WikiLeaks portrayed PayPal as bowing to government pressure. Another company, DataCell, which describes itself as under Swiss and Icelandic control, says it is accepting donations on behalf of WikiLeaks. And the organization says there are other options for supporting the organization financially.

Like Amazon and EveryDNS before it, PayPal said that WikiLeaks had violated its Acceptable Use policy, which says the service “cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity.”

In response to Amazon’s move, Daniel Ellsberg, the man known for leaking the Pentagon Papers and whose story has recently been retold in a 2009 documentary film “The Most Dangerous Man In America,” has called for a boycott of Amazon, saying he wants “no further association with any company that encourages legislative and executive officials to aspire to China’s control of information and deterrence of whistle-blowing.” He further asks Amazon insiders who may have documentation of what political pressures were brought to bear to send what files they have to WikiLeaks.

Amazon maintains its decision was motivated by nothing more than a Terms of Service issue, and it’s “inaccurate” to consider its move a response to a government inquiry.

First, the site Wikileaks.org was dropped by its domain name services provider last night and so has been forced to relocate to another domain name, within Switzerland’s top-level domain. The site can now be found at Wikileaks.ch, which forwards directly to an IP address. WikiLeaks’ former provider, EveryDNS, said in a statement that it took the action because of the numerous denial-of-service attacks that had been carried out against the original domain. More from the Guardian here.

Meanwhile, Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman has introduced legislation that would criminalize the publication of the name of any U.S. intelligence source. (Wait, that’s not already illegal?) “Our foreign representatives, allies, and intelligence sources must have the clear assurance that their lives will not be endangered by those with opposing agendas, whether they are Americans or not, and our government must make it clear that revealing the identities of these individuals will not be tolerated,” Lieberman said in a statement. It’s called the Shield Act, and you can read it here.

Then France is getting into the act. Le Point reports that Eric Besson–minister of industry, energy and the digital economy–has asked a government regulator to look into ways to block French Internet companies from hosting the files in that country. A Google translation of Le Point’s story is here.

Finally, Amazon issued a statement giving its side of the story on how it came to terminate its relationship with WikiLeaks, which had briefly been a customer of its Amazon Web Services. It wasn’t the DDOS attacks, it says, nor government pressure, but that WikiLeaks was violating several requirements of its Terms of Service agreement. For one thing, WikiLeaks was required to represent that it had rights to the content it was hosting. “It’s clear that WikiLeaks doesn’t own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content,” Amazon says. For its part, WikiLeaks says Amazon is lying.

In May, the Chinese telecom gear maker paid $2 million to acquire staff and intellectual property of 3Leaf Systems, a Bay Area start-up that developed technology for making collections of server computers work together like a more powerful machine.

Huawei and former 3Leaf executives say they didn’t think the acquisition required a review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., or CFIUS, because they didn’t buy all of the company’s assets. The inter-agency body reviews acquisitions that could have national security implications.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Participants hope to outrace Chinese engineers in bringing a thousand-fold acceleration of today’s most powerful machines–replaying a crusade in the past decade that leapfrogged a supercomputer in Japan that briefly held the world speed crown.

This time, the challenges could be much tougher. Achieving the next major leap in computing performance could require systems with as many as a billion electronic brains, as well as programming breakthroughs to exploit them. And Republicans in Congress bent on reducing deficits may be hard to persuade to subsidize such developments.

It’s not going to be easy,” concedes Horst Simon, deputy laboratory director at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, a major supercomputer user. But he says a case can be made that important scientific problems won’t be solved without a new generation of systems. “It is really an economic-competitiveness issue and a national-security issue,” he says.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The system was designed by China’s National University of Defense Technology and is housed at the National Supercomputing Center in the city of Tianjin. It is part of a new breed that exploits graphics chips more commonly used in playing videogames–supplied by Nvidia Corp.–as well as standard microprocessors from Intel Corp.

Supercomputers are massive machines that help tackle the toughest scientific problems, including simulating commercial products like new drugs as well as defense-related applications such as weapons design and breaking codes. The field has long been led by U.S. technology companies and national laboratories, which operate systems that have consistently topped lists of the fastest machines in the world.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

In light of this, Venture Capital Dispatch sat down with Philip Eliot, a principal at Paladin Capital Group, a multi-stage private equity fund with a focus on national security, to talk about why these threats are proliferating and how the opportunities are changing for entrepreneurs and investors in the space.

At Paladin Capital, Eliot sits on the board of Unitrends Software Corp., a maker of data protection appliances, and helped manage its investment in CloudShield Technologies Inc., a maker of network traffic management equipment, that recently was sold to Science Applications International Corp.

Here is an edited version of our interview:

Read the rest of this post on the original site

“What we don’t quite understand as seriously as we should is the extent of malicious cyberactivity that grows, that is growing now at unprecedented rates, extraordinary sophistication,” Blair told the House Intelligence Committee in the course of delivering his annual threat assessment. “And the dynamic of cyberspace, when you look at the technological balance, right now it favors those who want to use the Internet for malicious purposes over those who want to use it for legal and lawful purposes.” 

Sadly, the former seem to be far more on top of their game these days than the latter, which makes defending our financial, commercial and physical infrastructure all the more difficult.

“Attacks against networks that control the critical infrastructure in this country…could wreak havoc,” Blair continued. “Cyber defenders right now, it’s simply the facts of the matter, have to spend more and work harder than the attackers do, and our efforts frankly are not strong enough to recognize, deal with that reality.” 

The unnamed company was just one of several successfully penetrated by a campaign of cyberespionage, according to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission report to be released Thursday. Chinese espionage operations are “straining the U.S. capacity to respond,” the report concludes.

The bipartisan commission, formed by Congress in 2000 to investigate the security implications of growing trade with China, is made up largely of former U.S. government officials in the national security field.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

As Google (GOOG) notes, there’s no formal explanation yet for the block, though it may be in response to a seven-minute video posted to YouTube last week showing Chinese soldiers brutally beating Tibetans last March after the riots in Lhasa. China, after all, isn’t renowned for its tolerance of free expression or dissident speech. Remember, animated beat cops patrol the nation’s 13 top portals, warning citizens away from material the ruling Communist Party finds politically or morally threatening.

Asked to comment on the block, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang claimed Beijing was unaware of it. “Many people have a false impression that the Chinese government fears the Internet. In fact it is just the opposite,” he told reporters. “China’s Internet is open enough, but also needs to be regulated by law in order to prevent the spread of harmful information and for national security.”

In a 352-page report published last week, the National Research Council said data mining and behavior detection aren’t nearly as useful as their proponents claim. In fact, they’re of dubious scientific merit and have “enormous potential” for infringing on law-abiding Americans’ privacy. “Automated identification of terrorists through data mining (or any other  known methodology) is neither feasible as an objective nor desirable as a goal of technology development efforts,” the Council found. “Even in well-managed programs, such tools are likely to return significant rates of false positives, especially if the tools are highly automated.”

While not an explicit condemnation of the techniques at issue here, the report does recommend that the government evaluate the effectiveness and lawfulness of these data mining and behavior-detection programs it’s so keen on before implementing them, and periodically thereafter. Said the Council, “History demonstrates that measures taken in the name of improving national security, especially in response to new threats or crises, have often proven to be both ineffective and offensive to the nation’s values and traditions of liberty and justice.”