IRCnet Servers Strike To Protest DDoS Attacks
Many of the IRC servers on IRCnet are going to lock out
all of their users from 12:00 on Friday the 7th of April
to 20:00 on Saturday the 8th of April 2000 (time given in
UTC+0200) to
protest denial
of service attacks. It's a tactic that's been employed before,
but hopefully people will learn. Considering the attacks on so many
services on the Web, I bet we'll see this more. Course that might
just encourage the script kiddies.
Some people think that this sounds stupid, but it is not. A lot of people fail to realize that almost all of the IRC servers out there are run on a voluantary basis, IRC is a privelage not a right. A lot of script kiddies are not up to no good, the flood, the trade their warez and porn, and chances are that they are addicts, taking away IRC from them for a day will provide the same effect of denying a cocaine user drugs for a day. I do not think it will stop the problem, but I do think it will make people realize how much they value IRC, people fail to value things till it gets taken away from them.
Pardon all my tpyos, incorrect grammars and speelings, Rob when is slashdot getting a spelling and grammar checker?
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
The solution: Reduce their incentive to. Widely distribute a daemon, pstormd, and a program, pstorm. When pstorm is run, it will connect to every copy of pstormd in existence, each of which will begin ping-flooding every host it knows of.
Result: Anyone anywhere will be able to effortlessly bring down the Internet without getting caught. After several months during which the net is totally useless, a general appreciation for the fact that the network is not a toy will develop. Every month or two, someone will run the program out of maliciousness, terrorism, or curiosity, but the appeal will gradually dwindle. ISPs who deny access to the program to their users will be publicly flogged for "presenting a challenge to the little bastards." AOL, after steadfastly refusing to include pstorm's trademark "don't push" button in their software, will be disconnected from the network entirely, to general approval. pstorm will eventually be ruled illegal, but no one will care.
The FBI will be sued by the FSF, and lose, because its attempts to block pstormd from functioning involve reverse-engineering its messages (3-byte UDP packets which read, "GO!"). Microsoft will write its own pstorm, which says "BO!", and imply that the non-MS version is unreliable and may be unsupported in the future.
Eventually, use of pstorm will be restricted by tradition to certain celebratory occasions, such as Kwanza. It will also be used to protest particularly clueless decisions by judges and elected officials about The Way The Network Should Work, to remind them and everyone else how much say they have in the matter.