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Anonymous Now Attacking Corporate Fax Machines
An anonymous reader writes "Anonymous has claimed responsibility for distributed denial of service attacks against several anti-WikiLeaks websites this month. In a novel twist to the campaign, Mission Leakflood has started a new DDoS attack against fax numbers belonging to Amazon, MasterCard, Moneybookers, PayPal, Visa and Tableau Software. Some numbers have already stopped responding, and Twitter and PostFinance have since been added to the target list."
Someone in that group is an old-hand at this (or has access to a lot of back-issues of 2600).
The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in one dewdrop on the grass. - Dogen
What's a Fax Machine?
I love how all these "Anonymous" noobs are basically reporting themselves to the authorities by running Denial of Service attacks from their home computer.
"Sorry, the FBI took all our computers dad. I was doing some 1337 hacking for 'Anonymous'"
It looks like the "hacktivist" (better known to me as "vandals") are going backwards in time. Maybe they finally recruited someone older than 12?
I'm betting this just gets worse for a while. These attacks are all being carried out for attention, and they've been generating tons of it. They even get extra credit with the several "Are the attacks over???" articles I've seen over the past two days or so. These articles are adding fuel to the fire.
I'm using all of my mod points to mod ancient memes down. Please join me.
most (if not all) faxes are now handled electronically
what they are essentially doing is spamming paypal's email address. Yeah, that accomplishes a lot.
when the feds bust down the door to her house because you've been dialing out of her basement.
hahahahaha faxed goatse
Where is the "Ignorant" mod tag?
Can Fax die now? Lets move on to something from the 90's at least. How about email?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
support our 12 year old 1337 h4ck3r overlords.
The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) and FCC rules generally prohibit most unsolicited fax advertisements. In addition, the Junk Fax Prevention Act, passed by Congress in 2005, directs the FCC to amend its rules adopted pursuant to the TCPA regarding fax advertising.
...that let fax machines incorporate. Nothing but trouble since.
I haven't favored any of Anonymous's attacks so far, but this could be a great thing. Please please please keep this up, for years if necessary, until fax is completely eradicated from the face of the planet.
Someone should introduce these kids to something named "caller ID"
Also, consider:
1) USA calls need some special prefix to summon a "private" caller ID to make tracking require police force and phone company cooperation for identity disclosures rather than surgery-precision payback lawsuits.
2) Few international activists will make Europe-to-USA long-distance faxes, solely on the costliness of the attack. Too bad, since international calls tend to lack CallID data and are harder to trace due to multi-telco cooperation for your multiple attackers.
3) Desktop PCs don't have modems nowadays. Attackers must look go to some camera-ridden local travel agency equipped with a fax, and risk getting caught with highly visible black-page fax in their hands, or learn to install and use PC/fax hardware and software from home.
4) Most of these guys will use Windows Fax software (remember the Linmodem issue that ensures linux users are mostly ethernet users?)
Unless they research free web-to-phone faxing services online, they'll get taken down. And there's probably blackpage avoidance and user-location tracking built-in there to slightly control abuse. Oh, well. The idea was interesting.
Is there any proposal of more advanced planned joint actions? I just dont think attacking websites and fax machines is that effective, and from your own home not terribly smart. There has to be some mass coordinated action that is both more efficient, and perhaps less legally punishable.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Although this is somewhat a form of terrorism, this hidden militia is all we got against a government who is against the will of the people. Granted we need government to keep things organized, what happens when the government gets so big that they dictate what you read, what you can write, and most certainly what you do in your own family. What if the government begins to tell you that you can't have more then 1 child in your family? You people need to wake up and realize that the government certainly needs to fear the people and NOT the other way around. More power to the people who must break laws to get heard. There is a time and place for government.. But not a government that censors.
This totally cuts down on all the junk fax from timeshare companies.
Maybe they'll do something useful with the time they just gained?
All your processor is belong to Freedom.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I can't quite see their logic here:
1) DDoS corporate websites
2) DDoS corporate fax machines.
3) DDoS corporate record players?
4) DDoS corporate 8-track machines?
Reminds me of this Onion article.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
This is the 3rd article today mentioning them. Why is anyone even paying attention to them? Give them anonymity with obscurity. If these are just a bunch of rotten 12 year olds, then ignore them and maybe they'll grow up. Assuming Wikileaks is a good cause, was it even worth it to "hit" Amazon, Mastercard, and PayPal? If these kids are even remotely successful, they will come to regret it when they apply for jobs, and these companies make sure they are unemployable. It's like the old song says, don't pull on Superman's cap, spit into the wind, and don't mess with Jim. Amazon, Mastercard, and Paypal are Jim.
Would their battle with snow be equivalent to spitting into the wind?
for all the business/revenue lost by amazon, paypal, visa, mc. After all, he was the one calling around and pressurizing them to cut a client off, totally against the concepts of free speech, journalism, and fair business. politically censoring a journalistic outlet, for publishing detrimental information.
....
in case some of you havent kept up, here is how we know it was sen. joe liebermann :
day 1 : amazon cuts wikileaks from their cloud. it is rumored that liebermann pressurized them personally, but amazon does not comment. cites tos violation on balooney terms.
day 2 : everydns cuts wikileaks.org domain. they are not as secretive as amazon. they directly and openly state that joe liebermann called them, and threatened them. towards the evening, they mysteriously retract their statement.
a few days later : paypal cuts wikileaks donations and holds their funds. they cite tos violation, inquiry, and so on.
in the meantime : visa, mc do the same.
a week later : anonymous constantly attacks paypal since a week, keeping api.paypal.down and causing them millions in business. paypal comes around, and admits that they have suspended wikileaks due to political pressure.
a few days more with anonymous : paypal releases wikileaks funds that were being held.
today : anonymous starts attacking corporate fax machines.
count the times how many times word 'liebermann' passes in the above chronology.
after pressurizing the PRIVATE companies to cut down a perfectly legitimate customer, while in the meantime totally violating first amendment, modern principle of freedom of speech even outside us constitution, intervening and pressurizing private companies, going against journalistic freedoms, it is only natural that he would come up and pay for the business he cost all those companies. of course, not even counting the clients that started to bail out of american providers. not only payment like paypal etc, but a lot of small to medium size businesses are bailing out of u.s. based web hosting companies, datacenters, and content delivery providers.
surely, joe liebermann has the funds to make up for that business lost. else, he wouldnt be going around violating civil liberties, constitutions, and intervening in business for censorship
right ?
Read radical news here
not unless if you claim your machine has hijacked and you were not aware of it.
are they going to fine/jail everyone?
