Slashdot Mirror
Operation Payback Shuts Down IFPI Site
newtley writes "Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music's main IFPI (International Federation of Phonographic Industry) website is down. Not coincidentally, there's an Operation Payback post addressing the Pirate Bay crew's lost sentencing appeal: 'Dear IFPI, MAFIAA and other parasites, The recent verdict in the Swedish Appeal Court (ThePirateBay spectrial) provoked this statement from Operation: Payback. We emphasize our statement with a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack aimed at the IFPI's website.'"
are you aware that what you are saying basically totals to 'just be subservient' ?
the 'peaceful resolution' you speak of, has no effect. people elected someone on various premises, and he fulfilled maybe one out of a few dozen. people elected representatives on various issues, yet they set out to make laws totally against the will of public. they have even gone the extra mile of bringing out laws with NO transparency and democratic process, in the form of acta.
then there is the 'noncriminal', legal ways of doing that eh ? like, battling them in courts, where they have multiples of money to win over you ?
excuse me but what you speak of can only work in an ideal world.
Read radical news here
DDOSes are not serious for people who do not rely on and in fact mostly hate the internet. Quietly compromise and subvert their servers, collect damning emails for a while (they'll be there), then leak them and/or counter their plans. After a while, when you've got the hang of their writing style, you could also send forged ones.
I bet 99% of people on either side of this issue have never been to ifpi.org, what exactly is this supposed to accomplish?
Whether Anonymous is right or wrong is for you to decide. But under either case, you don't mess with them.
What a utterly stupid statement. That's justification for doing nothing about bad behavior by any individual or organization simply because they engage in bad behavior, and those who engage in bad behavior are not to be messed with.
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
Yeah, because launching a DOS attack against a web site you don't like is *such* a good way to demonstrate that you're a respectable, law abiding organization.
The best response to these types of organization is not through government or peaceful resolution. Even by stealing the media these organizations represent you are part of the problem which limits human potential. We can all stop buying (or even stealing) music that these organizations control. If you enjoy music and film, learn to create something of your own and share it. Subvert the organizations, not their websites/servers. Go to free, live performances, learn an instrument, write a screenplay or lyrics, share your creations in public or over the internet.
I'm sure they're shaking in their boots. I mean, Anonymous went and took out a website that no one visits. What will they do now? How will they bribe politicians without ifpi.org?
Some people consider imprisonment to be the use of force and intimidation. DDOS attacks seem tame in comparison. I suppose maybe you care a lot about whether the use of such tactics is "criminal" but that only depends who is writing the laws.
Agreed. While I don't always approve of the things Anonymous does (such as what they did to Boxxy), you can't deny that they know how to get things done.
Seriously, am I the only who's thought about what we could do if we could get get Anonymous to focus on digging up information on corrupt politicians / cops / other government employees?
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
It seems many here are quick to criticize the immaturity or pointlessness of launching a DOS on some arbitrary website no one ever visits, which is their right. However, I think launching an assault on a website (especially as Anonymous) serves a very important purpose, both functionally and symbolically. It conveys a very direct voice of opposition against companies shutting down websites like TPB or (as we've seen just this week) other torrent domains without due process. It is very clear that those companies and politicians have no idea how these websites function. Rightly so, they are made in a tiered and complex fashion so as to spread, eliminate, or avoid liability, as is the case in the OP (e.g. i-frames, torrents with no trackers, using only links to other sites but not actually hosting any illegal content). However, this isn’t an excuse for the judicial system to say that merely because a system is too complex to understand that those who are genuinely innocent should be lumped in with the guilty. That is ridiculous and I’m sure no one would agree with such a verdict. So while many people on Slashdot might complain about the point of DOS’ing a website, it says very loud and clear to those ignorant parties that people won’t stand for this kind of tyranny. Good for them, I say.
Carl Sagan quotes get you an automatic +5 on all posts.
Nice move. Protest the loss in court by doing something illegal.
I know that many of the corporations are pretty sleezy and they make money off the backs of the artists, but the pirate sites do exactly the same thing. At least the corporate suits give a few percent to the artists. The pirate sites keep it all for themselves. If you're going to do this thing, study the masters like Richard Stallman and write something intellectually coherent about intellectual property. Make a solid argument and it's more likely to be respected.
The Pirate Bay is not the Pirate Party is not "Anonymous" - I'm guessing, but I assume jdpars is talking about "Anonymous" - a multinational "mob."
Even if they could appeal to some government function, they can't - unless some global government came about and I missed the memo.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I'd say it's not very different from demonstrations and riots. While in most cases it's questionable - sometimes it's the only way to be noticed.
