Agreed. But it’s still sweet.

I hope that they draw the line here. If, say, the processing networks like FDC or Vital went down this time of year, it would be a huge inconvenience for Amazon and Wal*Mart, but ruination for a lot of small businesses. That might not be the best way of expressing concern about concentration of power.

That being said, it does show the degree to which private entities like VMC and PayPal now regulate the livelihood of businesses. Ask anyone in the porn business how benevolent this dictatorship has become. :)

Xof, they did successfully knock out part of Mastercard’s system. About six paragraphs in:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/08/operation-payback-mastercard-website-wikileaks

These guys are associated to Wikileaks solely by their own claims, not by anything which Wikileaks has done.

IMHO, the relation between Wkilekas and these self-appointed “allies” is altogether similar to the relation between Osama Bin Laden and the Palestinians: there’s simply NO connection between he two….except by the claims of the clearly criminal – the hackers here, Bin Laden there, – themselves.

We must ignore their claims.

Just like Julian.

I actually need to use that site during my day.

“Say, that’s a nice little payment processor you have there. It would be a shame if anything happened to it. During the holiday season. Your biggest time of the year. If ya know what I mean.”

I’m surprised that the big financial sites aren’t better protected. My understanding is that the LOIC isn’t even that sophisticated as modern DDoS tools go.

After all, we can all be “for wikileaks”, but if we don’t do anything about it, we might as well be signing its death warrant.

I’m not saying it isn’t going to happen, I’m just saying that a couple DDOS attacks don’t yet make it a world war. WWIII comes when millions of regular people start saying “f_ck it” and setting their computer up on the attack, when the US starts firewalling or taking down large portions of the internet, and when people start setting up ad hoc networks to circumvent government & corporate controlled networks. This is not that, yet.

Haha, I guess I am inadvertently concern trolling. After all, did the Scientologists ever manage to catch anyone during that whole business? They are probably as scary as the financial companies.

On the one side you have the powers-that-be who rely on complex, centralized infrastructure. Its vulnerability is that all of its systems and approaches assume that people agree to follow the rules.

On the other side you have the fragmented opposition who are loosely coordinated through a general ideology, use low-cost disruption methods, and just don’t give a damn.

If the metaphor to the “war on terror” is apt, the establishment will neither give in, listen to the opposition, nor listen to its own citizens, but instead will entrench itself, deploy costly, ineffective, and self-defeating countermeasures. And it’s the regular shmucks on the street who will bear the brunt of the costs and harm of the whole conflict.

So, you prefer no voice then?

For those suggesting this is amateur hour and that their targets are worthless web-brochures, get a brain. You may think Anonymous is a non-unified group of trouble makers but the people controlling this attack are no idiots. If they attack serious infrastructure (esp. financial), they risk serious legal consequences. This is meant as a demonstration of capability, not a real show of force.

I welcome their next moves on PayPal and Amazon, though there is a lot more risk involved with that one. Keep up the hard work Anonymous! I am going to install LOIC as soon as I get home from work.

When will the powers that be realise they don’t have answers for everything? Politicians didn’t build the internet meaning that the people who did will always be one step ahead. It is fun to watch your enemy fight an uphill battle.

I spoke to a woman who described this strategy at NNOG a few years ago. What was interesting was the fact that they have not figured out a way to get around the attacks yet.

Self-centered at all, there Mitch?

It’s the American way for many people, I suppose.

What may look like kids rioting in the streets, or groups moving away in some simple sense from the society they dislike or for that matters a group of 4chan users posting videos and creating tiny attacks on something so great as the fundaments of economic society is in itself something great. In the idea of revolt, the courage to actually decide that writing bullshit letters or whine to your friends just isn’t going to cut it any more, that you need to do something, anything – is the first tiny step to something new and maybe better.
What did you expect a brave new world lying infront of you just asking you to go ahead and transit easily?

No matter what comes out of all this mess, it will be new. It may be crap. But it’ll be new crap and thats what matters.

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/213039/mastercard_affected_in_attacks_over_wikileaks.html

That looks like an Akamai error message. Which probably means they’ve managed to take out a few Akamai caches, affecting users in some locations.

I’ve seen the effect of a 4chan DOS attempt, and it was clear they didn’t know what they were doing. Maybe they’ve improved since then, but I think this is still amateur hour.

We can look down our noses at the folks in our lives who can’t set the clocks on their microwaves, but these folks do matter, they do vote, and they are very worried and confused by what is happening.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyldvUhaAMs

Hey hi Bootzilla!

http://datacell.com/news.php
Reporting on the NYT (scroll down a bit): http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/wikileaks/