6 ms·

Parsing the impact of Anonymous

26 points by mcantelon 16y ago

mipapage 16y ago
More from the same author/author background: http://www.ted.com/talks/evgeny_morozov_is_the_internet_what_orwell_feared.html http://www.ted.com/talks/evgeny_morozov_is_the_internet_what... I knew I'd seen that name before.
- jdp23 16y ago
  Evgeny's done a lot of writing on cyberactivism, and was one of the most outspoken critics of Haystack. Even when I disagree with him (which is a lot of the time) I think his articles are generally well-reasoned and well-researched. He comes from a foreign policy background, not engineering, but usually does his homework well.
dnsworks 16y ago
Anonymous punished some bad corporate citizens for doing the wrong thing, and bullied some of them into doing the right thing. This is in direct response to the bullying Assange has gotten. Legal or not, it's sort of awesome to see bullies get bullied back.
z5h 16y ago
Perhaps if the author had titled the article "Understanding the impact of Anonymous" people would be better able to parse the title.
wccrawford 16y ago
"As long as they don't break into other people's computers, launching DDoS should not be treated as a crime by default; " Yeah, they should. Those attacks are the same as vandalism. They destroy some things that are hard to quantify, such as trust and image, as well as cost the companies money to attempt to mitigate the issue.
- andrewgodwin 16y ago
  Not only that, a DDoS can cost quite a bit in extra bandwidth costs (I've had a couple of small ones chew through a suprising amount). It's a bit more of a substantial repercussion in addition to hitting "brand", and often affects smaller companies proportionally more.
  - Retric 16y ago
    There is probably a reasonable separation between automated DDoS attacks and manual ones. If I convince 50 million people to click on CNN once at 3:17PM on a Tuesday then that's a reasonable form of protest IMO. If I rent a botnet for 24 hours and try and exploit some hole in your infrastructure then that's vandalism. From a monetary standpoint they might cause the same amount of harm, but from a social standpoint a manual attack is a much harder target.
    - TheAmazingIdiot 16y ago
      I say that the rulings and ideas here are... Backward. I've seen a few times a website owner who asked that slashdot submissions be linked to a static page because of php content. Instead, slashdot posts directly to a php link, causing cpu, memory to go through the roof along with flooding the net channel empying quota. And he was powerless to stop it, because he couldn't even ssh into the machine. We techies all know about the slashdot effect. How's it so much different, aside a tool called LOIC vs firefox and f5? Guess it does go down to intent?
      - Nick_C 16y ago
        > Guess it does go down to intent? Yes. If I put my hand on your shoulder, it could be friendly companionship or it could be assault. The physical action is the same; context is everything. One thing about engineers I'm sure we all notice is we tend to think in terms of logical analysis: true or false, black or white. Real life is full of grey.
- onedognight 16y ago
endtime 16y ago
Anyone else sick of articles implying that anyone who doesn't want to support Wikileaks is "bowing to pressure" from some unnamed "they" (probably Republicans)? Wikileaks very much seems to have an anti-US agenda and I can totally understand why an American company would want nothing to do with them.
- quanticle 16y ago
  They doesn't necessarily mean Republican. Remember, the one documented case of pressure we have in this whole saga was Joe Lieberman (a Democrat) pressuring Amazon. As to your second point, corporations aren't patriotic, no matter how much you want them to be. If a corporation drops an account, its because the costs of holding the account are outweighing the benefits. Lieberman's pressure raised the costs of hosting Wikileaks to the point that Amazon was unwilling to continue hosting them.
  - locopati 16y ago
    Minor correction - Lieberman is a former Democrat, elected as an Independent after losing the Democratic primary, who happens to caucus with the Democrats, though for the life of me, I cannot understand they put up with him, since he often sides with the Republicans.
- randallsquared 16y ago
  Stances regarding Wikileaks cross party lines. The current Democratic administration is against them, and I noticed some attempts by narrative-seeking media to pigeonhole support for Wikileaks as being the province of Tea Partiers. But lots of the US left like Wikileaks, so that doesn't work well. A slightly better division might be that the extremes of both the Left and the Right like Wikileaks to some degree, and the middle mostly doesn't. But support on the Right seems to be scattered throughout the span of extreme to moderate, possibly based on whether they think of Wikileaks primarily as attacking the Obama administration (them) or primarily as attacking the US (us).
  - hugh3 16y ago
raintrees 16y ago
"...empowering the likes of NSA/Cyber Command..." This makes me apprehensive that a possible "sell" of this power would be "would you like us to get rid of most/all spam? With our new technology, we will have the ability to trace spam messages back to the source and take appropriate legal action." On the other hand, I would imagine this will spark the digital DNA to rearrange chromosomes so that a distributed anonymous internet appears embedded in the current implementation to continue to avoid power wielders... If adult content has been a driver of past innovation, will spammers be drivers of the future? (I am guessing they already are...)
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
binaryfinery 16y ago
Corrupt officials in the US government must be overjoyed at how this is playing out. What is on the news? Is it: a) That US tax dollars paid for a US "security" company to throw a boy-rape for stoned Afghan police recruits, b) The US Government is engaging in censorship c) Wikileaks' personal army of hackers is stealing credit card information. We have the most damning release of information ever, and yet the media is successfully portraying this as a hacker issue. And we're all fucking making it happen.
- mcantelon 16y ago
  The media is very adept at avoiding the real news so if it wasn't Anon it would likely be Assange's "rape".

