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Julian Assange Biography – Facts, Birthday, Life Story …

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Synopsis

Born on July 3, 1971, in Townsville, Australia, Julian Assange used his genius IQ to hack into the databases of many high profile organizations. In 2006, Assange began work on Wikileaks, a Web site intended to collect and share confidential information on an international scale. The information his organization released earned him strong supporters and powerful enemies. For his efforts,

"If journalism is good, it is controversial, by its nature."

Julian Assange

"It is the role of good journalism to take on powerful abusers, and when powerful abusers are taken on, there's always a bad reaction. So we see that controversy, and we believe that is a good thing to engage in."

Julian Assange

the internet activist earned the Time magazine "Person of the Year" title in 2010. After arriving at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London in June 2012, seeking to avoid extradition to Sweden, Assange was granted political asylum by the Ecuadorean governmentin August 2012.

Journalist, computer programmer and activist Juliam Assange was born on July 3, 1971, in Townsville, Queensland, Australia. Assange had an unusual childhood, as he spent some of his early years traveling around with his mother, Christine, and his stepfather, Brett Assange. The couple worked together to put on theatrical productions. Brett Assange later described Julian as a "sharp kid who always fought for the underdog."

The relationship between Brett and Christine later soured, but Assange and his mother continued to live a transient lifestyle. With all of the moving around, Assange ended up attending roughly 37 different schools growing up, and was frequently homeschooled.

Assange discovered his passion for computers as a teenager. At the age of 16, he got his first computer as a gift from his mother. Before long, he developed a talent for hacking into computer systems. His 1991 break-in to the master terminal for Nortel, a telecommunications company, got him in trouble. Assange was charged with more than 30 counts of hacking in Australia, but he got off the hook with only a fine for damages.

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NSA and GCHQ spying on WikiLeaks

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As far back as 2010 the NSA added WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange to a MANHUNTING target list.

Julian Assange calls for the appointment of a Special Prosecutor to investigate the NSA, after documents show US spying on WikiLeaks and its supporters.

Today, documents were published from the national security whistleblower Edward Snowden, detailing US and UK spying efforts against the publishing organization WikiLeaks. One document shows that as far back as 2010 the US National Security Agency added WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange to a MANHUNTING target list, together with suspected members of al-Qaeda. Another shows that the NSA wanted to designate WikiLeaks as a malicious foreign actor in order to expand the NSAs ability to target WikiLeaks staff, associates and supporters. And a third document, from 2012, demonstrates that the NSAs UK partner GCHQ also spied on WikiLeaks and its readers.

In response to these revelations WikiLeaks Editor Julian Assange has released the following statement:

WikiLeaks strongly condemns the reckless and unlawful behavior of the National Security Agency. We call on the Obama administration to appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate the extent of the NSAs criminal activity against the media including WikiLeaks and its extended network.

News that the NSA planned these operations at the level of its Office of the General Counsel is especially troubling. No less concerning are revelations that the US government deployed "elements of state power" to pressure European nations into abusing their own legal systems; and that the British spy agency GCHQ is engaged in extensive hostile monitoring of a popular publishers website and its readers.

The NSA and its UK accomplices show no respect for the rule of law. But there is a cost to conducting illicit actions against a media organization. We have already filed criminal cases against the FBI and US military in multiple European jurisdictions. The FBIs paid informant, who attempted to sell information about me and my staff to the FBI, was imprisoned earlier this year.

No entity, including the NSA, should be permitted to act against journalists with impunity. We have instructed our General Counsel Judge Baltasar Garzn to prepare the appropriate response. The investigations into attempts to interfere with the work of WikiLeaks will go wherever they need to go. Make no mistake: those responsible will be held to account and brought to justice.

The disclosures come after yesterdays release of two new documents from the long-running US Grand Jury against WikiLeaks. As of November 2013 the United States Department of Justice has stated that the investigation continues.

AGB/AGB

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NSA and GCHQ spying on WikiLeaks

How to Buy PotCoins Part 2: Make a cryptocurrency trading account at swissex.com to buy PotCoin – Video

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How to Buy PotCoins Part 2: Make a cryptocurrency trading account at swissex.com to buy PotCoin
You will need to go to: https://www.swisscex.com/ in order to follow this video. This video shows you how to buy PotCoins if you already have BitCoins. If yo...

