{"id":425,"date":"2010-02-10T12:08:50","date_gmt":"2010-02-10T02:08:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelwyres.com\/?p=425"},"modified":"2010-02-10T12:08:50","modified_gmt":"2010-02-10T02:08:50","slug":"internet-censorship-politician-education-required","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/2010\/02\/internet-censorship-politician-education-required\/","title":{"rendered":"Internet Censorship: Politician Education Required"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Further demonstration that &#8220;they do not understand what they are messing with&#8221; came today, with the political establishment in this country completely missing the point in regards to what a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is designed to achieve.<\/p>\n<p><center>\n<table border=\"0\" width=\"80%\" cellpadding\t=\"0\" cellspacing=\"0\">\n  <tr>\n    <td class=\"linkbox\"><a class=\"linkboxtext\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.theage.com.au\/technology\/technology-news\/operation-titstorm-hackers-bring-down-government-websites-20100210-nqku.html\">Operation Titstorm: Hackers Bring Down Government Websites<\/td>\n  <\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/center>\n<\/p>\n<p>Quoting a release from the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE):<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>A spokeswoman for Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said the attacks were not a legitimate form of political statement. They were &#8220;totally irresponsible and potentially deny services to the Australian public&#8221;.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>No, really?<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s the idea.  A DDoS attack is &#8211; <em>by definition<\/em> &#8211; designed to &#8220;deny service&#8221;.  In the case of a commercial operation, a sustained DDoS incident can ultimately &#8211; and sometimes quite drastically &#8211; cripple revenue streams, with potential online customers unable to engage the organisation through e-commerce channels.  By attacking phone and fax systems, other inbound communications systems are also crippled.  This can be EXTREMELY costly to a company, and DDoS attacks are normally carried out to make a stand against an unpopular policy or practice of the organisation being attacked.  They are designed to hit the bottom line &#8211; as they say &#8220;money talks&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Very few businesses have the resources to take a sustained hit, so most give up, cave into the pressure, and alter their policies.  Whether or not that is fair is a completely different argument.<\/p>\n<p>So, this group is attacking the government, and preventing them from providing their services to the public &#8211; in protest of the upcoming internet filtering legislation, and banning of certain pornographic material, in an attempt to appease the various lobby groups.  They are seeking to &#8220;cripple&#8221; the government&#8217;s ability to provide its services, perhaps prevent people from being able to pay due taxes online.  This hits the government&#8217;s bottom line.<\/p>\n<p>Internet users are a powerful lobby group also &#8211; as the government is about to learn.  I don&#8217;t support the actions of this group, as I believe it will do more damage to our fight for internet freedom than good &#8211; the average Joe on the street will see this as a bunch of &#8220;pissed off kiddies&#8221;  &#8211;  but it&#8217;s no different than anti-war protesters marching up and down the street and disrupting people from carrying out day-to-day business.  Joe won&#8217;t understand this, but this is a legitimate form of political statement &#8211; much like laying down in front of a military tank.<\/p>\n<p>The government saying it is not a legitimate form of political statement is a rapid-fire response to get to the mainstream media, and make it sound like it is not.<\/p>\n<p>However, if nothing else, maybe Minister Conroy and Prime Minister Rudd might start seeing the point, but I won&#8217;t be holding my breath.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Further demonstration that &#8220;they do not understand what they are messing with&#8221; came today, with the political establishment in this country completely missing the point in regards to what a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is designed to achieve. Operation Titstorm: Hackers Bring Down Government Websites Quoting a release from the Department of Broadband, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=425"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}