26 points by mcantelon 16y ago

More from the same author/author background: http://www.ted.com/talks/evgeny_morozov_is_the_internet_what_orwell_feared.html http://www.ted.com/talks/evgeny_morozov_is_the_internet_what... I knew I'd seen that name before.

jdp23 16y ago
Evgeny's done a lot of writing on cyberactivism, and was one of the most outspoken critics of Haystack. Even when I disagree with him (which is a lot of the time) I think his articles are generally well-reasoned and well-researched. He comes from a foreign policy background, not engineering, but usually does his homework well.

dnsworks 16y ago

Anonymous punished some bad corporate citizens for doing the wrong thing, and bullied some of them into doing the right thing. This is in direct response to the bullying Assange has gotten. Legal or not, it's sort of awesome to see bullies get bullied back.

z5h 16y ago

Perhaps if the author had titled the article "Understanding the impact of Anonymous" people would be better able to parse the title.

wccrawford 16y ago

"As long as they don't break into other people's computers, launching DDoS should not be treated as a crime by default; " Yeah, they should. Those attacks are the same as vandalism. They destroy some things that are hard to quantify, such as trust and image, as well as cost the companies money to attempt to mitigate the issue.

andrewgodwin 16y ago
Not only that, a DDoS can cost quite a bit in extra bandwidth costs (I've had a couple of small ones chew through a suprising amount). It's a bit more of a substantial repercussion in addition to hitting "brand", and often affects smaller companies proportionally more.
- Retric 16y ago
  There is probably a reasonable separation between automated DDoS attacks and manual ones. If I convince 50 million people to click on CNN once at 3:17PM on a Tuesday then that's a reasonable form of protest IMO. If I rent a botnet for 24 hours and try and exploit some hole in your infrastructure then that's vandalism. From a monetary standpoint they might cause the same amount of harm, but from a social standpoint a manual attack is a much harder target.
  - TheAmazingIdiot 16y ago
    I say that the rulings and ideas here are... Backward. I've seen a few times a website owner who asked that slashdot submissions be linked to a static page because of php content. Instead, slashdot posts directly to a php link, causing cpu, memory to go through the roof along with flooding the net channel empying quota. And he was powerless to stop it, because he couldn't even ssh into the machine. We techies all know about the slashdot effect. How's it so much different, aside a tool called LOIC vs firefox and f5? Guess it does go down to intent?
    - Nick_C 16y ago
      > Guess it does go down to intent? Yes. If I put my hand on your shoulder, it could be friendly companionship or it could be assault. The physical action is the same; context is everything. One thing about engineers I'm sure we all notice is we tend to think in terms of logical analysis: true or false, black or white. Real life is full of grey.
onedognight 16y ago

endtime 16y ago

Anyone else sick of articles implying that anyone who doesn't want to support Wikileaks is "bowing to pressure" from some unnamed "they" (probably Republicans)? Wikileaks very much seems to have an anti-US agenda and I can totally understand why an American company would want nothing to do with them.

quanticle 16y ago
They doesn't necessarily mean Republican. Remember, the one documented case of pressure we have in this whole saga was Joe Lieberman (a Democrat) pressuring Amazon. As to your second point, corporations aren't patriotic, no matter how much you want them to be. If a corporation drops an account, its because the costs of holding the account are outweighing the benefits. Lieberman's pressure raised the costs of hosting Wikileaks to the point that Amazon was unwilling to continue hosting them.
- locopati 16y ago
  Minor correction - Lieberman is a former Democrat, elected as an Independent after losing the Democratic primary, who happens to caucus with the Democrats, though for the life of me, I cannot understand they put up with him, since he often sides with the Republicans.
randallsquared 16y ago
Stances regarding Wikileaks cross party lines. The current Democratic administration is against them, and I noticed some attempts by narrative-seeking media to pigeonhole support for Wikileaks as being the province of Tea Partiers. But lots of the US left like Wikileaks, so that doesn't work well. A slightly better division might be that the extremes of both the Left and the Right like Wikileaks to some degree, and the middle mostly doesn't. But support on the Right seems to be scattered throughout the span of extreme to moderate, possibly based on whether they think of Wikileaks primarily as attacking the Obama administration (them) or primarily as attacking the US (us).
- hugh3 16y ago

raintrees 16y ago

"...empowering the likes of NSA/Cyber Command..." This makes me apprehensive that a possible "sell" of this power would be "would you like us to get rid of most/all spam? With our new technology, we will have the ability to trace spam messages back to the source and take appropriate legal action." On the other hand, I would imagine this will spark the digital DNA to rearrange chromosomes so that a distributed anonymous internet appears embedded in the current implementation to continue to avoid power wielders... If adult content has been a driver of past innovation, will spammers be drivers of the future? (I am guessing they already are...)

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

binaryfinery 16y ago

Corrupt officials in the US government must be overjoyed at how this is playing out. What is on the news? Is it: a) That US tax dollars paid for a US "security" company to throw a boy-rape for stoned Afghan police recruits, b) The US Government is engaging in censorship c) Wikileaks' personal army of hackers is stealing credit card information. We have the most damning release of information ever, and yet the media is successfully portraying this as a hacker issue. And we're all fucking making it happen.

mcantelon 16y ago
The media is very adept at avoiding the real news so if it wasn't Anon it would likely be Assange's "rape".