Comment by roel_v | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roel_v | Hacker News Reader

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Meh. In a few years when we all depend on the internet even more, the law will catch up with this sort of internet petty vandalism. A couple of people will get sued and thrown into jail, joe schmoe user will be cut off from the internet the moment a ddos is detected from his ip, and people coordinating 4chan ddos'es will be tracked and arrested.

The only reason these things work today is because of a lack of urgency. I mean, when this starts happening every week, people will call for regulation, it may take a few years to get it sorted out politically, then another few before the policy catches up, and things like this won't be possible any more.

In the mean time, the damage done is relatively small. Yes it sucks for some online merchants, but let's not blow this out of proportion.

I remember 10 years ago there was a 'digital sit in' (the term 'ddos' didn't exist yet) on my at that time employer's website. There were camera crews coming in, interviewing our CEO's, it was big news. In reality, the effect was minor; averaged over the few days around it, the loss of sales was not even statistically significant.

I for one can't wait for the day when a government agency can detect that I'm initiating a DDOS from my home connection the second I start and immediately disconnect me, without a warrant, court order or trial.

Then you initiate it from the McDonald's parking lot, silly! Isn't free wireless grand?

When you drive too fast with your car, the policy will stop you and give you a fine, or take away your car on the spot. All within the bounds of the law, court-supervised. I'm not seeing the difference.

Imagine 100 years ago, when building and driving cars was practiced by enthusiasts only, how they must have lamented the prospect of not being able to drive as fast as they would like to on all roads! I'm not saying I'm looking forward to more control over the internet, but the Wild West days are over, and as the internet and computers become more fundamental in societal functioning, some form of oversight to safeguard a good functioning are inevitable.

And thank goodness nobody speeds anymore.

Seriously, if you thought enforcing traffic laws was a futile affair, just wait until the other 4 billion people on this planet get online, and the Internet becomes the medium of transmission for literally every bit of shared information on the planet. Think about it: every TV show, every film shown in theaters, every phone call, every book, magazine, and newspaper; things I'm not even thinking of because they haven't been invented yet. (While we're on the subject, every speeding ticket too.)

That day will come, sooner than you think. You seriously believe we will have the capacity to police that? I am dubious.

The point of imposing speed limits is not to 100% root out risky road behavior, it's to set a framework within which a 'generally safe enough' situation is created. Enforcing traffic laws is not a 'futile affair', I have no idea where you get that idea. Are you saying that people's behavior is not influenced by traffic laws? Are you saying that these norms do not transgress from the administrative to a collective social norm, where respect for general road safety becomes ingrained in all well-adjusted participants to that society? If so you have not reflected much on changes in social mores over the last 50 years.

You can hardly expect these things to arise overnight. I'm not sure what your point is on all the data that will be generated, transmitted and consumed. There is (in the context of this discussion) no need to track all of that, only to find out what the source is of traffic deliberately causing problems. Of course we will be able to pinpoint the origin of disturbances; when we can't any more, we'll be in Singularity territory, and then all of this is moot anyway.

This 'this is the Internet, your norms don't apply to us' nonsense needs to die already. With the internet becoming institutionalized, the same order that has arisen in meatspace will arise online. Of course there will always be the fringes where subgroups hang out in to a greater or lesser degree separate order (like the downtown biker bar in meatspace), but that doesn't prevent order from existing elsewhere.

My point is that the quantity of activity I am talking about will far exceed our ability to analyse and/or control it. Hell, that's already happened; if you don't believe me, I've got a record industry I'd like to sell you.

Take your own phase, "pinpoint the origin of disturbances." What exactly is meant by that? There are literally thousands of people all over the world who loaded up LOIC and are participating in this attack. I myself contributed simply by surfing to Mastercard.com to see what all the fuss was about, as I'm sure millions of others did as well. Who is culpable? Assuming it were technically possible, how would you go about solving this problem? I hope you'll agree that the word "pinpoint" is hopelessly inadequate here.

Anyways, the entire analogy is flawed. Policing that internet is absolutely nothing like patrolling the highways. How do you account for encryption? The fact that physical presence has no bearing on your online activities? This is unlike anything we've experienced before, and I have a hard time seeing free and democratic societies putting the genie back in the bottle. China is another story.

LOL, I'm reading this while watching the news here in the Netherlands with a clip on searches by the police at a Dutch hosting company that was hosting a website that called for the DDoS on MasterCard. The legal system is already catching up.

The question is not how to control, within hours, an attack like the one that happened on MasterCard. The matter is that when it happens again, and there is enough momentum for it, everybody participating will be logged (I mean it's generally not that hard to distinguish between a regular visitor and someone running LOIC) and prosecuted. After a while it will become known that doing things like this has consequences, and the amount of people willing to participate will fall rapidly, until there is only a core left (this core is usually hard to control, but small enough to not matter much).

Take another analogy: rioters. What is the strategy when you have a group of rioting protesters? You contains the damage (police squads to keep the mob from strategic points) and you arrest a few of the core people and prosecute them. That doesn't stop rioters, but it does impose a barrier on participation; so the size of the group of people willing to riot is small enough to be restricted to some extremists (which, despite popular opinion, is quite small).

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