41 - Wikileaks, Adrian Lamo... whistle blowers....

I'm kinda confused about something here. I read up a bit on Adrian Lamo a few years ago and I knew that he was known as "the homeless hackers". When I got to know read up about him first I read about the way that he would be break into websites, identify security weaknesses and not charge anything for the service, if you could call it that. He did this for some companies and he to this too some companies. He was somewhat of an ethical hacker, a grey hat. He broke into these sites because he wanted them to be more secure.

Then one day in 2010, Adrian Lamo was contacted by the now famous Bradley (Chelsea) Manning. Bradley Manning basically confided in Lamo telling him (Lamo) that he had leaked thousands of files to the website wikileaks. Files leaked were about the American government and issues regarding matters of national security.

Lamo reported the the soldier Bradley Manning to the US Army counter intelligence and Manning was arrested. Manning is now in prison and is not going any where for at least another 8 years (at least that if she is lucky.

My point?

Did Lamo do right? Did Lamo do the correct thing in whistle blowing the whistle blower? There is alot more to it than what I written here, like a-l-o-t! But to me, it is a basic question. Within the computer community alot of people knew Adrian Lamo as a grey hat hacker. Manning must have known it too. Was Lamo wrong? Was Manning wrong leaking the files?

34 Years Old + 92 Days

Sunday!!!!!

The day of rest, as I have reiterated before this, Sunday is now no longer the mecca of days of days anymore, but it is still an absolutely fantastic day. Today we left Castlebar and made our way down to Carraroe, carefully, the roads were kinda slippy, but I felt nothing of it, partially because of the roads, and you know what, partially becuase I am a good driver and I drove carefully.

I was this weekend totally impressed with the girls, they are really fantastic. I am seeing them growing up to into properly little well behaved women. I am able to ask Lucy now to do stuff for me and she has enough grasp of Irish and English that she will go and do it. I love them so much.

Why block the site unless it
 has something to hide

Ever hear of the website "Wikileaks"? It is about as politically loaded as they come. They hold stories about everything but particulairily from American soldiers who fought in the Afgan and Iraq war of late. I went to visit the site but when I tried in wikileaks.org nothing happened. I googled why nothing happened and I found out that I had to do some alterations to my host file (I did not know off hand what that was), but I was given an easier solution in the form of the actual ip address of the server itself, so that worked.... the IP address is http://213.251.145.96/ Go there and look at the site. It has become really interesting for me, you see seemingly what has happened is that it has been hit with denial of service attacks, a black hat hacker method of knocking out the domain server of a site. This was probably done by someone that does not like what wikileaks.com is doing and saying... that is providing free information to the public. This makes me believe that wikileaks is actually a good site.