What is WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks is a multi-national media organization and associated library. It was founded by its publisher Julian Assange in 2006.

WikiLeaks specializes in the analysis and publication of large datasets of censored or otherwise restricted official materials involving war, spying and corruption. It has so far published more than 10 million documents and associated analyses.

“WikiLeaks is a giant library of the world’s most persecuted documents. We give asylum to these documents, we analyze them, we promote them and we obtain more.” – Julian Assange, Der Spiegel Interview

WikiLeaks has contractual relationships and secure communications paths to more than 100 major media organizations from around the world. This gives WikiLeaks sources negotiating power, impact and technical protections that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to achieve.

Although no organization can hope to have a perfect record forever, thus far WikiLeaks has a perfect in document authentication and resistance to all censorship attempts.

WikiLeaks, its publisher and its journalists have won many awards, including:

* The Economist New Media Award (2008)
* The Amnesty New Media Award (2009)
* TIME Magazine Person of the Year, People’s Choice (highest global vote) (2010)
* The Sam Adams Award for Integrity (2010)
* The National Union of Journalists Journalist of the Year (Hrafnsson) (2011)
* The Sydney Peace Foundation Gold Medal (2011)
* The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism (2011)
* The Blanquerna Award for Best Communicator (2011)
* The Walkley Award for Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism (2011)
* The Voltaire Award for Free Speech (2011)
* The International Piero Passetti Journalism Prize of the National Union of Italian Journalists (2011)
* The Jose Couso Press Freedom Award (2011)
* The Privacy International Hero of Privacy (2012)
* The Global Exchange Human Rights People’s Choice Award (2013)
* The Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts (2013)
* The Brazillian Press Association Human Rights Award (2013)
* The Kazakstan Union of Journalists Top Prize (2014)

As well as nominations for the UN Mandela Prize (2015) and nominations in six consecutive years for the Nobel Peace Prize (2010-2015)

WikiLeaks is entirely funded by its publisher, its publication sales and the general public.

WikiLeaks has more than one hundred other staff accross the Americas, Africa, Eurasia and the Asia Pacific.

The WikiLeaks Files (Verso, Sep 2015)

WikiLeaks legal team is lead by judge Baltasar Garzón in Europe and in the United States, Michael Ratner, president emeritus of Center for Constitutional Rights.

WikiLeaks ongoing legal cases are best described in this UN report (2015) from the Center for Constitutional Rights

Julian Assange’s ongoing detention without charge is best described here: https://justice4assange.com/3-Years-in-Embassy.html

“This great library built from the courage and sweat of many has had a five-year confrontation with a powerpower without losing a single “book”. At the same time, these “books” have educated many, and in some cases, in a literal sense, let the innocent go free.” – Julian Assange, Der Spiegel Interview

More info: https://wikileaks.org/

Without the hardworking independent developers who build and improve the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network itself, our mission of helping the world access a fairer financial system wouldn’t be possible.

What is Bitcoin Cash?
Bitcoin cash is a cryptocurrency created in August 2017, from a fork of Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash increases the size of blocks, allowing more transactions to be processed. The cryptocurrency underwent another fork in November 2018 and split into Bitcoin Cash ABC and Bitcoin Cash SV (Satoshi Vision). Bitcoin Cash is referred to as Bitcoin Cash because it uses the original Bitcoin Cash client.

Understanding Bitcoin Cash
The difference between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash is philosophical.

As proposed by Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin was meant to be a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency that was used for daily transactions. Over the years, as it gained mainstream traction and its price surged, Bitcoin became an investment vehicle instead of a currency. Its blockchain witnessed scalability issues because it could not handle the increased number of transactions. The confirmation time and fees for a transaction on bitcoin’s blockchain surged. This was mainly due to the 1MB block size limitation for bitcoin. Transactions queued up, waiting for confirmation, because blocks could not handle the increase in size for transactions.

