What is Wikileaks ?

Whistle-blowing website Wikileaks is once again at the centre of attention.

It is preparing to unveil a new set of US secret documents which it says are bigger than past releases on Afghanistan and Iraq.

Last month, Wikileaks posted online almost 400,000 documents detailing events in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, months after releasing some 90,000 secret records of US military incident and intelligence reports about the war in Afghanistan.

It is the latest in a long list of "leaks" published by the secretive site, which has established a reputation for publishing sensitive material from governments and other high-profile organisations.

In April 2010, for example, Wikileaks posted a video on its website that shows a US Apache helicopter killing at least 12 people - including two Reuters journalists - during an attack in Baghdad in 2007. A US military analyst is currently awaiting trial, on charges of leaking the material along with other sensitive military and diplomatic material.

In October 2009, it posted a list of names and addresses of people it claimed belonged to the British National Party (BNP). The BNP said the list was a "malicious forgery".

And during the 2008 US elections, it published screenshots of the e-mail inbox, pictures and address book of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

Other controversial documents hosted on the site include a copy of the Standard Operating Procedures for Camp Delta, a document that detailed restrictions placed on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
Legal wrangles

It provoked controversy when it first appeared on the net in December 2006 and still splits opinion. For some it is lauded as the future of investigative journalism. For others it is a risk.

In mid-March 2010 the site's director, Julian Assange, published a document purportedly from the US intelligence services, claiming that Wikileaks represented a "threat to the US Army".

The US government later confirmed to the BBC that the documents were genuine.

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Farms to harvest rare animal parts 'are not the answer !!

Farming rare animal species will not halt the illegal trade in animal parts, a conservation group has warned.

Care for the Wild says the fact that the animals are worth more dead than alive is hampering efforts to save species such as tigers and rhinos.

They add that selling parts from captive-bred creatures would not result in a halt of illegally traded animal parts and would instead fuel demand.

A kilo of powdered rhino horn can fetch £22,000 on the black market.

Mark Jones, programmes director of Care for the Wild International, said recent media reports suggested that the South African government was considering "a feasibility study on some kind of farming or ranching of rhinos for their horns".

"This flagged up that these sort of farming initiatives are still being considered at quite high levels," he explained.

"Rhinos are in quite a lot of trouble at the moment, with the value of their horns going through the roof, especially in Vietnam."
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Tiger in the scrub (Image: AP)

A recent report said wild tigers were still at risk as a result of poaching

* 1,000 tigers 'killed in a decade'

Media coverage in 2009 reported that a member of the Vietnamese government said he took rhino horn and his cancer went into remission, prompting a growth in the demand for the illegal product.

"The sums that are being paid for powdered rhino horn are just astronomical."

There are two species of rhino found in Africa. While the white rhino (Ceratotherium simum) has enjoyed a surge in numbers in recent years, taking the population to about 17,500, it is a very different story for the northern sub-species Ceratotherium simum cottoni.

It is listed as Critically Endangered, and conservationists have warned that it is on the "brink of extinction" with four or fewer individuals remaining.

More than 200 rhinos have been killed in South Africa for their horns since the beginning of this year. This week, the nation's defence minister told BBC News that troops would be deployed to help rangers fight poachers.

Read more: Farms to harvest rare animal parts 'are not the answer

Alien' planet detected circling dying star !!

Astronomers claim to have discovered the first planet originating from outside our galaxy.

The Jupiter-like planet, they say, is part of a solar system which once belonged to a dwarf galaxy.

This dwarf galaxy was in turn devoured by our own galaxy, the Milky Way, according to a team writing in the academic journal Science.

The star, called HIP 13044, is nearing the end of its life and is 2000 light years from Earth.

The discovery was made using a telescope in Chile.
Cosmic cannibalism

Planet hunters have so far netted nearly 500 so-called "exoplanets" outside our Solar System using various astronomical techniques.

Read more:- Alien' planet detected circling dying star

Huge antenna launched into space !!

A US satellite carrying the biggest commercial antenna reflector ever put in space has been launched successfully from Baikonur in Kazakhstan.

The mesh structure on the Skyterra-1 spacecraft is 22m (72ft) across.

It will relay signals for a new 4G-LTE mobile phone and data system for North America run by Lightsquared.

Callers whose networks are tied into the system will be automatically switched to a satellite if they are out of range of a terrestrial mast.

Lightsquared is the latest effort to try to establish a hybrid satellite-terrestrial system in the US.

