I don't wish to be irreverent, but I needed to do some work just to feel normal again. Since we're discussing Web 2.0, I thought you might be interested in the following site. An American court purged the original wikileaks.org from the California registrar under pressure from a Cayman Island bank (first link listed in the left column under Analysis). But the site organizers obviously have more resilience than the court envisioned (or perhaps more expertise).
wikileaks
5 comments:
Wikileaks (like Wikipedia) is a perfect representation of Web 2.0. According to Wikileaks, they have over 1.2 million documents published on their site. That number is incredible when you consider the site had only been launched for a year when that number was achieved. Without unrestricted collaboration from Web users, I would think the content on their site would be considerably less comprehensive.
Due the subject matter of the documents they are publishing, however, I'm sure they will meet with many court injunctions.
And while I do not advocate censorship, what protection do businesses (like the Swiss bank that sued Wikileaks) have against erroneous publications giving a negative report against their company? I'm just throwing that out there.
If you want, if the URL for Wikileaks.com isn't working for you, try using this IP address: http://88.80.13.160
All they did was mess with the DNS entries, the site and server work fine.
There's a lot of fake stuff up there, and so, with these wikis, what is the level of liability of the host of the content? Have ISPs and other web-hosting services gotten sued for what's on their servers? I'm sure they have. How did those suits go down?
Thanks for exposing me to Wikileaks. I had no idea that was out there. I have to admit that I have the same questions as pb922 and dan. Since we've been discussing the relationship between author and reader, my biggest question is how do you, as a reader, confirm the ethos of the author in a Web 2.0 environment? As cynical as many have become about contemporary journalistic practices, I have to admit that I still trust journalists who presumably have been trained more diligently in their craft and their field's professional ethics. I don't quite trust Wikileaks' assertion that it "opens leaked documents up to stronger scrutiny than any media organization or intelligence agency can provide. Wikileaks provides a forum for the entire global community to relentlessly examine any document for its credibility, plausibility, veracity and validity." I'd rather rely on someone who's qualified to do this. After all, I assure you that no one wanted ME to peruse the Pentagon Papers and offer my two cents. It would have been a waste of everyone's time, and I would have most likely authored a fantasy or science fiction piece. Is my judgment of my fellow Web surfers too harsh?
The strange thing is that there are qualified people looking over some of this stuff.
Sometimes they have the typical degrees and/but sometimes they don't.
I don't know, nor do I have answers to those questions...oh well.
The bank gave up their injunction against wikileaks per this NY Times Blog article.
Via Slashdot.
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