Julian Assange

58. Julian Assange

Julian Assange is at the cutting edge of digital journalism – as states' and companies' attempts to silence Wikileaks show

Job: founder, WikiLeaks
Age: born 1971
Industry: digital media
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Julian Assange is the undercover force behind WikiLeaks, the self-styled "intelligence service of the people" that has published more than a million confidential documents from top secret military information to the hacked emails of Sarah Palin.

Launched at the beginning of 2007 and with a mission to change the world by abolishing official secrecy, the website has posted the text messages of people killed in the September 11 attacks, controversial correspondence between climate change researchers at East Anglia University and the so-called "Collateral Murder" video of American forces killing unarmed civilians in Baghdad.

At the cutting edge of digital journalism, it has "more scoops in three years than the Washington Post has had in 30", according to the internet guru Clay Shirky.

Unlike traditional media, WikiLeaks has so far escaped censure by basing itself in Sweden, which has strong laws to protect whistleblowers. When the Guardian was prevented from publishing documents about the activities of oil trader Trafigura, the material ended up on WikiLeaks soon afterwards.

Not that governments and big business haven't tried to shut the site down – Assange claims to have fought off more than 100 legal attacks since its launch. "To do that, and keep our sources safe, we have had to spread assets, encrypt everything, and move telecommunications and people around the world," he said.

A softly spoken Australian with a shock of white hair, little is known about Assange. He does not discuss his background – he was raised in Melbourne and convicted of computer hacking when he was a teenager - or where he lives. Favourite boltholes are said to include Kenya, Sweden and Iceland.

Assange was forced into hiding earlier this year following the arrest of a US intelligence analyst who claimed to have sent 260,000 incendiary US state department cables on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the site.

WikiLeaks claimed its founders comprised Chinese dissidents, hackers, computer programmers and journalists, but Assange is its driving force.

The website won the prestigious Amnesty Media award for exposing hundreds of alleged murders by the Kenyan police and is helping MPs in Iceland with their plans to become a bastion for global press freedom.

It has an annual budget of around $175,000, funded by small donations and free legal support from big media organisations, but a shortage of funds led it to temporarily suspending operations at the beginning of the year.

The site has also come under attack, not just by governments and big business, but from critics who claim it is indiscriminate and unaccountable. To which Assange replied: "When governments stop torturing and killing people, and when corporations stop abusing the legal system, then perhaps it will be time to ask if free speech activists are accountable."
source : http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jul/16/julian-assange-mediaguardian-100-2010

iamafanofassange

BBC: Julian Assange

To his fans, Julian Assange is a valiant campaigner for truth. To his critics, though, he is a publicity-seeker who has endangered lives by putting a mass of sensitive information into the public domain.

Mr Assange is described by those who have worked with him as intense, driven and highly intelligent - with an exceptional ability to crack computer codes.

He is often on the move, running Wikileaks from temporary, shifting locations.

He can go long stretches without eating, and focus on work with very little sleep, according to Raffi Khatchadourian, a reporter for the New Yorker magazine who spent several weeks travelling with him.

"He creates this atmosphere around him where the people who are close to him want to care for him to help keep him going.

"I would say that probably has something to do with his charisma," Ms Khatchadourian said.

Julian Assange has been reluctant to talk about his background, but media interest since the emergence of Wikileaks has given some insight into his influences.

He was born in Townsville, Queensland, northern Australia, in 1971, and led a nomadic childhood while his parents ran a touring theatre.

He had a child at 18, and custody battles soon followed.
Caught hacking

The development of the internet gave him a chance to use his early promise at maths, though this too led to difficulties.

In 1995 he was accused with a friend of dozens of hacking activities.

Though the group of hackers was skilled enough to track detectives tracking them, Mr Assange was eventually caught and pleaded guilty.

He was fined several thousands Australian dollars - only escaping prison on the condition that he did not re-offend.

He then spent three years working with an academic, Suelette Dreyfus, who was researching the emerging, subversive side of the internet, writing a book with her, Underground, that became a bestseller in the computing fraternity.

Ms Dreyfus described Mr Assange as a "very skilled researcher" who was "quite interested in the concept of ethics, concepts of justice, what governments should and shouldn't do".

This was followed by a course in physics and maths at Melbourne University, where he became a prominent member of mathematics society, inventing an elaborate maths puzzle that contemporaries said he excelled at.
'Encrypt everything'

He began Wikileaks in 2006 with a group of like-minded people from across the web, creating a web-based "dead-letterbox" for would-be leakers.

"[To] keep our sources safe, we have had to spread assets, encrypt everything, and move telecommunications and people around the world to activate protective laws in different national jurisdictions," Mr Assange said told the BBC earlier this year.

