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'Anonymous' WikiLeaks Proponents Not So Anonymous
Giovane Moura writes "For a number of days the websites of MasterCard, Visa, PayPal and others are attacked by a group of WikiLeaks supporters (hacktivists). Although the group calls itself 'Anonymous,' researchers at the DACS group of the University of Twente (UT), the Netherlands, discovered that these hacktivists are easy traceable (PDF), and therefore anything but anonymous. The LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon) software, which is used by the hacktivists, was analyzed by UT researchers, who concluded that the attacks generated by this tool are relatively simple and unveil the identity of the attacker. If hacktivists use this tool directly from their own machines, instead of via anonymization networks such as Tor, the Internet address of the attacker is included in every Internet message being transmitted. In the tools no sophisticated techniques are used, such as IP-spoofing, in which the source address of others is used, or reflected attacks, in which attacks go via third party systems.
I should change my WI-FI password?
I sat down to write a new sig tonight and all I did was make the chair warm.
I was under the impression that running the LOIC through TOR would DDoS the TOR network, not the intended target.
Good Luck, I'm Behind 0 Proxies!
and he'll be in jail soon.
"Looks like i will need to change my password on my router"
Problem solved.
What, did you think these people are stupid? Well, some obviously will be, but most won't be, they know DDoSing is illegal against an entity without permission.
That is just a simplified case of what people would probably come up with, some will probably even have left traces of hacking.
Some probably were actually hacked, some probably forgot they had it installed and "signed up to the botnet".
Others probably wrapped the program around some game or other program and sent it around myspace, facebook, bebo, orkut and whatever other social networks you can think of.
After all, social networks are just armies that don't know it yet.
Also, behind 7 proxies, etc.
Sending an IP datagram with your own IP in the header makes you traceable? Inconceiveable!
Why do you have to write a ten page whitepaper for a simple observation that anybody who is able to find out his own IP address and click on two buttons on wireshark could make in about 5 seconds?
HA HAHHAHAHAHAHAHHHAHAAA!
script kids that don't know how their software works (or even came from) used as pawns
People try to push some kind of ideology onto Anonymous, but the truth is that the only thing that matters is the lulz. When they get bored they will move on to something else. Anonymous is the mischievous kid with ADD whose parents are never around.
Only the fools who think "Anonymous" is an actual group could think that its members were actually anonymous.
The 7 proxies meme exists for a reason, mostly because no one cares enough to actually use a proxy.
Since the average internet troll can't IP spoof (he is limited to a /32 block) it's fairly obvious he will reveal his location. No need to use the source for that, Luke.
The idea behind a voluntary botnet is that the damage done by each participant does light damage, and is not effectively ddosing, while at the same time the aggregate damage is effective in delivering the desired mob justice. The legal effectiveness of that defense might vary.
As I recall, LOIC is for use with Windows machines. If that's the case, the likely reasoning behind not using any identity-concealing techniques is Windows raw socket restrictions. They're flooding web servers, and TCP packets can't be sent with raw sockets, so there's not much else to do other than repeatedly open valid connections (from the Windows platform).
(Muffled voice emanating from behind a couch from behind which a body and hindquarters are clearly visible) "Hahaha! They'll ~never~ find me!"
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
Assuming there are still plenty of wireless routers operating with WEP, or without any encryption whatsoever, what's to stop someone from hooking into your family router and leaving the blame for the poor folks? It seems trivial for someone to set up other people by doing that, and if necessary spoofing a MAC address already on the router.
How on earth would you raid a house like that?
FUD
I don't know who is worse- The idiots who download and use this tool or the knowing exploiters who distribute it in the naive hope of filling the jails and causing some kind of "Net Revolution" with noob cannon fodder. What a bunch of mindless sheep they all are.
Regardless of the amount of 'fight-the-man' fame WIkileaks and Assange and Company have drummed up, I think the bigger thing to take away from this story how vulnerable Big Company still is to online DDoS attacks at any given time and for any sort of reason, inflicted or not. You can argue about the traceability and poor track covering tactics of LOIC all day, but it did it's job and did it well. The time and effort to try and even prosecute any of the thousands and thousands of 'whomever's responsible for that source IP would be staggering and it just won't happen. Like many of the /.'s, I side with the notion, "Who cares" and wait for the next front-page new post.
