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Polish Internet community goes nuts against ACTA

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Re: Polish Internet community goes nuts against ACTA

#21

Post by choros12 »

Tomek_ wrote: post #18
choros12 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just saying... I remember the time in 90s when Polish coal miners didn't get guarantees from the Government regarding their pension plans. Well, they basically went to Warsaw and started riots. Real riots. As far as I remember they literally kidnapped member of the Administration or two. They destroyed a few government building in Warsaw. They terrorized and paralyzed the Government. Next thing you know, the Governme…

They fought hard with the police and caused some real damage to some of the government buildings, but there was no kidnapping, or terror. Poland is not some wild, crazy country. Also, most of the society was against the protests and was literally pissed off on miners and on government (for the fact that they indeed agreed to most of the requests of the miners).

That's exactly what I meant by terrorized. The miners did occupy Government building and they did destroy some of them and yes they did terrorize some of the high level Government officials by locking them up in their own offices and not allowing to get out.

Yes, Poland IS a wild country. That is its biggest strength. Poor Americans just have to deal with whatever laws thrown at them by their Government. Here, in Poland - not really.

Re: Polish Internet community goes nuts against ACTA

#22

Post by hastur »

Tomek_ wrote: post #19

According to this text: http://prawo.vagla.pl/node/9637 (in Polish, from a lawyer who is against ACTA), there was no real attack on any of the mentioned sites, it was just that there was so much interest in the case that some sites went down due to naturally increased traffic. Case in point: his own website went down, even though he is against ACTA.

Well, so let's be more specific about the alleged attack.

1) At least one target was attacked quite literally. The website of the Polish Parliament was defaced and subsequently taken down by its admins.

[This is the supposed deface image: http://bit.ly/wkygL4. The caption reads "Nothing is impossible! Cheers, gentlemen!"]

2) ACTA is a very new thing to the wider public (even the "trendy" internet public). First, on Jan 20 it made the front page of the biggest newspaper of record, Gazeta Wyborcza. And today ACTA was mentioned in the main TV news program (Wiadomosci on TVP1). The latter almost certainly triggered a wave of searches and attempts to access various sites. In result many website failures (the lawyer's, the Panoptykon Foundation, perhaps even Ministry of Culture) can be attributed to a sudden spike in interest.

[The lawyer mentioned in previous post has stated specifically that he has investigated the nature of the traffic and it doesn't look like a DDoS. Which is kind of credible, since each machine participating in a DoS sends gazillions of requests from the same IP, so it's distinctive from a visitor sending like 5 requests in total.]

3) That said, it's not an outlandish assumption that someone also had their way with the biggest sites of the Polish Government. A DDoS could have contributed to the whole mess.

Re: Polish Internet community goes nuts against ACTA

#23

Post by Mad_Dud »

gcb wrote: post #20
Tomek_ wrote: post #19

According to this text: http://prawo.vagla.pl/node/9637 (in Polish, from a lawyer who is against ACTA), there was no real attack on any of the mentioned sites, it was just that there was so much interest in the case that some sites went down due to naturally increased traffic. Case in point: his own website went down, even though he is against ACTA.

how can you tell requests to a site with the intention to DoS it and the regular ones if they were promoting in-browser tools for regular people?

The simplest way is to use netstat and check amount of connections from each host. If you see plenty hosts with many connections established, that's DDoS. If there is plenty hosts, but each one has few connections, thats DoS (aka slash dot effect), mentioned by Tomek_.

PS: DDoS - distributed denial-of-service attack. Deliberate attack which involves dedicated software; DoS - denial-of-service. Server can't handle all requests, because suddenly there is more of them (because of link on frontpage etc)

Re: Polish Internet community goes nuts against ACTA

#24

Post by viraptor »

jstepien wrote: post #3

It's worth being noted that the latest attacks on government's websites are top headlines on majority of Polish news sites at the moment. Both the attacks and ACTA are being covered on news TV channels and radio. Apparently, taking down government's website is a remarkably good method of raising interest of media.

I just hope it doesn't get interpreted in media as "hackers destroy government property using pirated software - that's what ACTA is supposed to stop". I wouldn't be surprised at all if that happened.

Re: Polish Internet community goes nuts against ACTA

#25

Post by hastur »

As I got up on a late Sunday morning, all major news outlets are talking both about the alleged attacks and about ACTA itself. Sunday talk shows are talking about ACTA. The Govt spokesman starts assuring people that they won't rush anything and ACTA will be consulted.

ACTA suddenly came into mainstream public debate.

Where else did that happen in the world? I'm friggin proud of my country. :]

Oh, and BTW, signups on Facebook for the street protest against ACTA have jumped from 13,000 to 19,000 in 12 hours. :]

Re: Polish Internet community goes nuts against ACTA

#26

Post by zdanozdan »

choros12 wrote: post #21
Tomek_ wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They fought hard with the police and caused some real damage to some of the government buildings, but there was no kidnapping, or terror. Poland is not some wild, crazy country. Also, most of the society was against the protests and was literally pissed off on miners and on government (for the fact that they indeed agreed to most of the requests of the miners).

That's exactly what I meant by terrorized. The miners did occupy Government building and they did destroy some of them and yes they did terrorize some of the high level Government officials by locking them up in their own offices and not allowing to get out. Yes, Poland IS a wild country. That is its biggest strength. Poor Americans just have to deal with whatever laws thrown at them by their Government. Here, in Pol…

I think we just see the government (any) as an enemy and I agree it's pretty healthy. History teached us to do so but somehow still works.
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