Use IP shielding!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There seems a tendency for people to criticise the activists for "not using proxies" or whatever. Face it, if people had to sort that all out the DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) would never happen simply because it wouldn't be accessible to most people. We should be 100% supporting these people and saving our criticism for the real scum who are corporations and governments.

Each person in the DDoS was just visiting a website many times, which shouldn't be illegal at all. These people aren't being targeted for their own actions but for the actions of many others. It is in principle no worse than a street demonstration where the crowd en masse blocks a business but each individual is just exercising their right to walk about in public.

Good luck to whoever was arrested, you did a noble thing in standing up against government and corporate censorship, and a big fuck you to the filthy scum at the FBI and their equivalents for being such corporate arse-lickers.

My mum did a sit-down protest during a peace march in opposition to the invasion of Iraq. That's the same as DoSing in my opinion, a minor objection, no real offence, I'm sure you agree. In current 'unjust' law though DoSing is a major criminal offence. However, my mum'd pleaded with me not for years to take direction against the wars, in case I got arrested. I slagged her off, for taking minimal action that was just as illegal in exactly the same cause, because she didn't know even a sit-down protest is now illegal.

I'd guess at least four out of these five, and the many to follow, didn't know an innocuous DoSing protest was illegal. I'd guess one of the four did know the risk but chose to take the risk, good on him. I wouldn't convict them But the people who encouraged them to do this did give them bad advice; Anonymous, Schnews and Indymedia; all failed to inform these saps that they would almost inevitably be identified because they didn't understand basic computing idioms.

If you want to hack, then take the time to learn real hacking tools( at least one has been listed here you idiots! ).

If you want to protest unjust laws, then teach the people that you recruit the risks that they face. Don't trust Indymedia posters or admins for safe advice, even me, protect yourself. That's what anonymous really means.

Don't undermine them with even more bad press-releases cause they just make you look dodgier.

The people who participated in the DDoS weren't "hackers" and what they were doing wasn't "hacking". Many of them were just regular people who probably don't know what an IP address is, let alone how to hide it.

If you restricted these protests to people who knew how to use proxies you'd have about 10 people participating and the DDoS wouldn't work. Not to mention that proxies aren't really suitable for DDoSing - it's not really a good idea to clog the Tor network up with DDoS traffic, for example. A lot of places will just block connections from Tor exit nodes anyway.

I think most people realise that unless you really know what you are doing, anything you do on the internet can ultimately be traced back to you given enough time and resources.

Criticising places like Indymedia for not going into explicit detail about this DDoS action is like criticising them for not warning people going on a regular demo to mask up and avoid wearing obviously identifiable clothes. At some point you will just put people off so much that they won't do anything! Your main defence is strength in numbers - some people might be unlucky but the statistical risk is small.

And I don't think we are sure if those arrested are just regular DDoSers or were involved in organising the protests in some way.

Anonymous severely fucked up. It wan't made clear that the tool was more akin to ping flooding from your own ip address than to a real ddos. A proper ddos these would normally employ a botnet, which would at the very least only show the addresss of the hapless people with compromised systems you used, on the victims network/server logs, thus at least needing some forensic to find you. By no means in itself an "anonymous" attack.

But the tool promoted didn't have any proxy or masking from what I gather. Thus any lowly proto geek could draw a straight line between the record of your ip address and network interface and using a free online service like ripe.net straight to your internet service provider. The isp will over as much resistence as your giddy aunt faced with tom Jones in giving all your details and corresponding logs to to the cops when served with a warrant. The logs will correspond to the MAC address of the device in you used be it modem, router, WiFi nic, etc. Leaving you only with a "no comment" police statement and a plausible deniabilty defence... ouch @ press release.

Anonymous are shagged for credibility now. A paranoid person could wonder what the fuck they were thinking...

They should be there as a nexus between the 1337 h4x0r5 and the enthusiastic noobs.
They should be educating recruits not duping people into willing zombies.

They did't act in the spirit of V, not even Tyler Durden, but rather like Lord Kitchener.

