Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Julian Assange Signs Deals Of Worth $1.3 Million For His Autobiography


Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, has signed deals for his autobiography worth $1.3 million yesterday.
In an interview Julian said that:
“The book will be published in the UK as well as the U.S. I would receive $800,000 from U.S. publisher Alfred A. Knopf, a unit of Random House, and £325,000 ($502,000) from UK publisher Canongate Books Ltd.”
For Random House a spokesman  confirmed the deal, but not the amount. According to the spokesman:
“We are very excited to be
publishing this book. The work that Assange has been doing at WikiLeaks has tremendous importance around the world.”
The 39-year-old Australian Julian, who is under house arrest in rural England as he awaits an extradition hearing early next year, has denied the accusations and dismissed them as a smear.
Julian said:
“I don’t want to write this book, but I have to. I have already spent £200,000 for legal costs and I need to defend myself and to keep WikiLeaks afloat.”
On Swedish charges of sex crimes Assange recently made bail after being arrested. Julian’s bank account has also been frozen at the Post Finance Swiss bank. Aside from those personal problems, Assange’s WikiLeaks website faces a number of obstacles.
After beginning to publish 250,000 stolen cables (emails) from the U.S. State Dept., the organization recieved immense amounts of heat from Gov’t agencies and officials. Under pressure, companies like Amazon, PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, and others dropped support for the Website.
In response, a group of vigilante hackers launched distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, shutting down all of the services for periods of time. DDoS attacks work by overloading Websites with thousands or millions more hits than they are used to, usually resulting in the Website going offline for a period of time.
It is most probable that Julian also write about the internal power struggles within WikiLeaks. A number of his staff recently defected and started a new leaking service called Open Leaks which has similar goals.
One of their main problems was that Assange seemed unable to follow one of Journalism’s basic tenets: keep yourself out of the story.
Mr Assange has been staying at a friend’s country mansion in Sussex since his release from jail on December 16 on strict bail conditions that include reporting to police daily and wearing an electronic tag. A court in London is due to hold a full hearing on the Swedish extradition request starting on February 7.

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