Slashdot Mirror
WikiLeaks Defenders Threaten Amazon
healeyb writes "CNN is announcing that, starting at 11 AM EST, the hackers (coined Operation Payback) responsible for the DDoS attacks on MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, and PostFinance have promised to commence an attack against Amazon for their revocation of the WikiLeaks EC2 account. They released a do-it-yourself hacking tool online Thursday so other people can help with the attacks they say took down the websites of MasterCard and Visa..."
Somehow I don't see escalation of online actions being to anyone's benefit in the long run.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Is wget in a while loop insufficient?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Yet another case of script kiddies giving hackers a bad name...
really isn't 'hacking' - or is it?
This news did nothing more than re-direct a lot of people to Amazon.com just to see if it was working. Then, they got distracted searching for something cool and subsequently made a few purchases.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
The US government now has another excuse for an internet-wide crackdown. Thanks assholes.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
Download at your own risk.
I'm stunned that all media, including Slashdot, just repeat that they are "hackers". What do they do?
They essentially go to the website and visit it. Voluntarily. No force at all applied.
How is that hacking?
gawker has said, although unsubstantiated, that websites are being handed federal orders to stop chronicling the attacks. If true (which it very well may not be), I would be very curious to learn on what grounds the coverage is being ordered to stop.
must be down for an update
Can they really take down Amazon? I though Amazon was too big, and had too much bandwidth, and too many servers, and most of the attackers were running out of their home Internet connections.
I honestly don't see how this can be considered 'hacking' to me it sounds like cyber vandalism. A petty crime for petty reasons. Amazon had valid reasons for dropping wikileaks, they aren't crusaders they are a business. This is pretty much tantamount to being the jackass that sits at the red light until it's yellow and then gunning it through the intersection, to make the rest of the people behind you wait for the next light.
If they were able to actually knock Amazon offline, which I think is mostly unlikely to happen, it would be the first to make a serious economic impact. Mastercard's website may have been unreachable, but their credit processing facilities were just fine, as I demonstrated with my own card several times over the past few days. Amazon, on the other hand, is in the middle of their holiday rush, which is crucially important to them. IIRC, it is the reason they had the cloud infrastructure in the first place: their immense holiday resources went unused during the rest of the year. The last thing they need is a DDoS attack right now. I wonder if they might try to appease the mob with some kind of nod to anon in the form of a daily book deal or similar...
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
Thus proving once and for all that the best course of action for any company is to stay as far away from wikileaks as possible. I guess it's the entropic principle that it's so much easier to destroy something than to create something, but I wish more people were thinking about constructive things to help WL and an open internet. But what could that be? Running TOR nodes? Hosting the documents? Giving money?
Digital terrorism doesn't seem like a particularly effective way to sell a point of view.
Considering Wikileaks rehosted to Amazon to escape their original sites getting DDOSed exactly BECAUSE Amazon is damn hard to DDOS, I wonder whether Payback can actually do that.
Maybe they just consider it a challenge they can't resist.
My cat is a hacking tool?
I think that those holding the reigns of the botnets doing the current DDOSing are making massive mistakes employing them at this time. Not only that, the targets they are choosing are not valuable. Take for example visa.com and mastercard.com. Have you ever been to those sites? For all intent and purposes they are superficial, and have nothing to do with the logistics of the financial services they provide. If you go to either site and try to view financial information you will be given a list of banks that issue that type of card, which provides links to the respective banks that actually issue cards.
Furthermore, the various governments of the world are watching this whole affair with intense scrutiny, and the powers that be will be alarmed over the power wielded by these botnets. It will serve as a wake-up call. By utilizing their resources, these people have shown their hand and provided the evidence and forensics needed to aid in the dissemination of those nets.
As far as Amazon goes, they are so distributed and have such massive resources that I doubt a DDOS attack would have much effect. I might be wrong, but there is a world of difference between Amazon and public relations sites like visa.com and mastercard.com.
Better known as 318230.
11:50EST and the target change off api.paypal.com hasn't taken place. There is serious internal strife as to weather or not to attack Amazon at all given that they so far haven't been able to reliably take out paypal.
Isn't having a script to continually request a page for one web site the technical equivilant of marching back and forth in front of a building holding a picket sign?
Why should people have the right to do both if they are unhappy with - and wish to protest a government, company or organization?
I am *not* saying it is right or legal for people to write trojan horses to set up botnets to con others' computers to unknowingly (or unwillingly) do ones bidding - but isn't it completely within an individuals right to do this themselves, from their own homes, with their own equipment?
P.S. I don't think the Wikileaks leaks did *any* damage whatsoever. It may have "undignified" a few "dignitaries" - but that's it. Period. In reality, I think it does the world a *lot* of good when everyone suddenly can see everyone elses cards - and know their thoughts and opinions.
LOIC is a tool that has been around for a while. Why would they say it was released Thursday?
Shunning plus Direct democracy equals this.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
What's more likely, that these tech companies received National Security Letters and can't talk about them under threat of theft, caging or worse, or that these tech companies all just fell over and made up legally and technically bogus excuses because they're idiots?