Most likely they will just join IRC, forums and mailing lists just like everyone, see who's coordinating the actions, and go after them. I would like to know how their servers are set up, what IP address, country, proxies, etc. If there's any running inside Tor, it's a bit of test of Tor trackability.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Are they going to start using carrier pigeons to send harshly worded ankle notes to the CEOs?
If done right someone can go undetected by spoofing the source #. Having your communications traverse interconnected circuit & VoIP providers who don't keep robust records, use shared trunks, or use servers outside the USA = Feds can't discover you. Feds almost exclusively catch ignorant or stupid people plus a few smart people when they slip up.
i would like to see governments worldwide try prosecuting millions of people ...
Read radical news here
millions of homes. raided. tens of millions of people affected due to relatives, social circle, friends, colleagues.
goes WAY over the population limit of many countries, mind that.
Read radical news here
They used the same thing against Church of Scientology. Basically they fax you a black sheet of paper so you run out of toner printing them.
If you spend six months organizing 10,000 marchers down Times Square in nyc you might get less media attention than these guys. Sad thing is, not only these kids are attracted to violence, the media and the readers are too. Not to mention the establishment. Planning meaningful action that does not involve these things is not easy.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
So is spam. ("Spam is actually illegal but many people are still receiving messages because people don't care about the laws" -- spamlaws.com)
So is phishing. (It's considered fraud.)
So is war dialing (In some places under "placing a call with no intent to communicate" and other laws).
So is robocalling.
These people don't fucking care.
After they outlawed faxing advertisements and junk, only outlaws faxed advertisements and junk.
hahahahaha faxed goatse
Actually, the best method would be to use a Black Fax rather than something like stick figures or Goatse. Better yet, not only a simple Black Fax, but one that is looped, so that it endlessly feeds itself through the fax - assuming the originator is a fax machine itself. Otherwise if the fax is originating from a computer or IP address of some sort, then multiple pages of plain monotone black - with the emphasis on MULTIPLE :)
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
... how important fax numbers are to companies like Paypal and Mastercard and Amazon.
Like it or not, a faxed document with a signature is still much more legally recognized as valid than a scanned email, even if said email has been digitally signed. As such, companies like Mastercard/Paypal/Amazon *ROUTINELY* rely on fax to send and receive legal documents, both among other businesses and their own customers.
Cutting off faxes would be a BIG BIG deal to a financial company like Paypal/Mastercard, and likely Amazon as well.
That defense may actually work if your computer is actually part of a botnet. Otherwise, you will likely find yourself learning more about computer forensics and perjury laws. No, your not going to just be able to lie to the FBI about your computer and get away with it.
The police / FBI may have a little trouble with 'the botnet defense' when they discover that your computer is not actually controlled by a botnet. Or is your computer under botnet control?
For those naive enough to take 'the botnet defense' seriously:
If the police are talking to you, you have already lost
The kind of lawyers that can actually get you off cost alot of money
Lying to the police is easier in theory than in practice
Your best defense against the police is silence. Just shut your mouth and get a lawyer.
"They can't arrest us all"
No, but they can log all of our IP addresses and arrest whoever they want. They can't arrest every drug user, but that doesn't stop them from filling the prisons with them. If you want to stay out of trouble, you should do your best to make yourself a small target.
Actually, the best method would be to use a Black Fax rather than something like stick figures or Goatse. Better yet, not only a simple Black Fax, but one that is looped, so that it endlessly feeds itself through the fax
Even better, a white on black flipbook animation sent in an endless loop.
That hurts, but is pretty juvenile and easily dealt with.
The best way to do it is if they faxed all those cables that Wikileaks has released. Black pages can be recycled easily. Sensitive data? That has to be shredded. And people who aren't supposed to be looking at these things may end up seeing them.
Imagine all the banks and Paypal and Amazon having to now deal with printouts of all the cables themselves - do they shred them? Recycle them without shredding? Also imagine people who shouldn't be looking at them looking at them accidentally (like all those trying to apply for federal jobs).
DDoS the fax? Doesn't do much. But use the fax to DDoS the company is more interesting because someone has to handle the document in the end, and they have to look at the incoming fax to determine routing. They may have to read the cables whether they want to or not to figure out if it's something to can or forward. Black pages - canned easily (and since it's all electronic these days, costs disk space). But pages and pages of readable material...
they will be after the telex machines next what will Joan at SCDP say when the Telex girls say they cant Telex that important client :-)
I love how all these "Anonymous" noobs are basically reporting themselves to the authorities by running Denial of Service attacks from their home computer.
"Sorry, the FBI took all our computers dad. I was doing some 1337 hacking for 'Anonymous'"
"I'm so glad you came officer, you see we've had this AWFUL paper jam for the last few hours and we're frankly fed up with waiting for geek squad to get here." Or you could just send it from a business.
If this has anything to do with the Google "Call A Phone" feature being used to robodial our corporate headquarters 2 nights in a row. It went to all of our on-call numbers, woke me up FIVE time before I finally turned my phone off (I'm on call, can't do that lightly). That number is now blocked.
Seems someone was using that "Call a Phone" feature without a Google Voice account attached, so it came from one of Google's California numbers. There was no one on the other end. Wonder if I had been screaming high pitched non-sense into the phone (instead of high pitched profanity) if it would have started sending a fax...
Why attack twitter? http://www.twitter.com/wikileaks seems to be working fine, and the explanation at http://www.boingboing.net/2010/12/06/why-wont-wikileaks-t.html#comment-958285 for why Wikileaks didn't appear in trending topics makes sense to me. Everyone seems to agree that #cablegate did trend. The issue of why Twitter should be attacked is not mentioned at all in the original article.
It is very likely some script kiddies are going to wind up in jail. If this is provably costing them money and having an impact on their business, that makes it a much larger crime and one the feds care about more. It also makes it one they'll complain about and demand action. Next part of that is that phone calls are completely traceable. The nature of the phone system makes it so that it is always known what number is calling. It has to to be able to switch the call. While caller ID can be messed with, the actual records can't.
Now yes, if you did some planning you could find a way to obfuscate your trail and make it much harder to find you, but I'd bet that didn't happen here. We are talking angry script kiddies, not sophisticated people.
So you've got a situation that is important and traceable. Sounds to me like there may be some people in for a lesson that actions can have consequences.
brb posting this to /b/
Ah, but they'll actually nail you on junk faxes (it's trivially traced and more easily linked to a direct tangible cost, unlike spam). The only way to do this would be to go to a copy shop and pay in cash, though your face would be on their security cameras (so you're traceable, but it's hard enough that you can probably get away with it). This could also be done with an email-to-fax gateway, of which a few exist, but it would result in shutting down a service that might have more useful applications...
