I don't know about being afraid. I mean, look at how spectacularly it backfired. Intel removed advertising, then realized their mistake and put it back, and on top of that partnered with Sarkeesian's Feminist Frequency and spent $300m on diversity. All the other advertisers, like Mercedes, changed their minds within days.

There was a lot of doxxing I suppose.

Are there any examples of US companies being able to steal domain names away from foreigners using US courts? I'm not aware of any but your scenario is somewhat plausible, but on the other hand if it happened it could easily cause the rest of the world to ignore US forced changes to DNS. The US doesn't want control of the internet to be taken away from it, especially since it would probably be given to the UN, so it has to play nice.

Best to avoid .com and other "universal but really US" TLDs.

GamerGate, it's about ethics in journalism. That's why it started with the defence of the most unethical journalist of the lot.

Oh, and the copy-pasta. Let's not forget that.

So in the space of a few hours you have gone for vague speculation that one particular comment she allowed might possibly have got her fired, to it being a hard fact that can be used to make your argument. Kinda like how all the "facts" GamerGate was based on were actually just innuendo and outright lies, but somehow became fact in the minds of it supporters.

The policy updates were minor classifications of existing rules. The articles stopped when GanerGate died down. The companies conned into cutting advertising went back to those sites when they realised what has happened and got even more negative publicity.

The lasting legacy of GanerGate is that Anita Sarkeesian is world famous and gets far more coverage than she otherwise would have, and some people have been investigated by the FBI. Oh, and the guy who kicked it all off has a restraining order preventing him harassing Quinn.

Great victory guys. You are filling no-one but yourselves. We've all read the IRC logs. Give it up.

I was there in the early days of the internet, and the BBS systems before. You aren't the same people who were around then. Maybe you have changed. Back then people weren't bent on making forums into cess pools. Even the trolls on Usenet were of a higher standard.

What really gets me is the war on free speech. While claiming to support it, the trolls keep telling us that there is "no right to be offended". There is, it's called free speech. Everyone has the right to express their disgust with you, and take whatever measures they like in response. If Reddit or any other site doesn't owe you a soapbox, you can't stifle their freedom to condemn you. Same with GamerGate trying to silence critics and web sites it doesn't like.

The level of organisation is shocking too. This is way more than anything the GNAA did. We see the same tactics spooks use, right out of the Snowden leaks. It's not just trolling for fun any more, it's people fighting an imaginary war.

Unfortunately that won't stop people trying to take it off you if they want it. I get occasional offers/demands for some of my domains, for example.

It helps to be outside the US, then you can just ignore 99% of the legal threats. Make sure to avoid using a US based domain registrar, so that US courts can't force them to hand the domain over with a default judgement. Make sure you never hint at or imply you might be willing to sell. Sometimes they will offer you insane amounts of money in the hope you will bite, but it's a trap. Once you express interest they will claim you are cybersquatting and try to use the dispute resolution system to take control.

Yep, the GCHQ/NSA shills are hard at work on sites like Slashdot. They are a bit shit at their jobs though, so it's usually obvious who they are.

That's one way of looking at it. Personally I think their efforts to confuse people were pathetic, the biggest problem is that people are just too stupid to participate in democracy.

Tor does in fact mask such traffic. It randomly merges and splits packets, adding in random padding data too, and small random delays. It is designed to prevent just such packet tracing, even if multiple nodes along the way are compromised.

To clarify, it was illegal for a variety of reasons, including interception of legally protected communications (e.g. with lawyers and members of Parliament) and because there was no authorization to spy on UK groups for this purpose.

Unfortunately encryption only hides the message content, not the metadata. As we have seen, metadata is often worse (from a privacy point of view) than the actual data, especially for a charity like Amnesty that needs to communicate with lawyers and MPs.

This sort of subjective law is actually quite common in Common Law countries, and seems to work reasonably well in practice. There are typically certain requirements, such as having to show actual harm took place (psychologist's report etc.) which means mere offence isn't enough. The prosecution would have to show, for example, that someone deliberately set out to harm a vulnerable individual.

There have been cases were people with existing mental illnesses have been driven to suicide. The people harassing them knew what they were doing. Society has an interest in protecting people from that kind of thing, because it's not a free speech issue. Harassment isn't free speech, it isn't necessary to allow it in order to allow full freedom to express unpopular ideas.

Some of them did. The people worst affected, particularly by unemployment, are the young ones who were only children or not even born when that stuff was going on.

The Greek government has a point. The only way out is for the Greek economy to reform and grow. Endless grinding austerity will just cause another revolution. The first one was peaceful, but if it fails the next one won't be. What do young, angry Greeks have to lose?