andygates

The intertubes are abuzz with the US Department of Justice's subpoena of a bunch of Twitter account details (signup stuff and DMs for a range of folks including non-Americans).  It's time for Twitter to stop being a service and grow up into a protocol.

Twitter's run in the US, and so is subject to US legal and political shenanigans.  They're generally good folks (which is how come the story broke: they told their users) but they are still subject to US interference.  If they were elsewhere, all sorts of international jurisdiction issues would apply, and we would have a situation where intensely privacy-friendly jurisdictions (traditionally Sweden, say) would be more attractive as Twitter hosts.  Plus, with more than one corporate player, our precious ability to tell each other about our cats and workouts and Justin Bieber are much more robust too.  If AOL buys Twitter, we can see the fail coming and move to EuroTweet or TweetRu or wherever. 

This incident serves as a high-profile poke to the deep geeks: Get your RFC hats on, and build the cross-server interaction rules that allow tweeting (that'd be short-form stateless real-time text messaging with user identifier and other metadata) between orgs.  The world will be a better place for it.

If you don't know it already, Wikileaks is a wiki site for leaks.  It's big news - things like the US unpublished rules of engagement for Iraq and all manner of political and corporate whistleblowing get leaked there.  It's where you go if you've got the minutes from a really juicy meeting and want it public with your identity protected.

Recently they tickled a Cayman Islands bank by leaking some of their stuff (alleged money-laundering leaked by a former exec)... and got savaged by lawyers.  Down, down went the site, for the judge ruled that the hosting ISP:

"shall immediately clear and remove all DNS hosting
       records for the wikileaks.org domain name and prevent the
       domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website or
       any other website or server other than a blank park page,
       until further order of this Court."

Slap! Take that, you naughty web anarchists!

Of course, taking down the DNS doesn't take down the site, as any fule kno.  You may enjoy the Streissand Effect gloatfest here at:  http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Main_Page.

And of course, as soon as word got out (and Wikileaks is very popular) mirror sites were spawned like a rash. Which means that they effortlessly survived the DOS attack and the fire at their colocation host's UPS.  And Wikileaks, very much alive and well, plans to put up as much as it can possibly find about corrupt Cayman banking.

Ah, le chortle.

Hey, Anonymous, these guys are the real deal.  "Oh fuck, the Internet is here" is not a bunch of goons exercising of a grudge in V masks, though the masks are a really nice touch.  "Oh fuck, the Internet is here" is this sort of thing: credible, robust, serious, unstoppable and making real the omniopticon that really does kill privacy dead dead dead.