Use Linux: 'sudo hping3 -S --rand-source -i u5000 -p '
You mean to tell me that the free "hacking" tool released to 15 year old kids doesn't take security precautions??
OH MY GOD!!! Our webs are down! All of them! They're stealing the internet! Quick, we need to hack all IPs simultaneously!
Anonymous is Everyone. You cannot arrest everyone and this article is stupid. What kind of research is that? god... idiots.
We are Legion
They are definitely NOT sitting with their laptops outside Starbucks/McDonalds/Library. Or logged in to their neighbors network. Or any one of a hundred other simple but devastatingly effective solutions.
While this is fairly obvious/easy to figure out stuff, it's nice to see my university in the news. It even has my thesis adviser as one of the authors. =)
Move sig!
Sounds like they got back-traced. Consequences will never be the same.
Slashdot: news for Apple. Stuff that Apple.
...anyone calling themself a 'hactivist' deserves to be locked up as far as I'm concerned.
I mean...fucking hell. Hacktivist.
There are 10 kinds of people in this world: those who understand binary, and nine other kinds of people.
i think not having to be anonymous while still being anonymous is the whole point of the name of the group.
so their tools are hackish bits of imperfection, people say? outrageous. unconceivable. perfidious. but oh, teh lulz.
I don't know who started this dumb, inaccurate, and insulting "hacktivist" portmanteau. These people are simple criminals. They are doing nothing to support Wikileaks. To support Wikileaks, give it money. Give it hosting. MIrror its documents. Attacking MasterCard does absolutely nothing to support Wikileaks.
"Hacker" only means bad things to most people, so I give up on that part of this dumb word. But "activist"? That belongs to people like Liu Xiaobo, winner of the Peace Prize who can't even go to his ceremony because he's in jail. It belongs to people who are actually trying to advance good in the world. It doesn't belong to simple criminals who are engaged in the pointless, cowardly, and pseudo-anonymous destruction of commercial websites.
I don't know if "hacktivist" is some attempt to be cute, some attempt to stir sympathy for these criminals, or some attempt to look cool by using some hip new word invented on some blog or in Twitter, but there is a huge difference between activism of any kind and simple, cowardly, criminal vandalism.
Penny - plain text accounting
Protest is things like gathering together peacefully to make your position and numbers known. Protest is writing your elected representatives to let them know that you find something unacceptable and will vote them out if they don't take action. Protest is refusing to shop at a store, and let others know why.
Protest is NOT launching an attack to try and shut down things you don't like. These people aren't protesters. They are like the jackasses at a physical peaceful protest that go and loot stores or burn cars or whatever. They are vandals, pure and simple. They are out to destroy, not to protest.
They aren't even EFFECTIVE vandals at that. Amazon is up and running good as ever, doesn't even seem to be slow. My understanding is that MasterCard was down but it is back up now, however none of that mattered since their site is not at all important, their transaction processing is and that was never affected (credit cards worked fine all last week). They are kids throwing rocks at a window, and missing, because they are angry and can't be bothered to do anything productive.
There isn't any excuse for behaviour like this. It also doesn't help your cause. It makes it seem like the people who support Wikileaks are just immature criminals, who lash out at 3rd parties when they don't get their way. It is real thug like behaviour "Do what I want or I'll hurt you!" That kind of thing does NOT lend itself to respect and support.
Even if there is such a thing as a "hacktivist," these kids are not it. Activism is about standing up and making your voice heard and organizing to demand change or raise awareness of something, in a peaceful fashion. "Anonymous" is not organized, isn't really demanding anything so much as lashing out as things that make them angry, and is certainly not peaceful. Imagine if all this effort were put into a website, or marches, or something constructive. The discussion would be a lot different than what can easily (and rightly) be dismissed as a bunch of privileged kids being internet vandals.
I never noticed Amazon have a single problem, and Mastercard's site is back up and not that important anyhow, it never touched the payment network. Doesn't seem to have been that effective.
As for DDoS vulnerability well ya, the only real defense is massive amounts of bandwidth and lots of server capacity. If someone clogs up your connection, or overloads your server, what are you going to do?
