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

[Matt Joyce]

Voluntary participation in a ddos is illegal.

Additionally, as pointed out elsewhere, the ddoses imposed by anonymous
served the specific purpose of censorship.

That's pretty wrong.

Also, what gives anyone the right to commit themselves to a pursuit that
harms others?  A personal question no doubt, but one worth mulling over from
time to time.

Gmc wrote an interesting response to the recent arrest of a dutch teenager
in association with anonymous ddosing.  This is an opportunity for
hackerspaces to reach out to folks and engage them is discussions on what
ethical hacking is or isn't.  As well as an opportunity to channel peoples
frustrations into the constructive rather than destructive.

-Matt
On Dec 10, 2010 11:18 AM, "Yves Quemener" <quemener.yves at free.fr> wrote:
> 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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