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
pointless
since most of the major corporations have moved from hardcopy faxes to digital ones, easier to handle, less waste.
i would assume since Amazon...paypal are large enough and have enough corporate structure (rules) that they would have moved to digital faxes, expecially to fulfil their archive responsibilities
It's not a typo if you understood the meaning!
That sort of thing is trivially detectable, however, and if they are using an efax service, I dont doubt that that sort of thing is filtered out.
This whole wiki leaks thing really isn't good for the us and uk at all. I'm glad there finally doing something about tho at last. The internet is a very dangerous thing.
There is no way these fools are going to sway anyone's hearts with this sort of behavior. However, it might strengthen the resolve of various organizations to improve internet security and accountability.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
It's not a case of being clueless noobs.
It's a classic example of Civil Disobedience ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_disobedience ) not unlike refusing to sit in the back of a bus - and when many people do it in large numbers, it changes policies.
This is a million geeks saying I AM ANONYMOUS just like the guys saying I AM SPARTACUS in that old movie.
didn't twitter come out and say that thanks to Justin Bieber, the trends tracker tracked sudden spikes in activity rather than gross aggregate tweets?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Yes, being able to receive faxes is vital to a business. It's a pity, but that's the way it is.
But I doubt that those large companies have actual faxes. They will simply feed all faxes into a web front-end or email gateway directly. A secretary will then sort through them. And you can't even block lines as even the most ancient phone systems support multiple connections behind a single number. Higher-volume fax numbers will be load balanced, anyway.
tl;dr: I don't get it.
Distributed Denial of Fax.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
Fax cables from cablegate!
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wikileaks-indictment-us-charge-julian-assange-espionage-act/story?id=12369173
"[The Espionage Act] criminalizes all casual discussions of such disclosures by persons not authorized to receive them to other persons not authorized to receive them... in other words, all tweets sending around those countless news stories, all blogging on them, and all dinner party conversations about their contents"
http://wikileaks.tard.is/cable/2008/07/08STOCKHOLM494.html
I'm not sure this would have the desired effect at these locations.
I have four or five offices I administrate that receives faxes and stores them without ever printing. It looks through the image for the attention tag and then the name after that and attempts to assign it to an email of a specific person. If that doesn't work right, it goes to one of the receptionists who sees the first page and manually determines who to send it too. If that can't be figured out from that little bit of information, it then goes to someone who views the entire fax to determine what to do with it.
In this situation, simply writing a script to detect more then so many black characters (more then say 80% or the fax) could automatically forward this to file 13.
I wouldn't think that large companies like Amazon or MasterCard have any less of a system. There might be certain offices that have direct fax lines but I would think that accountability laws and the nature of the business would require an automatic archive of all faxes in and out pertaining to any particular matter of business. This sort of makes it more likely that they are stored first and printed as/when needed. Perhaps in this day and age, all you can really do is tie up the fax lines and flood personnel with verification tasks.
In our organization I've seen a couple of incidents of some trojan trying to download a dialer (Babylon) malware. Could this be related?
The best way is to craft a black fax. You can fit thousands of pages on only a few minutes of communication. Compression works very well when the entire image is nothing but black pixels :)
Now, this of course won't make a difference, since big companies don't use fax machines, they use fax2email servers, like Hylafax or similar. In most cases they don't even host it, their telco does it for them.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
At my office, we have a digital fax machine that does not use any paper. When a fax comes in, a TIFF document is created. That means a dozen pages are neatly kept in a browseable .tiff document. No ink or paper is used. Junk fax? I just delete it.
I'm pretty sure a company like Paypal has a system like this, especially when they need to scan a barcode to classify your document (when I faxed them a signed document, a cover page with a barcode was supplied by them).
These kids need to put their minds to better use...
Amazon and Paypal don't do classified work for the government, so they aren't bound by the same standards for destruction of classified documents as a defense contractor.
The places that actually do classified work for the government would have this "problem" solved in seconds. It's not like their shredders are slow, and it's quite common to have cleared office staff who'd be handling the material.
I suppose Microsoft's security isn't all that bad, if they have to go after all the legacy stuff. Oh shit! the fax is down and so is the BBS....WHAT! our payphone and pagers are down too! I'm not getting tone on my 14.4 shotgun modem!!! We're going to sink! Hold on let me boot up the workstations! Load "*" 8,1
This is a million geeks saying I AM ANONYMOUS just like the guys saying I AM SPARTACUS in that old movie.
I think you've missed the point Anonymous is a large group of people, Spartacus was one man. They can all be Anonymous, they could not all be Spartacus.
You are doing a great job at boosting Wikileaks' credibility as a journalistic endeavor. There is absolutely no risk that the government, lobbied by the businesses you are attacking, will use your actions to convince the public as a whole that it is wise and necessary to introduce new draconian laws against online privacy and freedom.
Keep it up!
Yours sincerely, The Man.
P.S. I know where you live now, and I am going to tell my friends at the RIAA next time you so much as think of touching a torrent. Or maybe I'll tell them you did even if you didn't. Even if you manage to get an unusually intelligent jury, your life will be ruined long before the court finds out the truth. Have fun, kids!
Possibly pointless. But do Amazon or Paypal handle govt information? If they do, maybe they've signed an agreement with respect to handling sensitive or classified information, especially on electronic networks where it can easily be copied around. If there's any kind of clause to the tune of "keep classified data off of your unclassified networks," then they're in breach*. It may not be coming from the government, but it's still government data.
I work in a govt office (non-US), directives have come down twice saying not to view Wikileaks on our corporate LAN, because even though I'm pulling it from the FRICKING INTERNET, some of it is still considered classified information and will be treated as such. In my case that means the hard drive gets yanked. Likely whatever agreement they're bound to won't be as bad, but it's still going to be frustrating to go through. That's the point really - force the users to respect data sensitivity by annoying the hell out of them. Maybe they'll update their agreements with a "Unless Sensitive Data is provided by International Whistleblower Website, via their 14 Year-Old Hentai-Reading Proxies, in which case you can just delete it" clause.
*Unless, uh, Anonymous is sending everything to their fax # for sensitive information. But then that would be one lazy DDOS. You could say they're phoning it in.
Actually, what he is saying is pretty smart.
You see, when people get busted for smuggling drugs across the country, they generally get hit not because the cop said, he might have drugs, lets search him, but because they are speeding or sampling the merchandise and weaving or driving erratic or something. They failed to make themselves a small target.