However I don't know that you want to go around advocating for defense against it because an evil one I can think of is just to limit end user upstream severely. Make it so that ISPs can't give out more than 512k or maybe less. If end user connections can't send out many packets, it isn't such a problem. If the per connection upstream is small enough in relation to what big companies have, it'll just take too many systems to mount a DDoS with any effectiveness.
That's also the sort of things that worries me about these asshole tactics. They may lead to the government clamping down on the Internet. If big companies are hit enough and regular people get tired of the assholes, it may well lead to restrictions like small upstreams and more.
I think people fighting for something should first check who they are fighting for!
http://cryptome.org/wikileaks/wikileaks-leak.htm
http://cryptome.org/wikileaks/wikileaks-leak2.htm
the "IMMA CHARGING MAH LAZER” button?
Oh come on, this has to have been written by some 45 year old FBI guy who used to pretend to be an underage girl on chat sites.
what is a Low Orbit Ion Cannon?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
this is inane. The point is the attacks not only come from the LOIC network, but other bot networks can also be employed. Therefore it is not possible to differentiate if the computer involved with an attack is a willing participant or a worm victim. So unless the authorities act on every IP-address involved and pay those IP users a personal visit, and IF these people indeed have used LOIC and managed not did not wipe it, only then they have a problem with their non/relative-anonymity. Every one of the conditionals is very questionable to ever occur.
`Anonymous' as the group is called is called such only to indicate that this group does not exist in the sense of identity or organisation. It is plain stupid to speak of anonymous as a group of this or that. One can laugh about it if the mass media doesn't get it, but it's said when universities think something like this is noteworthy. If anon bombs an address with pizza deliveries, it has never been implied that the people who call the pizza delivery companies did so using a untraceable telephone connections. Please.
Three Rules:
(1) STFU
(2) Rule 1 always applies
(3) No exceptions
Anybody could have used the IP address. How do I figure out who? GOTO RULE 1.
Two things, firstly they should have targeted mastercard's authentication servers, attacking their website does next to nothing. If their authentication servers went down they'd be unable to process payments and there would be some damage done.
.:+Pedrobear: turtwig: like comparing it to the original slowloris.pl you can't see that much of a difference .:+Pedrobear: but running my version appears like it's working but it uses a lot of ram and 100% cpu and never exits or actually make any sockets
Second... It's a sad day when we need a front page story on slashdot that essentially says "sending traffic to another network host reveals your ip address!!!"
Also lol at anyone that used WB/Pedrobear's scripts.
09:05
09:05
^5 guys
Really if a couple of script kiddies (regardless if they got caught) can take down sites like Paypal and Mastercard. You have to be concerned about real hackers, master programmers, pro coders binding together and scrutinizing the LOIC and designing a way to perfect it. I mean as it is anyone can use the damn thing if you have its position and the info to access it. You can use it, anyone can. Thats a really dangerous tool in the hand of a novice. It becomes something quite different if scrutinized by a professional or group of professionals.
When you dislike the human race as much as I do, Karma:Bad is inevitable lol.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I was stupid enough to try using LOIC to attack mastercard for about 10 minutes without any IP spoofing or any other type of protection. Theoretically I could be found out, but considering I only used it for a little bit, how I likely do you think I'll get in trouble? Also, if I do, what is the best line of defence? Play stupid? A virus infection? Say sorry?
One would think that these M0R0N5 would have enough sense to realize that the lack of real privacy regarding the internet truly exists. I would think they were a little more technically savvy.
Oh right! they all hang out on 4chan...enough said.
It's only civil disobedience if they willingly accept and carry out the sentence.
The idea is the Christian idea of being morally forced to break the law, or even other moral code(s) : you do this act, which may even be killing, because it must be done. But one is to fully accept both the illegality and immorality of what was done (in response to an immoral act), and fully accept and willingly carry out the consequences (e.g. the bible prescribes that a kill done in the most obvious act of self-defense still merits punishment, no matter how justified or even accidental the kill was).
What are the chances of this guy accepting that attempting a ddos justifies, say, a 2 year jail stint, then carrying it out like a model prisoner, only ever lamenting about the original block by mastercard. Fully accepting that he deserves jail time for doing what he did, regardless of anything mastercard (or visa, or ...) did ?
