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SCO DOS'ed
Thomas Cort writes "BusinessWeek has an article about a DDoS attack against SCO.
"At 10:45 a.m., the Unix and Linux seller was hit by a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) that hampered its Internet operations, said SCO spokesman Blake Stowell ... the Utah-based company has incurred the wrath of many Linux enthusiasts infuriated with its lawsuit against IBM ... SCO's Internet service provider, ViaWest, told SCO that about 100 high-speed T1 data-transmission lines of network capacity--about 90 percent of its total bandwidth--was being consumed in the attack.""
Sure SCO is being a prick about this law suit but to have a bunch of vengefull open source/Linux Crusaders attack thier systems just gives the whole opensource community a bad name. Just suck it up and let them sue, cause either we the open source community screwed up and used code we shouldn't have or SCO is blowing smoke and IBM will win the suit.
there are too many *legal* ways of showing to SCO our revolt with they 're dirty tactics without needing to play at they 're (very low) level
Just my two cnts
cheers from Portugal ...
Despite the fact that I think SCO deserves it, I wonder if this will look good for open source. I mean I can see the FUD for this already.
"If you even make threats against the open source community they may just attack your systems. "
It wouldn't surprise me if SCO DOS'd themselves for more attention (or possibly DOS'd themselves by accident knowing those wankers), but I can see a possible bad spin.
Damnit. This sort of crap is exactly what we don't need! SCO's not pursuing this case because they expect to win, they're trying to get as much media attention as possible. The more bad press the OSS/Linux/GNU/hacker community gets, the stronger the need to shut SCO up becomes. They want to be bought out. Demostrating to the world that there are "evil hackers" out there with little respect for corporations and the law just adds fuel to a fire.
The drama the DDoS kiddies serves as a nice distraction that SCO has no case!
At 1.5mbps thats 150 megs a second!
IRC efnet a year and a half ago crawled to its knees when a cracker hit it with just 20 megs a second.
I am supprised it came this quickly considering how many hosts or routers he had to crack to find his slaves. Something this huge requires great efforts. Also regular users are now waking up that a firewall and Windows updates are needed. 2 years ago everyone I knew used Outlook, Office, and Windows unpatched without a firewall using a highspeed connection. Today only a few still do this which makes finding hosts alot harder.
http://saveie6.com/
In fact, I've influenced clients to go with BSD instead of linux for just that reason.
Listen to yourself: You're advocating the use of an OS based on the who is using it.
I'll never understand this way of thinking.. A good product will always attact good and bad people in mass.. Let's just imagine for second that everyone listened to the BSD advocates, and switched to BSD. Where are you going to turn when the idiots follow again? Is there some section in the BSD license that makes it impossible for the kiddies to use it or something?
How are you going to prevent people you don't like from using something that is useful?
More imporantly, why do you even care who else uses your software? After all, it is your software.
I guess some people were just born to be bitter..
Why do I keep typing pythong?
When I started out writing software back around 1980, computers were just cool. Nobody really cared which OS you ran and we were as excited by the Amiga as we were by Atari, Apple, or whatever else computer. It never seemed to matter that much what OS they were running. Now it seems as bad as any religion. People seem to think that theirs is the only true way and everybody else is going to hell. So many seem to think that they have to convert everybody else to their OS religion or else destroy them. I'm so sickened by what the computer geek world has become.
I'm reading through these comments and I see so many who believe that snuffing somebody off the net via DDoS is good and justified. More disturbingly, I see so many other posts by people who say they don't agree with this tactic, but that SCO "deserves" it. Deserves it for what? For believing that they have intellectual property that's been stolen and wanting to protect it? For not agreeing with the Church of Open Source and asserting that they have a right to keep intellectual property to themselves?
People don't know what or how much SCO claims is stolen, but since their claim threatens the First United Assembly of Linux, they're considered evil and they must be destroyed by any means possible. It's not about right or wrong, it's about us vs. them, and that is so very wrong.
This "us vs. them" mentality seems strangely similar to the attitudes of terrorists who want to cleanse the world of infidels. Sure, the users aren't killing actual people (so far), but obviously some are willing to cut off the lifeline of an offending business. Isn't this just another, softer, form of terrorism?
Some of the posts on this thread even propose that SCO or IBM or Microsoft are behind this whole thing. Doesn't that seem at least glancingly similar to the supporters of religious terrorism proposing that the countries which are the target of attacks are perpetrating the attacks themselves? Is the community so desperate to believe that it's right that it will blind itself to the reality that perhaps some of its own members are taking things too far?
Are there any reasonable voices left? Is anyone willing to wait and see what and how much SCO claims was stolen before convicting them of some perceived crime against their Linux God? Or is this really how the world operates now? Do we just read the headlines, draw conclusions using vague information, then either join the mobs or stand by while the mobs torch them and say "well, they deserve it"? If they're vindicated in the end, will we just excuse ourselves by saying that they deserved it anyhow for all their other crimes against Linux?
I'd hate to say this, but serves them right.
What would serve them right would be to win or loose in court, public opinion, or the market place.
DOS is criminal and effects more than SCO.
When / if the 31337 d00dZ doing this loose their equipment or go to jail, it will serve them right.
The amazingly stupid thing about this is:
1) it makes a clear case for increasing criminal penalties for interfering with comm services.
2) It doesn't hurt SCO. It may, however, bankrupt the small, independent ISP they chose to do business with.
3) Even if it did hurt SCO, who gets canned over it? The lawyers? Nope. The CEO? Nope. The first-level support guys who live paycheck-to-paycheck? Yep.
DDOS'ing a company is a stupid, childish, and completely counter-productive thing to do. It harms nobody but innocent bystanders. Cheering these idiots on is no different from cheering on any other vandal.