Wikileaks says it is under attack from a computer-hacking operation(by US state?)

It's a dos attack rather than being hacked. Looks like they have already distributed the files anyway. I am sure they will have it covered.

"We are currently under a mass distributed denial of service attack," it said on its Twitter feed earlier. It added that several newspapers will go ahead and publish the documents released to them by Wikileaks even if the site goes down"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/28/us-embassy-cable-leak-diplomacy-crisis

Some info on what is in the documents.

it's out now, see e.g. the NYT site
http://www.nytimes.com/

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/blogs/talking_politics/the-hypocrisy-of-the-media-attack-on-wikileaks-p150579.html

Mainstream blog comment on media coverage of wikileaks

it appears the site is still down, and it doesn't look like it's because of excessive traffic. I hope this isn't the last "dump" but it's probably going to get increasingly harder for them to distribute the info to an audience wider than just the biggest Western newspapers.

The site is going down on-and-off because Wikileaks had been using Amazon servers (following the attacks on their servers in Sweden) but Amazon just today made a move to block their access.

I would doubt that's their intent. Their overall purpose, according to Assange, is simply to leak massive amounts of sensitive State information in order to correct "regime behavior". They're probably satisfied with disseminating the leaks to the media and political establishment. Or rather, Assange is.

Wikileaks now removed from Amazon servers.

"WikiLeaks servers at Amazon ousted," WikiLeaks said about 3 p.m. EST on its Twitter account. "Free speech the land of the free ... fine our $ are now spent to employ people in Europe."

No comment from Amazon.

UPI.com article

now see here

article

WikiLeaks' Assange arrested in UK
So what do people reckon? Is he completely fucked now? End of wikileaks?

wikileaks isn't just assange, but he seems a bit of a control freak, would the others feel the authority to carry on?

paypal has frozen $50,000 of donations and a swiss bank has frozen $30,000 more.
Who knows what will happen, I thought the charges had been dropped. He might be fucked, not sure about wikileaks. But with the head honcho in jail and a big financial loss who knows if they can.

A curious article:
(...)
"Evgeny Morozov has cautioned in The Financial Times that the US backlash against WikiLeaks and Julian Assange may have unintended consequences: "WikiLeaks could be transformed from a handful of volunteers to a global movement of politicised geeks clamouring for revenge. Today’s WikiLeaks talks the language of transparency, but it could quickly develop a new code of explicit anti-Americanism, anti-imperialism and anti-globalisation.[...] An aggressive attempt to go after WikiLeaks – by blocking its web access, for instance, or by harassing its members – could install Mr Assange (or whoever succeeds him) at the helm of a powerful new global movement able to paralyse the work of governments and corporations around the world."
.
http://wlcentral.org/node/506

I would assume that he made sure that Wikileaks could go on operating without him before he was arrested, and he did have several days to do that, knowing that his arrest was inevitable. It does appear that Wikileaks is indeed going ahead without him for now. We'll see how long that goes on for.

Haha, I am just waiting for 4chan/anonymous to take over the mantle.

Didn't know that. Thanks for the link.

Online DDOS tool

As you may know, several websites that are acting against wikileaks.org are under constant DDOS counterattacks by parts of the online community. Sites such as www.postfinance.ch, the Swedish attorneys office (www.aklagare.se) and the Mastercard website (www.mastercard.com) have been unresponsive for days due to constant overload.

In a community board I found a link to http://pastehtml.com/view/1c8i33u.html which appears to be some sort of a botnet client for IRC coordinated massive DDOS protests. The attack on Mastercard has been performed by some 700 clients–a number that is considered to be too small in numbers for an intented succesful attack on amazon.com for its withdrawel of wikileaks S3 hosting space.

May be LOIC may as well serve as one more useful tool for fighting the class-war. There is a description of the LOIC tool at http://encyclopediadramatica.com/LOIC.

Comedy gold from John Bolton here

Interesting article criticle of Assange from a left perspective

http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com/2010/12/what-kind-of-anarchist-is-julian.html

CYBER WAR!!!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/11/wikileaks-backlash-cyber-war

edit: fixed... I know I know, I just wanted to say "CYBER CLASS WAR!!"

I don't see the class content requisite to make this battle an instance of class war. As far as I can see, it is (so far) an 'information war', a battle whose content is freedom of information and transparency.

I agree with waslax, I don't see any class content to this. Doesn't mean that wikileaks isn't a good thing, nor that it's repression isn't an important issue, but there's nothing inherent in either that makes it a class issue (or even a broadly anti-capitalist one). I saw an interview with Assange where he said that wikileaks had already become part of the journalistic mainstream (in that much of its purpose was to be the focus of legal attention, so that publications like the NYT an Guardian could then publish the scoops without so much threat of big legal bills).

It, and the recent attack on the fitwatch site by the MET, does raise a lot of questions about the infrastructure of sites which criticise the state not on its own terms (including this one of course). Particularly how easy it is to put pressure on hosting providers and how willing they are to comply with that pressure - whether the crappy host that fitwatch was on, or big services like Amazon.