Your post reads as if "civil disobedience" is a defense in court, like "self-defense" is for example. It is not.
Civil disobedience is getting the courts to convict you, then carrying out whatever punishment doled out gladly, for publicity, for change.
And when the truncheon cracks your skull remember to turn the other cheek as well.
You do realize that all that "Christian morality" crap was put there to keep the peasants from uprising every other weekend?
"Listen to what the boss tells you and there will be a pie in the sky later on when you die".
You can't have "high moral ground" when you are dealing with people who ridicule the concept of morality, no more than you could win a fight against a hungry bear armed with your "high moral standards".
While you are masturbating as you imagine yourself a martyr - they are playing to win.
Over your dead body or over a thousand dead bodies - same thing.
FFS wake up already.
You are living in a world where super-powers declare their soldiers beyond jurisdiction of international courts for any possible war crime they may commit.
And you want to "win on moral grounds" and be a "model prisoner".
Fucking moron.
To consider the fact that LOIC can be traced a revelation is just laughable. It even states that on the download page of the tool itself.
Yes, it is. It is also some kind of hubris to scream about Wikileak's "1st amendment rights" to then attack MC, Paypal, ....and Sarah Palin's website? These entities have a right to conduct their business however they want without undue criminal interference.
Now to quote Paypal "our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity"
Charles Arthur, the Guardian’s technology editor, points out that while MasterCard and Visa have cut WikiLeaks off you can still use those cards to donate to overtly racist organisations such as the Knights Party, which is supported by the Ku Klux Klan.
The Ku Klux Klan website directs users to a site called Christian Concepts. It takes Visa and MasterCard donations for users willing to state that they are “white and not of racially mixed descent. I am not married to a non-white. I do not date non-whites nor do I have non-white dependents. I believe in the ideals of western Christian civilisation and profess my belief in Jesus Christ as the son of God.”
Have they been attacking tumblr.com too?
It always seems to be down.
...The idea behind a voluntary botnet is that the damage done by each participant does light damage, and is not effectively ddosing, while at the same time the aggregate damage is effective in delivering the desired mob justice..
So the problem with your theory is that Amazon, and Paypal, and Mastercard, and Visa, are all defeating these attacks. Some of these guys had problems when the attacks first started but no they're doing just fine.
If you don't have the technology in house to defeat these attacks, you can have it in place in hours ( www.prolexic.com ). All that it takes is a phone call and some cash.
The concept of a virtual sit-in is very old and it's just being leveraged for more silly uses these days. I doubt any semi-tech savvy users of this group were ever under any impression that the LOIC software was "anonymous" so..... the publication is pretty fruitless.
Many of these types of mass HTTP request floods aren't designed to be malicious, but they are instead designed to overwhelm some target web service with normal requests from many users. Get enough people on board and you can cause service degradation or even take the entire service down. Best of all, these types of attacks are fall in a very gray-white legal spectrum so they're often not considered illegal or in violation of any laws. That means no warrants...
So, the web service can see hundreds upon thousands of requests and isolate the members and their IP addresses? The service provider being attacked might even geo-reference the general area many of the "attacker's" ISPs are registered at. The service provider would still need to contact each ISP to tie the IP address to a real name, and as this behavior is most likely, at it's best, just violating a ToS from the ISP, the user's identity won't be revealed at any point. It would take a warrant to link the address with the account owner's name.
this whole 'debacle' has turned out to be really educational for wannabe DDoS script kitties, meow!
I repeat, they were online protesters, douchey. You have difficulty with the English language?
Thanks, arivanov, for setting all these douchebags right. Geez, I can't believe the stupidity at this site lately.
And you, my fine spineless and cowardly wonder, will be facing the wrath of those of us who have fought the wars and done the chores, and will not stand you stinking whores....
PayPay, and that Swiss bankster, with absolutely no court order nor legal authorization, froze -- or in reality -- stole, over 100,000 Euros of Wikileaks' private donations.
And PayPal claims to have been coerced by the US State Dept., which is aiding, abetting and collusion, as well as strong-arming. Beyond the Euro Union laws, and individual countries' laws, there's also a document called the WTO Financial Services Agreement, which all the bankster frauds always conveniently forget when they so desire.
