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And let's be real. DDoS attacks are acts of digital terrorism. They're attacking infrastructure due to political motives. These people who want to revoke DDoS
by weberer 4y ago
And let's be real. DDoS attacks are acts of digital terrorism. They're attacking infrastructure due to political motives.
These people who want to revoke DDoS protection for groups they don't like are essentially promoting terrorism. Why else would they fight so hard to remove DDoS protection, if not because they simply want those attacks to succeed?
- cowtools 4y agoDDoS is a product of an inherent weakness of the internet infrastructure, namely BGP. Cloudflare "solves" this by acting as a middleman, and charging for their service. I don't know if I would describe a DDoS attack as "digital terrorism", but it is annoying and hard to stop on an individual level because of the design of the internet.
- greyface- 4y ago> namely BGP DDoS attacks would still occur if we used a routing protocol other than BGP. It's not created by BGP, it's created by the fact that the Internet is end-to-end oversubscribed.
- cowtools 4y agoThe weakness in the internet that allows for DDoS is that you can't tell your peers to filter incoming traffic on your behalf, so you need to discriminate on the edge. The attacker still gets to eat up your bandwidth and CPU time.
- greyface- 4y agoBGP absolutely does allow you to tell your peers to filter traffic before passing it to you. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7999.html https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7999.html
- cowtools 4y agoThis is just IP-based filtering, which is useless as the attacker can purchase more IP space. What you need is something like a whitelist-by-public-key or hashcash or something.
- ancarda 4y agoIsn't the issue more with how we implemented IP than BGP? AFAIK, DDoS attacks would be far less effective if every ISP implemented BCP 38.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- fomine3 4y agoIt's a problem that stop on an corporate level is also hard. Ultimately CDN is the only mitigation.
- sealeck 4y ago> They're attacking infrastructure due to political motives. They're attacking KiwiFarms for their agenda of trying to drive people to commit suicide.
- patmcc 4y agoTrue. Let's say KiwiFarms was entirely hosted/located in a shed in the middle of nowhere. Someone walks up to it and sets it on fire. Should the local fire department put it out? Assume it's not going to spread to other buildings/etc.
- pseudalopex 4y agoIs Cloudflare a government service? Do local fire departments remove copyright infringers' sheds?
- tomrod 4y agoIt's a platform of services like a government service is typically provisioned. While not a democratically elected government, they use governance all the same.
- pseudalopex 4y ago> It's a platform of services like a government service is typically provisioned. It's a monopoly funded by taxes obligated to serve everyone? > While not a democratically elected government, they use governance all the same. This is meaningless.
- tomrod 4y agoI can see you're not interested in discussion at this time. No worries, we all have those days. I did not say it was a government service, I said a platform functions a lot like a government service, especially when multihoming is limited due to switching costs.
- chc 4y agoThe group they're trying to target here is a terrorist group. Not even in a metaphorical sense. It's people who try to harass random transgender people to the point of suicide or murder.
- 3sGPqEu59EGDFUn 4y agoIf they are a terrorist group (or otherwise doing something "wrong"), then the appropriate means to deal with that is courts and law enforcement, not a CDN.
- chc 4y agoI agree, I wish we had a law enforcement apparatus that cared about protecting transgender people. But we don't have a clear path to that at the moment, and in the meantime we want to avoid more people being killed. Thus you have people trying to argue for more informal procedures that revolve around social pressure, telling companies basically "This is obviously way beyond the pale, you should not associate yourself with this." It's not a good state for things to be in, but pretending things are better than they are is an even worse solution.
- throwrqX 4y agoWhat evidence is there for the law enforcement apparatus not protecting transgender people in this particular case? Have their been similar cases for cisgender people where the law enforcement apparatus has cared more? I am not sure saying we need mob action to stop other mob action is a good long term solution.
- FrecklySunbeam 4y agoLaw enforcement is the tool being used to do the violence ffs, they’re not protecting anyone
- inquirerGeneral 4y ago
- blibble 4y ago> And let's be real. DDoS attacks are acts of digital terrorism. They're attacking infrastructure due to political motives. in my experience most of the time it's due to: - boredom ("gotta nuke something") - revenge for being banned/fragged/... - extortion ("ban this person I don't like, or else")
- Ticklee 4y agoAnother big reason is to inhibit the competition, this is often seen in video game servers DDoS attacking each other in order to get people to switch
- malfist 4y agoWow. So de-platforming Nazis is terrorism now?
- naasking 4y agoIf you deplatform a Nazi by murdering them, is it still murder?
- malfist 4y agoAre you implying that if cloudflare kicked a nazi off their services, that would murder them?
- naasking 4y agoNo. Clearly you're having trouble understanding basic logic so I'll spell it out for you: 1. Terrorism is not a judgment of the target but of the action. 2. The OP classified DDoS as terrorism. 3. DDoSing Nazis is thus terrorism. By parity of reasoning, I pointed out that murdering a Nazi is still murder, regardless of the fact that the target was a Nazi. The nature of the target is immaterial to the classification of the action taken against them.
