QuakeNet: Government-Sponsored Attacks On IRC Networks

Barryke writes "Like FreeNode, it seems more and more legitimate businesses or non-profit organizations are being targeted by government subsidiaries in attempts to disrupt and spy on their users. IRC network QuakeNet has posted a press release condemning these efforts. Quoting: 'These attacks are performed without informing the networks and are targeted at users associated with politically motivated movements such as "Anonymous." While QuakeNet does not condone or endorse and actively forbids any illegal activity on its servers we encourage discussion on all topics including political and social commentary. It is apparent now that engaging in such topics with an opinion contrary to that of the intelligence agencies is sufficient to make people a target for monitoring, coercion and denial of access to communications platforms. The released documents depict GCHQ operatives engaging in social engineering of IRC users to entrap themselves by encouraging the target to leak details about their location as well as wholesale attacks on the IRC servers hosting the network. These attacks bring down the IRC network entirely affecting every user on the network as well as the company hosting the server.' One of those tactics applied by governments is the DDOS, which (perhaps not so) coincidentally, is what their suspects are accused of. Is this irony or hypocritical?"

Comments

Fuck Beta!

[Anonymous Coward]

Please post this to new articles if it hasn't been posted yet.

On February 5, 2014, Slashdot announced through a javascript popup that they are starting to "move in to" the new Slashdot Beta design.

Slashdot Beta is a trend-following attempt to give Slashdot a fresh look, an approach that has led to less space for text and an abandonment of the traditional Slashdot look. Much worse than that, Slashdot Beta fundamentally breaks the classic Slashdot discussion and moderation system.

If you haven't seen Slashdot Beta already, open this [slashdot.org] in a new tab. After seeing that, click here [slashdot.org] to return to classic Slashdot.

We should boycott stories and only discuss the abomination that is Slashdot Beta until Dice abandons the project.
We should boycott slashdot entirely during the week of Feb 10 to Feb 17 as part of the wider slashcott [slashdot.org]

Moderators - only spend mod points on comments that discuss Beta
Commentors - only discuss Beta http://slashdot.org/recent [slashdot.org] - Vote up the Fuck Beta stories

Keep this up for a few days and we may finally get the PHBs attention.

Discussion of Beta: http://slashdot.org/firehose.p... [slashdot.org]
Discussion of where to go if Beta goes live: http://slashdot.org/firehose.p... [slashdot.org]
Alternative Slashdot: altslashdot.org [altslashdot.org] (thanks Okian Warrior (537106))

Re: Fuck Beta!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want "pathetic and obviously ineffective", take a look at beta.slashot.org, setting a new standard for toxic waste.

Beta a Bust

[LordFlower]

Beta sucks. I will not be back if Beta is made mandatory.

Soulskilll and Timothy

[Princeofcups]

Give it up guys. You know that no stories are going to be discussed. Today is the end of the old Slashdot. Start sending out resumes, since this is going down in a blaze of glory.

Hey, the first story we should get on the replacement site when set up is an interview with Rob and Roblimo on why they really left Slashdot and left these incompetents in charge.

Re:Soulskilll and Timothy

[carlos92]

They won't give it up because they still don't get it. They think of the site users as the audience, as if the value of Slashdot was the articles. Just in case Dice reads this: the value is in the comments from the community, some of which are less biased and more informative than the referenced articles. Some are written by experts in the matter, or contain perspectives that a journalist doesn't have. Sure, most of the comments are junk, but the mod system helps you with that. But nobody from Dice will read this, because if they read Slashdot they would have already seen it.

Re:Soulskilll and Timothy

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't please everyone.

And hey, it's easier to get all riled up in your parent's basement than it is to get involved and give proper feedback.

What I have seen repeated many times so far, is that the pubic feedback options for Beta actually *HAVE* been used, and that the issues mentioned in that feedback has been consistently ignored, A La what happened with Metro, Gnome3, and Unity.

It looks more and more like the current crop of UI developers does not know how to accept that their architectural marvels can be so poorly recieved that people would be willing to salt the earth and nuke the site from orbit to rid themselves of it, and instead "Just cant understand why people dont love it."

There does not need to be a reason to dislike something. For instance, think of the food you most despise. Why do you despise it? Can you quantify exactly what it is about that food that sets you off, and makes you go elsewhere? Could you give insightful feedback about what might be done to improve it, (that does not involve simply not serving that food-- because that option has been categorically decried as "Unhelpful".)

Most of the time, the answers to those questions will be a resounding "no", because personal preferences dont NEED reasons, and often times, dont even really HAVE a quantifiable reason to cite. People simply dont like the thing.