Next, we have all those legal transgressions in Sweden: (1) the leaking of the investigation by prosecutor Maria Kjellstrand to rightwing tabloids, in violation of Swedish secrecy laws; (2) the further leaking of Assange's file by person or persons unknown in the Swedish Prosecution Authority, in direct violation of their secrecy laws; (3) the fact that Chief Prosecutor Eva Finnes throw out the case initially, after reviewing the fact that the two women got together (corrupting the evidence and conspiring together with their individual stories prior to approaching the police), and next the Minister of Justice, Beatrice Ask, pressures Finnes to reopen the flimsy case; (4) the fact that when Assange and his attorneys attempted to communicate with the Swedish Prosecution Authority for 41 days straight, they were refused -- because not a single magistrate at that time would take on such a farce of a case; (5) the law only recently been written up, specifically for Wikileaks' Assange, WHILE they were actually submitting their Interpol warrant (Sex By Surprise).
...nothing to add, official clown masseysett, excepting you sound like you must be with either UBS or formerly with ABN AMRO? Money launderers to the druggie superstars (as in superstars of the drug cartel biz -- look it up, dood).
So suppose I have a 100mbit line to my server. Great. However then suppose people start sending a gigabit of traffic down it. Well now I'm fucked. There is going to be so much contention, so much bad traffic, that legit traffic won't get through. Nothing I can do about that, my firewall doesn't help since my line is full. If my firewall is over at my ISP, before my line, then on maybe it can, but there's still the matter of what kind of connection it has going in to it. At some point, there's a limit. Fill that up, and you are screwed.
That is the problem with a DDoS. Even if you can make it so that it never hits the server, when you are talking more bandwidth than you have, you can't do anything (on your end).
I don't know who started this dumb, inaccurate, and insulting "hacktivist" portmanteau.
GoogleBooks found a hit for "hacktivism" in a 1984 publication entitle "Alternative library literature" (Oryx Press), but the term doesn't appear to have taken off until it was coined and promoted by the Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc) in late 1998. Wired.com's Michelle Delio wrote a short historical piece entitled "Hacktivism and How It Got Here" (07.14.04) which credited the term to the cDc:
[N]o one called technology-enabled political activism "hacktivism" until 1998, when cDc members Omega, Reid Fleming and Ruffin were chatting online and were, Ruffin said, "bouncing some wacky ideas around about hacking and political liberation, mostly in the context of working with Chinese hackers post-Tiananmen Square." "The next morning Omega sent an e-mail to the cDc listserv and included for the first time the word hacktivism in the post," Ruffin said. "Like most cDc inventions, it was used seriously and ironically at the same time -- and when I saw it my head almost exploded." http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2004/07/64193
A quick lexus-Nexus search finds that the first use of "hacktivist" in Lexis-Nexus' newspaper database is attributed to 'Buzzing Around Flytrap' by Alex Kozinski (9/24/1998 12:19:00 PM) in Slate Magazine:
Technology of all sorts continues to be a hot item. Wired News reports on a phenomenon called Hacktivism--electronic sabotage as a means of political protest. The story features the Hong Kong Blondes, a near-mythical group of Chinese dissidents that have been infiltrating police and security networks in China in an effort to forewarn political targets of imminent arrests, as well as an organization known only as the Cult of the Dead Cow whose spokesman (a former United Nations consultant) goes by the moniker Oxblood Ruffian. (I'm not making this up, honest.) In response to this threat, the FBI is establishing a cyberwarfare center called the National Infrastructure Protection Center which will involve the intelligence community and the military. Sounds like more tightrope walking for you and the ACLU.
