I'm pretty sure I've read a choose-your-own-adventure Goosebumps that explored similar territory.
Right. It's a similar literary mechanic, but for grown ups.
As a kid I remember having an Indiana Jones choose your own adventure. The difference is that with Indy I had to choose whether to flee from the Nazis out the front door or climb the window to the roof. In Mass Effect you make choices like whether or not to commit genocide to suit humanities war effort, or support a close friend's choice to murder someone. It's a little different.
One person isn't going to bring down Amazon or Paypal so how can you compare it to an autodialer against someone with only one phone line?
Imagine if there was a really obnoxious person who thousands of people spontaneously disliked, all at once. And each one, without an autodialer, called just a few times a day to ask the person to stop being obnoxious. Is that/should that be illegal?
I guess part of the point I had conceptualized (but clearly didn't convey) was that all the protest analogies are imperfect. Neither picketing, sit-ins, or auto-dialing are perfectly analogous to what's happening. Though I think the auto-dialing analogy is the closest; consider all lines running into an Amazon call center being auto-dialed by a distributed community.
And to answer your question, if those thousands of people are coordinating their activity with the intent of preventing the target from using their phone line, then yes I would say that that should be illegal. It may even actually be illegal, at the very least it seems like one of those things that "ought to be". If those thousands of people just happen to start picking up the phones then I wouldn't think so. But the distinction (IMO) is that the activity is coordinated and intentional.
"Effecting social change is hard, therefore I should be exempt from expectations of responsible behavior."?
You feel oppressed by a bureaucratic government that doesn't listen to absolutely everything you say. Would you like someone to call you a Whaaa-mbulance?
But to be fair, making a decision against the wishes of a few tens of thousands of students doesn't necessarily mean that the system is broken. I don't know enough about UK domestic politics to lecture you on them, but isn't it possible that some greater good was served by raising the tuition cap? The system may well have worked just fine; but that doesn't mean that some people won't be disappointed from time to time.
We tend to want to absolve people whose causes we view as right. Civil rights protesters are seen as having broken the law for legitimate ethical purpose, but animal rights activists are seen by many as having broken the law for crazy extremists purposes.
A distinction between civil rights activists and Anonymous is that civil rights leaders would use their prosecution(persecution?) to publicize their situation. Anonymous is a bunch of cranky kids looking to have some fun that latched onto this "fight the power" mentality. I'm willing to bet that most of them carry a Visa powered debit card.
I'm long winded, but what I'm saying is that when we look back on causes that we agree with we tend to attribute their behavior as being morally justified. And in my opinion this kind of protest is an ethically and morally legitimate form of protest...for those willing to face the legal consequences of their behaviors.
I'm assuming that you (the figurative you, not actually you personally) have exhausted your options for legal and responsible conflict resolution before resorting to mob justice. Or are you the type that prefers to sit in Mom's basement firing off snarky political comments on the internet and call it activism?
Because if you haven't at least attempted to seek responsible resolution, you're little better than a kid on playground that prefers the "he-started-it" method of conflict resolution (again the figurative you, because I'm assuming you used the figurative us).
Enjoy yourself out there on Douchebag Island. You should really consider your personal values if your only response to a situation like this is to resort to anonymous mob justice. That kind of attitude is destructive.
Societies have laws to regulate how people interact with each other, and justice systems to allow resolution of disagreements. Resorting to this kind of vigilantism is childish and completely unproductive.
Do you really think vigilantism and total submission are the only two options? And do you really think this DDoS Attack on Visa is going to have any impact on how the US Government treats Wikileaks?
Nice of you to bend over and take it from the big corporations, Abcd1234.
And are you really trying to shame the GP by calling him out publicly, while posting as AC?
But the traffic is not comprised of legitimate service requests. It is comprised of requests intended only to consume resources in order to prevent the company from receiving legitimate service requests.
It's not really like picketing, where demonstrators are usually standing on on a piece public property and not actively consuming their target's resources. A better analogy would be to continually autodial their phone lines to prevent legitimate service calls from connecting, which at best is harassment.
