Rick Salutin : Yikes! Not another brave new world
These issues long have been discussed by hackers and hacktivists on the Internet. They were the context of the attacks, with AOL-Time Warner as the last straw. There's widespread contempt for what some call "the AOL lamer," says Toronto Net activist Jesse Hirsh, and agreement that there's nothing wrong with "bumrushing the mall, because these guys, the dot.coms, aren't the Internet, they're the mall, and if we shut down the mall, the Internet will still exist." Maybe the promise of the Net can then be reborn. There's a complex anger among such people, reminiscent of early industrial workers before they sorted out strategies like unions and socialism. There are older hackers, says Jesse, who have a more developed analysis; and there are the younger kids "who are like, 'Yeah, whatever, let's just fuck it up.'"
Alan Paller : Notes from the White House
"Witt Diffie stole the show with his analogy of DDoS attacks to the "breakdown of democracy." He said, "It's as if, Mr. President, you lost an election, not because people voted against you, but because someone stole votes and cast them in favor of your opponent. ... Throughout, the President asked many follow up questions and told us how he looked at the problem (like an arms race where some people develop weapons and other people develop defenses and the goal is to make the time between new weapons of your enemies and the applicable defenses as close to zero as possible)." Mr. Paller is the Director of Research at the
SANS InstituteDavid L. Sobel
"[Corporate] stalking -- that's new to me. To a certain extent, lawyers have to go through some contortions in these cases because we don't have effective, concise privacy laws that are readily applicable. [The case] underscores the need for uniform federal legislation that would create a privacy framework." Mr. Sobel is general counsel for
EPIC.
Students Against University [MP3] Censorship
"So the issue at hand is censorship. Should public universities such as Indiana University be allowed to censor what the students and faculty obtain on the internet? The university is publicly funded as well as alive due to the fact that the students themselves pay tuition, therefore, the students should have a voice in how their Internet service shall run." I have never understood why university students think that the "school as a service industry" argument won't eventually come back to haunt them. via
hit or missJason Vest quotes Bruce Sterling
"The class-resentment aspect is so obvious. It's a lot like the World Trade Organization thing, where people were
wandering around in pepper gas and people across the country
started thinking, gee, why would anyone possibly be against world trade as we know it? In this case, it's like, how could anyone possibly resent e-commerce, which is about a bunch of superrich guys with stock options up the wazoo more or less taking over the Web?"