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Re: Paypal.com appears to be unavailable

#71

Post by aj700 »

I'm morally indifferent, even in favour of the principle of wikileaks. I'm not in favour of a leaker of US information motivated only by wanting reforms that are pipe dreams. Freedom of speech can never extend to state secrets. In Europe, we'd never be so attached to the idea that we'd take it that far.

I think we may have sacrificed a lot - eg. the ability of the net to process pre-Christmas payments, for the "gain" of providing the ability of some dick at DoD to tell us what Hillary's people think of various national dictators, or that Iraq was not 100% superbly executed. Yeah, big deal.

I don't believe Assange's arrest is a conspiracy. 4chan launching all this shit may just force the net to change in some very bad ways.

Re: Paypal.com appears to be unavailable

#72

Post by rwmj »

ra wrote: post #58
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 mor…

... and true digital natives finally cast their votes for parliament too.

A lot of issues are caused because the young don't get out and vote. They* are already under-represented because the old simply outnumber them. The fact that they don't vote as well makes it especially hard.

Rich.

* = not counting myself amongst the "young" any more ...

Re: Paypal.com appears to be unavailable

#73

Post by pbhjpbhj »

pigbucket wrote: post #31

If you dominate a market, a serious ethical duty devolves upon you to do right by your customers, but Paypal, Visa, and MC, on which donation-supported non-profit orgs like Wikileaks almost entirely depend, have utterly failed to fulfill that duty; in fact they didn't even try. Their actions, arbitrary or spineless, have almost completely choked off funding for Wikileaks. I never imagined ending up saying this, but I…

>If you dominate a market, a serious ethical duty devolves upon you to do right by your customers, but Paypal, Visa, and MC, on which donation-supported non-profit orgs like Wikileaks almost entirely depend, have utterly failed to fulfill that duty; in fact they didn't even try.

The majority of Paypal Visa and Mastercard customers rely to some extent on a stable international environment. Suggesting that these companies need to change their moral stance to accommodate anarchists is silly. Wikileaks actions suggest they want to take down the establishment that in a large part enables such companies to operate.

Indeed the fact that these companies have now been attacked by the associates of those they chose not to support means that they made the right decision. Why would they want to bolster groups that will turn and attack them?

If Paypal, for example, hadn't accepted Wikileaks as a customer in the first place then they wouldn't be having to deal with the current situation and could serve the majority of their customers better.

Taking a capitalist view basically Wikileaks supports believe that the rest of us should be screwed over so they can make their point. It's not civilised it's brutish anarchism.

Re: Paypal.com appears to be unavailable

#74

Post by Nrsolis »

jrockway wrote: post #67
shin_lao wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Governments take IT security very seriously, I don't see where you've seen they don't. The problem is that you just can't secure a whole infrastructure overnight and that security is very hard.

The problem is that you just can't secure a whole infrastructure overnight and that security is very hard. Actually, you can never completely defend against every possible attack. Any finite limit can be exceeded. As long as an attacker can use up some sort of finite resource on your box or network, you're toast. SYN floods don't happen anymore because SYN cookies make the size of your TCP half-open connection table…

This is not true.

I work for a major DDoS mitigation equipment company and we see SYN floods all the time.

And you CAN block one million users from all opening up one connection. Our software/hardware makes this happen. There are MANY MANY ways that DDoS can be dealt with; the biggest hurdle in many cases is convincing a customer that they might be next. Until then, they often don't see the need to spend the money on sufficient capacity or properly test their system against the range of "probable" attack vectors.

That's likely what you're seeing here.

It /is/ true that attacks are becoming more sophisticated and targeting applications rather than just pure network resources (e.g. b/w). A big part of our efforts are trying to abstract away the potential attack vectors common to several application stacks rather than developing solutions for each one at a time.

P.S. Paypal seems to work fine for me right now.

Re: Paypal.com appears to be unavailable

#75

Post by naz »

aj700 wrote: post #71

I'm morally indifferent, even in favour of the principle of wikileaks. I'm not in favour of a leaker of US information motivated only by wanting reforms that are pipe dreams. Freedom of speech can never extend to state secrets. In Europe, we'd never be so attached to the idea that we'd take it that far. I think we may have sacrificed a lot - eg. the ability of the net to process pre-Christmas payments, for the "gain"…

It doesn't sound like you are in favour of the principle of WikiLeaks.

