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Anonymous Files Petition To Make DDoS Legal Form of Protest
hypnosec writes "Anonymous has filed a petition with the U.S. Government asking the Obama administration to make Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks a legal form of protest. Anonymous has argued that because of advancements in internet technology, there is a need for new ways of protest. The hacking collective doesn't consider DDoS as a form of attack and equates it to hitting the 'refresh' button on a webpage. Comparing these attacks to the 'occupy' protests, Anonymous notes that instead of people occupying an area, it is their computers occupying a website for a particular period of time."
I think I could agree that hitting refresh over and over again on a website would be a valid form of protest. But wouldn't having a program do it for you be like using mannequins to occupy wallstreet?
The whole idea of the traditional protest is that people had to stand in a particular area to create problems for wherever they were standing. The limiting factor is that it requires people's time.
Having a fleet of computers continually access a site does not occupy people's time, but rather is an automated process, which is not a form of individual protest. I would imagine that having people hit websites manually, and pressing the refresh button cannot be classed as a DDos attack, and if it were, then they would likely be protected by the right to protest.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
This site claims to hate censorship, but it fawns over a group that protests against people it doesn't like by crashing their websites so that nobody can hear their free speech.
I work for a small hosting/cloud provider, and from experience, I can say that this is a form of attack. It can't be controlled is the worst problem, and it starts affecting many other people who are not involved in the 'protest', who just happen to be on the same shared server, cloud, or data center. Also, as for any argument that such an outcome would be the point of a 'protest', to raise awareness, but the problem is that most people affected by it wouldn't know anything about the source of the attack. Overall, a dDoS should not be a protected option in any form or for any reason. It is way too blunt, and as we build more onto the Web, it can become dangerous or even life-threatening to allow these attacks. It could be the same as allowing people to attack power stations or plants, which is certainly a crime(bordering on terrorism in this day).
I think Anonymous is missing the concept a bit here. You can protest a business with a sign and megaphone, but you are not allowed to stop people from patronising that business. Very rare is it that a DDoS doesn't affect somebodies business. Most often, it affects somebody not even related to who the attacker is intending. If you want to protest, there are non disruptive methods to use, DDoS shouldn't be one of them.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
I hope, and expect, that the petition will be denied. What it means is that any entity with sufficient knowledge and resources (individual or corporation) would be permitted to flood the net with DDoS packets.
If such activity were legalized, by the same principle so would automatically-generated petitions. So would spam. So would noise pollution. It sets an extremely toxic precedent.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
If you legalize DDOS as protest, is it going to be ok for companies to DDOS their competitors, sites they don't like, sites posting negative stories about them etc?
DDOS: It lets you censor anyone who spends less on servers than you.
Sure, its not always corporate folks, but if you let people do something disruptive, big money is going to be spent to abuse it. I may reluctantly go along with money=speech, but money=right to censor others is too far.