When you have resounding negative feedback like this over a product, the question you need to ask is "What DO you want?", not "Oh, so you dont like the taste of liver and onions? How would you make liver and onions more palatable?" The former establishes good will-- the second one shows that you dont really care about what your consumer wants, and intend to make him eat liver and onions regardless.

In the case of /., the community HAS stated, emphatically and repeatedly, EXACTLY what they want-- They want a no-nonsense, low resource, and high data density version of classic with editing abilities for registered users, and unicode support, that does not break the commenting system and is very lean on data bandwidth and computational resources for rendering.

So far, the response from the beta team has been the sound of crickets chirping, followed by announcements that liver and onions will be served on feb 10.

If slashdot's beta team members would grow a pair like soulskill just did 2 posts up, and actually come in and discuss this matter with the community, it would really show some good will on their part.

As is, they are only just digging the hole deeper with their bullshit.

NO to Beta

[mccotter]

Do not make beta mandatory. Keep classic.

donotwant Slashdot Beta

[acid_andy]

Dice, Editors, your silence is deafening! Slashdot is News for Nerds but no true Nerd wants your Beta. Stop pretending this problem will go away. Maybe you actually hope it will go away, maybe you hope Slashdot itself will go away. Whatever - at least have the decency and respect for your long term readers to give some kind of response to all the negative feedback. Why not keep two versions of the site? If Beta was done properly it would all be a CSS skin with some scripts that could all be swapped out. You already have a mobile site, so it can't be to improve appearence on mobiles, tablets, phablets, touchscreens, etc. Oh sorry, I forgot, that wouldn't keep the advertisers happy. Slashdot was awesome while it lasted.

Re:Beta feedback helps

[aardvarkjoe]

We've tried that already. The feedback was ignored.

It's obvious that whoever is working on the new site either lacks the skills or the desire to match the functionality of the current interface. No amount of feedback is going to change that, and so the Beta will always suck.

Do they want to stop the complaining? That's easy. They don't have to get rid of the beta. They just have to formally commit to keeping the classic interface available, and make it straightforward to use it instead.

BetaNet: DICE-Sponsored Attacks on Slashdot

[ShaunC]

Cut this shit out. Revert. Take the DICE Marketing department out for a nice big lunch, drinks and all. Then send them home for the weekend. Then undo the damage they've done.

I'm sadly sure that this is an intentional ploy to drive away long-time users ("geeks" and "nerds") who have contributed so much that, like me, they're eligible to disable advertising. What they don't understand is that even if my karma was shit (we don't get numbers anymore, I guess mine would be 50++++++), I'd still be using Ghostery and AdBlock to block the ads without Slashdot's generous option.

Wake up, guys. This is a tech site. The comments make the site. The users make the site. We aren't going to sit around and watch it go to shit. You will have nothing, ZERO left if the beta interface goes into production, except for a few new users who came over from MSNBC.

Writing, wall, see it, hope you have negotiated a nice severance package.

Re:Beta feedback helps

[demontechie]

The beta feedback discussion for the last couple days has been literate and well thought out, but there has been no public response of any kind. Not even a half-hearted "we hear you and we'll see what we can do about making classic available in perpetuity, but no promises."

And with the revelation of Dice's view of the slashdot finances projections, and the heavy handed mass downmodding it's hard to see what reason the users have to retain any faith in the editors or their superiors.

Re:Beta feedback helps

[carlos92]

If you have access to the editors, let them know that nobody is discussing the stories today. In a day or two this will be a ghost town, they don't have much time to process the feedback.

"As we migrate our audience"

[skillrod]

That's one way to look at it what this Beta will do.

Re:"As we migrate our audience"

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

THAT's the problem right there. They think we're the AUDIENCE and not the CONTRIBUTERS.

NEWSFLASH: We don't come here for the stellar editing, we come here to make and read and reply to each other's comments. YOU'RE not supplying the content, WE are. Display some ads and stay out of the way, or expect most of us to "migrate" to another site.

Car analogy time

[Bob the Super Hamste]

Car analogy time:
I have gotten rid of vehicles that sucked less than the Slashdot beta. Seriously even that '85 Bronco II where everything was rusty, none of the body panels matched, and that had bad compression on the #5 cylinder sucked less than beta.slashdot.org.

Re:C'mon editors

[faedle]

The fact that's buried in the Slashdot Blog and not prominently featured in either the "you're gonna get beta whether you like it or not!" popup and/or a sticky on the Slashdot front page tells this long-time Slashdot user that your "Product Team" isn't really interested in our honest feedback.

Beta sucks, period. It's a design change the users haven't asked for and don't want.