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How to Buy PotCoins Part 2: Make a cryptocurrency trading account at swissex.com to buy PotCoin - Video

Could there be a $50,000 bitcoin?

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By David Z. Morris

FORTUNE -- In the last year, and with increasing intensity following the early December price spike that briefly put Bitcoin above $1,200, critics have sounded the alarm that the price is a bubble. Some, like Felix Salmon, have recognized the value of the cryptocurrency, but argued that it is simply overvalued, much like pre-2008 real estate.

Others haven't stopped there, claiming that bitcoin is all bubble, at the center of which is little or no intrinsic value -- something closer to a Dutch tulip mania than a real estate bubble. Those making the latter case have included Nobel Laureate Robert Shiller and former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.

It seems reasonable enough to be skeptical of a digital currency unbacked by any state or real-world goods. But bitcoin optimists argue that what "backs" bitcoin is the functionality of its frictionless, low-cost, decentralized payments system. As Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire put it at fact-finding hearings held by the New York Department of Financial Services in January, "The growth in the value of bitcoin is a put option on its adoption as a payments platform."

MORE:Bitcoin's no good, horrible, very bad few weeks

An anonymous viral e-mail circulating among bitcoin watchers and partisans lays out a few simple hypothetical usage and adoption scenarios, and their consequences for bitcoin's price. If Amazon.com (AMZN) adopted bitcoin for all payments, its volume of $38 billion, divided by a supply of (at the time of the email's writing) about 7 million bitcoin, would make each bitcoin worth $5,400. If $300 billion in international remittance was conducted in bitcoin, that volume alone would push the price to $42,000. Adding these, along with online poker and gas station transactions, would lead to a total transaction volume of $602 billion -- and a bitcoin, even at today's expanded supply of 12 million coins, worth $50,000.

"Those numbers are good ones to start with. In some sense, that's like a maximum," says Susan Athey, a professor of economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business who has been studying bitcoin. Few would realistically argue that bitcoin will service 100% of even these silos in the near term, but the volume/supply ratio is the starting point for understanding bitcoin price -- as more consumers or organizations choose to use bitcoin, increased volume will drive the price up.

Building from that basic formula, Athey adds a variety of variables to build an analytic framework. The first is velocity -- how frequently a bitcoin can be spent. Because bitcoin, unlike paper money, is very low-friction, there's the possibility of a very high-velocity bitcoin, if, for example, vendors or traders only held bitcoin very briefly, cashing it in and out to government currencies on either end of transfers. That, Athey says, would allow a small volume of bitcoin to process a large volume of payments, keeping the price of bitcoin relatively low.

Then there are even less predictable and higher-risk variables. Obviously, bitcoin's future price depends hugely on the adoption rate of the cryptocurrency model. Athey believes that the cryptocurrency model of distributed ledgers is "a really simple, powerful technology that is superior to existing technology," and there are major drivers that point toward wide adoption.

One fascinating adoption scenario frequently floated among bitcoin adherents is specific to retail. Online retailers' razor-thin profit margins get a huge boost when they pay a bitcoin processor's fee of about 1% instead of credit card fees of 2-3%. How long will it be, some ask, before a major retailer offers a discount for those paying in bitcoin, as a way to maximize that increased profit margin? Such a discount could drive significant bitcoin adoption in a very short timeframe.

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Could there be a $50,000 bitcoin?

AMD graphics card pricing skyrockets due to cryptocurrency mining, could kill AMD’s gaming efforts

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Cryptocurrency-fueled demand has driven the price of AMD Radeon cards through the roof in recent weeks, and consumers are feeling the pinch. This is a trend weve remarked on several times in the past, but rocketing prices have hit new heights in recent days, with the price of the R9 290X briefly breaking $900 over the weekend. Considering the card carries an official $550 MSRP, thats a massive 64% over premium.

Prices seem to have come down slightly since yesterdays exuberance; the R9 290X is currently selling for a mere $800 at Amazon, while Newegg has a handful of cards in stock for $700.The R9 290 is selling for $600 a mere 1.5x markup on its $400 MSRP. (Oops: When I started writing this story, Newegg had a handful of cards in stock for $700. Now, it doesnt.)