The Wired.com article referenced is 'The Golden Age of Hacktivism' (09.22.98) by Niall McKay
The phenomenon is becoming common enough that next month, the longtime computer-security group, the Cult of the Dead Cow will launch the resource site hacktivism.org. The site will host online workshops, demonstrations, and software tools for digital activists. "We want to provide resources to empower people who want to take part in activism on the Internet," said Oxblood Ruffian, a former United Nations consultant who belongs to the Cult of the Dead Cow. Oxblood Ruffian's group is no newcomer to hacktivism. They have been working with the Hong Kong Blondes, a near-mythical group of Chinese dissidents that have been infiltrating police and security networks in China in an effort to forewarn political targets of imminent arrests. [http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1998/09/15129]
The term was repeated in the title of U.S. News & World Report's article on the story - "Chinese 'hacktivists' spin a Web of trouble" - by Bay Fang (Sept 28 1998):
From the moment in 1995 that a commercial Internet provider first gave Chinese citizens access to the Web, the government has tried to maintain what some cyber surfers derisively call "the Great Firewall of China." This elaborate control system is supposed to block sites that the Communist Party considers morally or politically degenerate, from Penthouse to Amnesty International and CNN. But with a few simple tricks, ordinary Internet users are now making a mockery of the Great Firewall, tapping easily into forbidden foreign sites. Sabotage. Sophisticated hackers, meanwhile, are breaking into sensitive Chinese computers. Members of the Hong Ko
You're shooting the messenger. Everything on the site is documented, and it doesn't really matter who did the documenting. Consider them the wikileaks of the activist world.
That site has improved a lot since it was first founded by Rick Berman of Berman and Company, a Washington DC lobbying firm. Probably most famous for his 'Nanny State' campaign, Berman launched ActivistCash.com in 2000 as one of a constellation of other pro-industry astroturfing organizations, including ConsumerFreedom.com, NannyCulture.com. The site (and indeed, the tactic) is a legacy from the pre-9/11 era when corporate America got spooked by the anti-Globalization movement. What is Berman's guiding philosophy for these sites?
"Our offensive strategy is to shoot the messenger. Given the activists' plans to alarm beyond all reason, we've got to attack their credibility as spokepersons." (cite: Berman & Co.: "Nonprofit" Hustlers for the Food & Booze Biz', by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber. PR Watch, 2001)
Turn-about, as they say, is fair play.
Seriously, why the heck someone would post such stupidity on Slashdot? Everyone knows there isn't a group called "Anonymous". It's just a bunch of perverts with nothing better to do, doing it for the lulz. Most of them can't tell the difference between TCP and UDP, but one doesn't need to know that to install LOIC and fire up a load of nasty packets to a predesignated target. They don't know what the fuck they are doing, they just got a informational image on 4chan describing where to download LOIC, what goes where, and they are all set. It is like this incredible stupid hive with no one leading, one just follows the neighbour without asking questions.
And regarding the traceability of such people, seriously? People are actually doing studies on this? Give me a fucking break. They are anonymous in the sense that one doesn't need to sing up on 4chan to post, nor identify oneself. That's all there's to it. 4chan keep all their IP address logged, they know it and they can't care enough to use proxies.
They are trolling the world, and it is sad that timothy has taken the bait.
I'm both a software engineering student and a political activist... Or at least I was still a year or two ago. Now, with all the work and stuff, I have less time for activism. But anyways, there is one major difference between the two: Offline assembly takes time and effort. I don't have time to attend all the protests that I would have attended two years ago but if there would be important enough cause and well organized protest, I would take the time off from work, school, etc... And that personal sacrifice would be what would give my attendance the value.
If there are 1000 people at a rally, it doesn't just mean that a thousand people are for/against something. It means that a thousand people are so passionately against something that they actually chose to put off everything else in their life to travel to a rally, be there (often in the sub-freezing temperatures in this country) for an hour or two, etc... It is something really important to them. Also, there are organizers behind that rally: People who spent even more of their own time and have the ability to rally a massive crowd.
I've also been annoyed at some demonstrations that I've not participated in but I've always known this: "OK. This wastes my time. But somewhere there are all those people who think that their issue is so important that they're willing to use their time for this. It deserves some respect." If you are a hippie and chain yourself to a tree to prevent them from getting cut, you are causing harm to other people but you are also investing your own time and effort to it.
Now, compare this to a situation "assembly" where people downloan an app, turn it on and... That's it. That doesn't demonstrate their effort or passion for the cause at all. While I'm for free internet and support Wikileaks, I don't think that this kind of maliciousness deserves to be compared to more traditional protests or to free speech. It's actions, not speech any more than it would be free speech if I punched someone in the face (even though I might have political motives and it would serve to make a point).
