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Why Anonymous Can't Take Down Amazon.com
suraj.sun writes "The website-attacking group 'Anonymous' tried and failed to take down Amazon.com on Thursday. The group's vengeance horde quickly found out something techies have known for years: Amazon, which has built one of the world's most invincible websites, is almost impossible to crash.... Anonymous quickly figured that out. Less than an hour after setting its sights on Amazon, the group's organizers called off the attempt. 'We don't have enough forces,' they tweeted."
Well done anonymous, you've just handed Amazon their marketing for their hosting services for the considerable future.
And even if you haven't, there's still a ton of suited fatcats chortling merrily about the concomitant stock price rise as they stuff their faces with expensive food and drink this holiday season.
Y'all better step it up, or this might be your Waterloo.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
In the black hat jargon impossible means that nobody has done it yet.
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
Probably Slashdot stories about Amazon denying hosting to Wikileaks harmed more the company than the combined Anonymous attack. There is no firewall against social attacks.
Any victory of Anonymous would have been a phyrric one. It would have alienated tons of people they can now still win over. If i try very hard, i can come up with something more stupid than attacking Amazon shortly before Christmas, but it would be quite a challenge. For >50% of all people their christmas presents are more important than the fate of Julian Assange (even if he is shot "trying to escape"). Unluckily they've got a vote too. So converting them from indifference to hostile would neither help Assange nor Wikileaks.
CU, Martin
There is no such thing as an impregnable commercial website.
Never has been.
Never will be.
It doesn't actually have to be "impregnable", it just has to be able to scale larger than the resources their opposition is able to muster. They got that.
Assange is being called a terrorist by prominent government types, and not just in the US. He's not, even if the US or other countries have laws prohibiting publishing leaked classified material - whether or not he's bound by those laws. Terrorism is an effort to make political change by credibly threatening violence, typically by actual violence followed by explicit or implied threats to repeat it. Assange does not threaten violence, and the only change his (and Wikileaks behind him) efforts try to make is to reduce secrecy. Terrorism is arguably underwritten by violence against noncombatants, and only actual state actors (and their direct partners) are exposed in these Wikileaks releases. To call Assange a terrorist for that is to call any journalist who ever publishes a secret leaked to them a terrorist, even though Assange is not as recognizable a journalist. Indeed, it's because our journalists, especially in the US, have become nearly unrecognizable as people who would tell the public what many of these leaks reveal that Assange is not as recognizable as a journalist; if "real" journalists were busier exposing America's state secrets that Americans should know about, Assange would be more clearly one of them. But then he probably wouldn't be leaking these secrets, since others would be, and he wouldn't have an audience.
But now Anonymous "defends" Assange by actually terrorizing corporations and some (ie. Sweden and Switzerland) governments. That's terrorism: the violence and the threat (do what you did to Assange, and you get hit again) is designed to counteract the political activity that harassed Assange, which makes it equally political action - that's terrorism. Those targets might have had it coming. But now it's easy for the people calling Assange a terrorist to get people to believe it. Many won't distinguish between Assange and Anonymous; many will believe that Anonymous is really Assange; many will be unable to distinguish between "Assange the leaker" (which he isn't; he's the publisher) and "Anonymous the terrorist", especially as many think Assange is a "computer hacker" (which he isn't).
Geeks are becoming familiar with the "Streisand effect" when some controller tries to suppress some released info, which draws attention to it. But that's closely related to the effect where Assange's "defenders" make public perception of Assange worse, because his "allies" are what Assange's enemies call him. You're known by the company you keep, and Anonymous has now made Assange known as a terrorist.
--
make install -not war
Good idea. That really worked with Modern Warfare.
Yeah, that would be REALLY cost-effective -- pay AWS for cpu time and traffic (Amazon.com itself is not within AWS realm so traffic between EC2 and Amazon.com is not free) in order to try to hurt the retail web site. Doing that would have been colossally stupid; and quite profitable for Amazon.
I guess this is based on common mis-conception that Amazon.com itself runs on AWS systems. This is not true; ask any Amazonian and they can explain separation (which is due to historical reasons more than anything else; but there are strong security concerns too).
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes