What is the most practical way to maintain bitwise accuracy on a diverse set of binary data in an automated way using "diff and md5sum"?

Note that part where he was looking for an automated solution that will run itself without intervention, or a better means than hard drives...

You suggested... "Do some manual stuff using hard drives".

Right.

Mr Snowden did illegal things, but he is a hero, honestly, which could be illustrated no more clearly than your post.

Well, they did, until the Conservative government in the 1990s spawned the NZ First party and ran the government in a coalition with them, with their primary point of agreement on getting away from liberal Scandinavian-style legal approaches and into closer alignment with CanAusUS policy of "tough on crime".

It has worked rather poorly for them if you ask me.

Yes, but none of them would offer a $180,000 fine for the entire security response operation to a single individual protester.

I don't hear too many people arguing that there should be no punishment for willful DoS. Just that the response should be comparable to the offense.

And this is a problem with the US justice system, in my opinion.

"Been done since the 1980s" doesn't make it right.

Yes, but you wouldn't charge the guy who bolted the fourth bolt into the foundation of the gas chamber with genocide...

Or the guard in the back corner of the 97th train car.

Or the civilian who stopped by to offer a hand with herding unruly prisoners in what he thought was a justified act....

one...

billion...

dollars..

No, but this seems to be the argument of the GGP post.

But that's not how it works. This is how it might work in the Austrian Economics model, where it is assumed that people are perfectly rational.

They aren't.

Increasing punishments often had only marginal decreases in crime and sometimes none at all.

But we see this. And the conclusion in the English speaking world these days, paradoxically, isn't "hmmm, this isn't working", it is instead "need more!"

So we increase punishments again and still see only marginal decrease in crime.

Surveys show that immediately after the implementation of draconian punishments, crime rates drop slightly (but not linearly with the punishment), but often slowly rise back up over a period of time.

Now you've just reset the baseline, with marginal reductions in crime, and drastically harsher punishments.

This is how the United States came to be imprisoning more people per-capita than arguably any country in history (possibly setting aside Stalinist Russia and a few similar regimes), yet having one of the higher crime rates in the same population.

As was said before, what if you later catch guys 2-9?

What if it is 180,000 people?

Does the first guy who is caught owe 180,000 times his own contribution?

Asinine.

The cost of "recovering" from the DoS attack by LOIC is zero.

Let me repeat that cost. The cost they necessarily incurred in FIXING the site from this attack is zero.

There is absolutely a justification for charging him for the cost of business loss for 15 minutes, and the cost for incident responses, which should be minimal. Even at standard incident response consulting rates for good quality infosec people, you're at $10,000 per week. I'm shocked they spent 19 weeks "fixing" this issue, at those high incident-response rates. I've responded to this sort of thing before and the customer had a comprehensive report and detailed findings for under $15k much of the time.

The cost of "fixing" the site so that it was less vulnerable to LOIC is absurd. Even in court, if you break a window, you are liable to replace A WINDOW. You are not liable to replace the window with steel, or with crystal, or refurbishing the whole building to move the windows around.

Say what? Do you feel oppressed?

I'm a security consultant. I've responded to DoS attacks before, even for some large companies that you have heard of. I've never charged $183,000 to do it. The problem isolation, log correlation and report creation takes 2-4 weeks total. Nobody in their right mind charges more than about $10,000 per week for this work.

They got fleeced and some guy had to pay for it.

It's a bit like someone throwing a brick through the display window and then being found liable for the cost of a business doing a complete engineering survey and environmental impact analysis for the entire manufacturing plant.

Oh, you're falling into the Austrian Economics trap of thinking of everything as a rational system.

People aren't rational. People who are violating the law especially aren't rational.

There is ample statistics that show increases in penalties do not have a linear impact on crime on any macro scale and in many cases, increases in punishment result in no net increase in compliance.

They do, however, from a utilitarian view, impact the overall good generated by the justice system.

Therefore increasing penalties shows a diminishing return (and a rather rapid one, in my view).

I view a 1 minute DoS attack as roughly akin to orchestrating one minute of blocking the entrance to a store (or maybe multiple stores). Such an act, while punishable by a trespassing fine, probably on the order of $100-$500, the "online" equivalent of $183,000 and two years probation does not match the act, especially when he was one of only several thousand people doing the same thing.

There are a few countries in the 1960s and 1970s that adopted the policy that there is no social justification for "making an example" of someone, and that the purpose of the justice system is rehabilitation and fair application of rules, rather than vindictive retribution, catharsis for victims, or the attempt to squash crime through draconian punishments.

Those countries (Norway, Denmark, Korea, New Zealand) stand in contrast to those countries who adopted a policy of "tough on crime" during the same period (the US, Britain, France). Looking back, the crime rates in these countries diverged, and today we find those countries with liberal justice systems having seen their crime rate drop much faster than those with draconian justice policy.

Sure, this is anecdote, but I don't buy vengance or harsh deterrence as justified reasons for rolling out the stocks on the few people who are caught at a relatively rare crime.

Actually, the *location* of the capital of Sweden is 59.3294 N, 18.0686 E.

The capital is most definitely Stockholm.