One of Wikileaks’ main programmers and a couple of other staffers who left the project are going to start a new site.
The group is not only working on a new site to compete with WikiLeaks, it’s also apparently working on new technology to turn the gears behind it, according to unnamed sources. There are no public details as of yet about what that technology might encompass, though.
His name is Daniel Domscheit-Berg, and here’s a translated Der Speigel interview with him.
El Cid
Any organization, even one doing what is considered by so many to be invaluable work, can be led by someone with awful leadership skills. We’ve seen it a bazillion times. It’s probably the norm. I think it’s significant that this is the sort of criticism being made here.
Jinchi
Compete with WikiLeaks?
Does WikiLeaks make money?
matoko_chan
This is a trend. University of Michigan is training hackers, for example.
We won the hacker competition, which is a good thing cuz we sukk ass at football this year.
watchdogs to watch the watchdogs.
:)
Flugelhorn
Really? Danny Domscheit? Sounds apropos.
Corner Stone
IMO, it’s probably very important and maybe a little late for this kind of action.
The “core team” of WikiLeaks should’ve split before the collateral damage video, or possibly before the Afghan doc dump was released.
As the individual states, the goal has always been to have a thousand wikileaks publishing info about abuse/corruption in areas large and small.
The intense pressure they would receive was an easily foreseen result, and now it’s the most likely outcome that people hostile to WL’s purpose are waging cyber warfare against them.
matoko_chan
@Corner Stone: yep, the us gov already declared war on the Hacker Nation.
WL is just spawning independent insurgent cybercells.
This is just another war the dumbass US is doomed to lose, like the war on Islam.
polyorchnid octopunch
I’m with corner stone and matoko chan on this one. These things are far far harder to stop when they’re very decentralized. This is simply good net guerilla practice in action.
Eventually I expect that wikileaks (or a successor) will end up on some combination of flux and snowflake networks, enabled by people willingly (or even unwillingly) installing a bot to host content and provide the basic services necessary to run a site like that… similar to the old RSA contests, or the eti search. It’s hard to run a DoS against a flux network with several million nodes, any of which can take on the role of name service, content service, or serving service, or combinations thereof to enable the site. Think of it like spam botnets, but for the social good.
Just off the top of my head, I can think of several approaches that would leverage some key open source technologies to enable this kind of thing; a custom cooked version of the gnutella network for holding the content, for example….
EDIT: For example, a system like the one that google uses internally (ISTR reading that it’s enabled by beowulf, an open source clustering software) coupled with gnutella (for very redundant data storage) run on a botnet would be very hard to take out without seriously damaging the usability of the network for everybody else.
bago
It’s certainly an interesting problem space. Creating a globally distributed content delivery network hardened against political attacks in addition to your regular attacks. I suspect this involves more than a few timebombs.