The maldistribution of income in the United States is now worse than it was in the 1920s
Nonsense. The standard of living is substantially higher - for everyone - than it was 90 years ago. How rich some people is has nothing to do with how much better off everyone is. Your class-baiting, "the pie can never grow, so the only way for anyone to enter the middle class is to take money from somebody else" clap-trap is embarassingly juvenile.
In the 1930s, we dodged lightning. FDR was a visionary
No. FDR was a patronizing rich guy (who wasn't "visionary" enough, apparently to spread his own "maldistributed" disgusting display of personal wealth around to the nearest farmhands, was he?) who directly, and personally made the Great Depression much worse, and much longer than it otherwise would have been. He hurt more poor people than any single person in the last century, and his legacy is a lower strata of squalid dependency and a sub-culture of plantation-living poor people who - thanks to people like you - blame entirely the wrong people for it and think that only cure is more of the same.
enough nuclear weapons to turn every city in the world to glass that glows in the dark
Give it a rest, already.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
No, the inequality of wealth has a reasonable effect on the level of social cohesion within a country. Obviously people are materially better off now than poor people were in the 1920s. You'd expect that. But it doesn't mean that the poor people today have the same opportunities (despite the best intentions of law makers) to progress in their lives as those who are raised in rich households.
I see. So your solution is to make slaves out of the productive people, so that poor people can have more stuff.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I'm impressed: I couldn't squeeze that many fallacies into the same sentence if I tried. You're arguing that poor people aren't productive, and that the welfare state, with its progressive taxation, is "slavery"? You're really arguing that people who make millions would be less "productive" if taxed at a higher rate? If you're posting on Slashdot, it's exceedingly likely that you are not wealthy enough for our current plutocratic policies to work in your favor.
You illustrate my point perfectly: you've been convinced by the propaganda of the ultra-wealthy and their lapdogs to argue (and presumably, vote) against your own economic interests and damn our country in the process.
I would not consider someone who makes $100 million/year trading oil on a commodities market to be a productive person. No value is added, only value extracted from a system.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE57D3PQ20090814
The definition of "poor" is slowly encompassing more and more of the middle class in the US. I'd make sure you're on the right side when the pitchforks come out after the 21st century equivalent of "let them eat cake" occurs.
like, bush crowd, and their unwarranted laws, constitutional violations.
who is going to prosecute them ? supreme court ? THEY are the one appointing the supreme court justices.
like, bp oil spill. who is to prosecute them ? the senators who are their collaborators ? the administration which cooperated with them ?
what you say, is only naivete.
and, no, youre wrong, there isnt even the pretense of being accountable when it comes to putting somebody in jail or prison in the u.s.
http://www.alternet.org/rights/144656/%22we_can_make_him_disappear%22:_immigration_officials_are_holding_people_in_secret,_unmarked_jails
"If you don't have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but you think he's illegal, we can make him disappear." Those chilling words were spoken by James Pendergraph, then executive director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Office of State and Local Coordination, at a conference of police and sheriffs in August 2008.
http://www.thenation.com/article/americas-secret-ice-castles
Read radical news here
Really? How did the "Great Tumblr Takedown" go? Oh that's right, it backfired.
And if it happened to YOU because someone doesn't agree with your opinion. No matter what the topic? Is it still ok?
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
It was "illegal" for those who were participating in lunch counter sit-ins.
The point was, the law was wrong, not the people.
The same is true today. The problem is with the MafiAA types, not the people doing the protesting.
A DOS attack! That'll show 'em!
A bunch of internet vigilantes perform a Denial-of-Access-to-Information Attack in an attempt to get a court judgement in another country overturned in the vain hopes that the majority of people won't view them as little more than spoiled brat troublemakers ...
You know, MLK and his people braved fire-hoses, dogs and shotguns at close range.
The worst you guys have is running out of Mountain Dew and porn.
"My God...it's full of trolls!"
Blame? Who said anything about blame? Moralizing and pointing fingers doesn't accomplish anything. I don't begrudge the rich for taking advantage of their access to the levers of power. Human nature is immutable.
Ideally, we'd align incentives so that actions taken in self interest benefit all. Unfortunately, we don't have that incentive structure today. If we want to remedy that situation, we need to convince or force those currently in power to be more egalitarian; it just so happens that the people in power today (as is usually the case) are the ultra-wealthy.
The little things we agitate about today: censorship, abuse of copyright, overzealous airport security, our foreign wars, the loss of our manufacturing jobs, are all caused by the increasing ability of the wealthy to pervert government to work in their favor. When power is concentrated in a few hands, the result is inevitably selfish exercise of that power and poor outcomes.