If you want to invest your own time to supporting some cause online, you can still do it: Write articles, spread the word (more than just pressing "like" on FB), host a WikiLeaks mirror, write e-mail to political figures... But if you aren't willing to make any sort of personal sacrifices, don't expect to be treated like people who do so.
Still a damned sight more honest than the outfits they report on. Ask anyone in the ag sector which "activists" they'd prefer to have on their side.
At any rate, my point was that the term itself is already contaminated, just as is "hacker". As someone's sig here says, "When I hear the word 'activist', I reach for my revolver."
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
It's only civil disobedience if you act civilly.
It is "civil" because you are resisting a "Civil Government". Not because you are supposed to be 'nice' and 'orderly' about it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Disobedience_(Thoreau)#Title
The word civil has several definitions. The one that is intended in this case is "relating to citizens and their interrelations with one another or with the state", and so civil disobedience means "disobedience to the state". Sometimes people assume that civil in this case means "observing accepted social forms; polite" which would make civil disobedience something like polite, orderly disobedience. Although this is an acceptable dictionary definition of the word civil, it is not what is intended here. This misinterpretation is one reason the essay is sometimes considered to be an argument for pacifism or for exclusively nonviolent resistance. For instance, Mahatma Gandhi used this interpretation to suggest an equivalence between Thoreau's civil disobedience and his own satyagraha.
And civil disobedience DOES NOT necessarily have to be non-violent. Although it is much 'nicer' when it is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_disobedience#Violent_vs._nonviolent
Violent vs. nonviolent
There has been some debate as to whether civil disobedience need be non-violent. Black's Law Dictionary includes nonviolence in its definition of civil disobedience. Christian Bay's encyclopedia article states that civil disobedience requires "carefully chosen and legitimate means," but holds that they do not have to be nonviolent.[23] It has been argued that, while both civil disobedience and civil rebellion are justified by appeal to constitutional defects, rebellion is much more destructive; therefore, the defects justifying rebellion must be much more serious than those justifying disobedience, and if one cannot justify civil rebellion, then one cannot justify a civil disobedients' use of force and violence and refusal to submit to arrest. Civil disobedients' refraining from violence is also said to help preserve society's tolerance of civil disobedience.[24] But McCloskey argues that "if violent, intimidatory, coercive disobedience is more effective, it is, other things being equal, more justified than less effective, nonviolent disobedience."
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I'm gonna go ahead and downgrade them from hacktivists to script-kiddie-tivists then if nobody objects. Just think about what kind of person downloads a program and mindlessly runs it and thinks they're a cool hacker who's taking down a website and you may agree.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Just widely publish facts. That's what Wikileaks does. Just google some money laundering news or other similar "services" numerous financial mammoths offer regularly, publish them to many more places, and you'll do much more lasting damage than a bunch of packets for a couple of hours.
Someone has to to teach these kids that corporations are more worries more about teh bad publicity, than the broken websites. You're not breaking the law by widely re-publishing the truth, it can be done easily, and you can actually use Tor for that, respecting netiquette and all.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Actually "hacktivist" is a pretty old phrase - I remember reading about "hacktivism" on the cDc homepage at least ten years ago. At that time it was about writing some tool to allow people in totalitarian countries free speech by creating something like TOR, IIRC.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
Remember that, script kiddies, when the NSA comes and takes your Millenium Falcon modded case from your Mom's basement along with Dad's Blackberry, your XBox, and anything else the runs on a CPU. It's all fun until they take everything you've loved since middle school away.
...redundant word in title and post.
It isn't /b that you should worry about.
...and not for a bunch of "Anonymous" bomb throwers. Of course, I find Anonymous more appealing than Wikileaks at this point but whatever.
These people are arguably cyber-terrorists (but more realistically, 30+ year old obese men living in their parents basements)
I am the maverick of Slashdot
use the proxy at 127.0.0.1
It took a bunch of researchers to nab up a simple TCP flooder that, apart from being open source, was already known not to provide one bit of anonymity when used? Look up LOIC on 4chan's beloved Encyclopedia Dramatica, and you'll find something that says you'd be an idiot to attempt any form of DOS on your own with that software for very obvious reasons. People can find your ip address if you go it alone with LOIC.