"We've become good at it, and never lost a case, or a source, but we can't expect everyone to go through the extraordinary efforts that we do."

Daniel Schmitt, a co-founder, describes Mr Assange as "one of the few people who really care about positive reform in this world to a level where you're willing to do something radical to risk making a mistake, just for the sake of working on something they believe in".

Wikileaks has published material from a number of different countries, but really hit the headlines in April, when it released video taken from a US helicopter in Iraq in 2007. The images, carried by media outlets around the world, caused widespread shock.

Mr Assange emerged into the spotlight to promote and defend the video, as well as the massive releases of classified US military documents on the Afghan and Iraq wars, in July and October.

But reporters say he can still prove elusive, and that the workings of his website remain shrouded in secrecy.

In another twist in a controversial career, Swedish prosecutors are investigating allegations of rape and molestation made against him. Mr Assange has denied the charges, saying they are part of a smear campaign against his whistle-blower website.

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The boy who was raised as a girl

BBC World Service -

Health Check Special report

In a special programme Claudia Hammond tells the story of a boy who, due to a botched circumcision, was given gender reassignment as a girl; Brenda.

But as a teenager Brenda became suicidal and when her parent told her the truth she decided to change back to her original gender.

The BBC tells the story and reveals the terrible emotional toll that was only revealed in 1997 after 'David' was tracked down.

Faces are in, and must stand proxy for biography, psychology, gossip and sex

| Simon Jenkins | Comment is free | The Guardian

Faces are in, and must stand proxy for biography, psychology, gossip and sex

Elections are won and royal fiancees analysed on looks alone. We accord appearance far more value than we dare admit

Such a nice-looking woman. The eyes sparkle reassuringly, the cheeks bloom wholesomely, the mouth smiles easily in an outgoing, friendly sort of way. The face does not have Diana's coy allure, but is commonsensically pretty. She clearly has the inner stability and strength for a future queen, not a "people's princess" but rather a potential icon of bourgeois monarchy.

There you are. It is the best I can do. Another royal bride has launched a thousand platitudes on the rolling surf of celebrity. What can we poor commentators do? The nation apparently craves comment. Kate Middleton's face is more than a window on a soul, it is a window on the self-absorption of an entire people. It must stand proxy for biography, phrenology, psychology, gossip and sex. The face must tell all when so much is concealed. The one feature of the fiancee of a sometime king that they cannot censor or spin is her face. Age can wither it and custom stale its limited variety, but for the time being it is the one thing about her that is vulnerable and naked to the world. It is all we have to go on.

Faces are in. Some commentators thought the last election was won and lost on a face – that of smooth, confident David Cameron against hassled, haggard Gordon Brown. According to the Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell, Cameron's face so embodies "total moral opportunism combined with a complete, engorged, erectile sense of his own responsibility" that he draws it cruelly inside a condom. It is hardly Cameron's fault that his skin is smooth.

In contrast, Brown's face was caricatured as a decomposing Matterhorn of introvert exhaustion. His blind eye and muscular defect were mercilessly parodied. Ridicule is no respecter of the accidents of birth or injury. We no longer subject celebrities to trial by ordeal or combat. We leave them to cartoonists. Fair? Who said life was fair? It is Brown's fault he lost the election for not being beautiful.

The taboo that personal comment should not harp on physical handicap or disadvantage is falsified by its converse: comment that harps relentlessly on beauty. We may wince at Orwell's remark that "at 50 everyone has the face he deserves", or Groucho Marx's quip: "I never forget a face, but in your case I'll make an exception." But the reality is that BBC women of a certain age do not survive high-definition television. The prose may be fine but the pores are a problem. Brains and brawn must work their way in the world, but beauty has a free pass. If a woman's face is her fortune, it should surely incur inheritance tax.

In her biography of the Victorian admiral Jacky Fisher, Jan Morris tried to analyse the infatuation he induced in so many of his contemporaries. A humble-born, irreverent sailor with little experience of war, short and with a faintly oriental appearance, Fisher shot to the top of the most snobbish navy on earth. He dined privately with Queen Victoria and had politicians at his beck and call. He was master of all he commanded. What was so special about him?

History offered Morris no clue until she came across an early photograph of the admiral's face. She became so obsessed with it that she pinned it up in that most intimate of privacies, her wardrobe. It was of a man childlike and puckish, with dark eyes and strangely alluring lips, curled into a permanent smile. Anyone in his company instinctively smiled in sympathy. Gregarious, garrulous, tactile, always dancing, the man was irresistible, and not just to women. He was a bundle of facial charm. The secret of his success, Morris concluded, lay in one thing, and she called her biography Fisher's Face.