The only positive result that can come out of these attacks is that the next tech companies might push back against the government harder, but if there's a chance you're taking out innocent bystanders you're doing wrong - end of story.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
please stop calling them hackers. Anonymous are NOT hackers.
When someone who says "X is violating the freedom of speech rights" and tries to shut him/her/it up as punishment, than that person has not yet grasped the principle of "freedom of speech".
On the tactical level: Disrupting Amazon such a short time before christmas? Fox will have a field day.... At best it will convince the average man/woman on the street, that Wikileaks is evil (since they won't distinguish between Wikileaks and their anonymous supporters). It's like saying "We are facing a supperior enemy, let's make more of them". To mee it looks like some kind of Anti-Sun-Tzu or Clausewitz-in-reverse. Is there goal beyond "venting frustration"?
CU, Martin
How exactly do you take Amazon's servers offline? Amazon is the people you cloud your servers to when you're out of capacity. Visa / Mastercard / Paypal... Sure. Plausible targets. DDosing Amazon is like trying to DDos Google, and only 1 hop away from ddosing 127.0.0.1.
Now, if they specifically targeted one part of Amazon's infrastructure... say, their payment validation server, they might be somewhere. But all of Amazon?
The ______ Agenda
You don't have to. You could fight Wikileaks or you could stay out of it entirely. So, with three basic realms of possibility, I'd say that freedom still exists. Freedom does not ensure that all possibilities are particularly appetizing.
LOIC has been around for a long time. According to Wikipedia it was allready used for Operation Chanalogy, almost three years ago.
they get arrested. I had enough of these low life bleeding hearts.
Amazon is a private enterprise and they decide how they run their joint. If you don't like it, well, get the fuck off their lawn!
A bunch of angry idiots decide to have themselves a little riot, do some burning and head-cracking, and so far hardly a comment questioning whether this is in any way appropriate? I don't like the efforts to destroy/discredit Wikileaks any more than most here, but I hope the perpetrators of these "retaliatory" crimes feel the full weight of the law coming down on them. Absolutely disgusting to be violently attacking a business because that business made a decision that you disagree with. I have no patience or sympathy for these criminals (and I'm about out of patience with the fucktards who call themselves Anonymous).
You want to call a boycott? Fine. I might even join you. But the second you start attacking them and doing damage, you have crossed the line and deserve to be thrown in jail. There is no valid reason for this, just a bunch of thugs looking for some amusement.
The use of this LOIC tool that this group are encouraging people to download onto their PCs and fire up to launch these DDoS attacks will be easily detectable and tracable. I'm sure that the companies that are being attacked will be keeping records of the malicious traffic, to be passed on to the police who will, in turn, be able to tie the IP addresses back to broadband connections.
So, I wouldn't be surprised if we see raids, confiscation of computer equipment and (in the UK, at least) charges brought under the Computer Misuse Act. I wonder what the average decline in income is, due to one's inability to get certain jobs because of a criminal record.
And, by the way, those who think that they can get away with it by claiming that it must be a virus infection are deluded - forensic examination will reveal the deliberate downloading of the LOIC tool.
The powers that be: You need strong government and law enforcement because most people are unruly vandals.
Anonymous: We believe in a more anarchistic world, and so we're going to vandalize things until disorder comes about.
Silent Majority: Guess the powers that be called that one right.
Futurist Traditionalism
There are morally, ethically and legally sound ways to protest Amazon's actions if you feel as I do that they were unacceptable. Committing crimes against it, and its customers, is not one of those ways. It is not morally acceptable, and it takes away any moral high ground one might otherwise have had. FYI, I believe Amazon was coerced to some unknown but probably large degree by the government. There is no way to be sure, but I believe that it was, and I have tempered my own response accordingly. I have canceled plans to move some hosting to Amazon in 2011, both to protests its actions and also because it has demonstrated an unwillingness to host material of a potentially controversial nature. However I continue to do business with it as a retailer, since as far as I'm aware Amazon's retail business has behaved in a morally, ethically and legally sound fashion.
Nonaggression works!
Maybe later today I'll look for somethig else to buy. I'd like to hear someone announce a valid reason why their hatred of the US is so blindingly intense that they consider actions like this appropriate. In the meantime, I'm going to support Amazon and any other victims of these people.
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/civil_disobedience.html :)
So they could sell all the data wikileaks collected as an eBook: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B004EEOLIU ??
I've been on Amazon getting some gifts and had no problems.
Amazon has been around a long time and they started out as an internet company - in other words, they've considered this a looooong time ago.
All of Assange's fans from all around the World will not be able to take Amazon out.
The ONLY reason the shadowy hacker group[1] known as anonymous does anything is :
FOR THE LULZ!
[1] yeah, I know, I'm just yankin' yer chain. I heard NPR make that misteak this time, last night.
If some company does something involving Wikileaks that this group does not like, this group will punish that company with DDoS and other actions, right?
So, if I own a company, why should I provide any kind of service to Wikileaks? If I decided I don't want to provide my services to Wikileaks because someone is attacking them or I don't like what they are doing, which is my right, I am going to be pilloried by an anonymous group who are hell bent on hurting me and my business for doing something they do not like.
