Archive for the ‘United States’ Category

Posted on February 3, 2011 - by Venik

Cézanne and Stem Cells

The New York Times ran an interesting story on an unlikely diplomatic dispute between the US and Russia over fine art and inter-museum exchange. Apparently in July of last year a federal judge in DC ruled that Russia was supposed to hand over a collection of books and religious documents to a sect of Hasidic [...]

Posted on January 28, 2011 - by Venik

FBI Rushes to VISA’s Defense

The FBI has announced that it executed 40 search warrants for suspected members of the Anonymous international hacktivist group known for its actions in of Wikileaks. Police in the UK has arrested five suspected members of the group. Anonymous is credited with the successful attacks against VISA and MasterCard payment systems late last year after [...]

Posted on December 20, 2010 - by Venik

Conspiracy Theory

I am at work, filling my office with clouds of cigar smoke and reading Jim Goad’s “Julian Assange’s Honey Trap: That’s Rape in Sweden“, perhaps the most entertaining account to date of Assange’s Stockholm adventure. And a seemingly redundant question popped into my head: why exactly did Assange go to Sweden? I know, he went [...]

Posted on December 16, 2010 - by Venik

Sweden Wants Out

Swedish prosecutors investigating Julian Assange told reporters that they were not involved in the Crown Prosecution Service’s decision to appeal an earlier decision by a judge at City of Westminster magistrates court granting Assange bail. “Karin Rosander, director of communications for Sweden’s prosecutor’s office, told the Guardian: “The decision was made by the British prosecutor. [...]

Posted on December 14, 2010 - by Venik

Holbrooke’s Dead

One of America’s preeminent diplomats (a title not hard to attain, judging by the Wikileaks’ publications), former VP of a leading private equity firm Perseus LLC, and former board member of AIG died at the age of 69 from a ruptured aortic aneurysm after a meeting with Secretary Clinton. Evil tongues claim Wikileaks was the [...]

Posted on December 11, 2010 - by Venik

Nothing Odd

A couple of days ago Claes Borgström (thank God I am not Swedish), the lawyer representing Anna Ardin and Sofia Wilén in the sex case against Julian Assange, decided to explain some of the more obvious discrepancies in his clients’ version of events. Normally, this is what a good lawyer would be expected to do [...]

Posted on December 9, 2010 - by Venik

WikiDefendors

Today Wikileaks and Julian Assange gained two new influential supporters: the UN human rights commissioner Navi Pillay and her nemesis the Batman (aka Russia’s prime minister Vladimir Putin). Putin’s vocal support of Julian Assange comes a day after a member of Medvedev’s administration suggested Assange should be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. “When asked [...]

Posted on December 9, 2010 - by Venik

Network attacks against PayPal are effective

PayPal is backpedaling and there is good reason for that. While PayPal’s financial services remained accessible throughout the day, their performance was well below average. Prolonged, intermittent degradation of service can lead to the same loss of revenue as a complete but relatively brief outage. An intermittent degradation of service is also easier to achieve and harder to troubleshoot than a full outage. While PayPal’s PR representative was not lying when he said that attacks failed to crash PayPal’s services, they did degrade them significantly and it is just as bad, or worse.

Posted on December 8, 2010 - by Venik

Nobel Prize for Assange

An unnamed member of Medvedev’s administration told Russian new agency RIA Novosti that nominating Assange for the Nobel Peace Prize should improve his chances resisting legal and political pressure. While it is unlikely that such a nomination will come from the Russian administration, the fact that they are even talking about this in the Kremlin [...]

Posted on December 7, 2010 - by Venik

PayPal dumps Wikileaks

As you already know, PayPal stopped accepting charitable donations for Wikileaks. The Guardian reported that PayPal froze about eighty thousand dollars donated to Wikileaks via PayPal Donations service. So far PayPal has refused to release the funds, nor has it issued refunds to its customers who donated the money. I know this because I donated [...]

Posted on December 6, 2010 - by Venik

Low Hanging Fruit

The US government is pressuring Assange, his co-workers, Internet service providers, house pets, and even his lawyers. Ignoring the obvious illegality of this tactic, the more important question is: what exactly is the Department of State hoping to accomplish by harassing Wikileaks? The cat is out of the bag, the worms are out of the can. The entire collection of 250,000-some US embassy cables has already been widely distributed among leading newspapers and private citizens in various countries.

Posted on December 4, 2010 - by Venik

US Embassy Cables: Amateur Hour

By shining the light on the kindergarten that is the US Foreign Service, Wikileaks has effectively put an end to US diplomatic activities worldwide. No amount of damage control by the Department of State will turn the clock back and give back American diplomats the respect they lost. It will have to be earned from scratch over the coming years and decades. Short of a major asteroid impact, this leak of embassy cables is the most damaging thing that could have hit America’s national interests.

Posted on August 30, 2010 - by Venik

Global Moron Alert

Here’s my scientific study* on the density of morons in various almost randomly-selected countries. We deal with morons on a daily basis. Some of us would swear we are surrounded by morons. But how many morons are there? I decided to try to answer this question and arrived at some unexpected results. Wikipedia defines “moron” [...]

Posted on July 27, 2010 - by Venik

The Biggest Secret

While the US Army is revving up its investigation of Bradley Manning, those of us with a gift for diagonal reading are sure to be very busy for the next couple of weeks. However, I think it is safe to say that the Afghan war’s two biggest “secrets” have been sufficiently exposed. And they are [...]