You are absolutely correct that this is not hacking, cracking, or cyber terror. But you were also correct in labeling it as a disruption. An intentional sustained disruption intended to prevent the company's network from doing whatever it is that the company wants it to do. It's certainly not cyber-terror, but a reasonable person certainly could not label this as benign behavior.
We're not savages for gods sake. We have a justice system in place specifically for the resolution of grievances. This kind of snarky mob justice is ridiculous.
It's funny, because I just watched The Motion Picture this weekend. The first thought I had when I read this story was wondering how likely it is that the probe will find its way back to us one day.
Though it should be noted that tropical rain forests are not the only form of vegetation. The food crops we will need to support our unsustainable population and eco friendly cars will be grabbing a lot of the CO2 that the lost rainforests would have.
But the democracy practiced by the Empire was more like democratic imperialism, not the kind of fully representational democracy that we think of today..
The motivations for the notable revolutions were that democratic principles were not being applied to the colonies. They had democracy in England, but English democracy controlled India and the America's.
In reality for all the grandstanding the President of the USA is almost powerless. He can't do much without approval of congress
He's not meant to. The office of POTUS was intended to enforce decisions from Congress, who were intended to have decision making authority but no ability to enforce it. The courts exist to make sure everyone is playing nice. Separation of power and all that.
IMO the problem is that POTUS is too involved with policy and Congress is too involved with enforcement. Our direction and leadership was intended to come from our locally elected representatives, with POTUS serving as neutral enforcement of Congress' decisions. Too much decision making is being done by POTUS, so Congress is responding by trying to pick up some enforcement capabilities.
Unless the phone itself was provided by the employer to ensure that the employee had both a business phone so they can be reached, and a personal plan they they themselves pay for. I imagine this is possible because I feel like employers will be hesitant to allow a business phone to be virtualized and run on non vetted hardware.
In that scenario I could see employers desiring the ability to nuke both the work VM and personal OS at will.
They had Gov. Schwarzenegger declare a state of emergency. What other "due process" should there be...?
I'm thinking... Dolph Lundgren?
Both in his capacities as Scharzeneggar's villainous foil, and as a man with a Masters in Chemical Engineering. I'm just saying that I think he ought to be involved with this.
Glad to hear someone taking that viewpoint. Most people become very ethnocentric about their specialization, but fail to understand their their specialty is simply a piece of the business plan.
While to a technical person marketing speak seems like garbage, I'm willing to bet that a marketing guy hears technical jargon in the same light. Different fields, different specialties, different languages. To some extent (this doesn't happen everywhere but it is common) people in those capacities seem to try to protect the importance of their competencies by hiding it behind jargon.
I'm educated as a psychologist, but I do a lot of work with engineers (mechanical, electrical, and computer). I see this all the time. My "people" people colleagues protect our turf as people experts by attaching ridiculously complex explanations to simple behavior, and more technical colleagues will do the same with their own turf. We all do this to play up our relative importance to our project managers, so that future money will be spent on pursuing solutions based around our expertise, not technical solutions. My situation is borderline dysfunctional, but is really common.
Most of us fail to get that the organization succeeds when each specialty works with each other to fulfill their role. Marketing guys market. Programmers build applications. Janitors keep the space clean so people can work. Each specialty is significant in its own way.
The modded XBox will be used almost exclusively to run stolen software.
Exclusively? WTF! Seriously, what makes you think that?
Logical thinking and personal experience.
Sure, there are possible non-illegal applications for this, and many of us that do mod our consoles draw some inherent enjoyment from the hobby. But the principle motivation for someone paying someone else to mod their Xbox is almost certainly in part to play pirated media (almost certainly meaning only that actually polling every individual for their motivations is impossible).
Actually, that's exactly how I would try to find out who the owner of the device was. I would expect to find myself an office document or other files that would let me get a name.
Which shows how ridiculous it is - I don't even have to fly to the US to hijack a plane and fly it into a US building. A flight from Calgary to Toronto, a Canadian domestic flight, can still make its way into the states and hit a building. So in effect doing it JUST for US flights is no different.
