An arrest has been made in the case of the DDoS attacks against MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, and others. The Dutch police has arrested a Dutch guy [Dutch] who has already confessed to taking part in the attacks. Most likely, he is not in any way the brains behind the operation, and I’m going out on a limb here stating that these attacks will continue nonetheless. Also, I’m not the guy. Also also, I’m wondering if there’s police anywhere looking for the people who are continuously DDoS’ing WikiLeaks.
Why would there be? Wikkileaks isn’t a multi-billion dollar corporation that either directly or indirectly fund the election campaigns of those who control those police…
Even ignoring arguments of corruption for a moment, Visa and Mastercard are organisations with a lot of resources to throw at things like this. I don’t mean buying official attention – I mean that they have some of the biggest datacenters in the world staffed with people who know a lot about security. Wikileaks doesn’t.
So, Visa and co can use their own resources to identify people involved in the attacks, and hand police a list of names. Wikileaks don’t have the same resources, and need help tracking down the offenders.
This sounds to me more like a corporate dictatorship. A privately owned corporation gives the police a “list” of people “involved in the attacks”. That would be the end of constitutionality (not necessary the end of “democracy”) if those practices became reality because those “lists” are used in Red China too…
My guess is that they more likely gave evidence. I honestly hope Wikileaks does the same. DDOSing is a combination of dumb and illegal. I actually hope it continues just enough to force the FBI (or other authorities) to re-tool themselves and develop the willpower enough to actually go after internet attackers.
Wait wait wait wait.
Wait.
Are you implying you’re on WikiLeaks side? Us on the same side of something?
Brb, re-evaluating my life choices.
1 down, 74786 to go. Good job people.
Seriously? Mastercard deserve far worse than they have gotten for withdrawing the ability to donate to wikileaks.
I use mastercard due to my bank, and hate that they have tried to prevent me from donating to such a noble cause.
While I don’t think it is a noble cause, I agree that it doesn’t seem right that they remove your ability to transfer your funds as you please. But I am sure somewhere in the fine print of your card agreement it states that they reserve the right to not initiate fund transfers to parties they identify for whatever reasons.
Think many people here are mad at the police and goverment about why police will take down this 16 year old kid when it’s Mastercard or something to do with wikileaks.
But will laugh at you (literally), or even threaten you with prosecution for given false statements, when you try to get them to handle serious digital crime cases.
With this I mean both personal and business cases.
Just look what happens if you go to dutch police saying somebody just tried to hack into your servers or when somebody is being threatened online even if the person is known.
AFAIK only thing taken semi-seriously are professional online banking spoofs. Otherwise your left to how seriously parties like ISP’s and companies involved take this stuff.
Edited 2010-12-10 01:15 UTC
What happened to Kroc’s article that was on the site this morning about the intersection of OS and politics? It was in the rss feed, and made it into google’s cache. Kroc even responded to a comment that was made on it.
I missed that. Was it any good?
Yeah it was kick ass. You should google cache it use Kroc os politics osnews as terms.
Can’t find it in the cache.
Seriously where is it???
It is one thing for people to disagree but it really seems awful for articles to be getting disappeared?
Yes it was. Well thought, many ideas, titled “Politics affect operating systems too” and, contrary to what’s been posted these last days, he made a balanced argument.
I still have it in my Opera cache. It’s really weird that it isn’t “available” anymore…
It started with “I know that there’s a number of readers who don’t like it when OSAlert covers political topics, I’m one of them.” and ended with “We ask that you combat any flood of political stories by using your interest in operating systems to find and submit news of other more technical happenings out there as described by you.”
Edited 2010-12-10 09:15 UTC
Could you pastebin it somewhere? I’d like to read it but it’s gone from google’s cache (at least I can’t find it)
I can share the file created by the browser when I save the page as “complete web page”. Until I get back home and can share it via Opera Unite, I can only send it by mail: waav<underscore>zoungla<hyphen>osnews99<at>yahoo< dot>fr
I could have put it on my Unite repository right away but I can’t access it as the company blocks these sites.
Yeah, what’s this? Censorship?
Read this, it will be up when polished:
http://www.osnews.com/permalink?453090
Well, though it sometimes definitely makes things a bit more difficult (like when Amazon dropped paycheck support), I’m glad I asked for a “bare-bones” bank account when I had to get one, with only a withdrawal card as an extra.
At the time it was mostly because of security concerns about a mean of payment where you only need some digits on the back of the card to spend money on the internet, but these rats definitely don’t deserve more.
Edited 2010-12-10 06:34 UTC
@Thom, maybe this is a interesting twist to the story:
http://tinyurl.com/2emxfyl [Dutch]
In short: Hackerspace in The Hague wants to turn the guy into a Ethical hacker.