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Please Stop Attacking MIT's Network

blog.achernya.com

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Re: Please Stop Attacking MIT's Network

#91

Post by btilly »

geofft wrote: post #81
wavesounds wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not black and white. Sure Aaron built things but he also threatened to destroy JSTOR's business model. Likewise a DDoS may seem destructive but if it causes MIT to have better Ethics and Leadership as a result then its well worth the discomfort. If theres a bug in your system you sometimes have to replace some lines of code to make it better, this isn't destruction its just change.

But it won't. I certainly hope MIT makes serious changes in its leadership and ethics (if it turns out, after all, that MIT was in some way responsible -- that's still very unclear), but that's not because anyone's DDoSing MIT, it's because I can see the story. If there's a bug in your system, fix the bug. Don't delete a file in another directory and call it change.

if it turns out, after all, that MIT was in some way responsible -- that's still very unclear

In the Boston Globe, Aaron's lawyer says that a suggested plea deal with probation and no actual jail sentence was rejected by MIT, and that played a part in the prosecutor pushing for harsher judgement. If there is any truth in that, then there is evidence that MIT did indeed play enough of a role to have some of the responsibility here.

We won't have a full picture of what their role might have been until Abelson's report comes out. Which likely will take a good deal of time.

Re: Please Stop Attacking MIT's Network

#92

Post by cbs »

danielweber wrote: post #19
Apocryphon wrote: post #13

I suppose the one silver lining is that this could be useful data for MIT admins to locate weaknesses in their network.

It's not supposed to be a hardened network that freaks out whenever anyone connects to it. Or is that the goal? To make MIT stop being so open?

Oh please. Hardened systems and open access are not mutually exclusive. Pretending they are is the domain of untalented admins and those that wish to mislead you on reasoning for policy.

Also, this is MIT, the biggest threats to their network live on campus and are poking around on that network every day.

Re: Please Stop Attacking MIT's Network

#93

Post by btilly »

wavesounds wrote: post #85
Permit wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>To me this feels a bit like a lunch counter cook complaining all these black people showing up in his restaurant are causing him extra work. Are black people notorious for eating or something? That kind of came out of left field, there.

Yeah I was comparing a DDoS to lunch counter Sit-ins of the 60s. During the civil rights movement blacks and other protestors would overwhelm a restaurant taking up all the space at the counter until the owners agreed to meet their demands. It's a proven non-violent protest that works and is very similar to what DDoS does, except instead of human bodies filling up a restaurant you're using http requests to fill up a…

The significant difference is that when the owner gets unhappy about it, it is trivial to figure out who to talk to to get the problem fixed.

The same is not true of DDoS attacks.

Re: Please Stop Attacking MIT's Network

#94

Post by vor_ »

BrokenPipe wrote: post #56
gojomo wrote: post #45

As I'd mentioned on an earlier submission about W3C's site being inaccessible: A cool thing about Aaron's activism was that it involved building things, circumventing censorship, and spreading information, rather than sabotage and denial-of-service.

True but Aaron's activism resulted in him being bullied until he took his own life. It's a difficult topic. If you assume that ddos from a collective is similar to blocking a road by a collective during a strike or manifestation then I must say that some people won't be able to get to work that day and in general nobody would get hurt. This sort of pacific interruption raises awareness, which by itself is very import…

This "pacific interruption", as you delicately describe it, hurts innocent teachers and students who had nothing to do with the alleged bullying of Swartz, who was already suicidal prior to his prosecution.

Regardless of what one may think of computer laws, there is no proven link between his suicide and the criminal charges he faced, and any claims to the contrary have so far been entirely speculative and coming from people who never met the guy--one can't help but wonder if they had even heard of him before last week.

In addition, many of Swartz's accomplishments have been exaggerated specifically to fuel a frenzied mob. E.g., "co-creator of Reddit" which contradicts the public statements of other Reddit founders, and "creator of RSS" when he was one member of a group that took over Netscape's technology.

Of course, my saying this will be used as a reason to attack me for discounting contributions that he actually made, which isn't the case. I am simply pointing out that the knee-jerk righteous indignation and mad desire to blame is getting out of hand. It's becoming an angry mob, directing its violence at convenient targets to feed a primal hunger for revenge.