These attacks are showing companies that they should not do business with Wikileaks and any site like Wikileaks.
These attacks are hypocritical as well. The attackers are saying to these companies "You must do as we wish. You must associate with Wikileaks even if you don't want to or find their behavior objectionable." They are attempting to impose their will upon others from a position of secrecy.
These are not attacks. This is not a war. A politically motivated DDOS is exactly analogous in form and function to a lunch counter sit-in. These should be called 'protests' or 'online sit-ins.' Use of the words like 'war' and 'attack' only fuels a belief that there is no justified ethical motivation for these protests.
Let's see... your website is overloaded and you need more capacity quickly. Who do you go to?
Amazon EC2.
Maybe if they were actual hackers they might be able to do better than "request this page over and over", but I don't think this gaggle of script kiddies will even make them sneeze.
So Amazon doesn't agree with Wikileaks cause and blocked their business. But that is fair in your eyes, but the same can not be done in reverse?
My my, how you grovel at your masters feed as the perfect sheep unwilling to question anything.
Basically you claim that you are free, just as long as you don't upset anyone in power.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Did Wikileaks give Amazon that choice? Or did they just sign up for an EC2 account, forcing Amazon to make a decision sooner or later?
Do you mean that every business should scrutinize their customers and refuse, up front, to serve people who might incur legal liability for the business? If that's what you mean, it would be a generally bad thing for freedom.
What, that WikiLeaks did not "own" the documents? Copyright infringement? Under U.S. law, material produced by the government are public domain - it belongs to the public. How is a bogus claim of copyright infringement "valid"?
Has anyone tried the link in the article above recently? Cause it's not working. I am so amused... either all of us visiting it has knocked it offline, or someone has successfully attacked the attackers.
Now that they are going after bigger targets you can see they forgot to bring their slings let alone stones. Paypal is still up and so is Amazon, however operation payback's website is down...
Words fail to describe what i feel right now.
Just follow that link.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/WikiLeaks-documents-expose-foreign-conspiracies/dp/B004EEOLIU/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
is slashdot considered a hacking tool to ddos websites?
It appears the shit is beginning to hit the fan.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Amazon? PayPal? The Swiss Bank? EasyDNS? The list goes on and on.
These are not just random companies realizing they suddenly don't want Julian Assange as customer. Obviosuly, there are invisible connections and strings playing behind the scenes here.
They were ordered to terminate his accounts. This abuse of power should be exposed for what it is.
Next time, it might be yourself losing all rights to live and being shut out of business.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
If Black friday specials and all the people trying to buy their favorite xbox game
couldnt bring down the amazon.com website, why would a few hackers with their undersized underpowered
sad little botnets?
Hey script kiddies I laugh at your superior intellect and my ip address is 127.0.0.1
So this is either a misguided attempt to help wikileaks, or a damn clever attack on wikileaks by destroying any chance they have of working with anyone else. Either way it seems to me (and what the hell do I know) that this going to backfire.
Python
I'll usually believe something if it appears in the media but I'm not sure I believe this one. OTFA, The blogger says the group in question has a DIY hacking tool, yet there's no link.
If this is all made up, OTOH, I could see how governments publicizing supposed attacks by Wikileak sympathizers would sway general opinion against WikiLeaks as being aggressive nuisances.
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
So these assholes are potentially ruining quite a lot of kids holidays.
When Amazon stays up, Anonymous loses credibility. Not that they have any to start...they make a lot of noise and put on a show which the media loves but that's about the extent of their value.
No one seems to be concerned over Wikileaks' agenda, which is unknown. They selectively release material over time...why not just put it all up as they get it?
I hear the weather at Gitmo is lovely this time of year.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
I have a lot of online Xmas shopping to do. I would normally use Amazon for a good portion of these purchases, but out of fear of having my IP captured and designated an accomplice of Anonymous, I'll do my shopping elsewhere...
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
My personal thoughts about Assange aside, I really hate the idea that the government can make a phone call to a business and get someone's accounts deactivated. This especially when I've been considering Amazon Web Services for virtualization. I'm making it a point to *not* do any of my Christmas shopping at Amazon this season or for school texts for next semester. Last year, I dropped about $1300 on them.
Let me throw out a plug for Better World Books with that being said.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Amazon offers a service which Wikileaks felt was useful, and so Wikileaks purchased that service. I don't really see how that's forcing Amazon to make a decision. Amazon chose to make a decision about what content is allowed on their servers, so I'm pretty sure Amazon themselves just fucked up and guaranteed liability for anything in future found on their servers, rather than being able to go "we simply provide the service to anyone with an account in good standing, what's done with it is not our business," which would have been staying out of it. Instead, they chose to actively go against Wikileaks, showing they are willing and able to discriminate based on content, rather than legality. No Safe Haven for them.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
This has me breaking out my Visa to put money on my paypal account and make a purchase on Amazon I had not planned on. All in all this may be a boon for the companies those criminals are attacking. And it's going to be bad for the criminals at wikileaks also. As it's causing people like me to actually sympathize with the corporations under attack. Something I would normally NEVER do.
