ReadWriteWeb

Wikileaks boss Julian Assange arrested in London. Assange was arrested on outstanding rape and sexual assault charges from Sweden. Should Assange prove guilty of assaulting a woman in that country, it will put a severe ding in the public face of Wikileaks, an organization that seems highly centralized on and by Assange.

Should the prosecution prove inspired by pressure by the U.S. and others embarrassed by the release of diplomatic cables, it will probably give the organization a huge boost in credibility and justify the "infowar" in which many of his supporters fancy themselves soldiers.

Nonviolent direct action is a staple in the American diet. Our everyday freedoms depend on the work of activists who have put their bodies on the line to fight for the rights we enjoy. Despite that, many forms of protest are reviled in the present, as people are often more willing to condemn the actions of a few committed individuals as violent or unnecessary, than to judge the system, be it violent or unjust. But history reveals much that is hidden, and we will see how history will judge WikiLeaks and Operation Payback. In this post, I will analyze Operation Avenge Assange in light of nonviolent direct action as it has been traditionally considered.

It's been 11 days since the first batch of U.S. diplomatic cables was released by the online organization WikiLeaks.

A lot has happened in those 11 days. Below is a recounting of the key events, issues and debates that have arisen. There's enough going on that it's almost sure to include some details you weren't familiar with, dear reader, but we also invite you to correct the history we're working on documenting as it unfolds.

Following its very public DDoS attacks on the Visa and Mastercard websites this afternoon, it appears as though the vigilante group Anonymous will no longer be able to keep us apprised via Twitter or Facebook.

The group's access to both social networking sites has been pulled.

Updated: 30 minutes later, it looks like you can follow Anonymous at @AnonOps

Following the take-down of the Visa website, the group tweeted that its Facebook group had been banned. Then, it tweeted a link to a list of numbers, appearing at first glance to be credit card information.

Mastercard's website was down for several hours this morning, and now it appears as though Visa's is offline as well, as these sites have become the targets of ongoing DDoS attacks.

And so the infowar rages on today with these latest shots apparently fired by Anonymous, a vigilante group of hacktivists loosely affiliated with the message board 4chan. Anonymous has been fighting an ongoing crusade dubbed Operation Payback for the last several months. Using distributed denial of services attacks, this group has managed to knock off-line a number of pro-copyright websites, belonging to the likes of the U.S. Trademark Office and musician Gene Simmons.

Over the past few days, we've watched a battle unfold between two Internet giants. No, not Google and Facebook. 4chan and Tumblr. Members of the two sites have come to blows, so to speak, over who "owns" Internet memes, and some on the 4chan message board called for "Operation Overlord" - a DDoS attack targeted against the microblogging site. Tumblr users have threatened to respond by filling the 4chan boards with pictures of kittens. And both sites have taken turns over the past 24 hours being offline.

It's easy, perhaps, to dismiss this back-and-forth of bored and disgruntled teenagers. And because one of the call-to-arms on 4chan said "We are Anonymous" and involved a denial-of-service tactic, it may be easy to confuse 4chan v Tumblr with the more recent DDoS attacks undertaken by Anonymous.

Continuing its campaign against the defenders of copyright law, Anonymous orchestrated a denial-of-service attack against the website of the U.S. Copyright Office today, knocking the site offline for half an hour and rendering it slow to unusable for a couple of subsequent hours. (At the time of publishing, the home page is up, but none of the links on the site are operational.)

For the past month, Operation Payback, spearheaded by Anonymous, has targeted organizations like the RIAA, the MPAA, the UK Copyright Office, as well as KISS bassist Gene Simmons with DDoS attacks - either crashing their sites completely, grinding them to an unbearable halt, or in some cases, putting redirects in place so that visitors end up instead at the popular BitTorrent Pirate Bay website.

"Some of you may have heard a few popcorn farts re: our sites being threatened by hackers," wrote KISS bassist Gene Simmons on his website yesterday, responding to a DDoS attack that took down GeneSimmons.com earlier this week.

The attack was part of Operation Payback, a campaign that over the past few weeks has been targeting organizations who legislate and litigate in support of copyright laws. Loosely organized by Anonymous, a group of Internet "vigilantes" has launched a series of denial-of-service attacks against the likes of the MPAA, the RIAA, the UK Intellectual Property Office, as well as against the KISS bassman.

Trolls: Those creepy, hyperaggresive, hateful, mouth-breathing basement-dwellers. They were a feature of the Internet long before the social web, and most of us feel they're probably here to stay.

But one of the things most trolls rely on is anonymity, a wall behind which they hide any information that could be used against them, including their jobs, locations, appearances and real names.
And anonymity is a not-so-slowly disappearing feature of the social web. What do you think: Will the rise of transparency and the fall of anonymity put trolls in the deadpool any time soon?

FormSpring.com is a data collection and management system with a particular emphasis in online forms, registrations and surveys. An enterprise-level system, FormSpring.com might seem rather dry to anyone but an online retailer or event coordinator.

FormSpring.me, on the other hand, has tapped the very essence of what makes the social web so addictive. This new application, a free and social-side project, nearly has all the requisite puzzle pieces to go completely viral.
It's fun, engaging and slightly game-like, and it encourages the behaviors users love to indulge. It's only missing one critical element: