[hackerspaces] revspace and randomdata in the news re wikileaks ddos story

[Yves Quemener]

Hi,
You mention DDoS in the present case but from what I understood, I 
thought that these attacks were carried more by a big number of people 
voluntarily giving their bandwidth through applications like L.O.I.C 
rather than through an illegal botnet. Wasn't that the case ?

WARNING : possibly trollish material ahead. But it has been long since 
the last one on this list, hasn't it ?

If so, I have a very hard time calling the "Avenge Assange" operation 
unethical. I know that DoS are usually consider like a lowly technical 
act, like some act of random and stupid vandalism.

However, consider a physical world protest : it blocks streets, it 
causes problems, sometimes injuries, it is not a democratic process. 
However, if tomorrow there was a protest blocking the streets of your 
city to support Assange would you consider it unethical ?

Consider also what mastercard, paypal and amazon did to Wikileaks : it 
is a plain "denial of service" in its first meaning. They denied their 
services in the hope of censuring wikileaks out of the net. I understand 
that responding with DoS attacks is not the ideal way of making 
ourselves heard, but I unfortunately see no better one, especially when 
you see the media coverage that was given to these. And in that specific 
case, I find it very hard to call them unfair.

Technically not-impressive ? Indeed. Not hackerish ? Arguably not 
(though the fact that it might be legal to do that the way they do in 
some countries is worth some cred). Unethical ? I disagree completely.

Iv

> Hi All,
>
> Just thought i'd share this with you people:
>
> http://bit.ly/dlufWO
>
> it's a google translation of a dutch article on ict news website
> 'webwereld' ('webworld').
>
> It turned out the arrested young man who was involved with the
> ddos campaign against mastercard and paypal was someone we have
> seen in our space a few times, and who hung out on our irc channel.
>
> We see this as an opportunity to bring a positive story about hackers,
> and plan on organising a workshop/discussion around 'ethical hacking'.
> We will invite press there. We expect to announce all this on
> monday.
>
> Gr,
>
> Koen
>
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