I notice that justice.gov is down.
United States Sentencing Commission website hacked
61–70 of 154 posts
Re: United States Sentencing Commission website hacked
#62The site contains links to 9 encrypted files, one for each of the current Supreme Court Justices. The files are intended to be concatenated into a single file named: Warhead-US-DOJ-LEA-2013.aes256 (US-DOJ-LEA = United States - Department of Justice - Law Enforcement Agency) aes256 is apparently the encryption scheme used to encrypt the files. File names (and sizes): 1115 MB total Scalia.Warhead1 (150 MB) Kennedy.Warh…
There's something strange about those file sizes. If they were a split set, wouldn't they all be the same size except for one? The only explanation I can think of is the data was `tar`d, then `split`, then compressed (to make the varying sizes), then encrypted, which seems more than a little insane. The files are Base64 encoded, which means they are considerably larger than their equivalent binary.
Yeah it seems strange to me too, it's possible the server I was downloading from had incomplete files... it seems like Kennedy.Warhead1, Roberts.Warhead1, and Sotomayor.Warhead1 should be 150 MB... those are the file sizes reported by the server though.
Re: United States Sentencing Commission website hacked
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's something strange about those file sizes. If they were a split set, wouldn't they all be the same size except for one? The only explanation I can think of is the data was `tar`d, then `split`, then compressed (to make the varying sizes), then encrypted, which seems more than a little insane. The files are Base64 encoded, which means they are considerably larger than their equivalent binary.
Yeah it seems strange to me too, it's possible the server I was downloading from had incomplete files... it seems like Kennedy.Warhead1, Roberts.Warhead1, and Sotomayor.Warhead1 should be 150 MB... those are the file sizes reported by the server though.
$ curl --head http://www.easyseattleshortsales.com/Roberts.Warhead1 | grep -e "Content-Length"
Content-Length: 23883776
Re: United States Sentencing Commission website hacked
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exposing emails, hacking the FBI? This is not at all helpful. Murdering politicians, assassinating police officers and judges, freeing the wrongly imprisoned by force. A willingness to die fighting. Any or all of those would change things, possibly for the better. But this, this is a waste of your time and ours.
Can you say martial law? I know several officers who belong on either side of the integrity fence. Losing the bad ones violently will only turn the good ones against whatever good you're hoping to accomplish. This is absolutely the worst thing they could do. There are plenty of politicians, police officers and judges who are doing everything they can to free those wrongly imprisoned. Besides that, not everyone who wo…
At the time India gained independence, the British Empire was in shambles, and was financially derelict after World War 2. A strong argument can be made that it was the implicit threat of violence which the UK would be totally unable to handle at the time is what ultimately led to Indian independence.
The situation is not a particularly effective argument that non violent solutions are always preferable, or even possible.
Re: United States Sentencing Commission website hacked
#65Dudes. This is not at all helpful. Website defacements just create more of an excuse for a crackdown. If you're going to risk your life and freedom hacking things; make it worth your goddam time. Hack the prison industrial complex and get the evidence that shows that crimes are being created so that prisoners can be kept at a profit. Expose the email trails of corrupt judges who put away kids for kickbacks. Dox the m…
Let's say this Anon's action inspires other Anons within the federal government to take in a USB key and torrent a few GB of internal emails. Then it's a huge win. Any Anons with sysadmin skills will now join the federal government (they're always hiring), turn off logging, bundle up a tar, cover their tracks, and put it on the web. Nothing will take down a .gov faster than shining some sunlight on their Pentagon Pap…
Ask Bradley Manning how that whistleblowing thing works out. I think it's important to realise doing things like that, whether ultimately for the good or the bad, comes at a huge personal risk.
Re: United States Sentencing Commission website hacked
#66The narration seems to be in the style of v for vendetta, quite amusing to see such a portentous message on a hacked site. They've also made entire site editable. http://www.ussc.gov/index2.cfm
Don't know if you've seen any other Anon releases, but they almost always deliver the message in this style.
That's true, but they are one-upping themselves with every release. I find the packaging of their message this time is very impactful.
Topiary was the genius behind all the LulzSec antics, before him Anon releases lacked creativity. Topiary made anon realize the impact of PR.
Is this video part of some game CGI and they just reproduced it? Or did someone do this from scratch? How much time would it take to do from scratch?
