Slashdot Mirror
Russian crackers get whitehouse.gov?
An anonymous reader linked us up with a wired story that
talks about Russian Crackers
taking down whitehouse.gov. A Russian Newspaper has
claimed that it was anti-NATO folk, and the Whitehouse is
claiming it was a hardware failure.
Posted by Lassie:
I agree almost 100% on your post. I think the US means well but without ground troops they are not going to stop this blood bath. It makes me sick just hearing about this killing. Why can't we all just get along. I think the US and all the other countrys need to keep in mind that our actions could stop or start the next ww and that to stop the killing ground troops need to come and inforce the peace. If it means 500 million a year to keep the peace in the area it is well worth it.
Right away I noticed they were using the word "cracker" and not "hacker". Its about fscking time someone got it right. (Granted, this is Wired, but even they keep using the hacker==malevolent meaning all the time.)
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
For that matter, why are they bombing at all?
One truth is that the Americans are leading the charge back to global anarchy. They did an end-run around the UN and attacked a sovereign nation in a volatile region. Am I the only one who thought 'blitz krieg' (sp?) when NATO announced the original plan?
If news reports are to be believed (and that's a big if), they also succeeded in accelerating the purging.
--
Change is inevitable.
Progress is not.
Morality in politics usually is soiled by appeals to pragmatism. In that you are correct. The question here is whether that is a good thing. How important to us are ethical positions which we'll scrap for "pragmatic" reasons? I submit they aren't very important to us at all. And that again demonstrates how feeble appeals to morality are in the present conflict in Serbia. Let's be honest, Mr. President: the reason we are bombing Serbia into the Stone Age is not because "it's the right thing to do" but because we can. And we don't do it to China because we can't.
This is not an ethical position. It's laughably pathetic. It's inexcusable.
No one ever says "the right thing to do would be to bomb China, but we just can't do it because they're too dangerous." That would betray how frail our public morals really are. The truth is something different. It's not politically expedient to bomb China, but it obviously is plenty okay to bomb Serbia.
Again, I'm not trying to condone the killing of the Albanians by their own government. But I'm certainly not going to condone my own country's power-drunk assaults on the Balkans either -- until someone presents a valid ethical or legal argument for it. I haven't seen one, and I don't expect to see one either.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
The part of human nature that makes me especially sick is that which believes everything their television and government tells them. Another part of human nature that is annoying is hypocritical part which puts a blind eye to Northern Ireland yet bumbles around interefering with non-allied countries. Another part of human nature that is troubling is the part that prefers to spend money on blowing things up rather than supplying aid and education to those who need it.
Of course, my favourite part of human nature is that which destroys small european natures to cover up a president's latest sexual adventures...
Oh yes, of course the US are stepping in to prevent the next world war. Of course. Everyone knows that politicians are just a bunch of cuddly altruists. No way would a goverment put politics in the way of the good of the people.
That's why the lovely US fought in the Gulf as well, because they deeply care about freedom. No way did it have anything to do with nasty, dirty oil.
I for one sleep soundly knowing that the lovely, lovely, lovely (oh and cuddly too) US is there looking out for me and evryone else on this big, silly old planet.
Life sucks but death doesn't put out at all....
Seems like with computer guru Al Gore hanging around the white house they shouldn't have these problems. After all, he did invent the internet, right?
-- First post (by a female living in a state that begins with M and does not end in a vowel with a birthday that falls
It's strange that OCC hasn't noticed their new home page... the cracked version is still up.
The Army reading list
I get so tired of ignorant people. Idiot serbs take up for their crazed dictator leader. Russians don't even realize that its is almost the start of another holocaust. They are all damned idiots that don't even realize the US is stepping in to try to stop the next world war / holocaust from happening. Frankly, I think I will be glad when we don't have to live on the Earth. (Who says I'm talking about other planets?)
Human nature makes me sick, at least the Americans in charge of this situation are the most mature of all of them involved.
he who has the fastest cart always has the best lie.
Hmm, this is really interesting. Are we seeing the dawn of an age of electronic agression? Since so much of North America and Europe is dependent on electronic communications, and Internet communications in particular, it is not impossible that in the future, individual politically-minded crackers can strike at foreign governments and take down a significant part of their infrastructure.
The goal of the NATO bombings is to take out Yugoslavia's infrastructure... To destroy Yugoslavia's capability to produce goods and maintain a line of communication. Certainly, a dedicated group of crackers could do the same to an Internet-savvy nation.
Is the day near when we will see a one-man war against, say, the United States? I know, it's fantasy. But this article makes it seem plausible to me.
This is a hideous act of agression with the sole intent of instigating an international incident. The United States must declare war immediately. There is no other option. Whitehouse.gov is the cornerstone of the American Internet. Without it, there would be no way for United States citizens to learn the goings-on of the President, the Vice President or the entire Executive Branch of the government.
:)
Premeditated acts of terrorism like this cannot be tolerated. It is time for America to stand up for itself and deal a crushing blow to the country of origin of this electronic invasion.
Er?
Wait a second. It's www.whitehouse.gov. That's the first or second website everyone goes to when they get an internet account, and they never visit again. It's probably the first thing that 12-year-olds try to hack as soon as they get their AOL account. There certainly isn't any worthwhile information on it that can't be obtained elsewhere.
What a waste of a posting.
-Chris