51–60 of 70 posts
I think after some days, WikiLeaks will publish documents using torrents. That way they can avoid (at least) DDoS.
They can always release their analysis and interesting findings later.
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I guess this explains why netcraft keeps showing their website as mostly down worldwide for the last day or so when it's actually performing extremely well. Question: why does the RST packet identify non-existent nodes? Doesn't TCP sequence prevent a blind continuation of a http request? Is this just one type of syn flood protection?
Most likely, the initial Netcraft attempt to connect is met with a RST. Subsequent attempts are also met with the same RST. This is because the attempts are spaced out in time enough for the original ACL, permitting access, to be flushed. According to the RFC, the RST does not get an ACK if the initiating node is "legitimate." So the "silence" or non-ACK is a good sign, which results in the initiating node being adde…
Doing a little googling this process seems to detect an attack (from a valid ip) that has been programmed to ignore RST - presumably because some intermediate ISPs (like tier1 borders) will detect a DDOS and forge a RST to attempt to mitigate them. Much like the firewall configs that circulated to defeat sandvine RST throttling of bittorrent.
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> the laws of the EU We are, sadly, not quite that far along yet.
The EU issues Regulations, which have immediate effect in member states, and Directives, which member states are required to implement in national law, so it's not too far wrong to talk about EU law. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_law Caveat: IANAL (but my wife is).
I know DDOS is a difficult problem to solve, but I think using the cloud to out-scale your attacker doesn't solve the problem, it just increases the cost of it. The obvious solution for the bad guys (not gonna call them hackers, can't call them crackers can I?) is to use the cloud too. Generating an HTTP request is even cheaper than serving static content on a CDN.
I'd say a botnet already qualifies as "the cloud". Why pay Amazon when you can get a million desktop machines doing it for free?
This is very interesting. If Wikileaks does in fact become designated a terrorist organization by the US, then it seems Amazon will have to shut them down or run the risk of providing them "material aid". The same would be true of any other cloud provider... are there any sizable cloud providers outside the US?
If Wikileaks is a terrorist, then so too is the New York Times, and any other media outlet that has conveyed the same information Wikileaks released.
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Why should other members be anonymous? Isn't that hypocritical since Wikileaks is all about transparency?
It's also all about protecting whistle blowers. They've put a lot of thought into ways of covering the tracks of people who come to them to keep them safe - I don't think it's hypocritical. They're concerned for their safety, not their politics.
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Surviving DoS attacks is not a new problem; I'm sure that Amazon has quite a bit of experience in that area. But thanks for the trace, quite interesting!
I wonder how well their Cloudfront CDN holds up for delivering static content in the face of a DDoS vs just using heavy static cachine with ngnix or apache on EC2.
That being said, I wouldn't want to pay the bandwidth bill for the CDN :p
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It's also all about protecting whistle blowers. They've put a lot of thought into ways of covering the tracks of people who come to them to keep them safe - I don't think it's hypocritical. They're concerned for their safety, not their politics.
Ironically, Clinton expressed similar concerns about Wikileaks exposing people who speak privately to diplomats.
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/08/20...
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Sadly? The things that come out of the EU are at least as stupid as local laws, especially wrt technology.
The US has a massive commercial advantage because its laws, while not better per se, are at least uniform. Also, European national states are mostly too weak to have any influence in the global problems of the 21st century. A smaller share of a larger (power) pie would still be an improvement.
First install a working democratic process, then get more power. Not the other way around "lets give them insane power and then they will surely be nice to us and give us a good democratic process" as many people seem to want.
Also I'm not even sure that if there were a good democracy that I'd want to give e.g. Italians the power to vote on what happens to me, given that they elect and keep electing Berlusconi.