The pop psychology guru Malcolm Gladwell points out in his bestseller, Blink, that in virtually all contacts between individuals, the first visual glimpse is not just critical in conjuring a person to mind, it is all we get. The brevity may seem grotesque, but such facial flashes are the arbiters of most human relationships other than the closest. They are love or hate at first sight. On such flint-sparks we do what we can to form an impression.

The truth is that we accord appearance far more importance than we dare admit. We carry battered pictures of ourselves on cards and in wallets, as if they held our true identity. Young people exchange faces by internet as a simulacrum for friendship. This article is accompanied by a snapshot of its author, who cringes at its unrecognisability. He may plead for its removal – claiming pompously that it erects a wall of false impression between words and reader – but the editor is implacable.

Words can no longer stand on their own feet. The reader apparently requires that the writer pose before a camera, as if he were an illegal immigrant in the empire of prose. Something is needed to add colour to grey print, warmth to cold text, humanity to brute opinion. Some newspapers even prop up writers' faces with an entire suit of clothes, as if a column were window dressing a manikin.

My first humble job in journalism was to edit the apotheosis of the English face, the Country Life frontispiece. In those days it was a proper portrait, usually of a sub-lieutenant's fiancee, identical in hair, pearls and cashmere, with only the face to convey distinction. Over the years the feature became an anthropological record of a class of English female face, the sort described by Oscar Wilde as "once seen, never remembered". I longed one day to do a spoof frontispiece of Lucy, the hominid fossil found in Kenya, in full Bond Street rig, to see if readers noticed.

That frontispiece has, like these words, lost its presentational purity. Even a face dare not stand on it own. The Country Life girl is no longer a head wholly filling the frame but is surrounded by the clutter of middle-class status – by clothes, dogs, flowerbeds, interior design and, increasingly, something the girl is trying to sell, such as herself. The point used to be that the girl was engaged, unattainable, already sold. The frontispiece is now a record of lifestyle, while students of the human face would do better to study diamond advertisements.

The drug pushers of this craze, the photographers, are ever more facially intrusive, their lenses so powerful they can penetrate every pore and reveal the tiniest wrinkle or shaving mishap. Layout artists crop faces so as to exaggerate ageing or pass some quasi-political comment. I remember a BBC cameraman once asking his director before an interview: "Are we lighting for or against?"

Those who deride popular analysts of the Middleton face should beware. They do it themselves all the time. We all try to read between the lines. We long to leap the fence of privacy, to know better the person on the other side and "find the mind's construction in the face".

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The 360-degree image of London has a total resolution of 80 gigapixels..what a wow!

The incredible 360-degree panoramic photo of London that shows capital in unprecedented detail

By Daily Mail Reporter

It is a unique portrait of London, a dizzying panorama of our capital city captured in unparalleled detail.

A newly published 360-degree image of London takes the crown as the largest, highest-resolution  panoramic photo in the world.

The image of London has a total resolution of 80 gigapixels, or 80 billion pixels.

It is so detailed that the photographers even had to censor one image which they described as ‘naughty’ - but they have not told users where the image was found or what it was.

The 80-gigapixel panoramic photo is so detailed that users can even zoom in on the clock face at Westminster to read the time almost 1.5 miles away

The hugely detailed photo is at such a high resolution that individuals can be picked from across the city

This new London gigapixel image, if printed at normal photographic resolution, would be 115 feet long and 56 feet high.

Shot by photographer Jeffrey Martin over a period of three days from the top of the Centre Point building at the crossroads of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, the image reveals the highest-resolution view of any city that has ever been captured.

From this vantage point - 36 stories up in the air - an astonishing number of landmarks, houses, skyscrapers, shops, offices, and streets are visible.

Countless people at street level are observable, as well as thousands of windows, many of which reveal glimpses of life inside.  The faces of any identifiable children were also blurred too.

Previous attempts at world record gigapixels include a 26-gigapixel image of Paris, a 70-gigapixel image of Budapest, a 26-gigapixel image of Dresden, and Martin's previous record holder from 2009, an 18-gigapixel spherical image of Prague.

A couple can be seen stopping for a cup of coffee on the street, unaware they being photographed from up to two miles away, left, while viewers are able to zoom into office blocks across the city

Individual faces can be seen enjoying the view in the London Eye on the South Bank, left and viewers can even zoom up on the window of apartments, right

Martin, a panoramic photographer and the Founder of 360Cities.net, created the London gigapixel image from 7886 high-resolution individual photos taken from the Centre Point building.

These thousands of photos were then stitched together as one single image on a powerful Fujitsu CELSIUS computer.

See the image at 360cities.net/london.

The panorama was shot from the top of the Centre Point building in central London this summer

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1330811/The-incredible-360-degree-panoramic-photo-London.html#ixzz15fLyO1cO

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