Bitcoin Cash proposes to remedy the situation by increasing the size of blocks to between 8 MB and 32 MB, thereby enabling processing of more transactions per block. The average number of transactions per block on Bitcoin is between 1,000 and 1,500. The number of transactions on Bitcoin Cash’s blockchain during a stress test in Sep 2018 surged to 25,000 per block.

Major proponents of Bitcoin Cash, such as Roger Ver, often invoke Nakamoto’s original vision of a payment service as reason to increase block size. According to them, the change in bitcoin’s block size will enable bitcoin’s use as a medium for daily transactions and help it compete with multinational credit card processing organizations, such as Visa, which charge high fees to process transactions across borders.

Bitcoin Cash also differs from bitcoin in another respect. It does not incorporate Segregated Witness (SegWit), another solution proposed to accommodate more transactions per block. SegWit retains only information or the metadata relating to a transaction in a block. Typically, all details pertaining to a transaction are stored in a block.

Ideological and block size differences apart, there are several similarities between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. Both use the Proof of Work (PoW) consensus mechanism to mine new coins. They also share the services of Bitmain, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency miner. The supply of Bitcoin Cash is capped at 21 million, the same figure as Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash also started off using the same difficulty algorithm – Emergency Difficulty Adjustment (EDA) – which adjusts difficulty every 2016 blocks or roughly every two weeks. Miners took advantage of this similarity by alternating their mining activity between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. While it was profitable for miners, the practice was detrimental to increasing supply of Bitcoin Cash in the markets. Hence, Bitcoin Cash has revised its EDA algorithm to make it easier for miners to generate the cryptocurrency.

History of Bitcoin Cash
In 2010, the average size of a block on Bitcoin’s blockchain was less than 100 KB and the average fee for a transaction amounted to a couple of cents. This made its blockchain vulnerable to attacks, consisting entirely of cheap transactions, that could potentially cripple its system. To prevent such a situation, the size of a block on bitcoin’s blockchain was limited to 1 MB. Each block was generated every 10 minutes, allowing for space and time between successive transactions. The limitation on size and time required to generate a block added another layer of security on bitcoin’s blockchain.

But those safeguards proved to be a hindrance when bitcoin gained mainstream traction on the back of greater awareness of its potential and enhancements to its platform. The average size of a block had increased to 600K by Jan 2015. The number of transactions using Bitcoin surged, causing a buildup of unconfirmed transactions. The average time to confirm a transaction also moved upwards. Correspondingly, the fee for transaction confirmation also increased, weakening the argument for bitcoin as a competitor to expensive credit card processing systems. (Fees for transactions on bitcoin’s blockchain are specified by users. Miners typically push transactions with higher fees to the front of the queue in order to maximize profits.)

Two solutions were proposed by developers to solve the problem: increase the average block size or exclude certain parts of a transaction to fit more data into the blockchain. The Bitcoin Core team, which is responsible for developing and maintaining the algorithm that powers bitcoin, blocked the proposal to increase block size. Meanwhile, a new coin with flexible block size was created. But the new coin, which was called Bitcoin Unlimited, was hacked and struggled to gain traction, leading to doubts about its viability as a currency for daily transactions.

The first proposal also drew sharp and diverse reactions from the bitcoin community. Mining behemoth Bitmain was hesitant to support Segwit implementation in blocks because it would affect sales for its AsicBoost miner. The machine contained a patented mining technology that offered a “shortcut” for miners to generate hashes for crypto mining using less energy. However, Segwit makes it more expensive to mine Bitcoin using the machine because it makes transaction reordering difficult.

Amidst a war of words and staking out of positions by miners and other stakeholders within the cryptocurrency community, Bitcoin Cash was launched in July 2017. Each Bitcoin holder received an equivalent amount of Bitcoin Cash, thereby multiplying the number of coins in existence. Bitcoin Cash debuted on cryptocurrency exchanges at an impressive price of $900. Major cryptocurrency exchanges, such as Coinbase and Itbit, boycotted Bitcoin Cash and did not list it on their exchanges.

