Correct, but still it is trying to apply the wrong solution to a problem. Politicians want to appear as "doing something". Doing the wrong thing is (for their carreer) better than doing nothing. That way, a lot crap is being thrown over the mill.
OK, my theory is different here: Technology (disrupting or not) appears when the circumstances in the scoiety are right. The inventor is a channel, a spark (powder still required) at best. Look how often certain technologies have been "invented" in history. If you invent a fantastic technology in the wrong moment, you will be designated a lunatic or a SF author at best.
Even with the pill there was a change of social norms as well. I strongly believe, that technological innovations happen when the time is ripe for them. The steam engine for example was invented several times. It took a certain evironment for it to prosper.
I think i have an obsession for technical solutions. I can't walk by any new gadget without thinking "That could solve this problem" and ending up buying most of them. But in the end even i learned, that for social problems, you need social solutions. If you try to solve social problems with technology, you will always fail. It's also true the other way round: you cannot solve technological problems with social measures. Unless one accepts that, failures like this fence will happen again and again.
Maybe in the US. Here in Germany, the liberals and the greens are currently the better ones (which does not mean a lot). The conservative media is in the bed with the content mafia because they both share some thoughts (Internet threatens our business model).
I have to confess, i am very happy about this. This created a lot of waves and even the most conservative media outlets reported very critical about it. I think the copyright mafia used this time a shotgun for volley fire into their own feet. Though i am sorry for the kids, i am thankful for the allies this generated. The evil demasked itself...
Snail-mail could make a copy at every step of the journey
You are getting absurd. Snail mail is a transportation of a physical object instead of its content. The few uses i still make of snail mail is exactly because of this difference.
If you consider sending xeroxed love letters, your chances of procreation are severely limited and i shell win this argument biologicaly;-).
If we discusss, if Julian Assang is unfairly treated: i think we are in agreement on this point (no, he is not). The question that raised already several discussions on Slashdot: Can a wrong (DDOS on Mastercard) be justified by the treatment of him. My answer was no and that sparked this discussion thread;-).
If Gandhi would live today, do you think he would DDOS Mastercard? Even if you are angry you should be able to see, that you have thousand of legal actions available that he never had. They are bothersome, yes, and they will soak up your energy & time and you have to leave snail shell of anonymity, but they are available. Painting DDOS in civil disobedience colours is just a sluggards excuse. One thing Gandhi always did, when he was breaking the law: Saying here i am, i did this, come and arrest me (and they often did). If the DDOS'ler would do that too, we could start talking about civil disobedience. Right at the moment, they are just a lynch mob.
If you want to portest: come, do it, bear the consequences. I have quite some repect for Julian Assange (even if i do not agree in a lot of things with him). He knew what he did and what consequences it might bear. Those DDOS mob is just a disgrace to the IT.
Legal distinctions that don't exist in real life are examples of bad laws. Bad laws should be protested, repealed, and potentially broken if all else fails.
Just because you fail to see it, there still may be a distinction in real life anyway. Who decides which laws are "good" and "bad"? You?
Doing the same old thing on a computer makes it easier and more efficient. It does not, however, make "doing the same old thing on a computer" copyrightable, patentable, or illegal.
If i took you your email account and replaced it by pen&paper, you would not only complain about lost efficency. For me at least, it would make certain things completely impossible. Email and mail are completely different things. If i send you a letter, a physical object will be tranported from my to your location. If i send you an email, i use the network to copy digitally stored data so that you may read it. Computer just don't make things easier. They do things in a completely different way. The service email has been artifically made similar to regular mail for human convenience,
Good DDoS protection services exist that can filter out the spam so your server isn't trying to reply to all of it. Your argument is invalid.
In that logic i could say: "kevlar vests exist that can filter out small caliber bullets" so it was the murder victims fault if he/she doesn't have one. It is not my duty to prepare for all kind of attacks. I may choose to do so if it is in my best economic interest. But that doesn't give you the permission to try my defenses.
