zuckerberg, whom they had hired to write code for the site, stole the idea to create Facebook. Facebook has denied the allegations. A long-running lawsuit is pending
Another Harvard classmate, Aaron Greenspan, claims that he created the underlying architecture for both companies, but has declined to enter the legal battle.
In 2005, MTV Networks considered buying Facebook for seventy-five million dollars. Yahoo! and Microsoft soon offered much more. Mr. Zuckerberg turned them all down. Terry Semel, the former C.E.O. of Yahoo!, who sought to buy Facebook for a billion dollars in 2006, said, “I’d never met anyone—forget his age, twenty-two then or twenty-six now—I’d never met anyone who would walk away from a billion dollars. But he said, ‘It’s not about the price. This is my baby, and I want to keep running it, I want to keep growing it.’ I couldn’t believe it.”
PRIVACY ISSUES
Mr. Zuckerberg has pushed Facebook users to share more information about themselves. But Facebook users have pushed back, increasingly lobbing vociferous complaints that some new features or settings are privacy violations. The back and forth between Facebook and its users over privacy is gaining importance as the company's growth continues unabated. Facebook's policies, more than those of any other company, are helping to define standards for privacy in the Internet age.
Bowing to pressure over privacy concerns, Mr. Zuckerberg in May 2010 unveiled a set of controls that he said would help people understand what they were sharing online, and with whom.
Facebook's biggest mistake, Mr. Zuckerman said, was failing to notice that as Facebook added new features and its privacy controls grew increasingly complicated, those controls became efectively unusable for many people.
He said the crisis was challenging, but not as stressful as fending off billion-dollar acquisition offers from the likes of Yahoo and Viacom when he was 22.
In February 2009, when Facebook updated its terms, it deleted a provision that said users could remove their content at any time, at which time the license would expire. Further, it added new language that said Facebook would retain users' content and licenses after an account was terminated. After a wave of protests from its users, Facebook said that it would withdraw changes to its terms of service.
In one of the latest episodes in a string of frustrations about Facebook, users discovered in May 2010 that a glitch gave them access to supposedly private information in the accounts of their Facebook friends, like chat conversations. Although Facebook moved quickly to close the security hole, the breach heightened a feeling among many users that it was becoming hard to trust the service to protect their personal information.
Source: NYTimes
Mark Zuckerberg is the co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, the world's largest social network with nearly 500 million users around the world.
The start-up, born in a Harvard dorm room in 2004, has become an essential personal and business networking tool in much of the wired world.
As Facebook has matured, so has Mr. Zuckerberg, who was born May 14, 1984. He has traded his disheveled, unassuming image for an ever-present tie while visiting media outfits like "The Oprah Winfrey Show." And he says Facebook's most important metrics are not its membership but the percentage of the wired world that uses the site and the amount of information -- photographs, news articles and status updates -- zipping across its servers.
A new movie about the tumultuous origins of Facebook, "The Social Network," opened in October 2010. Facebook strenuously, and Mr. Zuckerberg more quietly, asserted that the portrayal of the company's founding is fiction. And Mr. Zuckerberg disputed the characterization of him in the film, though in a New Yorker magazine profile, he acknowledged having indulged in a bit of sophomoric arrogance.
Shortly before the film's opening, the real-life Mr. Zuckerberg made headlines by donating $100 million to improve the long-troubled public schools of Newark, N.J.
In 2009, Mr. Zuckerberg's stake in Facebook, which is not publicly traded, was valued at $2 billion, making him the world's youngest billionaire. The next year, when Facebook was valued at $23 billion, Forbes put his share at $6.9 billion. An investment by Goldman Sachs in January 2011 set the value of the company at $50 billion, putting Mr. Zuckerberg in a league with the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who are reportedly worth $15 billion apiece.
Mr. Zuckerberg grew up in Westchester County, N.Y., dropped out of Harvard to build the company and now lives in California. During its rise, he fended off numerous offers to sell Facebook, and in late 2010 discouraged speculation that it might go public anytime soon.
FACEBOOK'S ASCENT
Facebook's rise has been marked by several controversies. Three other Harvard students maintain that they came up with the original idea and that Mr. Zuckerberg, whom they had hired to write code for the site, stole the idea to create Facebook. Facebook has denied the allegations. A long-running lawsuit is pending
Another Harvard classmate, Aaron Greenspan, claims that he created the underlying architecture for both companies, but has declined to enter the legal battle.
In 2005, MTV Networks considered buying Facebook for seventy-five million dollars. Yahoo! and Microsoft soon offered much more. Mr. Zuckerberg turned them all down. Terry Semel, the former C.E.O. of Yahoo!, who sought to buy Facebook for a billion dollars in 2006, said, “I’d never met anyone—forget his age, twenty-two then or twenty-six now—I’d never met anyone who would walk away from a billion dollars. But he said, ‘It’s not about the price. This is my baby, and I want to keep running it, I want to keep growing it.’ I couldn’t believe it.”