Re: United States Sentencing Commission website hacked
#67They blackholed the dns it looks like, but http://www.ussc.gov/ is still up.
I was impressed when they hacked mit.edu, but geesh, how did they get a .gov -- that's pretty crazy.
Huh? Have you seen how the various .gov sites are being run? Their security is generally pretty pathetic. Most of their security comes from the fact that they will hit you like a ton of bricks if they catch you.
Re: United States Sentencing Commission website hacked
#68Dudes. This is not at all helpful. Website defacements just create more of an excuse for a crackdown. If you're going to risk your life and freedom hacking things; make it worth your goddam time. Hack the prison industrial complex and get the evidence that shows that crimes are being created so that prisoners can be kept at a profit. Expose the email trails of corrupt judges who put away kids for kickbacks. Dox the m…
This. I think hacktivism and subsequent whistle-blowing can do good, but this is pissing in the wind.
By that token so is voiding your ballot, but if that were the only form of expression available to you, you might be happy to be able to make even that small squeak. Voiding your ballot (and in the same way, defacing a website) sends a message to your peers and the authorities that you are dissatisfied and that alone can be solidifying. That is one of the purposes of any protest, be it disassociating yourself from an injustice or creating graffiti to propagandize for your cause. It creates, at minimum, an opportunity for a group acknowledgement of that dissatisfaction. However imperfect the expression, it can still contribute to positive change. (I would also, for example, say self-immolation is a terrible waste, but it's damn hard to dismiss. In the same way, Aaron Swartz's death says something timeless, whether he intended it or not, and however regrettable or frustrating or futile or "selfish"...)
Is the sentiment of disapproval here due to one wrong being used against others (which I echo) or fear ("excuse for a crackdown")?
Re: United States Sentencing Commission website hacked
#69The site has been dropped from DNS but IP still returns. The mirrors are slow/down, and file keys are the extortion:
http://www.zdnet.com/anonymous-hacks-us-sentencing-commissio...
Re: United States Sentencing Commission website hacked
#70[Shakes his head in disgust.] Hackers, it's time for me to hack the discussion. You and your first world problems have NO IDEA how to fight for freedom. This is the wimpy way to protest whatever it is you are protesting. Unlike most people who post here, I have actually lived under a dictatorial regime that ruled a territory that later had a peaceful transition to democracy and legally protected civil rights. Anonymous or whatever the name of the latest Western hacktivist group is going about things all wrong.
If you really want to learn about effective popular action to bring about more freedom, point your Web browser to the Albert Einstein Institute publications
http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsde07.html
and choose your language for titles like From Dictatorship to Democracy and The Role of Power in Nonviolent Struggle and others. Note that the main author of these publications has consulted with freedom movements all over the world and has had notable success in the Philippines, Thailand, Burma, and other countries, and is credited with much of the mobilization of the two-year-old Arab Spring movement.
Going after the United States Sentencing Commission website is beyond stupid. The federal sentencing guidelines were a helpful reform. Before they were adopted, on the example of Minnesota's sentencing guidelines, federal sentences were just about wholly indeterminate, making each judge could make up his or her own law of sentencing at trial. The Minnesota reform, which was the example for the federal reform, set up guidelines based on a "severity score" of the offense--so that for the first time legislative statutes from many different decades were compared as to the actual social harm resulting from each offense, based on community standards as of the time of the reform--and on a "criminal history score" of the offender, so that prison time was reserved only for the most dangerous repeat offenders. (Minnesota imprisons fewer convicted criminals than most states of the United States, being much like Scandinavia in this regard. Minnesota spends more dollars per prisoner but fewer dollars per taxpayer on its prison system than almost any other state.)
I know actual freedom fighters, that is publishers of opposition magazines and organizers of nonviolent protests, from Taiwan. Some of them experienced hard prison time while in the struggle for freedom, with family break up and ill health and the other consequences of imprisonment. But today they can look at a much freer country in their homeland than they grew up in. The biggest problem with website-defacing movements is their cowardice (no one in Anonymous seems courageous enough to go to prison) and lack of perspective (they complain about first world problems that they mischaracterize as important problems for the common people). It's time for the discussion on Hacker News to grow up and make more room for the real freedom fighters.