Re: Please Stop Attacking MIT's Network

#95

Post by leepowers »

Permit wrote: post #67
leepowers wrote: post #54

My guess is someone wants to "send a message" to MIT and so they're attacking the most vulnerable, most exploitable part of MIT's infrastructure: a non-critical system run by student volunteers. I doubt it's anything personal against Alex or other MIT students. Imagine if a thousand members of Anonymous staged a non-violent protest at MIT, marching across campus. This would inconvenience some students, possibly even…

Why is it perfectly acceptable to inconvenience people from their studies? Man, this kind of attitude makes me want to encourage harsher penalties on people who pull this bullshit. You do your movement no favours when you inconvenience the same people you want on your side.

I'm not a member of any movement, Anonymous or otherwise. The point I was trying to raise: civil disobedience is disruptive by nature and will inconvenience and annoy - but it is far from immoral. Why should a DDoS be considered any differently? The methods of physical and virtual protest are different but their ends are the same.

Re: Please Stop Attacking MIT's Network

#96

Post by [deleted] »

Permit wrote: post #67
leepowers wrote: post #54

My guess is someone wants to "send a message" to MIT and so they're attacking the most vulnerable, most exploitable part of MIT's infrastructure: a non-critical system run by student volunteers. I doubt it's anything personal against Alex or other MIT students. Imagine if a thousand members of Anonymous staged a non-violent protest at MIT, marching across campus. This would inconvenience some students, possibly even…

Why is it perfectly acceptable to inconvenience people from their studies? Man, this kind of attitude makes me want to encourage harsher penalties on people who pull this bullshit. You do your movement no favours when you inconvenience the same people you want on your side.

[deleted]

Re: Please Stop Attacking MIT's Network

#97

Post by btilly »

latj wrote: post #14

I do not condone the attacks that may be occurring. However, if you are trying to get someone's attention- it makes more sense to get the attention of the students rather than the administration. Today's MIT students are tomorrow's death-ray designers, robot-maintainers, and policy makers. They are tomorrow's administration- and they may not have made up their minds yet about ethical issues of intellectual property o…

This is true if by "get the attention of" you mean "shoot yourself in the foot".

People who are sympathetic to political action tend to become significantly less sympathetic when they are personally inconvenienced by said political action. And their ire tends to be directed at whoever they see as being most directly responsible for their inconvenience.

I am someone who broadly agrees with Aaron's goals. I agree with the principle of the protests. And it is for exactly THAT reason that I am squarely against this DDoS attack.

Re: Please Stop Attacking MIT's Network

#98

Post by ryguytilidie »

I feel like this guy could not miss the point by much more distance. How much of a shell do you have to live in to think "well sure, someone died after fighting for the rights of millions of people, but jesus, you people are going to inconvenience us for a few hours? this is just ridiculous!"

Re: Please Stop Attacking MIT's Network

#99

Post by mappu »

paupino_masano wrote: post #87
mappu wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, totally blank page. JS enabled, no plugins, no caching, Chrome Beta 24 from New Zealand. All HTML loads fine. There's an uncaught TypeError in common.js:40 (looks like jQuery.browser isn't getting defined?) which seems to cause the blogger object to not be created, breaking classic.js and gadgets.js nearly immediately. Ridiculous

Yeah - you're absolutely right. It's to do with this line: http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.min.js It seems Google API's have upgraded this particular URL to point to 1.9 which deprecates jQuery.browser. Technically they need to update their template to use something like: http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.8.3/jquery.min.js

Sounds about right - i'm glad browser sniffing is going away. Not sure what's up with blogger's testing team - maybe everyone's busy helping out with the GAE outage?

Next question - why doesn't everyone get the blank page?

EDIT: By your profile, i'm guessing you're also in NZ - Looks like they might have just pushed the update out to only parts of their CDN.

Re: Please Stop Attacking MIT's Network

#100

Post by FireBeyond »

btilly wrote: post #91
geofft wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it won't. I certainly hope MIT makes serious changes in its leadership and ethics (if it turns out, after all, that MIT was in some way responsible -- that's still very unclear), but that's not because anyone's DDoSing MIT, it's because I can see the story. If there's a bug in your system, fix the bug. Don't delete a file in another directory and call it change.

if it turns out, after all, that MIT was in some way responsible -- that's still very unclear In the Boston Globe, Aaron's lawyer says that a suggested plea deal with probation and no actual jail sentence was rejected by MIT, and that played a part in the prosecutor pushing for harsher judgement. If there is any truth in that, then there is evidence that MIT did indeed play enough of a role to have some of the respon…

So MIT should have had reasonable cause to believe that there was a risk of suicide should they decide to prosecute a case? And that makes them responsible? Is that a road we want to go down?
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