I agree with a lot you say, but you cannot make wrong right by doing wrong yourself.
We once hired a former top soccer referee as a guest speaker for an IT conference we organized. At first i was baffled: what could a referee tell us about IT decisions. Then he brought up this: He was a referee in an important match. There was a critical situation (penalty or not) and he decided against it. During the half time break he could see the TV input and learned he had been wrong. During the second half a similar situation appeared, but he thought it to be no penalty. He now could make up his mistake by giving the wrongly denied penalty now. In his speech explained, why this would have been wrong on several levels. In short: He would have rewarded irregular behaviour of the striker (by playing the dying swan) and put pressure on other referees to try also to make up for their mistakes. In the end, the balance would never be perfectly equalised. There would always be more compensation required.
It is completely different. If i stage a protest in front of Mastercard, i spend my tíme, expose myself to wind and weather and am acting as an identifieable person. If i get too rowdy, the cops come and take me away. With DDOS i just start a software and go visit a party. If protest in fron of a bank, the business of the bank is slightly impeded. Any judge/jury has to balance my rights of freedom of speech against the damage i do to them. With a DDOS the balance completely tilts....
The frequently-used tactic of deliberately flooding congresscritters with explicitly intentioned postcards, letters, faxes and phone calls disagrees with you. Usually form letters, so theoretically sending a single petition signed by as many people would be just as effective, right?
While this may be annoying, it doesn't effectly breaks the postal service (neither for that congressman nor the congress) down.
If a comparison was intended by your question, it is deeply flawed.
How so? Apart from the minor detail that a legal distinction has been made where no real distinction exists, I mean.
Apart that the legal distinction is not a minor detail, there are real world differences as well: an email is no postcard or letter. I can easily send 1 million emails, but i could not send 1 million letters. If i tried (here in germany), it would require me to spend 550K Euros (>700K$). So, if i did it anyway, i would also pay for the postal service (which would love that business) to sort out the mess i created. Furthermore by sending someone a million letters, i would at max flood his mailbox. He could still send emails, write letters or place phone calls. A DDOS attack can prevent that. DDOS attacks are meant to do economic damage. Juries and Judges are not so stupid, not to notice it.
I also would speak up against DDOS versus the KKK. The reason is, that the end doesn't justify the means. While you may get away with (due to public sympathy or the large number of acomplices), you are setting a bad precedent and moving onto a slippery slope. Being part of public outrage and being right may be two very different things.
CU, Martin
P.S. Concerning the videotaping of cops, i am 100% on your side. It has to be legal and if there were federal laws against it here in my country, i would fight those laws. Luckily it is currently moving the other direction: the cops in the capital must wear unique identifiers starting January 1st even if they are in full riot gear.
Good question, but probably depends on the laws in the country. If the prosecutor can proove that it was coordinated (e.g. someone called for or coordinated it) and it results in a postal service breakdown, the chances are in favor for a criminal offense. In reality this "attack" would already fail due to the costs and the manual labor by the attackers involved.
But in case of DDOS attack on a web site, the laws are quite clear on that issue. Several people already went to jail for that. And deserved to do so IMHO.
Both cases have nothing to do with each other. If a comparison was intended by your question, it is deeply flawed.
One reason i thought those actions against Mastercard etc. to be stupid was, that it established DDOS as method of protest. I am afraid, we will see more of this in the future. In my textbook, DDOS is neiter a legal nor a legitimate form of protest but a criminal act. It doesn't matter wether the target is Wikileaks, Mastercard or 4chan.
I played WoW for several years with G5 keyboard (which is very macro-friendly) and never had any problems with Blizzard..... AFAIK no one was ever banned for using a specific input device unless he/she actually used it for botting.
in school mathimatics is mostly execution of algorithms provided by your teacher, learning when and how to apply them. This changes a lot with university. At first, mathematics is a language to be learned. You have to be able to express your problems in a normed language. This is the first art. If you read papers, you can distiguish easily between those peoples who truely have mastered that language and those who don't have. Later on, you learn how to prove things. The interesting things you cannot prove by just applying an algorithm. At that point you need a lot of creativity, which the second art form required by a true Mathemagician.