PRIVACY ISSUES
Mr. Zuckerberg has pushed Facebook users to share more information about themselves. But Facebook users have pushed back, increasingly lobbing vociferous complaints that some new features or settings are privacy violations. The back and forth between Facebook and its users over privacy is gaining importance as the company's growth continues unabated. Facebook's policies, more than those of any other company, are helping to define standards for privacy in the Internet age.
Bowing to pressure over privacy concerns, Mr. Zuckerberg in May 2010 unveiled a set of controls that he said would help people understand what they were sharing online, and with whom.
Facebook's biggest mistake, Mr. Zuckerman said, was failing to notice that as Facebook added new features and its privacy controls grew increasingly complicated, those controls became efectively unusable for many people.
He said the crisis was challenging, but not as stressful as fending off billion-dollar acquisition offers from the likes of Yahoo and Viacom when he was 22.
In February 2009, when Facebook updated its terms, it deleted a provision that said users could remove their content at any time, at which time the license would expire. Further, it added new language that said Facebook would retain users' content and licenses after an account was terminated. After a wave of protests from its users, Facebook said that it would withdraw changes to its terms of service.
In one of the latest episodes in a string of frustrations about Facebook, users discovered in May 2010 that a glitch gave them access to supposedly private information in the accounts of their Facebook friends, like chat conversations. Although Facebook moved quickly to close the security hole, the breach heightened a feeling among many users that it was becoming hard to trust the service to protect their personal information.
Source: NYTimes
Selasa, 29 Maret 2011
NO SECRETS
The house on Grettisgata Street, in Reykjavik, is a century old, small and white, situated just a few streets from the North Atlantic. The shifting northerly winds can suddenly bring ice and snow to the city, even in springtime, and when they do a certain kind of silence sets in. This was the case on the morning of March 30th, when a tall Australian man named Julian Paul Assange, with gray eyes and a mop of silver-white hair, arrived to rent the place. Assange was dressed in a gray full-body snowsuit, and he had with him a small entourage. “We are journalists,” he told the owner of the house. Eyjafjallajökull had recently begun erupting, and he said, “We’re here to write about the volcano.” After the owner left, Assange quickly closed the drapes, and he made sure that they stayed closed, day and night. The house, as far as he was concerned, would now serve as a war room; people called it the Bunker. Half a dozen computers were set up in a starkly decorated, white-walled living space. Icelandic activists arrived, and they began to work, more or less at Assange’s direction, around the clock. Their focus was Project B—Assange’s code name for a thirty-eight-minute video taken from the cockpit of an Apache military helicopter in Iraq in 2007. The video depicted American soldiers killing at least eighteen people, including two Reuters journalists; it later became the subject of widespread controversy, but at this early stage it was still a closely guarded military secret.
Assange is an international trafficker, of sorts. He and his colleagues collect documents and imagery that governments and other institutions regard as confidential and publish them on a Web site called WikiLeaks.org. Since it went online, three and a half years ago, the site has published an extensive catalogue of secret material, ranging from the Standard Operating Procedures at Camp Delta, in Guantánamo Bay, and the “Climategate” e-mails from the University of East Anglia, in England, to the contents of Sarah Palin’s private Yahoo account. The catalogue is especially remarkable because WikiLeaks is not quite an organization; it is better described as a media insurgency. It has no paid staff, no copiers, no desks, no office. Assange does not even have a home. He travels from country to country, staying with supporters, or friends of friends—as he once put it to me, “I’m living in airports these days.” He is the operation’s prime mover, and it is fair to say that WikiLeaks exists wherever he does. At the same time, hundreds of volunteers from around the world help maintain the Web site’s complicated infrastructure; many participate in small ways, and between three and five people dedicate themselves to it full time. Key members are known only by initials—M, for instance—even deep within WikiLeaks, where communications are conducted by encrypted online chat services. The secretiveness stems from the belief that a populist intelligence operation with virtually no resources, designed to publicize information that powerful institutions do not want public, will have serious adversaries.
Iceland was a natural place to develop Project B. In the past year, Assange has collaborated with politicians and activists there to draft a free-speech law of unprecedented strength, and a number of these same people had agreed to help him work on the video in total secrecy. The video was a striking artifact—an unmediated representation of the ambiguities and cruelties of modern warfare—and he hoped that its release would touch off a worldwide debate about the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was planning to unveil the footage before a group of reporters at the National Press Club, in Washington, on April 5th, the morning after Easter, presumably a slow news day. To accomplish this, he and the other members of the WikiLeaks community would have to analyze the raw video and edit it into a short film, build a stand-alone Web site to display it, launch a media campaign, and prepare documentation for the footage—all in less than a week’s time.