Not that I support the specific security measures but...
I bet that if our TSA had the authority to reach up there and force it's security protocols on you they would. Just because we aren't able to reach across the borders and impose our policies doesn't mean that we don't want to.
From the TSA perspective, the weakness you describe would seem to indicate we need stronger security at the borders. With armed flights in the air at all times ready to shoot down any rogue Canadian aircraft that dares to impinge on our airspace.
Then you don't even need a license. You can do whatever you want on your private property (with permission from the owner). The argument is that once you go onto Government controlled public property, like state roads, then you give up some of your rights for the sake of all the other people on that public property.
The spike removing and train derailing is awesome. But I have a hard time seeing how such a small volume of gasoline would cause significant damage to the train. I would think the majority of the inconvenience is the train itself falling off the tracks. Adding a cascading series of small gasoline explosions, while being unspeakably awesome, probably has limited damage potential.
Though like you point out it sounds like he definitely had his shit together.
I think you might be surprised at how little authority HR people actually carry in structural decisions within an organization. An HR team would probably have input into how the organization is restructured, but were likely not the ones to pull the trigger to make it happen.
A likely possibility (I don't know the details of the GP's situation) could be that "reorganization" had been on of those topics that is frequently talked about but implementation had been put off. I've seen this in some previous organizations; upper management would frequently be discussing reorganization as a future goal but put it off because it is inconvenient in the short term. The shift to actually taking it seriously may have surprised some managers, who were probably aware of the discussion but still needed to keep their staff at full strength.
Again, I don't know the GP's exact situation. But from experience I am painfully aware that many Managers feel a need to be seen as action oriented "doers" that make quick decisions to fix problems. Unfortunately, these types commonly fail to grasp the long term effects of their action.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure I've read a choose-your-own-adventure Goosebumps that explored similar territory.
Right. It's a similar literary mechanic, but for grown ups.
As a kid I remember having an Indiana Jones choose your own adventure. The difference is that with Indy I had to choose whether to flee from the Nazis out the front door or climb the window to the roof. In Mass Effect you make choices like whether or not to commit genocide to suit humanities war effort, or support a close friend's choice to murder someone. It's a little different.
One person isn't going to bring down Amazon or Paypal so how can you compare it to an autodialer against someone with only one phone line?
Imagine if there was a really obnoxious person who thousands of people spontaneously disliked, all at once. And each one, without an autodialer, called just a few times a day to ask the person to stop being obnoxious. Is that/should that be illegal?
I guess part of the point I had conceptualized (but clearly didn't convey) was that all the protest analogies are imperfect. Neither picketing, sit-ins, or auto-dialing are perfectly analogous to what's happening. Though I think the auto-dialing analogy is the closest; consider all lines running into an Amazon call center being auto-dialed by a distributed community.
And to answer your question, if those thousands of people are coordinating their activity with the intent of preventing the target from using their phone line, then yes I would say that that should be illegal. It may even actually be illegal, at the very least it seems like one of those things that "ought to be". If those thousands of people just happen to start picking up the phones then I wouldn't think so. But the distinction (IMO) is that the activity is coordinated and intentional.
What's your point?
What's yours?
"Effecting social change is hard, therefore I should be exempt from expectations of responsible behavior."?
You feel oppressed by a bureaucratic government that doesn't listen to absolutely everything you say. Would you like someone to call you a Whaaa-mbulance?
But to be fair, making a decision against the wishes of a few tens of thousands of students doesn't necessarily mean that the system is broken. I don't know enough about UK domestic politics to lecture you on them, but isn't it possible that some greater good was served by raising the tuition cap? The system may well have worked just fine; but that doesn't mean that some people won't be disappointed from time to time.
We tend to want to absolve people whose causes we view as right. Civil rights protesters are seen as having broken the law for legitimate ethical purpose, but animal rights activists are seen by many as having broken the law for crazy extremists purposes.
A distinction between civil rights activists and Anonymous is that civil rights leaders would use their prosecution(persecution?) to publicize their situation. Anonymous is a bunch of cranky kids looking to have some fun that latched onto this "fight the power" mentality. I'm willing to bet that most of them carry a Visa powered debit card.