Any victory of Anonymous would have been a phyrric one. It would have alienated tons of people they can now still win over. If i try very hard, i can come up with something more stupid than attacking Amazon shortly before Christmas, but it would be quite a challenge. For >50% of all people their christmas presents are more important than the fate of Julian Assange (even if he is shot "trying to escape"). Unluckily they've got a vote too. So converting them from indifference to hostile would neither help Assange nor Wikileaks.
Their playbook is not by Sun Tsu or Clausewitz, it is Macchiavelli.
Have you read those three books? I strongly recommend to do so. When Machiavelli was confronted with the thesis, that he his book would show tyrans how rise to power, he replied "Yes, but i have also shown you how to get rid of them".
Sun Tzu and Clausewitz are well worth reading beyond any military application.
That makes them a bunch of spineless collaborators.
1. Maybe they are spineless, but when spine would be rewarded by additional revenue, they would be the first to grow one. As long as the average citizen doesn't reward extra spine in their buying decisions, corporations will consider that feature optional. Corporations are like mirrors. If you don't like the picture, breaking them will not make you or your fellow citizens more beautiful.
2. Even if they were spineless bastards, that gave neither a legal nor a legitimate reason to attack them. Being spineless is not a crime.
3. It is easy to demand spine of someone else. Spine is easier demanded than delivered. If you have a mortage, a wife, two kids and obligations to your fellow worker, a lot of spine suddenly disappears.
Slashdot Mirror
Correct, but still it is trying to apply the wrong solution to a problem. Politicians want to appear as "doing something". Doing the wrong thing is (for their carreer) better than doing nothing. That way, a lot crap is being thrown over the mill.
OK, my theory is different here: Technology (disrupting or not) appears when the circumstances in the scoiety are right. The inventor is a channel, a spark (powder still required) at best. Look how often certain technologies have been "invented" in history. If you invent a fantastic technology in the wrong moment, you will be designated a lunatic or a SF author at best.
Even with the pill there was a change of social norms as well. I strongly believe, that technological innovations happen when the time is ripe for them. The steam engine for example was invented several times. It took a certain evironment for it to prosper.
I think i have an obsession for technical solutions. I can't walk by any new gadget without thinking "That could solve this problem" and ending up buying most of them. But in the end even i learned, that for social problems, you need social solutions. If you try to solve social problems with technology, you will always fail. It's also true the other way round: you cannot solve technological problems with social measures. Unless one accepts that, failures like this fence will happen again and again.
CU, Martin
Maybe in the US. Here in Germany, the liberals and the greens are currently the better ones (which does not mean a lot). The conservative media is in the bed with the content mafia because they both share some thoughts (Internet threatens our business model).
I have to confess, i am very happy about this. This created a lot of waves and even the most conservative media outlets reported very critical about it. I think the copyright mafia used this time a shotgun for volley fire into their own feet. Though i am sorry for the kids, i am thankful for the allies this generated. The evil demasked itself...
CU, Martin
I think we are still in agreement:
* Julias Assange is being treated unfairly.
* The DDOS was not unprovoked but ist still wrong.
If we continue arguing, we will probably find even more points we are in agreement with each other ;-).
Snail-mail could make a copy at every step of the journey
You are getting absurd. Snail mail is a transportation of a physical object instead of its content. The few uses i still make of snail mail is exactly because of this difference.
If you consider sending xeroxed love letters, your chances of procreation are severely limited and i shell win this argument biologicaly ;-).
CU, Martin
If we discusss, if Julian Assang is unfairly treated: i think we are in agreement on this point (no, he is not). The question that raised already several discussions on Slashdot: Can a wrong (DDOS on Mastercard) be justified by the treatment of him. My answer was no and that sparked this discussion thread ;-).
