The Electronic Disturbance Theater and Electronic Civil Disobedience (1998) | Hacker News Reader

The Electronic Disturbance Theater and Electronic Civil Disobedience (1998)

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38 pointsjruohonen10 comments

"The Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) is a small group of ..." PEOPLE WHO WRITE IN GIANT FRICKING WALLS OF TEXT.

Seriously, I took one look at the EDT site, got as far as that quote, and thought that no normal/sane human being would want to read that mess ... so I didn't either.

I guess it explains the lack of other comments. EDT people, if you have something to tell the world, maybe consider writing it for an audience of someone besides yourself (and even then ... do you people seriously like writing like this ... really?)

Note that this is a document from 28 years ago, not a current movement.

Basically, these were people who were experimenting with DDoS for political change.

In two comments, a clear illustration of how different the internet has become, when compared to the 90s. People actually read content that was longer than 140 chars. And if it sounded subversive, it would quickly spread worldwide - because that was what we were all there for. Counter-culture, hacktivism, long rants... and yeah, cats, I guess. The common denominator? Well, porn, of course.

28 years later, DDoSing modern attention spans with "walls of text"...

Yeah. "Walls of text" that -somehow- fit on three US Letter-sized pages.

In regards to TFA, the story of the Mexican Government's countermeasures is quite neat. Using the poor control of pop-up windows to making using the flooding computer somewhere between extremely annoying and impractical to use is clever.

If only present-day webmasters could do something so simple to disrupt the DDoS bots run in service of the LLM Industry...

Google is returning poisoned responses to some, I'm sure we can get more creative than that.

Based on what I've read from many sysadmins, returning "poisoned" data does approximately nothing to disrupt the DDoS bots. Until the Infinite Money Spigot gets shut off, few of the folks who are ultimately shoveling that data into their LLM-production systems are going to give it a detailed inspection.

And from what I've heard, getting "clever" causes the bots to get even more aggressive. Either you feed them junk and pay the money for the massive amounts of wasted CPU and bandwidth, [0] or cut off your site from a great many -but not all!- bots and many humans by blocking traffic from fairly huge chunks of the Internet.

[0] ...and -depending on how little CPU and bandwidth you can pay for- maybe end up with a site that's largely useless for humans...

I clicked the link, expecting an impenetrable 25 page tract or something, but instead it's a mere 6 paragraphs and not even contiguous paragraphs at that.

Normal people should be able to read 3 pages of text without having a melt down.

10-20 years ago, I’d fully agree.

Unfortunately, the normal people largely got replaced by 3 year olds that are >5ft tall and look like adults.

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