Aside from Julian Assange’s house arrest and sundry legal troubles, his brainchild WikiLeaks has been at the center of a so-called “financial blockade” by payment processing companies for over six months. In response, WikiLeaks has announced that unless the blockade is ended by Thursday, July 7, they will file a lawsuit against the companies involved.

At issue are services such as PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard which have refused to process payments supporting WikiLeaks. The companies claim that they cannot support any illegal activity, and have cut off the secret-spilling website from some much needed donation money. WikiLeaks and their payment processor DataCell counter in their suit that the continued blockade constitutes an unfair use of the companies’ market dominance.

Julian Assange is worth $1,735. While that isn’t his net worth, it is what he’s going for these days. Time spent with the founder of the now infamous WikiLeaks is going for $1,735 on Ebay. Embattled in legal struggles related to a Swedish rape case in addition to defending the actions of his controversial company has drained both the company and Assange of funds. So, he is selling himself on the auction website.

More specifically, Assange is selling spots at a luncheon with himself, followed by a seat at a Frontline Club conversation with himself and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek where the two will discuss the impact of WikiLeaks on the world and in the future. Currently the seventh of eight spots at the event is going for $1,735 on Ebay in Britain. According to Ebay, 100% of the proceeds from the sale of time with Assange will go to WikiLeaks.

A hacker group trading under the name “lulzsec” was able to gain control of PBS‘ servers, defaced several websites, and posted an article to the PBS Newshour site claiming that deceased rapper Tupac Shakur was found alive in New Zealand. The group then posted several taunting messages to Twitter before methodically tweeting out PBS website passwords and other information the group gleaned during the attack. As of this morning, PBS was still struggling to contain the attack.

The motive behind the attack seems to stem from a May, 24 Frontline report on WikiLeaks called “Wikisecrets,” which the group found to not be to their liking. Some of the defaced pages also made reference to the continued incarceration of Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of leaking the documents to Wikileaks. The Frontline piece has received some criticism from Manning’s supporters and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange as being an unfair and hostile portrayal of Manning and the Wikileaks operation.

Attacks on Wikileaks, perceived or otherwise, has set off cyber attacks in the past, most notably with the hacker collective Anonymous. However, Lulzsec apparently claims no connection with the group. According to Wired, Lulzsec was responsible for a security breach at Sony and also for an attack on Fox.com which resulted in personal information from X-Factor applications being made publicly available.

To read the hacked article in its entirety, and to see other pages defaced by Lulzsec, head over to our sister site Mediaite.

(via NYTimes, Wired)

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has lost his UK extradition hearing, and he has seven days to appeal the court’s decision before he is extradited to Sweden. Assange has not actually been formally charged with any crime; rather, he is wanted for questioning in relation to allegations that he sexually assaulted two women while in the country last summer. The judge presiding over the UK trial rebuked Assange’s Swedish lawyer, Bjorn Hertig, for misleading the court in a “deliberate” fashion about the efforts of the Swedish prosecutor to contact Assange before he left Sweden; Hertig said that prosecutor Marianne Ny did not make an effort to contact Assange, but later corrected his statement.

Assange’s lawyers expressed their disappointment with the decision, and questioned the fairness and transparency of the legal process facing Assange in Sweden: Geoffrey Robertson said in a statement that Assange would be “tried in secret behind closed doors in a flagrant denial of justice,” and that he feared that the Swedish prosecutor’s efforts were front for an eventual US effort to extradite Assange.

Full legal ruling below:

Thomas Edison’s Predictions for 2011 in 1911 (Paleofuture)

3DS games will cost between $40 and $50 (Kotaku)

Cover your iPhone in LEGO brick (Amazon)

Bones producer involved with Julian Assange biopic (Variety)

Brand New Women in Comics Wiki Needs Wiki-ing (Women in Comics)

Pac-Man getting animated, will stop at nothing to be relevant again (AnimeNation)

This link is about whale sex (Discover)

(Photo via Steotch)

“I don’t want to write this book, but I have to … I have already spent 200,000 pounds for legal costs and I need to defend myself and to keep WikiLeaks afloat.”

–embattled WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, currently under house arrest in the UK, has signed a book deal with Random House valued at roughly $1.3 million to write an autobiography; he says the money will be used to pay for his legal defense and to fund the site.

(via Breitbart/WSJ; pic via Mediaite)

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange seemed to imply in a recent interview that Bank of America would be the major bank about which WikiLeaks planned to release a vast amount of potentially damaging information early next year. Forbes security columnist Andy Greenberg has his doubts, but Bank of America, in any event, seems to be taking no chances. According to Domain Name Wire, BoA has been quietly buying up “hundreds” of domain names related to how they or their executives “suck” or “blow.”

When TIME Magazine named Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg its 2010 Person of the Year, the reaction among many (including myself) was one of puzzlement: Yes, Facebook is a huge phenomenon and has arguably had a bigger impact on the day-to-day lives of many people than many a more ‘serious’ technology or political movement, but why now? As John Hodgman bitingly put it, “Time Magazine just named its Person of the Year 2007.”

Of the other five finalists that Zuckerberg beat out, Julian Assange seems like the most deserving candidate: While WikiLeaks has been elevated to media perfect storm over the past few weeks, it’s been doing far-reaching if highly controversial work for far longer than that, and it represents such a rare and crucial nexus between politics and technology, open and closed Internet, privacy and transparency: Whether one applauds it or condemns it, WikiLeaks is a thing emblematic of our times. And as Glenn Greenwald points out, “In TIME’s Person of the year poll, Assange received 382,000 votes – Mark Zuckerberg received 18,000 – only 20 times less!” At that, TIME did put Assange on the cover two weeks ago.

Over the past day, there’s been a lot of speculation, debate, and Internet controversy about why TIME picked Zuckerberg over Assange. Yahoo’s Michael Calderone cut through the punditry bubble and asked TIME managing editor Richard Stengel point blank why the magazine made the choice that it did. Stengel didn’t tread lightly: “I think Assange will be a footnote five years from now,” he responded.

As announced by TIME Magazine’s managing editor Richard Stengel on the Today Show this morning, the founder of Facebook will be honored with their Person of the Year award.

Facebook’s 500 million user base benchmark and the general ever expanding scale of online social networking seemed to be the prime motivating factors for his claim to the title.  While Mark Zuckerberg certainly isn’t the only face of social networks, he’s got to be the only one with a movie about him.

His competition for the increasingly broadly defined title of “Person” of the Year was Steve Jobs, Hamid Karzai, Julian Assange, The Tea Party, and The Chilean Miners.

>>> Full article and video at Mediaite.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has reportedly been granted bail by a London judge. When Assange turned himself in last week, he was initially denied bail.

Assange’s bail has been set at £240,000. However, there are additional conditions: Heather Brooke reports live from the courtroom via Twitter that Assange has to wear an electronic tag, surrender his passport, obey curfews from 10am-2pm and 10pm-2am, and report to the local police station at 6pm every day.

(via MSNBC, Heather Brooke)