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Re: Paypal.com appears to be unavailable

#51

Post by nikster »

geedee77 wrote: post #14

To be perfectly honest, the actions of the 'anonymous' are pretty disgusting and it's bullying. A company provides a useful service to the majority of the on-line world and, just because they do something to protect themselves and their identity (there's a lot of people who dislike wikileaks) then this 'collective' decide to disrupt the whole company. Bullying was pathetic in high school and is so much worse in the '…

You know, I am really glad that you're not at all concerned about the invisible hand which seems to synchronize actions across governments, Visa, MC, PayPal, Amazon, and other major businesses. All in the name of shutting down free speech.

Wikileaks has not been charged with any crime anywhere in the world, let alone been found guilty.

So why is it the US government is after them like the villain in a bad James Bond movie?

This isn't about wikileaks or what they have published - it's not about the content of cablegate, which is 250k documents which would have been made public in 5 - 10 years, none of them "top secret", all of them freely available to 3M+ army and government personnel.

This is about a free press, and in turn, it's about democracy. It's about who rules this world. Is it us, the people. Or is it big business which has bought our government with good money?

Let's be very clear about this - leaking classified information is a crime. Publishing leaked classified information, however, is protected by the 3rd Amendment. The US government therefore can't charge Wikileaks with a crime. So the US government has decided to go rogue and fight outside the legal framework - without laws, courts, or trials. THAT is the problem. Nothing else.

Re: Paypal.com appears to be unavailable

#52

Post by DanielBMarkham »

aerique wrote: post #50
pokinoi wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"MasterCard, Visa and PayPal. As if money and shareholder interests are all that matters." There are millions of jobs and people who depend on these companies everyday. It's not just about money and shareholder interests.

I don't understand your point. If they hadn't disabled Wikileaks' accounts these jobs and people would have suffered how exactly?

If they hadn't disabled Wikileaks accounts there would have just been another topic just as controversial that would have gotten a bug up hacker's asses. This isn't a story about Wikileaks. Wikileaks is just the handy example. This is a story about how small numbers of people can have a temper tantrum and produce a global impact.

You can't reason backwards and say "well if they just hadn't done X everything would be fine" The parent's point is if they start reasoning like that, they'll just toss out anybody vaguely smelling suspicious (which I also think is the logical result, along with increased black lists of IP addresses)

Re: Paypal.com appears to be unavailable

#53

Post by zefhous »

nikster wrote: post #49
zefhous wrote: post #27

And now thanks to this story Hacker News is participating in the DDOS because we all want to see for ourselves if PayPal is responsive...

A few thousand hits doesn't make any difference. It takes millions and billions to rattle PayPal.

Yeah, I'm not too serious about HN being involved. I just always think it's funny when there's a story on a popular website about some website being over capacity because everyone starts visiting and checking if it's up yet.

Re: Paypal.com appears to be unavailable

#54

Post by nikster »

herrherr wrote: post #15

What I like most, is that all people click on the link although it says "It's unavailable". Wondering if this has an additional effect on the availability.

Nah, no way. PayPal wouldn't go down from a few 10k additional hits. PayPal is huge, and needs 100% uptime, and in addition to that has undoubtedly prepared for a major DDOS attack.

They have unlimited resources, they have expertise, and they've seen it coming. If Anonymous can take PayPal down, then they can take anyone down.

Re: Paypal.com appears to be unavailable

#57

Post by [deleted] »

CamperBob wrote: post #10
ThePinion wrote: post #4

Shutting down the Visa and Mastercard probably didn't change too much, but this for sure will. Think of how much eBay is dependent on PayPal for purchases. This should be an interesting outcome! Even if people don't feel it's morally right, I'm still very impressed by the current "cyber wars" going on. Either way, I don't lose anything. I guess I'm just one of those people that likes to watch the world burn...

There isn't going to be any burning. What's going to happen is that banks and CC companies will proactively scrub their client lists for anything that looks even vaguely controversial, and hose it before it blows up in their faces. After this, the banks will be afraid of Anonymous, and they will do whatever it takes to stay off their radar... including turning down a lot of legitimate business. "Politically unconvent…

[deleted]

Re: Paypal.com appears to be unavailable

#58

Post by ra »

Silhouette wrote: post #19

I suspect we are going to see two major changes over the next few weeks as a direct result of the "cyber-attacks" going on recently. 1. Financial services will re-evaluate the risks of this kind of attack vs. the cost of assigning more resources to guard against it. 2. Governments will finally start taking IT security seriously. The latter is the more interesting, because while banks are generally reasonably clued up…

I won't hold my breath, though; this could all end in tears, with a mess of ill-informed and poorly-implemented measures that cause all kinds of additional dangers to innocent people without actually fixing the real problem.

If I were a betting man, I'd say we'll see many years of ill-informed and badly implemented draconian policy. I'd go further to say that it won't improve significantly until at least a couple more generations have walked the halls of power and true digital natives finally cast their votes in parliament.

Re: Paypal.com appears to be unavailable

#60

Post by mapleoin »

paraschopra wrote: post #17
il wrote: post #7

https://www.paypal.com/ still works, all they're doing is hammering the front page, any transactions over SSL should still work fine.

I briefly logged onto their IRC channel. It is a total chaos but still they all agree to one target. They have also been hammering www.paypal.com port 443 so I expect this to do down soon too.

What IRC channel are you talking about?
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