CNN Misrepresenting etoy vs. etoys Battle?

J Hotch writes "Check out CNN's story: eToys attacks show need for strong Web defenses. Check out this frighteningly inaccurate description of the conflict: "Online retailer eToys has taken legal steps to prevent a Swiss art group from using the domain name etoy.com." This makes it sound like etoy.com was trying to muscle in on etoys.com. They don't mention that etoy.com was registered years before etoys.com was even a twinkle in some business-major's eye. Unfortunately, they are just using the denial-of-service attacks on etoys.com as a springboard into a web security article. "

Comments

To be fair to CNN..

[Masem]

CNN's focus on this article is NOT etoy.com vs eToys.com. It's on how script kiddies can readily and easily cause a pure e-commerce vessle to sink if it's not well prepared.

Now, let the ranting begin:

1) The only time that I would ever advocate a DoS attack on a site is never. There is no reason to do so; sure, you might put it down for a while (etoys reported 98% instead of 100% reliability during the last few weeks), but if anything it could lead to worse things (see below). There are more effective ways to state your dislike for something.

2) CNN's not wrong; their article on the etoy/etoys things is truth. Just using a different set of words that seems to put etoys on the right side of the thing. Words are very powerful, but you can't blame CNN for misusing them.

3) I really don't like this idea of DoS attacks, especially in light of this article. Chain of events: All over e-commerce they read that a service can be put down because of DoS (they won't care why the DoS was initiated); Etoys says they have to use custom-built DoS prevention tricks to stop it; E-commerce security experts all up in arms on how to stop this; e-commerence management wonders how to easily stop it; e-commerce turns to US Government (using large bags of money) and asks them to stop it; US Government bans all TCPIP tools except port 80's. Ok, so the last one's going a bit far, but I don't doubt that this series of events can happen. Just as with the question of linking, overly long patent and trademarks, poor patents, and other junk, stuff like this only kills the net for anyone not involved in e-commerce, and even then, may take some lowend e-commerce sites down.

Moral of the story: PLEASE DONT BE A SCRIPT KIDDIE. :-P

Right vs. Wrong

[humphrm]

There are too many right vs. wrongs here, and nobody (except maybe /. and etoy themselves with their legal counter action) is addressing this properly.

I recieved one of RTMark's e-mails; they clearly got my e-mail address off of /. because I responded to the earlier story about this. So, since I piped in with support of etoy (my post included simply options of other toy retailers to use, and my angle was that these other options are actually cheaper than eToys)

So, let's see... RTMark takes it upon themselves to harvest my e-mail address, send me Spam, and tries to enlist the spam's recipients to engage in an illegal DOS attack against eToys -- and they're the good guys?

The news article may not have been complete, (gee, Slashdot's never done that...) but they did get it right: this is an illegal attack that does nothing except make legitimate advocates for etoy look bad.