The insanity, however, isnt confined to the highest-end cards. Heres a comparison of the official AMD MSRPs and the current selling prices.

Price %s over MSRP

Even the R9 270 cards are selling for 30-40% over MSRP, while the R9 280X a GPU thats supposed to cost $300 is actually selling for $489. We can zoom in on one particular card thanks to website price-tracker CamelEgg, and see the greater problem.

Save for a brief period in late November and immediately after Christmas, the gap between official selling price and street price on the R9 290 has been enormous. It also corresponds exactly with the rise of alternative cryptocurrency mining(Litecoin, Dogecoin, et al.) as Bitcoin became too difficult to work with.

This might sound like a great deal for AMD. Huge demand for video cards lifts prices, prices drive profits. Everybody wins, right?

Maybe. Unfortunately its not that simple. AMD hasnt changed its MSRPs, which means much of this price gouging is likely dropping into the pockets of Newegg and Amazon resellers, not Sunnyvale itself. Just because AMD hasnt changed its MSRPs, of course, doesnt mean it isnt quietly charging higher wholesale prices, but its ability to claim some of the bubbles earnings for itself is likely limited by previously agreed-upon contract prices as well as the volatile nature of the market. Add-in board partners (AIBs) wont pay huge premiums for chips when they know the market for those processors depends on something as volatile as the cryptocurrency markets.

Beyond making life fun for reviewers, who have to take practical cost considerations into account when evaluating different GPUs, theres another problem here. AMDs entire GPU strategy since October of 2013 has relied on steep price cuts to fuel sales. The Radeon R9 290 and R9 290X were killer cards partly because they equaled or bettered Nvidias GTX 780 or GTX Titan, but at far lower price points.

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AMD graphics card pricing skyrockets due to cryptocurrency mining, could kill AMD’s gaming efforts

Spies monitored WikiLeaks visitors in real time, Snowden docs show

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Newly revealed documents leaked by former NSA analyst-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden reveal that American and British spy agencies have targeted whistleblower publication WikiLeaks since 2008, not long after the controversial website was launched, reports The Intercept. As part of its surveillance efforts, the UKs Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) collected real-time data on visitors to WikiLeaks, which included country of origin, and search terms used to arrive at the website.

By exploiting its ability to tap into the fiber-optic cables that make up the backbone of the Internet, the agency confided to allies in 2012, it was able to collect the IP addresses of visitors in real time, as well as the search terms that visitors used to reach the site from search engines like Google, reports Glenn Greenwald and Ryan Gallagher.

The collection of IP addresses used to access WikiLeaks, which promised anonymity to whistleblowers, could have potentially been used to reveal their identities.

A document dated 2010 shows that the NSA added WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to its so-called Manhunting Timeline, which lists individuals that the US government considers risks. Assange was added to the Manhunting Timeline after WikiLeaks began publishing 70,000 classified documents about the war in Afghanistan. The document cites a 2010 report from the Daily Beast, which stated that the Obama administration is pressing Britain, Germany, Australia, and other allied Western governments to consider opening criminal investigations of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and to severely limit his nomadic travels across international borders.

The Manhunt Timeline also lists Iceland as one of the nations pressured to prosecute Assange, who remains secluded at the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning under allegations of sexual misconduct.

In a statement, Assanged condemned the surveillance of WikiLeaks by the NSA and GCHQ and its supporters, calling it criminal activity against the media.

News that the NSA planned these operations at the level of its Office of the General Counsel is especially troubling, said Assange. No less concerning are revelations that the US government deployed elements of state power to pressure European nations into abusing their own legal systems; and that the British spy agency GCHQ is engaged in extensive hostile monitoring of a popular publishers website and its readers.

Another program used by GCHQ to understand and shape the Human Terrain of the Web, dubbed Squeaky Dolphin, collected real-time data that included YouTube video views, URLs liked on Facebook, and Blogspot/Blogger visits, according to a page of the leaked documents.

Further documents show that the NSA used its resources to target file-sharing sites the Pirate Bay, which the agency cites as an example of a malicious website, as well as the hacktivist collective Anonymous.

DT

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Spies monitored WikiLeaks visitors in real time, Snowden docs show


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