I'm long winded, but what I'm saying is that when we look back on causes that we agree with we tend to attribute their behavior as being morally justified. And in my opinion this kind of protest is an ethically and morally legitimate form of protest ...for those willing to face the legal consequences of their behaviors.
So you've tried this, yes?
I'm assuming that you (the figurative you, not actually you personally) have exhausted your options for legal and responsible conflict resolution before resorting to mob justice. Or are you the type that prefers to sit in Mom's basement firing off snarky political comments on the internet and call it activism?
Because if you haven't at least attempted to seek responsible resolution, you're little better than a kid on playground that prefers the "he-started-it" method of conflict resolution (again the figurative you, because I'm assuming you used the figurative us).
Enjoy yourself out there on Douchebag Island. You should really consider your personal values if your only response to a situation like this is to resort to anonymous mob justice. That kind of attitude is destructive.
Societies have laws to regulate how people interact with each other, and justice systems to allow resolution of disagreements. Resorting to this kind of vigilantism is childish and completely unproductive.
Do you really think vigilantism and total submission are the only two options? And do you really think this DDoS Attack on Visa is going to have any impact on how the US Government treats Wikileaks?
Nice of you to bend over and take it from the big corporations, Abcd1234.
And are you really trying to shame the GP by calling him out publicly, while posting as AC?
But the traffic is not comprised of legitimate service requests. It is comprised of requests intended only to consume resources in order to prevent the company from receiving legitimate service requests.
It's not really like picketing, where demonstrators are usually standing on on a piece public property and not actively consuming their target's resources. A better analogy would be to continually autodial their phone lines to prevent legitimate service calls from connecting, which at best is harassment.
You are absolutely correct that this is not hacking, cracking, or cyber terror. But you were also correct in labeling it as a disruption. An intentional sustained disruption intended to prevent the company's network from doing whatever it is that the company wants it to do. It's certainly not cyber-terror, but a reasonable person certainly could not label this as benign behavior.
We're not savages for gods sake. We have a justice system in place specifically for the resolution of grievances. This kind of snarky mob justice is ridiculous.
It's funny, because I just watched The Motion Picture this weekend. The first thought I had when I read this story was wondering how likely it is that the probe will find its way back to us one day.
Your point up top was right on though. Fallout 3 felt like it should have been an MMO.
Though it should be noted that tropical rain forests are not the only form of vegetation. The food crops we will need to support our unsustainable population and eco friendly cars will be grabbing a lot of the CO2 that the lost rainforests would have.
Our privacy policy:
Is that for real? As a technologically educated user of the internet, I think I would certainly appreciate a privacy policy worded exactly like that.
I might not agree with the policy, but it offers no ambiguity about the level of privacy protection your website offers.
But the democracy practiced by the Empire was more like democratic imperialism, not the kind of fully representational democracy that we think of today..
The motivations for the notable revolutions were that democratic principles were not being applied to the colonies. They had democracy in England, but English democracy controlled India and the America's.
In reality for all the grandstanding the President of the USA is almost powerless. He can't do much without approval of congress
He's not meant to. The office of POTUS was intended to enforce decisions from Congress, who were intended to have decision making authority but no ability to enforce it. The courts exist to make sure everyone is playing nice. Separation of power and all that.
IMO the problem is that POTUS is too involved with policy and Congress is too involved with enforcement. Our direction and leadership was intended to come from our locally elected representatives, with POTUS serving as neutral enforcement of Congress' decisions. Too much decision making is being done by POTUS, so Congress is responding by trying to pick up some enforcement capabilities.
Unless the phone itself was provided by the employer to ensure that the employee had both a business phone so they can be reached, and a personal plan they they themselves pay for. I imagine this is possible because I feel like employers will be hesitant to allow a business phone to be virtualized and run on non vetted hardware.
In that scenario I could see employers desiring the ability to nuke both the work VM and personal OS at will.
They had Gov. Schwarzenegger declare a state of emergency. What other "due process" should there be...?