But what about finding your ip amongst hundreds of thousands of other attackers? Assuming the system attacked isn't hung up in the process, it would still be a rather daunting and difficult task.
You are living in a world where super-powers declare their soldiers beyond jurisdiction of international courts for any possible war crime they may commit.
... Just like everybody else in history.
And let's not pretend that America is somehow lacking in human rights, as compared, say, the Netherlands (and therefore as compared to this court)
The fun fact is that the Netherlands itself, hosting and manning the "international court of justice", never has apologized for it's own history. You might want to look up what a "privateer" actually was, and what some of these guys did on "orders" of the East India Trading company, the Dutch state. The SAME organization that is the current dutch state.
If you're going to make the argument that these bozos somehow have the authority to appoint "international" judges, you're not going to get very far with me.
In fact, when it comes to historical genocides, they were done for many reasons. Religions, politics, racial conflicts, trade routes ... but the dutch government is pretty unique in one thing : it's the only government, to my (admittedly lacking) knowledge that has ordered genocides merely for better chances in closing business deals.
The UN is the organization, renamed after WWII, that was responsible for putting people like Hitler and Stalin in power. In addition to that, the UN has comitted dozens of genocides, from the Katanga massacre in Congo (right when they started) to the more recent attacks and mass rapes in Western Sahara. And they've been quite busy in between those 2 events as well.
Wake up. The "international court of justice" is a title that would perhaps best be compared to that other title - "arbeit macht frei". It serves the same purpose.
If you are naive enough to believe activistcash.com is anything other than an industry shill (Center for Consumer Freedom, a corporate PR organisation), then you'll believe anything.
Animal abusers deserve all the shit they get, IMHO. If you want to bend over for the corporations then fine, but personally I'm glad there are people standing up to them.
Most tools anon uses are made to "Just Work" (TM), so no shit.
Boredom is bliss.
You really don't need a router.All you need is an app hide IP and when you activate this then goto formyip.com and it tells you that you are in Germany,Hong Kong,Lithuania and so on.Everywhere but your own personal IP that you are provided with.So its really not hard to by pass a system and still remain anonymous.
I don't think we should be confusing these script kiddies who are running around DDoS'ing anyone that doesn't support WikiLeaks with titles such as "activists", "vigilantes", or "rebels with a cause". Nothing could be further from the truth, which is that these little shits are little more than cyber-criminals, deserving of only the harshest punishment possible to the fullest extent possible under applicable laws. Their modus operandi of "Support WikiLeaks or we'll DDoS you back to the stone age" isn't any different than Islamic extremists and their "Embrace Islam or we'll kill you" mantra, and is equally devoid of logic, ethics, and morality. You don't win people over to your way of thinking through hostility and intimidation. And, as most people of the world probably aren't clamoring to get to their nearest mosque in a hasty attempt to convert to Islam before their house gets blown up, I sincerely doubt anyone with an ounce of intellect and a shred of decency is going to immediately fall into step and support WikiLeaks for fear of losing their Internet connection. All these script kiddies are doing is making themselves look like a collective bunch of jackasses, especially when they decide to attack organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
I love the conspiration theory that our cute blonde boy (god bless austria lol) has been used by CIA or perhaps any other three letter agency responsible (lady gaga cd full of captain obvious facts) as an excuse to ask loads of money from the state to rebuild the whole security system which is now supposed to be so greatly secure that any state or agency, who wanted to know a secret or two, had it available anyway.
I do not think that anybody cares what is in the papers. We are so overflown with information; and anyway, average joe already knew that many civilians have died in the war for freedom and that sarkozy is a buffoon, we did not need wikileaks to know that.
What baffles me is how commercial companies promote communistic "active self-censorship". In case there has been some sort of court of order sent to all affected companies, I apologize. In case there was none, then it is pretty bad. Bending down in front of state based on unofficial threats or just "sense of what is wrong or right" in fear of loosing profit, then congrats, we have downloaded communism. The day was saved, none money has been lost. If there would not be people who dislike self censorship. That is the part of risk of commercial enterprise. Did they get an insurance on government threats?
Lastly, nobody cares that thousands of people have been murdered in the name of government policy, but LOIC gives and outrage and people cry for punishment. Murder is not a crime. Unfunny.