The same goes with a concealed weapon. It's the people who show it to everyone who get busted for carrying it. Well, that unless they get busted for something else. In either case, they failed to make themselves a small target.
What he is saying is that if you don't want to get into trouble, don't do anything wrong. And if you do, do as little as noticeable so you don't become a big target on their radar.
This is a million geeks saying I AM ANONYMOUS just like the guys saying I AM SPARTACUS in that old movie.
You do know how that ended, right?
Fricken kids trying to fit in and doing the same stupid crap the person next to them is doing.
No, destruction of property/disruption to other people's services is not civil disobedience. It is plain, flat out, illegal. It is, and should be, punishable with large fines and jail time.
You're right, it's not a case of being clueless noobs. It's a case of being self-centred arrogant pricks.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Thanks for all the stress testing, Anonymous. --USA, Inc.
Better yet, not only a simple Black Fax, but one that is looped, so that it endlessly feeds itself through the fax
1993 called. They want their sabotage back.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
If you actually have an old-school fax machine, it really doesn't cost more.. as it isn't ink/toner but heat sensitive paper akin to most receipt systems... Then again, the heating element/pen in the machine could overheat... but I'd think most larger corporations are using digital systems, where all black won't take up much more space than all white, and alternative would be better..
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Further along these lines, if you preface it with "I wanted to let you know, this is some of the material that Wikileaks handles. I wanted to bring to your attention the important journalism that they do." or something along those lines, you are actually sending content rather than ddosing, and it may give you some more legal protection, but IANAL.
not unlike refusing to sit in the back of a bus - and when many people do it in large numbers, it changes policies.
What a load of shit, do you even know what Civil Disobedience is? The first sentence in the article you posted? Refusing to sit at the back of a bus is NOT civil disobedience.
It's not a case of being clueless noobs.
It's a classic example of Civil Disobedience.
Well the group is called Anonymous and most of the members are smart enough to remain that way. Using the clueless noobs to fill out the ranks and take the fall - if there is any - is a good strategy since civil disobedience rarely works as a defence.
As a society we have lost our ability for calm measured response. Any trivial issue can now be instantly promoted to international awareness by even trivial acts of pseudo-terrorism. That then means than the current best way to get your issue heard is to get all 'splodie on someone or something. It doesn't even have to be really a real explosion in the real world.
Now I cannot particularly gainsay Anonymous. Someone else set the stage and established the rules. Then the government and a bunch of reactionaries did _utterly_ _fail_ to simply ignore wikileaks like they should have. Then still others tried to "rally with the government(s)" in their utter failure to properly ignore wikileaks.
Now it wouldn't be a bad thing at all if The Internet got the "do not fark with those guys" street-cred that the Islamists got. I mean we cannot post _old_ pictures of Muhammad right? Well maybe if companies got the "net neutrality or no net for you" message then things might be better.
Meanwhile the Internet as a whole can out-wacko and out-crazy _any_ organization you can imagine. It can also out-think such organizations.
Mark my words: Soon we will see a DNS system based on PGP keys and distributed by DHT etc. The URLs will look like "pgpk://key_here/path/resource", "pgpkfp://pgp_key_fingerprint/path/resource" or just plain "pgp://your_domain_word/path/resource". The client will look in the distributed database and get a list of IPv6 (or v4, sadly) addresses (and actual public keys for pgpkfp: or pgp:) and all the requests to those addresses will be encrypted with that same pgp key, and include the public key to use in response. Someone wants to take over "wikileaks.org" they, at best, could add new keys. But the old keys worked, and the new keys, when they got to internet-busy-signal warning pages would just me marked "crap" by the user with a click. People will have real "home pages" for themselves instead of others, and those pages will be full of known-good key-based links that take them to the start of "The Internet they want to see".
And if someone, say ICANN, were to start poisoning the key cache, then people would blacklist their key and they would find themselves stranded with everybody just ignoring their node(s) in the distributed database.
Yea, banks and business would have a terrible time at first because of the pishing possibilities as hundreds of evil-people added "chase.com" to the key cache. They'd adapt eventually. The alternative DNS system will rise up informally at first as a bind replacement amongst techies, free-thinkers, and yes, media "pirates", but nobody will be able to prove any one participant is a bad actor so who cares. Everything will be encrypted anyway, and when the Distributed Name Database (dnd 8-) grows up it will carry bit-torrent up with it in a giant reverse Streisand Effect.
So yes, all these articles are fuel for the fire.
But the overgrown plain of dead grass that is the currently broken media infrastructure and semi-stable self-appointed gate keepers kinda needs to burn.
Not all fires are bad, and in information systems, like ecosystems, many of the seeds only germinate after a good conflagration.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
When the feds bust down their doors and discover that the VoIP account that spawned all those calls isn't _really_ owned by the GOP, PETA, or Westboro Baptist Church.
Yea, a lot of the the small-timers will be linked back to some guys house. But most of the bad actors are probably going through hacked SIP nodes or, if they are smart, email-to-fax converters or plain old mis-attributed VoIP accounts paid for with pre-paid visa cards, recharged with cash, and with names and addresses associated with the victims themselves.
You know... "Why is Amazon.com fax spamming PayPal.com?" will be a pretty good question for _someone_ to ask.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
It's a classic example of Civil Disobedience not unlike refusing to sit in the back of a bus - and when many people do it in large numbers, it changes policies
Civil Disobedience is never anonymous.
The entire purpose of the thing is to put names and faces to those who are prepared to risk jail or death for what they believe.
(1) Faxes are "as good as" photocopies, and as such have a legal standing. Particularly in that if the fax went straight to paper, that paper is a fixed media. Yes, someone can forge anything at any time. That isn't the point.
(2) Anonymous doesn't expect to be "listened to" any more than prison officials expect their prisoners to "become reformed." We live in a "crime and punishment" society, not a "reflect and reform" one. The best "The Internet(tm)" can hope for is a "don't mess with those crazy mo-fos, they will jack your shite up" reputation. If you don't think that didn't work for the Islamists go try to put an image of Muhammad on your masthead.
We have created a "fear the terrorist" climate, and so it should not surprise us that when someone wants to engender a reaction they want to wave the banner of "dangerous to your peace".
Just like there are just as many non-poisonous but colorful creatures that take advantage of the fact that nature has learned that "bright colors means deadly", there will be a number of effective techniques of disruption that are in no way actual terrorism but will receive the "terrorist-like" moniker in the press, and so become effective means for inciting change.