The problem seems more spread out than that to me. Consider the anti-Bush villainization, or the anti-Obama villainization now. Most people are still playing my-team vs your-team, and not really caring about the influence of the powerful on the government. If the influence of the powerful was the core problem, people would at least care about it. And actually they still have enough power to be able to do something about it if they wanted to. But nearly everybody is willing to mistreat other people in exchange for some apparent advantage for people more like themselves. Its not just the rich who are doing this, its most people. For example, the loss of manufacturing jobs is directly related to the way wall street profiteering dominates the economy. But try talking to any upper middle class people about our ethical responsibilities while investing and see how far you get. I'd give a similar example for lower middle class people, having to do with unreasonable collective bargaining demands or entitlements, but they don't really have that kind of power any more. They did have a hand in losing it though, and one can still see the same kind of selfish stupidity with public sector unions in many states.
I'm also optimistic that things can get better. A lot of things are a lot worse now than they ever were before, but a lot of things are better. I don't think what we've got now is worse than Jim Crow. And its not as if we lack the power to break the cycle. Wealth stops being power if people stop being willing to be bought.
a guillotine worked for the french
Y'know what? It may be called "out of line" by someone, but I'd say the O:P operations are the modern-day equivalent of a lunch counter sit-in, or Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat.
Not even close. This is more a bunch of babies pissed they missed nap time, then any sort of civil disobedience ala Rosa Parks/MLK.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
No, it wasn't illegal. Sit-ins were non-violent and did not violate the law.
I hate when people who are little more than thugs trying to get their way try to wrap themselves the curtain of non-violent protests and pretend they're doing the same thing.
Hint: The word "attack" in DDoS Attack is not non-violent. It may not be injuring anyone, but it's still an act of agression, completely the opposite of Rosa Parks and The greensboro 4.
So no, the law was not wrong. There was no law being broken by either the sit-ins or by woolworth. It wasn't illegal to be desgrated, it was merely company policy.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
Since when is agressive attack equivelent to non-vilent protest? You seem to be quite confused about the methods used in those events, or confused by what a DDoS attack is.
What would be similar is if a bunch of individuals quietly sat down in the lobby of the IFPI and simply refused to move. Attacking them is the opposite of what Rosa Parks or the Greensboro 4 did.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
themselves the curtain of non-violent protests
It is a non-violent protest, though.
but it's still an act of agression
Alternate suggestions? The government is practically bowing down to rich corporations. What are some ways that you could get the government to listen to you without being 'aggressive' over extremely rich corporations? They may not be doing much, but at least it's something.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
How are they wrong? Is it because they're taking action (even what little action they are doing counts) against a corrupt government? Just because something is illegal that doesn't mean it's wrong. There may be no other choice at this point.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Federal reserve conspiracy theorists aren't even on the level of 9/11 truthers --- they're more like birthers or victims of alien abduction. You were right to stop before you went further into tinfoil-hat territory, but you were pretty deep into it to start. Debt-based money is nothing more than fractional reserve banking, which is a very effective tool for driving economic growth.
As for going off the gold standard --- that was a good thing. It allowed inflationary monetary policy, which also drives economic growth. Read a fucking book, you ignorant bastard, before you convince somebody the government is stealing your precious bodily fluids too.
They really hurt the church of scientology. The DDoS itsself inconvenienced them and no more, but the publicity around it, the digg-spamming, the subsequent interest the media took... the church's reputation was the real target, and it took a hit so hard they have had to step up their recruitment operations in third-world countries now in order to find people who don't just walk away at the mention of their name.
I'll grant that they are breaking the law, but they are doing it to protest that the law is unjust.
If you don't like their approach, suggest an alternative, that has any chance of success. (And define success.)
I don't like what they're doing, but I dislike it less than I dislike the corrupt legal systems that they are protesting. (OTOH, let's not be confused. It's just a protest. It's not anything that's very effective.)
The "effective" measures that I can think of are all much more illegal, and all require a much higher level of commitment. Things like assassinating all the janitors and secretaries that work for the company. One a day. So replacing them gets to be so expensive that it can't be done, but they can't be given 24-hour guard because there are too many targets. That has the potential of being effective, but I don't think group of people is so committed that they would do it.
Were they to do as the above paragraph suggests, then one could reasonably argue that they were doing wrong, rather than merely acting illegally. But if they were so committed that they would carry out those acts, then I doubt that they would pay any attention to your evaluation of their moral worth. (Actually, I doubt that anyway. *I* certainly consider it a mere assertion without any backing argument.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.