I'm thinking... Dolph Lundgren?
Both in his capacities as Scharzeneggar's villainous foil, and as a man with a Masters in Chemical Engineering. I'm just saying that I think he ought to be involved with this.
Glad to hear someone taking that viewpoint. Most people become very ethnocentric about their specialization, but fail to understand their their specialty is simply a piece of the business plan.
While to a technical person marketing speak seems like garbage, I'm willing to bet that a marketing guy hears technical jargon in the same light. Different fields, different specialties, different languages. To some extent (this doesn't happen everywhere but it is common) people in those capacities seem to try to protect the importance of their competencies by hiding it behind jargon.
I'm educated as a psychologist, but I do a lot of work with engineers (mechanical, electrical, and computer). I see this all the time. My "people" people colleagues protect our turf as people experts by attaching ridiculously complex explanations to simple behavior, and more technical colleagues will do the same with their own turf. We all do this to play up our relative importance to our project managers, so that future money will be spent on pursuing solutions based around our expertise, not technical solutions. My situation is borderline dysfunctional, but is really common.
Most of us fail to get that the organization succeeds when each specialty works with each other to fulfill their role. Marketing guys market. Programmers build applications. Janitors keep the space clean so people can work. Each specialty is significant in its own way.
Synergy. It's real.
Exclusively? WTF! Seriously, what makes you think that?
Logical thinking and personal experience.
Sure, there are possible non-illegal applications for this, and many of us that do mod our consoles draw some inherent enjoyment from the hobby. But the principle motivation for someone paying someone else to mod their Xbox is almost certainly in part to play pirated media (almost certainly meaning only that actually polling every individual for their motivations is impossible).
Actually, that's exactly how I would try to find out who the owner of the device was. I would expect to find myself an office document or other files that would let me get a name.
Right...
If only we could engineer toilet chairs that were capable of magically whisking poo away. Then we'd be onto something.
Amen.
We've already got grenades that will take down a wall. Imagine the terror of having an armored soldier tearing down that wall with his bare hands.
Like the Kool-Aid man. But with less happy.
Which shows how ridiculous it is - I don't even have to fly to the US to hijack a plane and fly it into a US building. A flight from Calgary to Toronto, a Canadian domestic flight, can still make its way into the states and hit a building. So in effect doing it JUST for US flights is no different.
Not that I support the specific security measures but...
I bet that if our TSA had the authority to reach up there and force it's security protocols on you they would. Just because we aren't able to reach across the borders and impose our policies doesn't mean that we don't want to.
From the TSA perspective, the weakness you describe would seem to indicate we need stronger security at the borders. With armed flights in the air at all times ready to shoot down any rogue Canadian aircraft that dares to impinge on our airspace.
Then you don't even need a license. You can do whatever you want on your private property (with permission from the owner). The argument is that once you go onto Government controlled public property, like state roads, then you give up some of your rights for the sake of all the other people on that public property.
The spike removing and train derailing is awesome. But I have a hard time seeing how such a small volume of gasoline would cause significant damage to the train. I would think the majority of the inconvenience is the train itself falling off the tracks. Adding a cascading series of small gasoline explosions, while being unspeakably awesome, probably has limited damage potential.
Though like you point out it sounds like he definitely had his shit together.
I think you might be surprised at how little authority HR people actually carry in structural decisions within an organization. An HR team would probably have input into how the organization is restructured, but were likely not the ones to pull the trigger to make it happen.
A likely possibility (I don't know the details of the GP's situation) could be that "reorganization" had been on of those topics that is frequently talked about but implementation had been put off. I've seen this in some previous organizations; upper management would frequently be discussing reorganization as a future goal but put it off because it is inconvenient in the short term. The shift to actually taking it seriously may have surprised some managers, who were probably aware of the discussion but still needed to keep their staff at full strength.
Again, I don't know the GP's exact situation. But from experience I am painfully aware that many Managers feel a need to be seen as action oriented "doers" that make quick decisions to fix problems. Unfortunately, these types commonly fail to grasp the long term effects of their action.