If Gandhi would live today, do you think he would DDOS Mastercard? Even if you are angry you should be able to see, that you have thousand of legal actions available that he never had. They are bothersome, yes, and they will soak up your energy & time and you have to leave snail shell of anonymity, but they are available. Painting DDOS in civil disobedience colours is just a sluggards excuse. One thing Gandhi always did, when he was breaking the law: Saying here i am, i did this, come and arrest me (and they often did). If the DDOS'ler would do that too, we could start talking about civil disobedience. Right at the moment, they are just a lynch mob.
If you want to portest: come, do it, bear the consequences. I have quite some repect for Julian Assange (even if i do not agree in a lot of things with him). He knew what he did and what consequences it might bear. Those DDOS mob is just a disgrace to the IT.
CU, Martin
Legal distinctions that don't exist in real life are examples of bad laws. Bad laws should be protested, repealed, and potentially broken if all else fails.
Just because you fail to see it, there still may be a distinction in real life anyway. Who decides which laws are "good" and "bad"? You?
Doing the same old thing on a computer makes it easier and more efficient. It does not, however, make "doing the same old thing on a computer" copyrightable, patentable, or illegal.
If i took you your email account and replaced it by pen&paper, you would not only complain about lost efficency. For me at least, it would make certain things completely impossible. Email and mail are completely different things. If i send you a letter, a physical object will be tranported from my to your location. If i send you an email, i use the network to copy digitally stored data so that you may read it. Computer just don't make things easier. They do things in a completely different way. The service email has been artifically made similar to regular mail for human convenience,
Good DDoS protection services exist that can filter out the spam so your server isn't trying to reply to all of it. Your argument is invalid.
In that logic i could say: "kevlar vests exist that can filter out small caliber bullets" so it was the murder victims fault if he/she doesn't have one. It is not my duty to prepare for all kind of attacks. I may choose to do so if it is in my best economic interest. But that doesn't give you the permission to try my defenses.
CU, Martin
I agree with a lot you say, but you cannot make wrong right by doing wrong yourself.
We once hired a former top soccer referee as a guest speaker for an IT conference we organized. At first i was baffled: what could a referee tell us about IT decisions. Then he brought up this: He was a referee in an important match. There was a critical situation (penalty or not) and he decided against it. During the half time break he could see the TV input and learned he had been wrong. During the second half a similar situation appeared, but he thought it to be no penalty. He now could make up his mistake by giving the wrongly denied penalty now. In his speech explained, why this would have been wrong on several levels. In short: He would have rewarded irregular behaviour of the striker (by playing the dying swan) and put pressure on other referees to try also to make up for their mistakes. In the end, the balance would never be perfectly equalised. There would always be more compensation required.
CU, Martin
It is completely different. If i stage a protest in front of Mastercard, i spend my tíme, expose myself to wind and weather and am acting as an identifieable person. If i get too rowdy, the cops come and take me away. With DDOS i just start a software and go visit a party. If protest in fron of a bank, the business of the bank is slightly impeded. Any judge/jury has to balance my rights of freedom of speech against the damage i do to them. With a DDOS the balance completely tilts....
The frequently-used tactic of deliberately flooding congresscritters with explicitly intentioned postcards, letters, faxes and phone calls disagrees with you. Usually form letters, so theoretically sending a single petition signed by as many people would be just as effective, right?
While this may be annoying, it doesn't effectly breaks the postal service (neither for that congressman nor the congress) down.
If a comparison was intended by your question, it is deeply flawed.
How so? Apart from the minor detail that a legal distinction has been made where no real distinction exists, I mean.
Apart that the legal distinction is not a minor detail, there are real world differences as well: an email is no postcard or letter. I can easily send 1 million emails, but i could not send 1 million letters. If i tried (here in germany), it would require me to spend 550K Euros (>700K$). So, if i did it anyway, i would also pay for the postal service (which would love that business) to sort out the mess i created. Furthermore by sending someone a million letters, i would at max flood his mailbox. He could still send emails, write letters or place phone calls. A DDOS attack can prevent that. DDOS attacks are meant to do economic damage. Juries and Judges are not so stupid, not to notice it.
