Cyberattack That Brought Down Twitter & Facebook Only Highlighted The Guy It Hoped To Silence
from the whoops dept
Ajit Jaokar alerts us to the fact that last week's "cyberattack" seems to have given a much greater voice to a guy the attacks were designed to silence. If you haven't been paying attention, late last week, there were huge denial of service attacks on Twitter and Facebook, which knocked out both sites for a period of time. Apparently, the attacks were an attempt to silence an economics professor in the republic of Georgia, who online has gone by the name cyxymu. Jaokar noticed that cyxymu had very few followers on his Twitter account, but since the news has come out that he was the target of the attack, thousands of new followers have started paying attention to him. So whoever ran the attacks (cyxymu blames the KGB), which sought to first discredit cyxymu and then take him offline, seems to have only done the opposite. They've suddenly given him the world's attention.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: cyberattack, cyxymu, streisand effect
Companies: facebook, twitter
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Another thing one must consider is the possibility that monitoring tools might be used by ISP's to sniff out information that people attempt to censor and block the distribution of it before hand (and if it's done at the ISP level it will also apply to P2P networks, e - Mails, blogs, etc...). Of course the social ramifications of this are complicated (ie: the person might try to spread the word organically via word of mouth but that maybe difficult, but it may also anger a lot of people. Who knows how that would work). One can argue that encryption might be a possibility, but not in a world where government and such are trying to ban the use of encryption. As such sniffing software becomes more sophisticated who knows where the future might lead. Then again, software that tries to circumvent information censorship might also become more sophisticated just as well so it might turn into a game of cat and mouse. Who knows what the future holds for the Internet but lets just hope it doesn't turn into the nonsense that mainstream media has turned into.
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Fuel to the Fire
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smacks of a hoax
I just think this sounds like that kid who planted false info on Wikipedia about some dead French guy and nobody stopped to check any facts about it before writing his obituary.
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If you're paranoid enough...
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15 minutes is done, next.
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The solution to these DDOS attacks is distributed delivery of service.
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A solution could be to allow the different servers to communicate with each other, kinda like IRC (ie: Efnet) where you have a bunch of people connect to different servers and they talk to their local server and their local server distributes the information to various other servers which then distributes it to all the users on each server.
But I don't think government interventions is necessary, any time the government gets involved all they EVER do (and I can provide example after example. Intellectual property that practically lasts forever, taxi cab medallions that add artificial scarcity to the process for no good reason, a corrupt FDA that takes away our health freedoms and plays corporate favoritism not based on product safety and effectiveness, but based on politics; an FCC that looks into the stupid RIAA's case over some high school that boycotted signed artists for one month two years ago, the fact that the government pays for most telecommunication infrastructure and yet they grant monopolies to special interest groups like cable and phone companies, the government funds a substantial amount of pharmaceutical R&D yet they grant economically unregulated monopolies (patents) to pharma corporations, the list goes ON AND ON AND ON AND ON, these thugs can't be trusted) is serve private interests at public expense. They can't be trusted and hence they should be left out of the equation because they will only make things worse. I don't mind having one centralized system, like twitter, because it provides broader faster communication, and then having a bunch of backup systems that people can go to in case twitter falls. However, to the extent that such backups are necessary the free market will naturally provide for them without our untrustworthy parasitic government getting involved because all they will do is find ways to server private interests at public expenses because that's all they have EVER done.
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Don't Silence Information, Spread Disinformation
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