Before 9/11, no terrorist organization or action had _ever_ lead to victory. But the "toh mai gawd" reaction of the U.S., and our utter willingness to hide behind our full-body pat-down security theater have lead even smart countries to bow to Islamist demands like "don't show that picture or we will get testy".
The U.S.A. under Bush did what no terrorist organization had ever done before, give individuals with 'splodie things credibility.
Now we reap what the right-wing fraidy-cats have sown so deeply.
And we reap it in all sorts of unexpected ways.
You cannot fault Anonymous. They didn't set the rules. And their grievance is even pretty valid.
Someone somewhere wanted an internet kill switch, they have discovered that if they piss off more than a minuscule fraction of the internet, the internet will react badly and kill them. "No net neutrality from you, then no internet for you" is a pretty good lesson for companies and maybe even governments to learn.
TCP packets can be used like bullets and we _are_ now in a territorial dispute over the internet landscape. It doesn't matter what side of any one issue you support, you are in the fight, or at least the crossfire.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Anonymous' last name is Coward and posts here in /. very often!!!
transparent proxy aka YOU WILL be caught chronoss ask the fbi they know
3) exploiting the very website in 1)- Wiping out everything and leaving hte Anonymous video 4) spray painting all over th place "Anonymous"
5) outting more data retrieved in 3 to wikileaks and others exposing more corruption.
6) putting data retrieved form old discarded hard drives onto the net as well showing even more criminal behavior by those you attack.
7) pics of the leader of that nation your attacking doing gay things with donkeys
Why are they attacking PostFinance? PostFinance is not a bank. It is a financial services (money transfers and the like) arm of the Swiss post office. Accounts are only for Swiss residents. Assange is not a Swiss resident, so is not eligible for an account. Hence, his account was closed and the money in his account returned to him.
The gub'ment has demanded the cables be returned; they'd have to box and ship them all. COD.
Civil disobedience is, for the most part, flat out illegal too. And, for the most part, it involves disruption of other people's services. What makes it "right" rather than "wrong" is not a matter of whether there are laws against it or whether people are depending on you not doing it, but whether those laws or that allocation of services is just in the first place.
You don't think that the Mississippi sit-ins disrupted white folks' services at restaurants? You don't think countless young activists engaged in non-violent actions that nonetheless violated various local apartheid laws?
Civil disobedience is a term which distinguishes non-violent resistance from violent resistance, not non-resistance from resistance.
Refusing to sit in the back of the bus is most certainly civil disobedience, if the law (or policy) says you must sit in the back of the bus.
That's ridiculous. The purpose of civil disobedience is to disrupt unjust (according to the disobeying party) policy and make it too costly to maintain. That there is some risk involved is a consequence of the injustice; wanton self-risk without regard for purpose is exactly how *not* to accomplish anything worthwhile in activism. It's at least as useless as having neither purpose nor taking risk, but quite a bit more destructive as it's likely to cause needless waves of repression in response.
http://twitter.com/julian_ass
Except those people on the bus were not anonymous and actually took some real risk. You insult them by comparing the actions of anonymous to their actions.
These pranks of blackpaper, or endless loops worked wonders "back in the day", but by now most large companies have automated faxes. Inbound faxes are delivered to your corporate work email as a nicely readable PDF file. With the rise of VOIP, a lot of companies have phased out fax machines on the recieving end. Most PBX system natively accept faxing even. Even a small business can save money by using an old pc and a modem for receiving, nobody likes the flimsy and expensive fax paper. This would cause more problems for tying up their fax lines than on their fax equipment themselves I'd imagine.
move along, nothing to see here.
Oh no this is rich stuff, sending junk faxes is already against the law, the banks, Amazon/paypal and mastercard are probably regulated to the point where they probably have their own assigned FBI liason; throw in phone records I think the no-fly list is going to be getting pretty long. Don't forget each one of those junk faxes is worth a $500.00 fine or civil damages just to sweeten the pot.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Fax is very important to me, as I've never heard of this so-called "Internet".
Refusing to sit in the back of the bus is most certainly civil disobedience, if the law (or policy) says you must sit in the back of the bus.
You can say refusing to do anything is civil disobedience if there is a law requiring you to do it. In general refusing to sit at the back of the bus is not going to be civil disobedience...it's a retarded example, what place has such a law?
(While stating that I don't know exactly what Anonymous transmitted) What I don't understand why it's not illegal when Rush Limbaugh calls on his audience to call or fax Congress with the explicit intent of tying up their switchboards/lines? Why is that not a denial of service attack? It's certainly denial of service.
It's funny that that law references "annoying" faxes. The whole point of contacting Congress is to annoy them. If it weren't annoying, they'd pay no heed.
I'm not saying Limbaugh should be prosecuted for calling for faxing Congress, but why then should Internet posters be prosecuted for calling for faxing anti-Wikileaks corporations?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
A great deal of the south-eastern United States during its apartheid era. That's where the example comes from.
Do you really think these kiddies have a fax machine?
They just _call_ the fax machine with any throwaway cellphone or sip-phone every 10 seconds, so that it can't receive legit faxes.
Additionally it's not DOS if you 'accidently' dial a wrong (fax) number when trying to reach a friend.
A great deal of the south-eastern United States during its apartheid era. That's where the example comes from.
pretty sure there was never any such law.
Why didn't I think of that and write "law (or policy)"? Oh wait, I did.
Telegraph?
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
You see, when people get busted for smuggling drugs across the country, they generally get hit not because the cop said, he might have drugs, lets search him, but because they are speeding or sampling the merchandise and weaving or driving erratic or something. They failed to make themselves a small target.
There's the world of difference between smuggling drugs and making a revolution! ... OK in Sth America not always that much a of a difference ... :/
In any case, the very best way to make yourself a small target is in a crowd. As Kropotkin wrote "If a law is wrong, and you know it is wrong, break it! And break it in force!
What he is saying is that if you don't want to get into trouble, don't do anything wrong.
Well yes, but more than that he is saying, "if you could possibly get into trouble, don't do what you know is right." That's why he's a moral cripple.
That hurts, but is pretty juvenile and easily dealt with.
The best way to do it is if they faxed all those cables that Wikileaks has released. Black pages can be recycled easily. Sensitive data? That has to be shredded. And people who aren't supposed to be looking at these things may end up seeing them.
Imagine all the banks and Paypal and Amazon having to now deal with printouts of all the cables themselves - do they shred them? Recycle them without shredding? Also imagine people who shouldn't be looking at them looking at them accidentally (like all those trying to apply for federal jobs).
