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The Anonymous hacking collective has petitioned the White House, using the US government’s open forum to ask for DDoS attacks to be registered as an official form of complaint — and requesting the convictions of previous DDoS attackers be wiped from their records.
The petition does make some sense. Anon claims that a DDoS attack is similar to the modern trend of “occupy” protests, where unshaven anti-capitalists sit inside a branch of Vodafone annoying proper customers with their banners and shouting about tax.
It says a DDoS is the same thing, only virtual, with complainants instead using their computers to occupy a web site and therefore denying users the chance to use it.
Anon doesn’t do itself any favours, though, pointing out that the DDoS attack method is little more than “repeatedly hitting the refresh button on a webpage.” Which doesn’t sound as cool. [White House via The Register]
If I where the Whitehouse I’d check very carefully that any votes for this came from real people not spambots. Actually that’s not true, If I were the Whitehouse I’d be a big white building and not concerned at all with human things.
No, occupy is not the same thing. The clue is in the name: DoS stands for ‘DENIAL of service’.
Occupy protesters do not prevent others from accessing their buildings. If they did, they would be arrested.
Shutting down a website is not cool. It prevents access to its owners and its customers and can result in considerable losses.
So can protesting; if you see a group of people protesting outside a shop, you won’t go in it, and they will lose business for the length of time the protest lasts for. The same applies to ddos attacks. They both inconvenience the owner.
There’s a crucial difference between incidental inconvenience and militant denial.
Oh, I agree with you, the motives are different. But the results are the same, and criminal law tends to scale punishment according to the results. So they should both face the same punishment, whether that be none at all (like anonymous want) or something else.
Incidentally, do you really think all protesters are so naive? There are ‘professional’ protesters who basically just go along to cause a riot. And then there are the student protests – having frequented the skirts of some myself, the majority feeling there is just to piss people off. Is that so different to DDOS attacks? Same with anti-Apple and anti-fur rioters. I really don’t think there is that much of a difference.
Yeah, you cross a line when you prevent others from going about their business. That’s when the protesters’ right to free speech comes into conflict with the general public’s right to carry on with their lives.
A DoS attack is akin to placing a barrier over the door to a shop and posting a bouncer on the door with the express purpose of turning away all customers. Anyone who does something like that could expect to be arrested. And yeah, I don’t think protesters are generally too dumb to know this. However, I’m not so sure about Anonymous…
To be honest, in their current forms, I don’t think either should be legal, since both always hurt the individual person much more than they harm the businesses.
I would hope that any militant act that causes significant disruption or expense to anyone, business or individual, should be illegal. Even big businesses are made up of ordinary people, and such acts can impact on their livelihood.
Call me a pacifist, but Ghandi had it right.
Grrr, spot the deliberate spelling mistake…
…EDIT button, please…
DDoS attacks should be equated with picketing.
Picketing is legal, but a disruptive blockade is not. DoS attacks are more like a blockade.
Picketing is a blockade.
Not necessarily. Under most circumstances, in many nations (including the UK) a picket that forms a blockade is unlawful.
https://www.gov.uk/industrial-action-strikes/going-on-strike-and-picketing
Okay, technically, you’re right. Realistically though
Realistically, large pickets often have cops hanging around them precisely to ensure that laws like this are enforced.
But that’s getting away from the original point, which is that DoS attacks and pickets don’t really equate.
If a given place/shop/location has a limited amount of physical space and the protesting movement take up all of that space, is that akin to a DoS attack?
Yes, I’d say so, because that’s blocking access to the shop by staff and members of the public.
The law states that a protest cannot block access to premises, regardless of whether that effect is intentional or not.
Yet again Anonymous have embarked on some form of action which will ultimately result in nothing changing.
I wonder if the Northern Irish will wish to get petrol bombing recognised as an official form of protest?
I propose Head of State Slaughtering should be an offical form of protest. We can call it HOSS, and go around assassinating foreign dictators.
Sounds like a great idea. I’m sure it’ll reach the required number of votes in no time on the Whitehouse website
A bunch of children with children’s understanding of how things work.
The Whitehouse doesn’t have much to worry about if they ignore them – none of them are old enough to vote, and hopefully in 5 or so years they would have matured a bit
DDos is NOT a legitimate form of protest, any way you look at it! I have no desire for my PC to form part of a botnet, in support of something that I don’t necessarily agree with. Not to mention that it is essentially a form of vandalism. Think of it as stealing someone’s car, in order to block the gates of some factory you question the ethics of. If someone has a bandwidth cap, they may well end up having to pay for the extra bandwidth that the bot requires.