Two previous ventures ran into financial problems. Both Terrestar and DBSD North America had to seek legal protection under Chapter 11 bankruptcy rules while they sought to restructure enormous debts built up as they rolled out their systems.
Skyterra-1 (Boeing) The satellite has been built by Boeing

LightSquared has promised a different approach. It says its business will be wholesale only. It will be selling capacity to carriers who wish to offer go-anywhere connectivity to their consumers, be they phone or data users.

The system will be capable of supporting smartphone-sized devices, it says.

Under a schedule approved by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the company has to have a ground network of terrestrial stations in place to serve 90% of the US population by the end of 2015.

The Skyterra-1 satellite was launched from Baikonur on a Proton rocket at 2329 local time on Sunday (1729 GMT)

The 5.4-tonne satellite will be located at 101.3 degrees West longitude and is expected to have a service life of 15 years.

The launch was the 10th Proton flight of 2010, and the seventh organised by International Launch Services, the company that sells the Russian rocket to commercial operators who need to get satellites into orbit.

A second satellite, Skyterra-2, will follow in 2011.

Huge antenna launched into space

Internet pioneer Vint Cerf warns over address changes !!

The internet could face years of instability as it moves to a new addressing system, one of the network's original architects has warned.

Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet, spoke as the UK was urged to begin using the new addressing system.

With current addresses due to run out in 2012, nations and businesses must get on with switching, said Mr Cerf.

During the switch internet links could become unreliable, making sites and services hard to reach, Mr Cerf said.

"This has to happen or the internet will stop growing or will not be growable," he said of the move to the addressing system.

The net has grown to its current size using version 4 of its addressing scheme (IPv4), which allows for about 4.3 billion addresses.

Estimates suggest that this pool of addresses will be exhausted by the end of January 2012.
Priority issue

A system with a far larger pool of addresses has been created, called IPv6, but progress towards using it has been sluggish.

"The business community needs to understand that this is an infrastructure they are relying on and it needs to change for them to continue to grow and to rely on it," Mr Cerf said.

He criticised global businesses, saying they were "short-sighted" for not making the shift sooner.
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"They cannot grow their business if they do not have an address space to grow it into," he added.

The problem of the switchover will be exacerbated, said Mr Cerf, because the two addressing systems are not compatible.

As parts of the internet do eventually convert to IPv6 those trying to get at the parts still on IPv4 may not reach the site, resource or service they were after.

The net would not stop during the switch, said Mr Cerf, but access could get "spotty".

That instability could last years, he suggested, as even search giant Google - his current employer - took three years to get its IPv6 network up and running.

"There's work to be done," he said.

"It's not massive work but it is meticulous work."
Clock, BBC Time is running out for firms to get using the replacement addressing scheme

Mr Cerf was the keynote speaker at a launch event for 6UK, a non-profit group set up to get UK businesses converting to the new addressing scheme.

Currently only about 1% of data sent over the internet is wrapped in IPv6 packets, said Mr Cerf, adding that moving to using the bigger address space should now be a global priority.

Some nations, such as China and the Czech Republic, had made great strides in using IPv6 but others had not even started.

"There is turbulence coming," said Nigel Titley, chairman of RIPE, the body that hands out Europe's allocation of IPv4 addresses.

He said it was only a matter of time before the shortfall of addresses started to hit business.

Attempts to get more people online, close digital divisions or to boost e-commerce could all be hampered by a lack of addresses, Mr Titley said.

The key to accelerating the shift to IPv6 would be making internet service providers (ISPs) offer the service to their customers, he said, something too few were doing at the moment.

"Sooner or later BT is not going to be able to provision a new broadband customer," said Mr Titley. "That's when the accountants might wake up."

Burma hit by massive net attack ahead of election !!

An ongoing computer attack has knocked Burma off the internet, just days ahead of its first election in 20 years.

The attack started in late October but has grown in the last few days to overwhelm the nation's link to the net, said security firm Arbor Networks.

Reports from Burma say the disruption is ongoing.

The attack, which is believed to have started on 25 October, comes ahead of closely-watched national elections on 7 November.

International observers and foreign journalists are not being allowed into the country to cover the polls.

It will raise suspicions that Burma's military authorities could be trying to restrict the flow of information over the election period.

The ruling generals say the polls will mark a transition to democratic civilian rule.

But as the BBC's Sue Lloyd-Roberts reports from Burma, many believe the election is a sham designed to cement the military's grip on power.

In the last elections in 1990, Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) won a landslide victory but the junta ignored the result and have remained in power ever since.
Cyber attack

The Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, as it is known, works by flooding a target with too much data for it to handle.

source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11693214