Tag: Wikileaks

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Business online safety piracy Regs surveillance & privacy

Swedish ISP Bahnhof provides anonymity to customers by default – #deappg #deact #Wikileaks

Swedish ISP, Banhof, is offering a service that provides its customers with total anonymity on the internet.

We have the privilege to be able to offer a solution for those who want to remain anonymous on the net. When you go online with our partner, all traffic to and from the Internet to go through their servers through an encrypted “tunnel”, which means that nobody can see what you are doing.

Bahnhof, which apparently now hosts the Wikileaks website, does not keep logs of customer activites and would not be able to provide this information to anyone requesting it for the purposes of litigation (*eg Rights Holders in pursuit of copyright infringers – a hot topic at the moment with regard to the Digital Economy Act).

This raises quite an interesting point.

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Business Cloud

Amazon is Down and What that Means for Public Cloud Confidence

Having noted the resilience of Wikileaks and thus the internet from concerted Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks we wake up this morning to a crisis in cloud confidence with the news that some of Amazon’s own European sites have been down. The reason cited? “hardware failure”.

As a network operator I know that no one is immune from such failures.  It is a surprise however that such a failure (we are not given any details) could bring a site such as Amazon down. The Amazon pitch is that their cloud is distributed over multiple sets of hardware and is supposedly able to live with the failure of any given server/drive.

The fact is that this puts out a message that Amazon’s service is not as resilient as they would like it to be.  It will quite possibly make businesses think twice about using a public service that is shared with so many other users.  If any one of those users is attacked it could affect everyone else with collateral damage.

I’m not sure that the cyber battles currently going on over Wikileaks can be described as full scale cyber warfare. The shot across the cyber bows is however going to make people think hard about their cloud strategies.

As a provider of services local to the UK  this actually does give me hope that the model of private clouds for business rather than the big scale low cost low margin world of Amazon et  al has the potential to be one of the winners.