Re: Paypal.com appears to be unavailable

#76

Post by chopsueyar »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #73
pigbucket wrote: post #31

If you dominate a market, a serious ethical duty devolves upon you to do right by your customers, but Paypal, Visa, and MC, on which donation-supported non-profit orgs like Wikileaks almost entirely depend, have utterly failed to fulfill that duty; in fact they didn't even try. Their actions, arbitrary or spineless, have almost completely choked off funding for Wikileaks. I never imagined ending up saying this, but I…

>If you dominate a market, a serious ethical duty devolves upon you to do right by your customers, but Paypal, Visa, and MC, on which donation-supported non-profit orgs like Wikileaks almost entirely depend, have utterly failed to fulfill that duty; in fact they didn't even try. The majority of Paypal Visa and Mastercard customers rely to some extent on a stable international environment. Suggesting that these compan…

I think you've watched 'Fight Club' too many times.

Re: Paypal.com appears to be unavailable

#77

Post by jrockway »

Nrsolis wrote: post #74
jrockway wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that you just can't secure a whole infrastructure overnight and that security is very hard. Actually, you can never completely defend against every possible attack. Any finite limit can be exceeded. As long as an attacker can use up some sort of finite resource on your box or network, you're toast. SYN floods don't happen anymore because SYN cookies make the size of your TCP half-open connection table…

This is not true. I work for a major DDoS mitigation equipment company and we see SYN floods all the time. And you CAN block one million users from all opening up one connection. Our software/hardware makes this happen. There are MANY MANY ways that DDoS can be dealt with; the biggest hurdle in many cases is convincing a customer that they might be next. Until then, they often don't see the need to spend the money on…

Yeah, it's hard to speculate as to what's going on, because we are not Paypal or Mastercard. Maybe someone from Anonymous works there and changed their uplink media to 10BaseT :)

So about the SYN floods you see in real life, how do those work? Do routers not do SYN proxying for the servers behind them? Do SYN cookies not work? Are sequence numbers being forged? Is the link saturated? Something else?

Re: Paypal.com appears to be unavailable

#78

Post by chopsueyar »

petercooper wrote: post #39
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...

You're lucky you don't depend on Paypal for your income like hundreds of thousands of eBayers and people with few other choices (e.g. non US sellers). On the other hand, this will all blow over within days.

What is the saying about eggs and baskets?

Re: Paypal.com appears to be unavailable

#79

Post by alnayyir »

citricsquid wrote: post #69
pigbucket wrote: post #31

If you dominate a market, a serious ethical duty devolves upon you to do right by your customers, but Paypal, Visa, and MC, on which donation-supported non-profit orgs like Wikileaks almost entirely depend, have utterly failed to fulfill that duty; in fact they didn't even try. Their actions, arbitrary or spineless, have almost completely choked off funding for Wikileaks. I never imagined ending up saying this, but I…

You're ignoring the thousands (hundreds of thousands, millions?) of "innocent" businesses that are having problems because of this. Sure try and hurt Visa, Mastercard and Paypal, but hurting innocent people? Isn't that exactly what the US government have done? "It's for the greater good". The people involved in these attacks are just as bad.

I'm going to preface this by saying that I'm not actually a huge fan of WikiLeaks or of Anon, but...

Try to keep things in perspective. We're facing a substantial progression towards a hybridization of the scenarios outlined in 1984 and Brave New World, and you're worried about the disruption of commerce?

Are your priorities really that warped?

There's always collateral damage, whether it's merchants or your civil rights.

I should've guessed that there would be hand-wringing about commerce on here, but I never knew it would be so ridiculous considering what's being hashed out here.

Re: Paypal.com appears to be unavailable

#80

Post by pbhjpbhj »

freechoice1 wrote: post #21

Paypal is notorious to freeze accounts as they like, and bully people around. They can do this because they know they are big. Now they are starting to force their own political agendas on the world population as well. I've quit my account with them because I want this world to be a better place to live in, than being controlled by a bully who harass people.

>I've quit my account with them because I want this world to be a better place to live in, than being controlled by a bully who harass people.

So Wikileaks and Anon are not bullying people?

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