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Online activists fighting to keep WikiLeaks alive

Though it's in hot water with the U.S. government, WikiLeaks is being supported by online activists fighting to keep the site alive.

WikiLeaks is being propped up by a barrage of mirror sites created by activists following moves by Amazon to stop hosting its site and Domain Name System provider EveryDNS.net to cut off its DNS services, according to The New York Times. Such mirrors can replicate an entire Web site, ensuring that all content and documents remain online and accessible even if WikiLeaks' own site is taken down.

But some of WikiLeaks supporters are adopting a … Read more

Amazon cuts off WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks no longer has a home at Amazon.

The controversial site, which has roused the ire of the U.S. government for leaking classified information, is no longer being hosted by Amazon's Web servers as of yesterday.

WikiLeaks had been tapping into Amazon's EC2, or Elastic Cloud Computing service--including earlier this week. WikiLeaks said yesterday it's now being hosted by servers in Europe, according to Reuters.

In response to its expulsion from Amazon, WikiLeaks tweeted two comments:

"WikiLeaks servers at Amazon ousted. Free speech the land of the free--fine our $ are now spent to employ … Read more

E-book writing tool

Books are here to stay, but paper is an endangered species. While libraries full of actual books won't be disappearing any time soon, electronic books like Amazon's Kindle have established a firm toehold in the market, a trend that will continue as more titles are published as e-books. That's where Visual Vision's eBookWriter Lite enters the story. It's a free tool for creating and publishing e-books, but it's not a compiler. It's a complete visual environment that requires no knowledge of coding to use, yet it creates single-source-file e-books that can be opened … Read more

Classic PC game site GOG.com back from dead

Classic PC gaming fans were thrown for a loop last week when the GOG.com Web site was replaced with a terse message about changing market conditions and the promise of a forthcoming further announcement. The digital distribution service also known as Good Old Games was known for offering officially licensed versions of older PC games, all packaged as DRM-free executable files, suitable for modern operating systems. But with the site down, members could no longer re-download games they had purchased (an important selling point for customers), and the future of this DRM-free experiment seemed shaky at best.

It turns … Read more

4chan takes down RIAA, MPAA sites

Members of image board and Internet forum 4chan over the weekend launched a series of DDoS attacks against Web sites for the two biggest media trade groups.

Accused in the past of drumming up raids against Twitter, YouTube, and other popular sites, users at 4chan urged fellow members to carry out DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks against the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) late last week, taking both offline on Saturday.

The actions by 4chan users were launched in retaliation against similar DDoS attacks aimed at The Pirate Bay and other file-sharing … Read more

Rapid resizing

We resize images all the time--to e-mail to friends, post on blogs, share on Facebook, and much more. Although we often resize images in a photo-editing program as soon as we take them off the camera, it's not uncommon for us to need a resizing tool that can be used the rest of the time. After all, who wants to launch a big photo-editing program for tasks that can be completed with a lightweight utility? That's where Fast Image Resizer comes in. This basic program lets users resize images as quickly and easily as anything we've seen.… Read more

Twitter at a crossroads once again

Twitter acknowledged Tuesday that "from a site stability and service outage perspective, it's been Twitter's worst month since last October." It's a big embarrassment for a company that, over the past year or two, has managed to clean up its reputation for technical instability and that this spring one-upped critics by unveiling a business model that looks like it might actually work.

"Last Friday, we detailed on our engineering blog that this is going to be a rocky few weeks. We're working through tweaks to our system in order to provide greater stability … Read more

Will.i.am riffs on BlackBerry, music distribution

It's easy to dismiss a celebrity product endorsement as an empty money grab, but not so when the celeb is Black Eyed Pea's front man Will.i.am and the product is his BlackBerry. When speaking about his phone there seems to be an honest affinity between the man and the brand, a relationship he plans to capitalize on as a means to communicate directly with his audience.

"I've been using them since the very beginning; I'm a BlackBerry fan-fan," Will.i.am said.

At one time this may have meant Will.i.am … Read more

Valve's Steam coming to Mac May 12

Mac gamers who have been eager for Valve to port over its Steam game distribution software to OS X now have a date to look forward to. Valve on Thursday finally set Wednesday, May 12, as the day when the software will be made available to the general public.

Valve has been testing the Mac version of its Steam client in a private beta since the end of March. Screenshots and videos of the pre-release software began leaking out just a few weeks later.

As mentioned in previous coverage, the software promises to bring the same digital distribution for games … Read more