Hi Jonathan, On Sat, 26 Jan 2013 20:52:07 +0200 (IST) Jonathan Ben Avraham <y...@tkos.co.il> wrote:
> Hi Shimi, > You are suggesting that there is no recourse to DDOS attacks, that > Israelis are fair game for foreign attacks and it is no one's business > except for the victim. > > The ISP does need to "suffer" in this case, in that the ISP has allowed an > act of war to be committed through his service. I see little difference > between this and the cab drivers who transport illegal workers from the > Palestinian territories to jobs in Israel. We require the drivers to take > some responsibility for whom they transport. > I find this comment and analogy out of line, because it touches on many loaded political topics (e.g: "Zionism"/anti-Zionism/post-Zionism, pro-Israelism/critique-of-Israel-policy/anti-Israel, open immigration/free immigration/restricted immigration, effects of foreign works on economy and unemployment, the historical context, even racism) which put together are guaranteed to devolve any civil discussion into name calling and what not. (And please don't comment on what I said). That put aside, I do not support people DDOSing the site of your associate or any other site. That's right any other site: sites that are racist, sites that call for unethical or illegal action, sites that are clearly illogical (claim that existence does not exist, or that A can be both A and not-A), etc. etc. For example, I host http://perl-begin.org/ (and other sites) on hostgator.com and if someone who thought that Perl sucked and COBOL was much better wrote a COBOL script to DDOS http://perl-begin.org/ , then all of hostgator.com (including the sites of all COBOL lovers there) will suffer. So what can he do instead? He can either E-mail the http://hostgator.com/ complaints department, saying that perl-begin.org is unethical and spreads disinformation and stands against their TOS and hostgator.com may consider to remove it (because it is a hostile site). Or alternatively if it doesn't work or if the site's admins are non-responsive, he can prepare a site called cobol-begin.org or perl-begin-sucks.org or whatever to set the record straight, as well as try to surpass perl-begin.org in popularity by using better marketing (including possibly "viral" marketing), and convince everyone that COBOL is the one true way. Yes, I made a farfetched example on purpose, and naturally there's the obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/406/ . As a result, any DDOS attempt (including against sites or pages or resources that you or I may find ridiculous and unethical) must be fought and not tolerated, because they are harm the general public as a whole. Someone here noted that he once blocked the IP of an Israeli porn site, only to later discover that the site of the municipality was hosted on the same web-site address. The Technion administrators decided to block away direct external IRC connections (I think they still allow web-based IRC and IRC-port-forwarding-over-ssh, so it could be much worse) , because they sometimes had to field off some DDOS attempt from script kiddies who took revenge upon a Technion IRC user who angered them, which took away all the (relatively) limited Technion's bandwidth and kept the Technion's net admins busy for days. So DDOS cannot be tolerated. I'm not sure Police/Interpol/etc. is the right way to recurse it (reportedly the traditional police are not very capable of fighting Internet criminal activity - at least not yet), but I hope we will see a good solution of Internet policing in our life time. See what I wrote about it inspired in part by a talk that Shachar (Shemesh) gave here: http://www.advogato.org/article/947.html (though it seems many ISPs have mostly been unaware of it or ignored it so far). Sorry for not having a more concrete advice, but you can try talking the Israeli ISP into reinstating his service using civil and polite discourse, or, if that fails, try to press charges (and hope for the best). Regards, Shlomi Fish P.S: maybe it's time to form a public Internet “cabal”. -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ Funny Anti-Terrorism Story - http://shlom.in/enemy :)-< +-- — Moses the Smiley by Shlomi Fish Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply . _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
