118 Lessons from Wikileaks
Tuesday 7th December, 2010
An interesting article by Simon Phipps, discussing the implications of actions of Paypal, Amazon, and others, namely blocking Wikileaks from their paid services without judicial review, useful explanation or workable recourse.While the Internet itself may have a high immunity to attacks, a monoculture hosted on it does not. We might be able to survive a technical outage, but a political outage or a full-fledged termination of service are likely to put a company that's relied on the cloud for critical infrastructure out of business ... a sales system hosted in the cloud can be taken offline instantly by someone we will never discover, for reasons we can't determine and with no way for us to get them back online.
Amazon and PayPal shouldn't be boycotted; they are just reptiles, after all. The problem is that we have a society with the governments that it deserves, ready to encourage summary judgement rather than consider matters deeply.