I never said DoSing is hacking, it isn't, but these articles claimed it was by using misleading terminology such as 'hacktion stations' etc.

"If you restricted these protests to people who knew how to use proxies you'd have about 10 people participating and the DDoS wouldn't work"

You don't need a proxy to spoof, and one person could have modded the LOIC so it was anonymous. Most of the people who took part probably assumed that a tool recommended by anonymous was anonymous, and they should have been warned that it wasn't.
Besides we both know that most of the traffic was coming from about 10 people, using botnets, and the crowd was for cover/PR.

"it's not really a good idea to clog the Tor network up with DDoS traffic, for example"
Yet that was exactly the advice given here by some idiot and which I had to correct. And it's not that it 'clogs up the network with traffic and is easily blocked', the main risk is that it identifies the routers not just to the companies, but to everyone watching, and it is pointless anyway since it divides the number of participants and their traffic by a huge figure.

"Criticising places like Indymedia for not going into explicit detail about this DDoS action is like criticising them for not warning people going on a regular demo to mask up and avoid wearing obviously identifiable clothes."

I agree fully, which is why that advice is always being given here. The same warnings should have been included in the original articles about the LOIC.

"Your main defence is strength in numbers - some people might be unlucky but the statistical risk is small"
Strength in traffic numbers is not the same as participant numbers, and using uninformed innocents as human shields is unacceptable.

"
And I don't think we are sure if those arrested are just regular DDoSers or were involved in organising the protests in some way"
Maybe so, of the two Dutch arrestees, one was a DoSer and one an organiser. I just hope the DoSer had the risk explained to him in advance.

"At some point you will just put people off so much that they won't do anything! Your main defence is strength in numbers - some people might be unlucky but the statistical risk is small. "

There is no moral defence. If you dragged some total newbie along to a demo and they were expecting a march and you knew it was likely to kick off into a riot and they got their skulls cracked, then you are as guilty as the arsehole who coshed the person you brought along.

Consent can only be given when it is INFORMED (within reasonable parameters).

Anonymous *could* have flagged up the issues with the tool. *Could* have told people that there was a risk and explained that the more people who used it, the lesser the chances (statistically) of being humped by the courts.

Hey, they could have fucking acted like the better end of the hacking community and educated people how to take some precautions.

Instead, they decided to act like the channel ops in an open IRC channel and exploited the new and naive.

The crime of "visiting a website too many times in one minute" sounds like something off a Monty Python sketch (if the internet had exist then!). It's hardly crime of the century.

I don't think anyone ever claimed the DDoS tool was magic and would hide your IP address. If you are visiting a website I think it is fairly well-known even by the relatively computer-illiterate that you can be identified.

And "If you dragged some total newbie along to a demo and they were expecting a march and you knew it was likely to kick off into a riot and they got their skulls cracked" then no, I don't think you are anywhere near as guilty as the people doing the skull cracking. There is a fine line between making people aware and inducing such paranoia that they are too scared to do anything.

I don't know how many people participated in the DDoS but I imagine it was thousands or tens of thousands. So they are either just picking a handful of people to make an example of, or else they are specifically targeting people involved with distributing or publicising the event.

Let's not detract from the real scum here: the US government who has been exposed for what they are by Wikileaks, and the corporations and other governments who do their bidding.

"The crime of "visiting a website too many times in one minute" sounds like something off a Monty Python sketch (if the internet had exist then!). It's hardly crime of the century."

It is arguably morally no offence at all, that's not the point. It currently carries a massively disproportionate potential court sentence, and that should have been included in the initial advice.

"I don't think anyone ever claimed the DDoS tool was magic and would hide your IP address. "

Other non-magical tools hide your IP address. I've heard, though I don't know for sure, that some of these tools were even recommended to Anonymous in advance. Presumably they were rejected in favour of one so simple even the computer-illiterate could use. But the converse of that is even computer-illiterate sys admins with a bought microsoft qualification can ID them.


Oh, and whoever is trying to hack me just now stop it, it's mildly irritating. Don't make me put down my beer.