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Operation Payback and Hactivism 101
Orome1 writes "While individual acts of hacktivism are inconvenient, something else happens when hacktivists group together — they commonly perform a DDoS attack. Techniques have advanced to automate the process, making the attacks more powerful and thus more able to bypass security controls — the effect, however, remains the same. Let us take a look at the recent Operation Payback which has gained notoriety in the past few months."
Is it freedom of speech if you don't let the other guy talk?
You know, for many of us, we simply don't care about this whiny distinction between "hacking and cracking".
It's stupid -- back in the day, you could hack some code, or you could hack into a system, or you could pull off a hack and hang a volkswagon from a bridge or make your calculator to something cool that nobody expect. We understood the difference between these things, and it was all one word.
You whiny kids who think you "own" the language and have to be telling everybody the "right" want to say it are just fooling yourselves. Even in the nerd community you think you represent, for many of us "hack" still means exactly what you claim it doesn't. Hell, 2600 has been around since the 80's, and it's always been hacker -- it's got a shitload more street cred than you kids who think that it's always been differentiated. Anybody under 40 who is saying anything about what is "hack" and what is "crack" is too fucking young to know what they're talking about.
It's all the same fucking thing -- "cracker" is a very recent word, and quite an arbitrary distinction which people tried to apply after the fact to make what they did sound less evil and dissociate itself from malicious break-in type stuff. Get over it.
Now, STFU, and get off my fucking lawn.
Oh please.
100 people can sit in at a lunch counter, shutting down service, and it's considered activism and protest.
100,000 organized people could easily shut down 1,000 restaurants, or bank branches, or other retail storefronts by the same behavior. Again, activism and protest.
100-500,000 people can jam up the phone banks to Congressional offices and we call it a "Virtual March on Washington." And nobody suggests it doesn't qualify as activism and protest.
All of these count as activism. Yet when an unknown number of people voluntarily download an item to their computer to participate in a "virtual march" on the website of a bank, or the RIAA, or Paypal, or Scientology, somehow it's not activism?
The major difference is whether the participants are willing or unwilling. In the case of most botnet-based DDoS attacks, the participants are unwilling; their machines have been hijacked and often they don't even know they are participants. In the case of LOIC, they are all willing. They purposely downloaded and installed the software. They can leave it running or only turn it on at specific times. They can easily uninstall it if they believe it is being used in a way they don't support.
What is going on is not a "cyber attack." It is a virtual protest march.
"Freedom of speech involves freedom from retaliation. If you choose not to do business with them, that's great. But if you prevent others from doing business with them then you've crossed the line." Assuming that we're starting with a level playing field. Mastercard, Visa, Paypal, and Amazon are all able to buy Congressmen. Regular people can't. Our government is so corrupt at this point, there's really no recourse for regular people who have to go up against these corporations with more rights and privileges than actual people.
I don't respond to AC's.
When people lose faith in democracy, they turn to violence. Right now a lot of people, espicially online, feel that they live in a society where corporations rule and people are regarded as nothing more than the consumers and employees that fuel them. Unless people can feel that they matter - that the government really will seriously listen to them - this is just going to continue.