Archive for December, 2010 Page 2 of 2

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Twitter and Facebook have not abandoned Wikileaks, yet.

Published on December 8, 2010 in Facebook, Twitter, politics and social media. View Comments

Amazon Web Services, PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, its DNS server and its Swiss bank account have all abandoned Wikileaks, presumably after Senator Joe Lieberman called on corporations to stop doing business with Wikileaks. However, two notable outlets for the organisation’s communications still appear to be accessible as I write this post: Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook Wikileaks

Are Twitter and Facebook going to shut down the Wikileaks accounts? It appears not, well at least not yet. ReadWriteWeb reported that Facebook has made the decision to keep Wikileaks’ Facebook page live. Andrew Noyes, Facebook’s Manager of Public Policy Communications is quoted as saying:

The Wikileaks Facebook Page does not violate our content standards nor have we encountered any material posted on the page that violates our policies.

Facebook also asserted that it hasn’t received any official requests to disable the Wikileaks page (as of the writing of that post), or any notification that the articles posted on the page contain any unlawful content. They also maintain that they are continuing to monitor the situation. This seems to imply that if Wikileaks is found to be breaking the law, Facebook might change its mind.

Wikileaks Twitter

Twitter has also said that it is not censoring Wikileaks from ‘Trending Topics’, after it was questioned by reporters and users on the issue. Twitter was suspected of removing the hashtags #wikileaks and #cablegate after the heavily used tags were no longer trending.

So despite taking a number of serious hits over the past couple of days, including the arrest of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in London on sexual assault charges, Wikileaks is still able to communicate via social media.

Additionally, to make it very difficult indeed to remove Wikileaks from the Internet, with the aid of many supporters, multiple (1289 at the time of writing) mirrors of Wikileaks have been set up.

Do you think Wikileaks’ social media accounts will eventually be disabled, if it’s found that any laws have been broken by the organisation?

Google Earth Engine launched to aid global environmental monitoring and measurement.

Published on December 7, 2010 in Google, clean tech, environment and technology. View Comments

Google has launched Google Earth Engine at the United Nations Climate Change Conference, currently underway in Cancun, Mexico. The new platform enables global monitoring and measurement of changes in Earth’s environment.

Google Earth Engine will allow scientists to use Google’s huge infrastructure to analyse imagery (running analyses across thousands of computers), in order to study data related to such things as the state of deforestation, disease mitigation, disaster response and water resources.

Google says it’s particularly excited about the use of Google Earth Engine to support development of systems to monitor, report and verify efforts to stop global deforestation. Deforestation is responsible for a substantial amount of carbon being released into the atmosphere, and loss of biodiversity.

It’s a timely launch, as a United Nations proposed framework  for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD) is a key agenda item at the Cancun conference.

Because of the huge amount of satellite imagery, and the substantial computer resources needed to analyze the images, many images have never before been seen or analyzed. Google says that scientists will now be able to build applications to mine the significant amount of data they have built up.

Google is also donating 10 million CPU-hours a year for 2 years on Google Earth Engine, to help developing nations track the state of forests. The aim is to provide transparency and certainty to efforts to stop deforestation; both important and significant issues.

It’s good to see Google using its resources in a project such as this, which I notice is also supported by several partners, including key strategic and funding partner the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Wikileaks is rocking our institutions to the core.

Published on December 1, 2010 in Australia, business, politics and technology. View Comments

You’d have to have been living under a rock not to notice the massive and continuing fallout from the latest Wikileaks release of diplomatic ‘cables’, on top of the Iraq war logs released not long ago.

Add to this the probability that Wikileaks will release documents that will significantly impact some major banks (and other companies?) in the near future, and you have a full blown scramble to try and shut down Wikileaks as soon as possible.

Wikileaks, It's time to open the archives

Just in the last couple of days since the beginning of the latest release, among other developments, many governments seem to be in damage control; Wikileaks has been under DDOS attack on multiple occasions; Interpol has issued a ‘Wanted’ notice for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange; Amazon has cut off hosting to Wikileaks on its servers; and a senior advisor and strategist to the Canadian Prime Minister has even called for Assange’s assassination! What next?

Whether you think what Wikileaks is doing is right or wrong, there’s little doubt that they are so far succeeding in rocking many of our major institutions to the core, including ‘the media’, governments, and soon various large corporations. It also leaves little doubt about just how much impact the Internet is continuing to have on the world. Wow.

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