Hurricane Island Outward Bound
OB
Dear Anonymous,
Do do what you want, what you really need is bombs, and a schedule of hotel lobby security details. Right now, you're IRA/Irgun bombers that nobody cares about, because when your bombs explode they just mildly inconvenience everyone in the lobby. Your plan is that you will bomb the establishment in a way that basically affects nobody for very long, and your follow through demands are to establish a world where, essentially, there is no privacy.
That's a bad plan. You are fighting the thought police. 1984 has happened. Right now, you are only justifying more police power to stop the flow of information. You are encouraging the establishment of thoughtcrime law. It will happen if you give them enough ammunition. Shutting down commerce is incendiary, it will inflame, rather than shatter the will.
In the meantime, the press is loving tying and sinking Assange with the rock of your wannabe terrorism. If he's ordering this, he's foolish. If not, let him run his long game, because it's a better idea than your short term outbursts.
THX.
Wikileaks is pretty well enfranchised I would say. There are billions who are not.
And yet Amazon, Mastercard, etc are being denied their right to freedom of association.
I love how these idiots are attacking businesses and people that speak out against w-leaks in the name of defending "freedom of speech".
fucking morons.
If the only option you leave for people is DDOS, they will ddos.
..), what's left to people ?
people talk 10+ hours for minimum wage. people tend their kids. people are studying in colleges by paying to them, in order to have a chance at future. those who have established some career, are busy paying bills.
they dont have the time or resources or the means to mount and run nation-spanning political campaigns, engage in social activity for prolonged periods. they have lives that they are forced to attend to.
and, in the end, because of all these necessities our current dog-eat-dog capitalist system enforces upon people (its always good to cut benefits, social security, and wages for profit after all, aint it
hitting 'like' button on facebook, doing comments under online news stories, discussing in forums, instant messengers, online blabber. maybe donating a few bucks to a ngo. and the most extreme of what they can do online, ends up being DDOS. they cant even do serious hacks, they dont time or the means to learn and further any knowledge in that area.
and they do this. ddos. because, this is the travesty of a situation our current society manufactures, and then pays for. the ironic thing is, the very perpetrators, creators of this situation, the big corporations, end up on the receiving end of this. hunter hunted.
no, ddos may not be ethically so justifiable. but, as said, if you leave the only option for people to DDOS, they will DDOS.
Read radical news here
Sorry to post as Anonymous Coward, but I'm too lazy to get an account. My name is Jared. One question I haven't seen addressed in this discussion is the ethics of releasing other peoples information to the world. Wikileaks doesn't own any of the information they leak, yet people hail them as robin-hoods regardless of whether the information they disseminate is necessary for the welfare of the world or not. The fact is that for any good they do, they do just as much harm. What wikileaks does is by nature chaotic, and disregards the consequences of their actions. There is no wisdom involved. They just leak, and let the fur fly. I realize that the founder is a self proclaimed anarchist, but I can't honestly see that any good comes of his undirected form of anarchy other than by chance. It's just a gamble, because he can't possibly know what the consequences will be. And from what I'm observing, the consequence is increased paranoia, while the information released hasn't merited it.
For my part, I enjoy my own privacy, and I would find it personally annoying if someone recorded my phone calls, and posted them, simply because they thought I wasn't being transparent. I'm not entirely sure that it would improve my behavior, or make the world better. Chances are, I would become a lot sneakier if I thought someone was likely to treat me that way, and I don't think that would be an improvement.
Any thoughts?
While we are at it, can anyone tell me how to recursively download all the torrents in the
http://213.251.145.96/file/wikileaks_archive.7z link?
I can't seem to find a torrent client that enters all the directories and downloads preserving the directory structure..
any ideas? when I'm done I will make a freenet site of it..
AC for obvious reasons
talk = work in the above post, 2nd sentence.
Read radical news here
I just visited Payback's IRC channel and it's a mess there. Bunch of silly little kids. Call me paranoid or a tinfoil hatter but this could be a US false flag op to eventually limit the freedom of The Internet. Even if it's not, they will certainly use this as a chance to lock down the last source of free information. What a shame and very bleak future lurking. I do hope that I am wrong, but only time will show.
Which just shows Amazon was right to ditch the drips.
Returns are not free if the reason is "just because", you have to pay for shipping back. How many people are really going to do that? Would it even be a blip on Amazon's screens compared to the millions of people doing that as a normal course of business?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Amazon is chugging along as usual. If these 12-year-olds hadn't made an announcement, no one would know about this crippling attack.
#DeleteChrome
What bad press? In the US?
Amazon has a great reputation in the US as a company that sells cheap books and cheap legal music, their shipping
is very reasonable and they have excellent customer service. Other than a few hackers, most Americans either dont care what amazon
did and are too busy christmas shopping on amazon.com or support the action of amazon.com.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
We'll just call anybody a terrorist nowadays, won't we?
Quiet you terrorist, or you're next!
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
they were not going to do it otherwise ? so, acta, coica, this that, has been cooking since 2004, for nothing ? there werent even the mention of these kind of situations back then, you know. yet they were more than ready to censor it.
so, you will just let them do it, just so that you can have an illusion of freedom a little longer ?