But it received vital support from Bitmain, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency mining platform. This ensured a supply of coins for trading at cryptocurrency exchanges, when Bitcoin Cash was launched. At the height of cryptocurrency mania, Bitcoin Cash’s price skyrocketed to $4,091 in December 2017.

Paradoxically enough, Bitcoin Cash itself underwent a fork slightly more than a year later due to the same reason it split from Bitcoin. In Nov 2018, Bitcoin Cash split into Bitcoin Cash ABC and Bitcoin Cash SV (Satoshi Vision). This time around, the disagreement was due to proposed protocol updates that incorporated the use of smart contracts onto bitcoin’s blockchain and increased the average block size.

Bitcoin Cash ABC uses the original Bitcoin Cash client but has incorporated several changes to its blockchain, such as Canonical Transaction Ordering Route (CTOR) – which rearrange transactions in a block to a specific order.

Bitcoin Cash SV is led by Craig Wright, who claims to be the original Nakamoto. He rejected the use of smart contracts on a platform that was meant for payment transactions. The drama prior to the latest hard fork was similar to the one before forking Bitcoin Cash from Bitcoin in 2017. But the end has been a happy one as more funds have flowed into the cryptocurrency ecosystem due to the forking and the number of coins available to investors has multiplied. Since launching, both cryptocurrencies have garnered respectable valuations at crypto exchanges.

The purpose of Linux Mint is to produce a modern, elegant and comfortable operating system which is both powerful and easy to use.

Linux Mint is one of the most popular desktop Linux distributions and used by millions of people.

Some of the reasons for the success of Linux Mint are:

* It works out of the box, with full multimedia support and is extremely easy to use.
* It’s both free of cost and open source.
* It’s community-driven. Users are encouraged to send feedback to the project so that their ideas can be used to improve Linux Mint.
* Based on Debian and Ubuntu, it provides about 30,000 packages and one of the best software managers.
* It’s safe and reliable. Thanks to a conservative approach to software updates, a unique Update Manager and the robustness of its Linux architecture, Linux Mint requires very little maintenance (no regressions, no antivirus, no anti-spyware…etc).

More info: https://www.linuxmint.com/

Sea Shepherd was founded in 1977 by Captain Paul Watson in Vancouver, Canada, with the mission to protect and conserve all marine wildlife. Incorporated in Oregon in 1981 as the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, today the movement has independent entities in over 20 countries working together on direct-action campaigns around the world. Navigate our timeline on here.
Our Mission
Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is the world’s most passionate and powerful protector of ocean life. We are on a mission to defend, conserve and protect the seas and marine wildlife like no organization can.

From its earliest years, Sea Shepherd has embraced the mandate of the United Nations World Charter for Nature to uphold international conservation laws. With the largest private navy on the planet, we collaborate with governments who share our ships and use their authority to intervene and enforce the law.

To save marine wildlife and ecosystems, we take more than a stand. We take action.

Our Approach
“The oceans are the last free place on the planet” – Paul Watson
paul imageWe are risk-takers. For over 40 years, we have grown from a small organization to a global movement of thousands of passionate volunteers from dozens of nations. What has never changed is our attitude.

We put ourselves on the front lines to expose the truth, save marine wildlife, conduct vital research and stop illegal activity through collaborative campaigns with communities and governments through lawful means and in accordance to international charters and declarations.

Our commitment has led us to protect marine wildlife—including endangered or threatened species—and their delicate habitats. We have cut illegal nets, cleaned vital ecosystems, shutdown illegal operations in contentious waters, and even delivered humanitarian supplies. We never stop because the survival of our ocean is a constant challenge. It is an enduring commitment and a long-term solution.

Life began in the ocean. We must Defend, Conserve and Protect it. Now and always.