DDoS the fax? Doesn't do much. But use the fax to DDoS the company is more interesting because someone has to handle the document in the end, and they have to look at the incoming fax to determine routing. They may have to read the cables whether they want to or not to figure out if it's something to can or forward. Black pages - canned easily (and since it's all electronic these days, costs disk space). But pages and pages of readable material...
People still use fax machines? Seriously? Seems easier, and cheaper, to have the fax come in, well, digitized and stored on computers. If you have to print it out, then you can. Otherwise, save on paper & ink.
Time to get into the year 2010 businesses. Oh wait, most of you are still require IE6? No wonder...
Be seeing you...
I'm sorry, but that is not entirely the case.
Civil Disobedience is not only refusing to follow an unjust law. It also involves, and in some ways requires, facing the consequences of that disobedience. That will involve arrests, jail time, court dates, and even, sometimes, prison, as well as all the ancillary niceties involved in a punitive judicial system, to wit: police brutality, criminal records, prosecutors conducting 'coercive negotiation,' and the like. Civil Disobedience seeks to put a face and a name to those who are disobeying an unjust law. It is not a panacea, there is no critical mass of participants which will collapse an unjust system, and it will not happen overnight. It is not easy, and it takes a lot of courage to, for example, handcuff yourself to the gate of Raytheon, knowing that you're going to be arrested.
Did you know that when people were protesting nuclear plants and nuclear weapons production, there was a whole procedure that led to virtual coordination between security forces and protesters? There was even a "How to arrest a nuclear protester" training course. Basically, the protesters were told to not put up a fight, and the security guys would be very formal and arrest them. The arrest of the protesters was part of the procedure.
Mohandas Ghandi, who first proposed satyagraha (only one aspect of which is civil disobedience,) knew that there are two ways to break an unjust system. One way is slow, painful, bloodless but for a handful of voluntary victims, long-term, and can be a heartbreaking struggle. This is civil disobedience. The other way is fast, but much more painful, incredibly bloody for anyone near it, hopefully short term, and can also be a heartbreaking struggle. This is armed insurrection. And the real life Ghandi did not have nuclear weapons backing up his words.
What this is, is not satyagraha. It is closer to what you see the Black Bands do when the G-8 comes to town and firebomb a few dozen Starbucks.* They firebomb and then they run. Their goal is to NOT be arrested. Now, I can respect the anarchist message, even sympathise with it, but don't go confusing what they do with civil disobedience.
* - Not like it's all that hard to MISS one of them, considering how many there are. Can't lob a Molotov Snapple without hitting a damn Starbucks.
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."
Actually, there was. They were called "Jim Crow" laws, and they allowed separation of races in public spaces and provided punishments for those who refused to comply.
Rosa Parks was arrested and served time in jail for refusing to stand up for a white man. The law mandated that she obey the driver regarding the segregation of the seating on the bus.
Quote:
Jim Crow laws in various states required the segregation of races in such common areas as restaurants and theaters. The "separate but equal" standard established by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) lent high judicial support to segregation.
A Montgomery, Alabama, ordinance compelled black residents to take seats apart from whites on municipal buses. At the time, the "separate but equal" standard applied, but the actual separation practiced by the Montgomery City Lines was hardly equal.
It was most certainly a "city ordinance" and therefore a law in 1955.
The mental gymnastics required to believe Anonymous is anything other than thugs has now reached Olympic levels.
> You see, when people get busted for smuggling drugs across the country, they generally get hit not because the cop said, he might have drugs, lets search him, but because they are speeding or sampling the merchandise and weaving or driving erratic or something.
I especially loved the guy who drove a semi full of pot on the cars-only level of the George Washington Bridge.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
I'm sure its much easier to prosicute someone in the US on wirefraud charges when they are wardailing/DOS'ing over a PTSN line than it is over ethernet. Much easier to reliably trace too..
I think you've missed the point Anonymous is a large group of people, Spartacus was one man. They can all be Anonymous, they could not all be Spartacus.
I think you've missed the point. They were all Spartacus! The point was that you can kill the man, but you can't kill the idea.
If you take one of us out, another will step into their boots.
This is exactly like the guys (in that old movie) saying "I am Spartacus."
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Yes, if every fax machine started spewing out this cable... http://www.buzzfeed.com/awesomer/the-single-most-damning-wikileaks-cable
Still ties up a fax line though. POTS is far more vulnerable to DOS than IP is because each incoming fax use 100% of the bandwidth of a single line, and most places don't have that many.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The Roman Empire fell and slavery was abolished?
OK, so it took a little time...
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
This is exactly like the guys (in that old movie) saying "I am Spartacus."
The same guys who were later crucified by Crassus (iirc) all the way along the Via Appia pour encourager les autres?
worked really well for them...
Spartacus was 70 BC, gladiator fights were gradually abolished in the 4th century AD, slavery was never abolished in the ancient Roman Empire.
People still use fax machines? Seriously? Seems easier, and cheaper, to have the fax come in, well, digitized and stored on computers. If you have to print it out, then you can. Otherwise, save on paper & ink.
In other news, most of us still don't work in paperless offices
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Ha ha rickrolling by fax, how Eighties.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Exactly. The whole point is that you are aware of the possible consequences and choose to accept them. DDOS'ers who get arrested and plead guilty stating they are proud to stand up for injustice: you have my support! If however you try to weasel your way out of it, well just that's pathetic, enjoy your time in jail.
Faux Fax on Fuxing Fox.
Film at 11.
The Roman Empire fell and slavery was abolished?
OK, so it took a little time...
you forgot the part about the 6,000 slaves who survived the fight being crucified by Crassus.
the general populace has proven to be awfully bad at judging what "they" can do and what they can't afford to do (see the various European peasants' risings for similar examples).
Crassus had no problem with executing 6,000 (in public) to save the Roman Republic - consider that by doing so he did also destroy an awful lot of (human^^) capital belonging to the owners of the latifundia these slaves ran from.
Strength in numbers does only go so far once you seriously threaten establishment.
Good idea. Let's print leaks and include them with everything we send. Return packages to Amazon, mail to banks or government, etc. If you want to play safe you can use the edited versions from a mainstream media outlet.
What system do you use, or is it hand-crafted?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Agreed. I'll be proud of our DDOS'ers when they all put their names and addresses online, effectively DDOS'ing the police as well. Only then I'll admit you have some guts.
If you want to stay out of trouble, you should do your best to make yourself a small target.
You are a mental cripple. I feel truly sorry for you.
