

Rebuttal: LulzSec Ups The Ante - rl1987
http://attrition.org/security/rebuttal/rebuttal-lulzsec_ups_the_ante.html

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wccrawford
This article highlights 2 things for me:

1) White text on black is really hard to read. I had to edit the style to read
it comfortably.

2) I now get why I don't like Twitter. It's impossible to have a conversation
or debate on it. This post was a direct result of that impossibility.

~~~
bdhe
_I now get why I don't like Twitter. It's impossible to have a conversation or
debate on it. This post was a direct result of that impossibility._

Slightly OT, but the New Yorker recently profiled Jarod Lanier[1] where he
critiques social networking sites as _dehumanizing and designed to encourage
shallow-interactions_. There are also a lot more interesting viewpoints
including calling Wikipedia a _triumph of "intellectual mob rule"_. I would
highly recommend the article as a "Devil's advocate" sorta reading, which is
unfortunately behind a paywall[2].

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier>

[2]
[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/07/11/110711fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/07/11/110711fa_fact_kahn?currentPage=all)

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phuff
Does anybody else think that the kitchen table analogy totally stands? I have
things in my house that contain a significant number of other people's
personal information in them. I don't lock them in an extra protected safe in
my house because I consider my house to be (relatively) secure by both
convention and practice. If somebody were to forcibly enter my house and steal
that information and publish it on the internet it would be breaking and
entering, regardless of any overarching political point that person was trying
to make.

It would also be a huge invasion of my personal privacy which to me seems like
something only a jerk would do.

I'm not trying to analogize these things to Anonymous or LulzSec, but I am
saying I don't think these arguments for their motives pass any kind of
logical test.

~~~
hudicris
To make the analogy more fair, let's say your house (filled with people's
personal information) had an unlocked secret entrance way, even though many
lock experts say that unlocked entrance ways are generally unsafe. People may
or may not be going into your house everyday while you're gone, and using that
personal information while everyone remains blissfully unaware. One day,
someone comes in and takes all the personal information and publishes it to
show how insecure it is.

Yes, the person breaking in may be a jerk, but maybe people will put locks on
their doors now.

~~~
phuff
I don't think that physical locks are much more secure than a reasonably
secured apache instance, which is definitely still exploitable, just like the
locks on my door are, which I guess is part of why I think saying the analogy
to papers on my kitchen table doesn't work rubs me the wrong way. It's
_totally_ analagous.

There wouldn't be any rebuttal or arguing that LulzSec's work is actually good
because it's going to increase security if we were talking about physical
break ins to real buildings, even though there are many well known attack
vectors on most modern locks.

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Zarathust
What I find particularly striking in this is that attrition.org has been
strongly tied to the antisec movement in the past. This leads me to think that
the previous "doxing" or disclosure of lulzsec members identities were either
staged or a rogue incident. Older antisec groups then appears to be more
involved in this recent lulzsec surge

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aw3c2
This is not related to today's events but an older article.

