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DDoS-Style YouTube Dislikes For Sale
An anonymous reader writes: Dell's Joe Stewart chronicles the tale of the YouTube channel that came under attack in the form of an avalanche of 'dislikes' for any videos that touched upon a certain company or even which examined themes around the company's product without mentioning it. The number of dislikes was so disproportionate to the casual number of viewers for the channel, and so concentrated as to constitute a particular type of net-attack — one that appeared to originate in Vietnam. Stewart eschews the notion of a "cottage industry" of Vietnamese YouTube "dislikers" in favor of the fact that any network exploits are eminently reproducible in a country which has only five ISPs among nearly ninety million people — and a widely distributed vulnerable router.
Now that might explain some recent strange network problems that I've been having here in Vietnam. About 3 weeks ago, Google started denying my searches saying that due to the large number of attacks coming from your network they would refusing traffic (or something like that). I immediately checked my home network (a fiber optic TOTOlink router) and changed the password but the messages persisted. (They're gone now.)
I thought that perhaps I had a (lot of) neighbors who had been compromised/involved in attacks and perhaps Google was casting a wide net (blocking a large subnet of the ISP or even the entire ISP) and that I was just caught up in it. That may be the case, like the summary says there are few ISPs and presumably few different routers being used so it would be easy for a hacker to exploit a vulnerability and command a botnet of thousands of routers. On the other hand, I looked up TOTOlink router vulnerabilities and it said that there is an unpatched backdoor to my model so it is vulnerable. I assume this is true even if I changed my passwords.
So (since I'm obviously not an expert) my question is: is it likely that my router has been hacked? Will it allow the hacker to use it as a "bot"? Is my (unencrypted) traffic vulnerable to interception/change/man-in-the-middle attacks? Or is it more likely that Google isn't blocking my little network (that is attached to the internet by a single dynamic IP address) specifically but is blocking a large portion or even the entire ISP (in my case Viettel?).
I hope whoever can answer my questions is rewarded Karmically! Thanks! :)
This is one of the problems with a rating system which allows dislikes. To quote from my earliesr posts on the topic: The average ranking is not rank = (up - down) like you'd think.. It's rank = p1*up - p2*down. Where p1 is the size of the population which would rank it up, and p2 is the size of the population which would rank it down. Unfortunately, p1 and p2 aren't perfect, and a certain percentage of them will vote stuff up/down just because it makes them comfortable/uncomfortable. If they canceled each other out, there would be no problem. But if the size of p2 is >> p1, then that small percentage of p2 can be larger than all of p1. A minority viewpoint consequently gets a disproportionate number of unfair downvotes simply because it's a minority viewpoint, and thus has to garner a lot more upvotes just to obtain an equal ranking to a majority viewpoint.
For an apolitical, non-religious example, consider Windows vs. Linux. Say Windows users outnumber Linux users 50:1. Now imagine if a search engine let you rate search results based on whether they were useful or not useful, which is then used to prioritize subsequent search results. In every population, there's going to be an idiot segment who votes stuff down simply because the search result was irrelevant it was to their query, not because they thought it was wrong. Consequently, if a search for hard disk repartitioning brings up four Windows sites and one Linux site as the top results, the Linux site is going to have 50x as many downvotes from those idiot users who never specified Windows in their search but were upset that an "irrelevant" Linux site was included in the search results. If the idiot segment of the Windows population exceeds 2% (numerically equivalent to 100% of the Linux population), that Linux site will end up with a negative rating regardless of how useful or informative it is.
In this case, if a % of p2 is a government-directed smear campaign in control of millions of voters, it can be sufficient to overwhelm p1 and bury a YouTube video with dislikes. (For similar reasons, it's folly to allow non-democratic nations to participate in democratic votes like in the UN. You end up with things the Commission on Human Rights controlled by a bunch of countries who don't respect human rights simply because they have the majority of votes.)
I suspect rating systems fall under similar limitations as Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, and there's no way to develop a perfect rating system. So you need to dispense with the notion that there is one "best" rating system. One is not better than another, they simply tell you different things about what the population is thinking.
To its credit, YouTube still allows you to see the raw number of likes and dislikes, so you can simply ignore the dislike count if you wish. It would be good though if they let you customize their search algorithm per individual account, so you could give more or less weight to certain things like number of likes or dislikes. That would dilute the impact of (purported) smear campaigns like this, as well as drive the SEO people nuts.