Read radical news here
OOOOH, 15% off a USB rocket launcher! Thanks, Amazon! You're my favorite!
My thoughts on the subject for anyone bored enough to read them:
-Wikileaks committed no crime, and is protected under free speech/press rights. The person who leaked the documents in the first place is in a boat load of trouble, and rightfully so.
Basically I equate this to the cold war of the 1960's... instead of protesting in the physical realm, people are instead choosing to do it digitally. Just as Johnson/Nixon's administrations tried to shut up the "movement" through things like operation chaos and spreading false info, the government today is pissed that their dirty dealings and behind-the-back talks have become public, and they chose Assange as a scapegoat. When the "leader" of a movement is jailed/persecuted, there is always some backlash, and now we are seeing that in a digital form due to Anon.
Pretty interesting stuff if you ask me. I'm scared to see where this will lead us though, I feel like its going to drive our politicians to be super paranoid.
These particular laws would hold Amazon liable for what you call "staying out of it". The safe harbor exclusion you mention is part of the DMCA, and only covers copyright liability -- not espionage.
Overall, I'm in favor of what Wikileaks has done, but the OPs behind Operation Payback need to remember what happened after the French Revolution. Someone tell them to google "Robespierre" to see where their actions would lead, were they to succeed.
Another Reign of Terror is not what we need.
I just went to Amazons site and I think it responded even more quickly than usual.
scriptkiddiesfail amirite?
Since Amazon is so robust and distributed online, Anonymous should go stand in front of Amazon headquarters and block employees from going in and out. This would be a legal and effective way to protest, and makes great video footage for the news. Where's the leader of Anonymous? I have to pitch this idea!
Here's some info.
If you want to participate, you want to download hivemind LOIC or javaloic if you're not on windows.
rs.4chan.org will have links to both.
You can also use the regular LOIC in manual mode and select your own targets.
The best way to find out what's going on is via twitter. Various twitter accounts for operation payback have popped up since the first was killed off. Which is real? Probably all of them.
Here's a current one that's real - https://twitter.com/#!/Op_Payback
The channel to join if youw ant to use hivemind mode is #loic . The server to connect to is loic.anonops.net (down now) or irc.anonops-irc.com .
loic.anonops.net was taken down and the domain name revoked. irc.anonops-irc.com seems to still be up. Any further take downs will invariably be rectified within hours (or minutes) - just watch twitter. And if you can't find anything on twitter, head to /b/ (random) on 4chan.org and just F5, ctrl+f, anon. Reddit and digg and twitter and etc. will have the new details shortly after they hit 4chan, which is typically the first static public place they get posted to.
http://www.cnn.com/video/flashLive/live.html?stream=stream2&hpt=T2
I've been pretty ambivalent about WikiLeaks. I'm not sure these most recent disclosures accomplished much or were necessary, but I'm sure any damage they've done will be temporary. But this kind of activity is distressing. I don't know how involved in it WikiLeaks itself is, but these attacks don't put them in a good light. Their so-called supporters are making them look like a gang of dangerous thugs. Mess with us, and we'll knock your business down.
They didn't attack the money-collecting parts of Visa and Mastercard. They attacked the corporate sites. They didn't disrupt commerce. - Seems they were letting them know they didn't appreciate what the financial companies did. Zombie DOS Attacks Support WikiLeaks
Daily News http://newsblaze.com
It seems anonymous has posted a video explaining themselves on mediaite.com and it is interesting to say the least...
As of 11:00 am amazon seems to load quite quickly, slashdot on the other hand...
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
And thats why our freedoms and privacy continue to erode. Government and law enforcement make it so this kind of vandalism is one of the few remaining potent mechanisms to actually affect powerful corporations and government
You've been well played :)
Blar.
Ask an Iraqi or an Afghani!
Blar.
Consider a real-world example: a small publisher runs a newsletter out of an office in a mall. The newsletter publishes some leaked information from a government source, and later his landlord kicks him out and changes his locks. While the publisher pursues legal avenues to get the doors open again, his subscribers (and some of their friends) mount a protest at the mall, blocking the entrances and picketing for the landlord to reverse his decision.
In the real world, I would have a hard time feeling sympathy for the landlord, since he acted like a jerkass by closing up the newsletter. But blocking all of the entrances so that other stores (like Amazon's ZStores, which are run by mom-and-pop companies) lose business and customers can't get the purchases they want is just going to earn more enemies than friends. Letters to the editor, a peaceful protest (like forming Facebook groups and email chains), and boycotts would be much more effective than chaining yourself to the front doors.
Of course, acting like a civilized adult requires you to first be a civilized adult. Something that Anonymous/4chan just plain aren't.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Seems other posts have covered the moralizing bit pretty well. What about the cause/effect?
What is this path that lead to Anonymous DDoSing these sites?
I posit that it is a familiar quad (which I am observing, not advocating): "Soap Box, Ballot Box, Jury Box, Ammo Box."
That phrase is not just a prescription; it is also a prediction. It is the natural path of any society which believes in the first three, finds them stimied, and has access to the fourth. In this case, the "Ammo Box" is cyberwarfare (or perhaps a new step between three and four).