You're the one who's shaky in the brain department.
If you are doing something illegal, unless you want to get caught as some sort of civil disobedience gesture (in which case you should just go and physically vandalise the company's offices, or something) then of course you want to make it hard for the authorities to catch you.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Pizza deliveries.
We're the kids in America.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
No, but I can see you masturbating over an absurd fantasy through your parent's basement window.
Damn it, Soulskill...
nt
1) Fax the Wikileaks cables to public service office
2) Wait n days
3) File a Freedom of Information request for the contents of the Wikileaks cables
Of course, if thousands of people/computers do (1) and (3), then you could indeed cause a problem. Not sure not-your-Pal and the like would respond to FoA requests, although some UK companies do because they're public/private partnership.
My plan has more holes than a block of Swiss cheese, but it still amuses me ;-)
It is likely that any FAX machine owned by Amazon, etc. doesn't hit paper, hence using heavy quantities of black will not do much. No ink or toner will get used, and a mostly black page will compress a cleanly as a mostly white page, hence not really doing anything beyond the normal bandwidth requirements of the FAX machine.
A more effective way to DOS a fax is to send a white noise pattern, while the sending machine is configured to handshake at a low baud rate (9600 or less). The purpose behind the low baud rate is obvious; the white noise pattern will confound the compression algorithm used (which is optimized toward large numbers of consecutive white pixels followed by chunks of consecutive black pixels), thus grossly increasing the bandwidth per page required by the machines. You can then impose whatever content you want onto the white noise pattern by altering the threshold selectively when converting your white-noise pattern from greyscale (fax has a 1-bit colour depth).
www.wavefront-av.com
Actually, the best method would be to use a Black Fax [wikipedia.org] rather than something like stick figures or Goatse.
Maybe, but HR won't need to organize counseling sessions just because on of the admins saw a black fax.
Destruction of property... property like tea?
Disruption of other people’s services... like the service of having nice comfortable seats to sit in when they ride buses?
Distributed Denial of APK: It takes 15 seconds to reply to him anonymously, but wastes tons of his time if we all do it.
These attacks on the various companies / organizations should be considered domestic terrorism and the perpetrators should be hunted down and dealt with to the fullest extent of the law.
In fact they should out themselves, not be the cowards they are. If these terrorists have done nothing wrong, then they should have nothing to fear.
Wikileaks personal have shown themselves show real courage.
Finally, you all should open your eyes and look at what was released. It shows our government and others at their worst. Evil/bad/wrong doings cannot stand the light of day.
As an American citizen^Wsubject, I would like to preemptively thank these kids for the spasming congressional knees which will give us many restrictive new laws.
Anonymous is no one, no one can claim credit for "anonymous", for all we know it might as well be butthurt Scientologists, Habbo admins, or simply the government setting the stage for the Internet kill switch.
Do not buy into this.
They don't say "anonymous is not your personal army" without a reason, they say so because no one can address anonymous directly and direct it, because there isn't a cohesive group to direct, it's not even /b/astards or /v/irgins, it's whoever call himself A is A.
But... the future refused to change.
In Soviet Russia, you attack DDoS
most corporate "fax servers" are integrated into technology like copiers, with a limited hard disk capacity of around 60 gigs. fill the disk with wikileaks documents or high resolution graphics (think screencaps of the entire collateral murder video) and the fax machine effectively shuts down until someone can find an op to clear the disk on the copier/multifunction device. add multifactor authentication required to access faxes in corporate environments like visa, and this attack works well to slow down or stop the days faxes entirely.
sysops in most companies also do not know much about the fax/copier other than toner requirements...so its been my experience personally you'll need to fetch a gray-haired woman from the switchboard or an exec assistant to log into the copier and show you what to do. Fax interfaces on these systems are notoriously painful to navigate, requiring hours of either point and click deletion or button punching to get results.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Civil Disobedience is not only refusing to follow an unjust law. It also involves, and in some ways requires, facing the consequences of that disobedience.
This is a tactical consideration, as much or more than it's a philosophical consideration. The reality is that engaging in disobedience (in the literal sense) always involves some risk, whether or not the disobeying party is aware of that. But the extent to which that level of risk should be taken proudly depends on the overall strategy of a given civil disobedience campaign.
Actions which require that level of voluntary submission to the consequences of unjust laws/policies tend to be more symbolic in nature—which is not at all to dismiss or denigrate those actions, but simply to distinguish them from another strategy of civil disobedience. Another strategy involves more direct and concrete disruption of the system or organization which enforces the unjust laws/policies in question. This strategy is better served by having its operatives on the ground continuing to act, rather than symbolically getting themselves locked up without cause.
This works best when strategies are combined and overlap, where there is a sea in which to swim, so to speak. Covert operations are best supported by simultaneous actions of the more symbolic kind, and by non-disobedient actions (eg. traditional protest/rally/teach-in/and so on) of sympathetic activists. It might seem unfair that some are exposed to a great deal more risk than others, but this is going to be the case when there is widespread motivation to act regardless; the people who choose that role will volunteer themselves.
The problem with underground organizations is not that they lack courage, but usually that they lack broad support. Sometimes this is because they do a poor job of articulating what they're doing, but often it's because there is little sense of strategy in activist movements of the powerless.
I'm interested, in an academic sense, in discussing the philosophical underpinnings of civil disobedience movements. But in a more direct sense, I'm much more interested in discussing effectiveness. I want to see a civil disobedience strategy that works, and that ultimately wins. It's pointless to discuss Gandhi's philosophy—as with King's—outside the context that there was also non-civil disobedience trends that were quite powerful and effective in their own right.
The British Empire would eventually have quit India regardless, as their capacity to gun down hapless Indians was severely limited by the collapse of their empire around them; but Gandhi's struggle was aided and accelerated by the fact that there was also armed insurrection and a great deal of other forms of resistance. Likewise, the strength of the US Civil Rights Movement was bolstered by all manner of disruption, not the least of which was a growing and increasingly militant revolutionary movement aimed at total upheaval of US society.
But ultimately, if we philosophically shackle to "civil disobedience" a requirement of voluntary exposure to risk when it need not be taken in order to accomplish real disruption of injustice, the consequence will be to ensure we never gain broad support. The privileged who tend to prefer covert operations will simply choose privilege and that will be the end of that. All the better, you might say. But as, again, I'm mostly interested in winning, I quite disagree.
Did you know that when people were protesting nuclear plants and nuclear weapons production, there was a whole procedure that led to virtual coordination between security forces and protesters? There was even a "How to arrest a nuclear protester" training course. Basically, the protesters were told to not put up a fight, and the security guys would be very formal and arrest them. The arrest of the protesters was part of the procedure.
