Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Monday October 17 2016, @07:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the where's-the-nearest-Starbucks? dept.

Multiple sources reporting:
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37680411
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2016/10/17/wikileaks-says-assanges-internet-link-was-severed-by-state-party.html
http://time.com/4532984/wikileaks-julian-assange-theories/

Wikileaks has announced that Julian Assange's internet access had been intentionally severed by a state actor. I would assume this means they disrupted a VPN connection he had rather than just cutting all internet access to the Ecuadorian Embassy, but again details are limited.

The announcement of disruption was also preceded by multiple strange tweets of random numbers (likely crypto keys) that appear to be part of a dead man system activated by the disruption.

takyon: The full tweet states "Julian Assange's internet link has been intentionally severed by a state party. We have activated the appropriate contingency plans." Wikileaks recently released Part 9 of the Podesta Emails. Also at CNET and Ars Technica.

Update: Wikileaks says: "We can confirm Ecuador cut off Assange's internet access Saturday, 5pm GMT, shortly after publication of Clinton's Goldman Sachs speechs."

Perhaps the embassy's perennial guest has finally overstayed his welcome?


Original Submission   Alternate Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday October 18 2016, @01:03AM

    by butthurt (6141) on Tuesday October 18 2016, @01:03AM (#415476) Journal

    Am I missing something? 60 seconds/minute *60 minutes/hour *24 hours/day *56000 bits/second /8 bits/byte /1024 bytes/kB /1024 kB/MB = 576.8 MB/day

    200 MB/day works out to 19418 bits/second.

    Even 200 MB/day of uncompressed plain text is far more than anyone can read or write. With a mastery of meditation--or under sufficient sedation--one might have the patience to even view a few Web pages.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday October 18 2016, @01:29AM

    by edIII (791) on Tuesday October 18 2016, @01:29AM (#415484)

    No, I missed the difference between bits and bytes. That 200MB mark is what I was effectively pushing through a 56K modem on a moderately crappy connection 17k ft from the CO. It may have been suboptimal speeds :) (although never underestimate the speed of 4GB hard drives doing 60mph between a data center and a house)

    Even still, 576.8 MB is not the much. While it still may be more than what can be read or written by a person, that doesn't mean it's suitable for data transfers, or that it can suffer the overhead of encryption and document formatting. Not with recent data, that tends to be pretty bloated.

    With a mastery of meditation--or under sufficient sedation--one might have the patience to even view a few Web pages.

    Some of us older guys are laughing quite a bit right now. The "Internet" used to be pretty slow, and protocols that could let you view the data while you downloaded it were cutting edge and pretty cool.

    Download speeds used to be slow enough that you needed to pace yourself viewing porn. So you could last till the bottom of the image, or perhaps even go through a couple of them in "real time". The funniest pranks I've ever heard of was replacing a girls pussy with a big ol' dick or Bozo the Clown, as the dude was wanking furiously for a few minutes till the "big reveal". Older BBS's had a sense of humour.

    Porn in ye olden times was an adventure where you earned the reward. Dudes these days with the Internet and 40 thumbnails loading in less than a second are so spoiled :)

    --
    Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
    • (Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday October 19 2016, @04:18PM

      by Bot (3902) on Wednesday October 19 2016, @04:18PM (#416197) Journal

      > although never underestimate the speed of 4GB hard drives doing 60mph

      The speed is therefore 60mph. :)

      --
      Account abandoned.
  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday October 18 2016, @01:38AM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday October 18 2016, @01:38AM (#415486) Journal

    The math doesn't tell the whole story. Years ago, when all I had was dialup in Outback Nowhere, downloading an ISO of a few hundred megabytes might take all week. We didn't have bittorrent, there were just FTP and browser downloaders, and a couple download managers. You got about half the ISO, and got a message that the file was corrupt, do you want to start over. FTP was far more reliable than any other choice of downloaders, but not all sites supported FTP.

    Long story short, dial up sucked the llama's ass.

    • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday October 18 2016, @02:32AM

      by butthurt (6141) on Tuesday October 18 2016, @02:32AM (#415503) Journal

      Rsync was released in 1996; for those who had a shell account it could make such things relatively painless.

      https://groups.google.com/forum/?_escaped_fragment_=msg/comp.os.linux.announce/tZE1qtTcQaU/IF8GhGQ_uTsJ [google.com]

      Aside from that, there were (are) ways of resuming an interrupted download, or failing that, breaking a file into smaller files, to be combined after they all arrived.

      zipsplit - split a zipfile into smaller zipfiles
      [...]
      -n size
              Make zip files no larger than "size" (default = 36000).

      --
      http://www.info-zip.org/mans/zipsplit.html [info-zip.org]

      split — split a file into pieces
      [...]
      -b, --bytes=SIZE
              put SIZE bytes per output file

      -- https://www.mankier.com/1/split [mankier.com]

      ZMODEM supports enormous block sizes and, following a communication failure, allows transfers to resume from where they stopped.

      -- https://www.techopedia.com/definition/1805/zmodem [techopedia.com]

      The NcFTP client can reget files which have only partially downloaded.

      -- http://www.linuxmisc.com/3-solaris/8399fba0726d9e39.htm [linuxmisc.com]

      One fellow, however, had difficulty downloading such an FTP client:

      Please, tell me where I may get an FTP client for
      Windows 3.11, which has "restart" or "reget" option. I was
      given a PPP connection (for free) from George Soros'
      International Scientific Foundation (ISF, Kiev Branch). But
      their name server is overrun by users' calls during most of
      the day and I can access it only from 01.00 to 07.00.
      Generally, there is only 300-800 bps speed of transfer,
      which makes files larger then 500k almost unaccessible for
      me. Last night I tried to pull out a 1.8M file from the USA.
      That was very stupid. I went around my PC all night long
      like a hungry jakal around a dying elephant but, alas. The
      transfer was aborted at around 08.00 after I got a 0.7M
      portion. Well, someone's surfing -- someone's "snailing".

      :-(

                I found a utility from ftp.download.com, which can
      retrieve files in several sessions ("GetRight" shareware)
      but again, it is too large for me (1.140M zip) and it
      requires Windows95. I also tried to download an evaluation
      copy of WS_FTP from Ipswitch.com (both "Profesional" and
      "Limited Edition") but all transfers (6 attempts) were
      aborted after approx. 100K had been done.

      I shall appreciate it highly if somebody tell me where I can
      get a "reget" (not very large and for Windows3.11).

      -- https://lists.purdue.edu/pipermail/cytometry/1997-March/006699.html [purdue.edu]

      • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday October 18 2016, @02:44AM

        by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday October 18 2016, @02:44AM (#415509) Journal

        Informative, but I needed you to tell me this over 20 years ago. ;^)

        Back then, FTP was a "new" technology to me. Not to the computing world, but to me. I certainly can't tell you which client I was using then, but it could and would fail to resume. The resume feature was there, it simply failed as often as not. And, at that time, I had no idea what rsync was. My "support" consisted of people who had relative "broadband", trying to help some country hick out. They didn't seem to understand my problems, and I certainly didn't understand how they managed to download the entire internet on a daily basis.