When the secrecy started ratcheting up after 9/11, lots of people got on the soap box. They elected a President who claimed he was going to open government. They filed lawsuits and FOIA requests to get the openness they believed themselves due. Those are the first three steps, all found severely lacking.
Then, some people went back to Soap Box (WikiLeaks), the US Gov't started rattling sabers at WikiLeaks, and some people have gone to the ammo box (cyberwarfare, which may be a distinct step before the traditional ammo box).
Also worth deeper consideration of the Pentagon Papers. From Johnson/Bush secret war, to Nixon/Obama torn between damaging the other party and advancing authoritarianism, to civil unrest; the similarities go far beyond Ellsberg/Manning / NYT/WikiLeaks.
Which all is, as noted, not to take a postion on who is right and who is wrong. But to point out that this is exactly what we should all be expecting, and the path ahead should be quite clear. And scary. Unless we find some way to reach detante.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
If Anonymous really wanted to help WikiLeaks, they would've created a botnet to mirror Wikileaks.
What they're doing now is destructive, not constructive.
Maybe the botnet masters are learning to cooperate & use their tools more effectively against larger more distributed targets.
Amazon UK is releasing Wikileaks extracts as an ebook! That should sell well.
Can I just say it again? LOIC is an application anyone can download and use to participate in a DDOS attack. It takes no skill whatsoever.
For those who haven't seen what the AC parent is talking about, there's a screenshot here, with a reasonably innocuous URL that shouldn't get you in too much trouble with your employer's IT department...
Provided you don't work for the US Government, Amazon, mastercard, Visa, or paypal... or any other place that has a way to decode sourceforge project IDs .AND. a proscription against tools like LOIC.
And, it's about what you'd expect from a bunch of /b/tards.
I can see the fnords!
If they were able to actually knock Amazon offline, which I think is mostly unlikely to happen, it would be the first to make a serious economic impact. Mastercard's website may have been unreachable, but their credit processing facilities were just fine, as I demonstrated with my own card several times over the past few days. Amazon, on the other hand, is in the middle of their holiday rush, which is crucially important to them. IIRC, it is the reason they had the cloud infrastructure in the first place: their immense holiday resources went unused during the rest of the year. The last thing they need is a DDoS attack right now. I wonder if they might try to appease the mob with some kind of nod to anon in the form of a daily book deal or similar...
That mob is not as big as you think it is, nor Amazon infrastructure is the typical one that can be brought down or even dented significantly that easily by script kiddies.
Furthermore, I think this is an asshole move by these Wikileads fan hackers. It is preposterous to subject private business to their uncompromising ideologico-retarded for not subjecting themselves to the US government's ire. Damned if you, damned if you don't. I mean, c'mon, even a retarded 6-grader should be able to see that.
An action of this type not does not amount to a defense of freedom of speech and transparency at all.
It is instead unabashed, unjustifiable blackmailing, attacking a third party's (Amazon) private property (infrastructure) for not aligning itself to a particular political/ideological position, in a fight that it's not its own, and risk the ire of an entity far more powerful that itself (the US government)...
That people are not content when you use all your might to coerce the most prestigious bastion of free information and thought out of business in order to sweep your dishonesty, atrocities and downright belligerence under the rug.
People view freedom of speech, freedom of information, the neutrality of net, as a good thing.
It is an idea worth fighting for, and worth putting yourself in risk for.
This behavior is heroic; what's happening here is David and Goliath re-enacted.
All this is happening because the powers that be are publicly hamming nine inch nails of slander and incarceration through the flesh of the only person willing to publicly make a stand against corruption and evil.
Do not get sidetracked by FUD, for this is a just fight for Common Good.
but you cant say that it hasnt worked. see, paypal had spilled the beans, saying that they were pressurized to cut wikileaks donations by politicians in united states. back a few days ago, they were not directly admitting it, saying stuff about tos violations and some other blabber. the least the attack has done, has been make paypal come out spilling the beans. and this is bad for the politician (hello joe liebermann, arent you too old to be alive already, just die out) that pressurized private companies to censor free speech.
Read radical news here
loic://https://api.paypal.com:443
The more trouble these morons are able to do the worse it will be, there will a greater consensus to clamp down even further on the Internet and the RIAA and the MPAA and all those suckers will attach themselves to the next legislation even tighter and parachute even more control into the Internet. Great move. It's a lose lose situation.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
We need to coin a new term that fits. How about "wreaking," a portmanteau of "web" and "freaking," giving it technological evolutionary significance, and it has the benefit of also being a real word with similar connotations.
I prefer "Using", considering that they are simply using the intended IP (Internet Protocol) en masse.
Much like those that overload a telecom by organizing a coordinated mass phone call campaign would be called, "callers"; Those that utilize the Internet to perform their goals should be called "users".
Folks that use their own means to protest should be called "protesters". Much like how sit-ins did no physical harm, neither do too many IP packets.
Those that cause trouble by using technology should be called "trouble makers", optionally prefixed with the adjective "pesky".
The group Anonymous, would simply be "pesky, trouble making, Internet using protesters", which is far more descriptive and has the benefit of also explaining exactly what they are.