CU, Martin
I also would speak up against DDOS versus the KKK. The reason is, that the end doesn't justify the means. While you may get away with (due to public sympathy or the large number of acomplices), you are setting a bad precedent and moving onto a slippery slope. Being part of public outrage and being right may be two very different things.
CU, Martin
P.S. Concerning the videotaping of cops, i am 100% on your side. It has to be legal and if there were federal laws against it here in my country, i would fight those laws. Luckily it is currently moving the other direction: the cops in the capital must wear unique identifiers starting January 1st even if they are in full riot gear.
Good question, but probably depends on the laws in the country. If the prosecutor can proove that it was coordinated (e.g. someone called for or coordinated it) and it results in a postal service breakdown, the chances are in favor for a criminal offense. In reality this "attack" would already fail due to the costs and the manual labor by the attackers involved.
But in case of DDOS attack on a web site, the laws are quite clear on that issue. Several people already went to jail for that. And deserved to do so IMHO.
Both cases have nothing to do with each other. If a comparison was intended by your question, it is deeply flawed.
CU, Martin
Leeeroooyyyyyy!
One reason i thought those actions against Mastercard etc. to be stupid was, that it established DDOS as method of protest. I am afraid, we will see more of this in the future. In my textbook, DDOS is neiter a legal nor a legitimate form of protest but a criminal act. It doesn't matter wether the target is Wikileaks, Mastercard or 4chan.
CU, Martin
I played WoW for several years with G5 keyboard (which is very macro-friendly) and never had any problems with Blizzard..... AFAIK no one was ever banned for using a specific input device unless he/she actually used it for botting.
I would love to see a Raid of 25 people using this. It should look like some kind of ballet.
CU, Martin
Hi,
in school mathimatics is mostly execution of algorithms provided by your teacher, learning when and how to apply them. This changes a lot with university. At first, mathematics is a language to be learned. You have to be able to express your problems in a normed language. This is the first art. If you read papers, you can distiguish easily between those peoples who truely have mastered that language and those who don't have. Later on, you learn how to prove things. The interesting things you cannot prove by just applying an algorithm. At that point you need a lot of creativity, which the second art form required by a true Mathemagician.
CU, Martin
Just modded the whole internet "Troll"
Any victory of Anonymous would have been a phyrric one. It would have alienated tons of people they can now still win over. If i try very hard, i can come up with something more stupid than attacking Amazon shortly before Christmas, but it would be quite a challenge. For >50% of all people their christmas presents are more important than the fate of Julian Assange (even if he is shot "trying to escape"). Unluckily they've got a vote too. So converting them from indifference to hostile would neither help Assange nor Wikileaks.
CU, Martin
Their playbook is not by Sun Tsu or Clausewitz, it is Macchiavelli.
Have you read those three books? I strongly recommend to do so. When Machiavelli was confronted with the thesis, that he his book would show tyrans how rise to power, he replied "Yes, but i have also shown you how to get rid of them".
Sun Tzu and Clausewitz are well worth reading beyond any military application.
CU, Martin
That makes them a bunch of spineless collaborators.
1. Maybe they are spineless, but when spine would be rewarded by additional revenue, they would be the first to grow one. As long as the average citizen doesn't reward extra spine in their buying decisions, corporations will consider that feature optional. Corporations are like mirrors. If you don't like the picture, breaking them will not make you or your fellow citizens more beautiful.
2. Even if they were spineless bastards, that gave neither a legal nor a legitimate reason to attack them. Being spineless is not a crime.
3. It is easy to demand spine of someone else. Spine is easier demanded than delivered. If you have a mortage, a wife, two kids and obligations to your fellow worker, a lot of spine suddenly disappears.
CU, Martin