

Richard Stallman talks online freedom in The Guardian - ra
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/17/anonymous-wikileaks-protest-amazon-mastercard

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iuguy
RMS provides a misleading definition of the term DDoS as he's adopted the view
of the use of LOIC as part of the right to protest. In his eyes the groups
aren't conducting a DDoS because they're simply protesting and they're
consenting to use the tool.

Try telling that to Amazon. Wikileaks aside, if that happened to your site
would you accept that this isn't a DDoS and is just the work of some people
exercising their right to protest? Of course not.

The source of a DDoS is mostly irrelevant (beyond being distributed), it's the
impact that matters, the success in the denial of service to others. The
people that are using LOIC aren't protesting. They're (for the most part and
certainly in the UK where the Guardian is based) committing a crime.

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doki_pen
You are not making an argument against his main point. Why is this different
then a street protest in front of a store?

The reasons, he's saying, that it shouldn't be illegal is because it requires
the consent of many individuals to work. If many individuals decide that they
have a reason to disrupt a service, then they probably do. If you argue
against this logic, then do you also argue against right to assemble? If not,
then what is the difference in your view?

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jackowayed
A big difference is that when you protest in the streets, you take up one
person's worth of space. So you need a lot of people to make an effective
street protest.

But when you have your computer support a DDoS, it's generating, say, a
thousand times more traffic than you would if you were normally visiting that
site. And you don't even have to do anything once you start it. I would argue
that if you organized 10 million people to repeatedly refresh their page on a
site, that would be ok. They're doing the same thing that people who genuinely
want to visit the site do (opening the site in a browser). It would take a ton
of people to be effective, and it requires recurring effort.

But when you use the leverage that computers give to make it take orders of
magnitude fewer people and no recurring work, it's too easy for a small group
to be disruptive. If a few thousand KKK members used Anonymous's technology to
DDoS the NAACP website, would you be ok with that?

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ra
"The Ministry of Truth has been privatised."