- malfist 4y ago> 2. The OP classified DDoS as terrorism. This is begging the question. DDoS is not terrorism. Terrorism is "the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims." Inconveniencing a people, by taking down a website is not violence or intimidation. Without that tenant, everything you've argued on this thread is a moot point. Keep in mind who you're defending here. The site in question doxxes trans people so they can be harassed and sent death threats. That IS terrorism.
- naasking 4y ago> Inconveniencing a people, by taking down a website is not violence or intimidation. The intent of the DDoS in question is very clearly a form of intimidation. DDoS in general does cause real economic harm and not merely inconvenience. > Keep in mind who you're defending here. That's irrelevant. Murdering Nazis is still wrong and illegal. > The site in question doxxes trans people so they can be harassed and sent death threats. That IS terrorism. If it were they would have been charged. You're imputing intent and actions without sufficient evidence, because if that evidence existed we wouldn't even be having this conversation. Extra-judicial actions of this sort, no matter how plausibly justified, are not how society works. We have laws and a justice system because mob "justice" is wrong.
- xdennis 4y ago> And let's be real. DDoS attacks are acts of digital terrorism. No, it's not. Not everything that's bad is terrorism. Terrorism is specifically about using violence. Don't water down terms.
- Ticklee 4y agoSpeech can be violence. This can for instance be seen on the very website we are discussing.
- naasking 4y ago> Speech can be violence No. Don't blur this line or you not only lose credibility, you descend into absurdity.
- weberer 4y agoTerrorism includes attacks on infrastructure, not just bodily harm. Firebombing an empty building still counts. In this case, it would fall specifically within cyber terrorism. >the premeditated use of disruptive activities, or the threat thereof, against computers and/or networks, with the intention to cause harm or further social, ideological, religious, political or similar objectives. Or to intimidate any person in furtherance of such objectives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberterrorism#Defining_cyberterrorism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberterrorism#Defining_cybert...
- _ktx2 4y agoI would call it vigilantism which is a type of definitional terrorism. People in the US don't like that word, but there's a good many things that are terrorism that we don't call such. At the end of the day, violence with political aims is terrorism.
- Dylan16807 4y ago> I would call it vigilantism which is a type of definitional terrorism. Only if it's sufficiently political. Lots of DDoS is not. And that bar gets higher for an attack that's minimally violent.
- kodah 4y agoThere is no DDoS that's minimally violent. You are right though, not all DDoS attacks are politically motivated.
- Dylan16807 4y agoWhatever, can we say it's a 3/10 or less on the violence scale instead of having an argument about what "minimal" means?
- kodah 4y agoFor certain things I will measure/compare harmfulness relative to potential outcomes because sometimes doing enforcement is suboptimal. In this case, however, we're talking about someone co-opting the governments monopoly on violence, which is more of an issue of principle. Once you let people co-opt that, it's a fairly run-away train. That's a long way of saying, for me this situation is very binary. There's no degrees of vigilantism.
- anigbrowl 4y agoYou seem to be treating all political conflict as terrorism. Couldn't you say the same about people who organize on Kiwifarms and flood social media with specious allegations of bad character or nefarious actions? For that matter, the site has been heavily associated with doxxing and swatting.
- weberer 4y agoNo, as I've posted below. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberterrorism#Defining_cyberterrorism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberterrorism#Defining_cybert...
- anigbrowl 4y agoThe Technolytics Institute defines cyberterrorism as The premeditated use of disruptive activities, or the threat thereof, against computers and/or networks, with the intention to cause harm or further social, ideological, religious, political or similar objectives. Or to intimidate any person in furtherance of such objectives. The National Conference of State Legislatures, an organization of legislators created to help policymakers in the United States with issues such as economy and homeland security defines cyberterrorism as: The use of information technology by terrorist groups and individuals to further their agenda. This can include use of information technology to organize and execute attacks against networks, computer systems and telecommunications infrastructures, or for exchanging information or making threats electronically. -- Just taking the first two, they could easily be extended to Kiwifarms, where information on individuals is compiled and shared in public fashion and discourse revolves around how such people deserve to be harrassed. I haven't been following the Keffals episode in particular but Kiwifarms already had a reputation for facilitating and fostering personal harassment.
- philistine 4y agoHistory has shown that reprehensible acts can be done for the greater good. Getting Kiwi Farms off the Internet at all cost might be good, digital terrorism be damned.
- LionTamer 4y agoIsn’t it a bit disingenuous to equivocate terrorism, which actively targets/kills innocent civilians, with DDOS attacks against services which are responsible for moral atrocities? Could it be compared to vigilante justice? Perhaps. But comparing it to terrorism is unfair, to put it mildly.