Internet Ethics [was Re: [OT somewhat] DDOS attacks, where to report?]

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi Jonathan,

On Sat, 26 Jan 2013 20:52:07 +0200 (IST)
Jonathan Ben Avraham <yba at 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 .