On another note: "Hacker" is a silly term that I propose be replaced by "exceptionally skilled programmer".
This nonsense and childish behaviour should stop, it's only for their own ego and nothing else.. In the netherlands the first person is already taken into custody for doing the ddos-attachs, I hope they get all those morons.. Stop it, it certainly isn't in wikileaks interest...
As of yet, I have not found where Anonymous has posted ALL their private and public communications.
Maybe they've posted it on WikiLeaks and that's the reason they're trying so hard to restore availability.
I mean, if Anonymous is requiring complete transparency of the U.S. government, they've lead by example by becoming completely transparent themselves...right?
Yes, they are being denied their right to freedom of association. They can't choose not to associate with the US governemnt.
Yet, people are mad at them because they are helping the US government...
Rethinking email
I might be a single customer, but I spend about 50 to 200 Euro per month on Amazon, increasing. I thought of spending there more for Christmas. I am looking for other offerings now. It will cost much effort for Amazon to make me return to them. In the long run, they will loose a lot of money.
There might be others joining them but do they really change their customer base?
cb
Yes, they are being denied their right to freedom of association. They can't choose not to associate with the US governemnt.
Yet, people are mad at them because they are helping the US government...
Everyone in a civil society is associated with their government. The people elected them in the first place.
Some people are ready to scream about the constitution, a document created by representatives or the people and yet those same people are not willing to live by the same rules of law which were also created by elected representatives of the people. A civil society needs to have rules that everyone abides by and every power, even our rights have to have limits or you run the risk of tyranny be it the tyranny of the majority, a small group of people or even an individual holding society hostage.
Freedom of speech is neither absolute or a defense to violate the rights of other. You cannot, for example, yell "fire" in a crowed" theater as a "joke" nor can you yell "hi jack" or "bomb" in an airport.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
What about its tail? ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Script kiddies (coined Operation Payback) need to grow up and get a life. This type of shit helps no one...NO ONE. Instead of being destructive, try being productive and proactive and positive.
Until this afternoon, you could actually download the cables (1-5000) from Amazon (as a Kindle e-book, and for UK residents). The title was "WikiLeaks-documents-foreign-conspiracies" by Heinz Duthel
They must have removed the book quite recently, but I can still see it in my recently viewed items.
Here is the dead link: http://www.amazon.co.uk/WikiLeaks-documents-foreign-conspiracies-CONTAIN/dp/B004EEOLIU/ref=pd_rhf_p_t_2
Torture is ultimately self-defeating and so are Denial of Service attacks, sit-ins and strikes.
You end up pissing off the general public and other third parties rather than "winning" them over to your cause.
What does work are:
1. Peaceful protests which do not disrupt the lives of innocent bystanders in a significant way.
2. Disseminating your point of view in a coherent and intelligent manner without resorting to personal attacks and profanity.
3. Organizing a boycott. The sugar boycott in England is what eventually brought an end to the slave trade in the British empire.
4. Writing letters to your leaders with your grievances and what you would like to see changed.
I don't support the way Wikileaks has gone about this matter. I would rather have seen them filter out and only publish information that was directly related to "corruption". The purpose of the "fifth estate" is the hold the government accountable and to expose corrupt. That is what the whistle blower laws are there for. They are there to protect people who leak information to uncover corruption, not for the fun of it or for profit.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
A more sensible and legal approach to costing a large company like amazon money (at least in the UK) would be for people who want to protest to make a request for all personal details that amazon hold on them under the terms of the data protection act.
Information about the process is available from the information commissioner's office at http://www.ico.gov.uk/for_the_public/personal_information/how_manage/access_info.aspx
I sincerely hope they actually launch an attack...
The web servers can definitely handle any traffic they generate, and the per-impression ad revenue will add a tasty snack to the 4th quarter profits. My stock options thank you!
Seriously, Anonymous, attacking a company for not hanging on to a hot potato is just plain dumb. EC2/AWS bills are not paid upfront... the best theory I've heard around here is that their bill exceeded their credit rating and their service was terminated. TB of data transfer isn't free, and if you can't pay the bills, they pull the plug. All the righteous (if misguided) anger in the world can't force Amazon to host your website if they don't want to.
Isn't it a bit ironic that the people who are squealing about "Freedom" (I'm looking at you, Anonymous) are attempting to trample all over another entity's freedom in their attempt to right a wrong?
The 17th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was held during 26 January - 10 February 1934. During this congress things were said which were very damaging to Josef Stalin.
More than thousand delegates participated in this Congress. Almost all, all were later tracked, arrested and shot. In addition the smaller local congresses, which selected the delegates to this one, were arrested and shot.
Wikileaks cannot be stopped? Downloading insurance.aes256? Feeling pretty smart? Hmm... Think again. More strange things known to happen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/17th_Congress_of_the_All-Union_Communist_Party_(b)
What about Amazon's Freedom of Association?
That seems to have been lost somewhere along the line here...
Comment of the year
I love the sternly worded repudiation of the LOIC attacks "...but causing damage is crossing a line...". ... illegal...