I'm not sure if you're putting this up as exemplary or to mock it. I've seen this scenario play out d
I'm wondering if you're aware that the infamous tea was tea of the British East India company - a company that had a Crown mandated monopoly on tea in the American colonies and that they had jacked up the price to cover getting pantsed in the spice trade with no recourse for the colonists.
So it wasn't just a case of "This tea is British! Rargh! *Patriot Rage*". And "Boston Tea Party" wasn't a term used until a century later.
The East India Company in this case was a defacto agent of the Crown, the tea essentially government property. They didn't go smashing up random merchants' tea cargoes. Annonymous is attacking whomever they think they can get away with under the cover of being "protesters".
Hopefully someone that participated in the civil rights protests will properly thank you for comparing them with Anonymous.
Working as the IT Director for a copier/MFP sales and service dealership, I can tell you within the past 5 years, nearly all of my clients have converted to sending faxes through the network (using a network fax driver,) and receiving faxes either to a networked folder, or a shared fax e-mail address with strict spam filters... I can't imagine that Joe Schmoe's Realty on the corner is running a more advanced fax environment than the likes of PayPal, Amazon, etc. This seems very trivial indeed.
Thanks for the history lesson, but you didn’t tell me anything that I didn’t already know.
Annonymous is attacking whomever they think they can get away with under the cover of being "protesters".
I disagree.
Distributed Denial of APK: It takes 15 seconds to reply to him anonymously, but wastes tons of his time if we all do it.
And "Boston Tea Party" wasn't a term used until a century later.
It was the shortest way I could think of to differentiate it from the Tea Party a la Sarah Palin.
Distributed Denial of APK: It takes 15 seconds to reply to him anonymously, but wastes tons of his time if we all do it.
Timothy McVeigh got snagged driving a car with no license plate.
And whilst you say that, there will still be the odd fax machine about. Perhaps in some director's office who doesn't want to have to use the new system - and can pull rank to be able to not have to use it. Perhaps a legal department sometimes faxes confidential communication, and the simplest way to keep it secured is to have a simple fax machine, that doesn't have any ability to keep copies etc., in a locked room. Smaller regional offices are more likely to be stuck with older kit - I have worked for a couple of corps where the sites that executives frequently used had all the best facilities and newest (and shiniest) kit, and the rest would only get new stuff when the old stuff broke and caused a big problem. Those more minor regional offices are much more likely to have DOS-able faxes.
Anonymous - dig out those war diallers and find the hidden faxes in the corporate telephone number blocks. The publicised fax numbers will have to be handling fax-spam, and that might be useful for the corporation to be able to ignore these attacks. The targeting of non-public faxes is much more likely to lead to a cubicle full of used thermal paper, leading to direct costs for the corporations.
Car analogies break down.
I'd agree, except that the target of their "civil disobedience" is a private enterprise, and not in fact the state itself. And it should be noted that civil disobedience only applies where the subjects are violating a law because they believe it immoral. The law against DDoS is hardly immoral, although the law against whistleblowing might well be - except that the law against whistleblowing isn't what they're violating here.
Hence, not civil disobedience. Just being dicks.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Destruction of property... property like tea?
Disruption of other people’s services... like the service of having nice comfortable seats to sit in when they ride buses?
In both cases, the target of the protest was the government. However, it should be noted that the Boston Tea Party was not in fact Civil Disobedience. Rosa Parks did engage in an act of Civil Disobedience (specifically, the violated the segregation law because the felt it was immoral).
To engage in Civil Disobedience, one has to violate the specific law they feel is immoral or unjust. Committing a Distributed Denial of Service against MasterCard for refusing to do business with Wikileaks (funny how Slashdot is OK with Freedom of Association until it's used against someone they like) is not a protest against an immoral law, it's being jackasses. To protest the whistleblower laws, they'd have to themselves acquire state secrets and distribute them.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
The act of civil disobedience isn't meant specifically to target laws against DDoS, but rather corporate policies acting as government-sponsored censors. To say that an act of civil disobedience must be against a state and not against corporations is to ignore that the state is a valid target because it exercises power, not because it is called a state. Corporations wield great power and as such are just as valid as targets of civil disobedience.
However, it should be noted that the Boston Tea Party was not in fact Civil Disobedience. ... To engage in Civil Disobedience, one has to violate the specific law they feel is immoral or unjust.
You’re nit-picking, but I just think I can out-nit-pick you.
The tea ship Dartmouth arrived in the Boston Harbor in late November of 1773. According to British law it had to be unloaded, and its tea tax be paid, within 20 days of its landing (if not, the cargo would be confiscated by customs officials).
Samuel Adams headed a meeting which drafted a resolution urging the captain of the Dartmouth to return to England without paying the import duty. However, the British governor of Massachusetts, named Hutchinson, refused to permit this. As twenty-five men were assigned by the colonists to guard the ship, the tea could not be unloaded either, and there it sat. Meanwhile, two more ships arrived laden with tea.
As the 20-day limit came to a close, Hutchinson had continued to refuse to allow the ships to leave without paying the import duty and unloading their tea. At that point, in defiance of the crown and its governor, a number of colonists boarded the ships and unloaded the tea themselves. Into the harbor. And the ship thereafter left for England without paying the duty.
So in fact the specific law – which amounted to “you will buy our tea, you will pay the tax, and you will enjoy it, or this ship never leaves” – was exactly the one that they broke: They unloaded the tea and sent the ship back to England without paying the tax.
Distributed Denial of APK: It takes 15 seconds to reply to him anonymously, but wastes tons of his time if we all do it.
I think you've missed the point. They were all Spartacus! The point was that you can kill the man, but you can't kill the idea.
If you take one of us out, another will step into their boots.
This is exactly like the guys (in that old movie) saying "I am Spartacus."
No it isn't, saying 'I'm Spartacus' meant they had a group of people all claiming to be one man, they thought killing that man would kill the idea. Everyone already knows that anonymous is an idea and not one person and that taking out one person that claims to be anonymous won't kill the group or the idea but merely discourage participation. So saying 'I'm Anonymous' is just admitting you are part of a criminal group.
Alright, I'll concede that point - I'd never heard the full story before and that's actually quite interesting.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
I think (and fear) some slashdotters may miss the reference 'sit in the back of the bus'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Parks
yes, there were laws about that kind of thing, racial segregation laws aka Jim Crow laws
Oh, and the place was of course the great nation of freedom, USA.