Assange also wanted to insure that, once the video was posted online, it would be impossible to remove. He told me that WikiLeaks maintains its content on more than twenty servers around the world and on hundreds of domain names. (Expenses are paid by donations, and a few independent well-wishers also run “mirror sites” in support.) Assange calls the site “an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking and public analysis,” and a government or company that wanted to remove content from WikiLeaks would have to practically dismantle the Internet itself. So far, even though the site has received more than a hundred legal threats, almost no one has filed suit. Lawyers working for the British bank Northern Rock threatened court action after the site published an embarrassing memo, but they were practically reduced to begging. A Kenyan politician also vowed to sue after Assange published a confidential report alleging that President Daniel arap Moi and his allies had siphoned billions of dollars out of the country. The site’s work in Kenya earned it an award from Amnesty International.
Assange typically tells would-be litigants to go to hell. In 2008, WikiLeaks posted secret Scientology manuals, and lawyers representing the church demanded that they be removed. Assange’s response was to publish more of the Scientologists’ internal material, and to announce, “WikiLeaks will not comply with legally abusive requests from Scientology any more than WikiLeaks has complied with similar demands from Swiss banks, Russian offshore stem-cell centers, former African kleptocrats, or the Pentagon.”
In his writing online, especially on Twitter, Assange is quick to lash out at perceived enemies. By contrast, on television, where he has been appearing more frequently, he acts with uncanny sang-froid. Under the studio lights, he can seem—with his spectral white hair, pallid skin, cool eyes, and expansive forehead—like a rail-thin being who has rocketed to Earth to deliver humanity some hidden truth. This impression is magnified by his rigid demeanor and his baritone voice, which he deploys slowly, at low volume.
Sumber: TheNewYorker
Assange is an international trafficker, of sorts. He and his colleagues collect documents and imagery that governments and other institutions regard as confidential and publish them on a Web site called WikiLeaks.org. Since it went online, three and a half years ago, the site has published an extensive catalogue of secret material, ranging from the Standard Operating Procedures at Camp Delta, in Guantánamo Bay, and the “Climategate” e-mails from the University of East Anglia, in England, to the contents of Sarah Palin’s private Yahoo account. The catalogue is especially remarkable because WikiLeaks is not quite an organization; it is better described as a media insurgency. It has no paid staff, no copiers, no desks, no office. Assange does not even have a home. He travels from country to country, staying with supporters, or friends of friends—as he once put it to me, “I’m living in airports these days.” He is the operation’s prime mover, and it is fair to say that WikiLeaks exists wherever he does. At the same time, hundreds of volunteers from around the world help maintain the Web site’s complicated infrastructure; many participate in small ways, and between three and five people dedicate themselves to it full time. Key members are known only by initials—M, for instance—even deep within WikiLeaks, where communications are conducted by encrypted online chat services. The secretiveness stems from the belief that a populist intelligence operation with virtually no resources, designed to publicize information that powerful institutions do not want public, will have serious adversaries.
Iceland was a natural place to develop Project B. In the past year, Assange has collaborated with politicians and activists there to draft a free-speech law of unprecedented strength, and a number of these same people had agreed to help him work on the video in total secrecy. The video was a striking artifact—an unmediated representation of the ambiguities and cruelties of modern warfare—and he hoped that its release would touch off a worldwide debate about the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was planning to unveil the footage before a group of reporters at the National Press Club, in Washington, on April 5th, the morning after Easter, presumably a slow news day. To accomplish this, he and the other members of the WikiLeaks community would have to analyze the raw video and edit it into a short film, build a stand-alone Web site to display it, launch a media campaign, and prepare documentation for the footage—all in less than a week’s time.
Assange also wanted to insure that, once the video was posted online, it would be impossible to remove. He told me that WikiLeaks maintains its content on more than twenty servers around the world and on hundreds of domain names. (Expenses are paid by donations, and a few independent well-wishers also run “mirror sites” in support.) Assange calls the site “an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking and public analysis,” and a government or company that wanted to remove content from WikiLeaks would have to practically dismantle the Internet itself. So far, even though the site has received more than a hundred legal threats, almost no one has filed suit. Lawyers working for the British bank Northern Rock threatened court action after the site published an embarrassing memo, but they were practically reduced to begging. A Kenyan politician also vowed to sue after Assange published a confidential report alleging that President Daniel arap Moi and his allies had siphoned billions of dollars out of the country. The site’s work in Kenya earned it an award from Amnesty International.
Assange typically tells would-be litigants to go to hell. In 2008, WikiLeaks posted secret Scientology manuals, and lawyers representing the church demanded that they be removed. Assange’s response was to publish more of the Scientologists’ internal material, and to announce, “WikiLeaks will not comply with legally abusive requests from Scientology any more than WikiLeaks has complied with similar demands from Swiss banks, Russian offshore stem-cell centers, former African kleptocrats, or the Pentagon.”
In his writing online, especially on Twitter, Assange is quick to lash out at perceived enemies. By contrast, on television, where he has been appearing more frequently, he acts with uncanny sang-froid. Under the studio lights, he can seem—with his spectral white hair, pallid skin, cool eyes, and expansive forehead—like a rail-thin being who has rocketed to Earth to deliver humanity some hidden truth. This impression is magnified by his rigid demeanor and his baritone voice, which he deploys slowly, at low volume.
Sumber: TheNewYorker
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