ORLY? It's line drawing we're worried about, is it? Ok then. How about when the companies lose your personal data? Misuse it? Sell it to the biggest scumballs on Earth to pad the bottom line? That's allright, as long as there's a thin veneer of pretend legality on it. But god forbid people get angry and do an automated page refresh. That'd be
Folks, "illegal" is a word that means that some very powerful people have decided they don't want certain kinds of behavior. It can also refer to the "elements of the social contract that help us get along". Laws that disproportionately favor the rich/power/well-connected are of the former category. While their enforcement is probably even more stern than for the latter, for you, the normal person, the blanked moral outrage at committing "illegal" actions is disingenuous at best, deliberately ignorant at worst. Exactly what's the moral high ground in obeying bullshit regulation? I call troll on these "let's all obey the law and sing kumbaya" posts!
I propose to add:
+1 terrorist
and
-1 terrorist
How Anonymous is any different from the Taliban, the government they are trying to protest against, or The Nazi Party truly escapes me.
if they really want to screw amazon, well, how about a lot of really really bad data, lots of screwy reviews, pucheses that get cancelled (esp on third parties that use amazon). etc...
maybe add some dodgy products, 1gbs of weird and wonderful products at crazy prices and mad reviews all over the place.
Maybe get 4char to put a bit of porn up there.
over xmas!
Packets are speech, after all. Is a DDOS really so different from too many people trying to use a telephone system at the same time?
</diabolicaladvocacy>
Tweet, tweet.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/loic/
Compile it yourself.
We both said a lot of things that you are going to regret.
If the attackers really wanted to get someones attention, they would not be going after the websites of these companies, they would go after the processing servers. The pocket book is what gets the attention.
On http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/ you can share your opinion of Amazon's actions with the CTO of Amazon.
Once you get big enough, it is no longer possible to keep the devil may care, only beholden to the shareholders attitide, in the real world.
In the real world, companies are not just beholden to the shareholders, but also to their employees and every single person that directly or indirectly work with them and are able to put food in the table. It is stupid, cynical and rather juvenile to forget this fact. It is also irresponsible to expect a company to risk the employment of every person under its payroll to defend an ideological position that was never its own to begin with.
slashdot also has a cool new tool to take down websites.... its call the submit button. just post an article ablout a site and thousands of people will go to that site bringing the site to its knees not by a bot net but by the average joe clicking on a link to what they are told is a "bad site" that needs flooding. this shall be called a "cyber protest"... take that million man march.....
Ascend to Attack, Sustain, & Decay.
Sounds like end of the Free world as we know it, by Neil Young.
Excuse me, but it appears that you're inflating things here a little with "riot", "burning", "head-cracking", "violently attacking" "thugs".
Noone got physically hurt, and you conflate electronic publishing (what a DDOS is at its core) with militarist personal street violence. How you get modded up as "interesting" for that irrelevant piece of misdirection speaks volumes about the mob, and how you secretly dream of being our overlord/thought police.
Here's some news for you, asslicker of authority; I'll publish what I goddamn fucking please, so long as I goddamn fuckin can, and if that means it harms your delicate conformist sensibilities, well, tough shit.
If Company ABC manufactures destructive product XYZ as a "business decision", you, and/or your precious orderly gummint, are expected to "violently attack" it with a DDOS in the form of a "legally approved" court order - it amounts to the same thing as a DDOS in the end, just different actors.
Your desperate desire for "WAR ON EVIL-THING"TM has gotten out of control, you're an armchair warrior of the worst hypocritical flavour - "oooh, maybe I'll join a boycott from my comfortable, conformist little desk job". You're a thug in dsiguise yourself, you want to throw those with an ACTIVE conscience under the bus cause they make you look like the pansy-wetting self-important twat that you really are.
So saith the AC (irony included for free - if I sign my name to the message, you'll send your goons around to silence me, like you try to silence others who look like they might disrupt your precious canned universe).
Digital riot? Fuck you.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/09/wikileaks_ddos_arrest/
It's a pity it's a 16 year old who, arguably, isn't old enough to know better. I'd be happier if it was some 20-odd year old feckless leftie layabout who we could lock up for five years or so to send a message.
In any case, kudos to the Dutch police! I expect we'll see a signifcant drop-off in the DDoS effectiveness as it begins to dawn on people that is' not, actually, the same a sitting down and refusing to move, and that they could actually end up in court.
Hopefully, they'll have gotten some good leads when they took down anonops.net
Nobody is being held down. Amazon could always refuse to answer queries on the internet, it's not like Anon is FORCING Amazon to have a web presence.
And this isn't censorship because it's not the government, it's a group of people making a DDoS, freely speaking on the internet.
Nice way to spin the point. The problem is, it was the US government that ilegaly approached thoses sites ordering them to stop doing business with Wikileaks. It was the US government that put them betwen a rock and a hard place. Now some people are just making sure the hard place is, well, hard, so that ceding to illegal orders from the government isn't such an obvious thing to do.
No party is completely in the right here, and the victmis were victimized by both parties. But it was the Us governemnt that created the problem, the people are only reacting.
Rethinking email
Or blockading Cuba...