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Sweden to Make Denial of Service Attacks Illegal

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the play-nicer dept.

paulraps writes "Sweden is to pass legislation making Denial of Service attacks illegal. The offense will carry a maximum jail term of two years, and is thought to be a direct response to the attack which crashed the Swedish police's web site last summer. Nobody was charged for that, but the fact that it came shortly after a raid on the Pirate Bay's servers was thought by many to be not entirely coincidental. Sweden's move follows the UK, which is even tougher on web attackers — there the sentence can be over five years in prison."

3 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. More importantly by denoir · · Score: 2, Informative

    What is just briefly mentioned in the article is that conspiracy to make a DOS attack will be punishable. It seems like a very vaguely defined crime and because the tough sentences it would give the police search warrants way too easily. Technically to be a suspect all you need to have is a computer - what else kind of evidence could there be before an attack is actually committed?

  2. Re:Mostly pointless... by sr180 · · Score: 5, Informative

    In fact, this is also why thePiratebay.org exists and is so successful - since file sharing carries a sentence which is usually much less than 2 years, the police are not allowed to raid or subpoena the ISPs for the identity of the person that is using a specific IP address. (The Swedish MPAA aka APB have treid hard to get a criminal conviction for file sharing for this reason.)

    No. The pirate bay exists because its not illegal to link to illegal copyrighted material in Sweeden. The pirate bay doesnt share illegal material, just torrent files, which are essentially a link to where the material actually is.

    --
    In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!
  3. Re:Are they currently legal? by the-intersocialist · · Score: 2, Informative

    IKEA is an abbrevation for Ingvar Kamprad Eltmaryd Agunnarryd (the first two are the names of the founder and the two second are the name of the farm he grew up at and the parish of said farm). IKEA is not a word in Swedish.