You plan on having that billed to your credit card?

So while you might get buy with DDoSing someone, you're going to have a completely different world of pain brought on by a massive credit card charge.

Steal someone elses card? Okay, its fraud, which means their going to be even more pissed, and their going to have well trained fraud experts willing to go after you, private and government.

Either way, all you're doing is pissing more people off financially AND adding more charges to the list which are FAR easier to use against you. DDoSes have plenty of legal grey areas, credit card fraud on the other hand has been used to put people away when they couldn't get them for the real crime they've committed.

So the time to hit them and have the most effect is probably right around now until the last shipping day to make christmas deliveries.

They may have better luck in a week.

But, I'm guessing that the increased infrastructure to support the prepaid EC2 and S3 machines and extra standard accounts will buffer plenty over their normal yearly rush as well. AWS accounts probably don't experience the same 'christmas rush'

But to do anything noticeable you'd either have to hit a lot of them or hit big ones, either way by the time you're done you're back to trying to DDoS Amazon's infrastructure en masse again.

Pardon my ignorance of the Icelandic economy, but is Visa REALLY going to be that upset if they can't do business there? What do they do?

I love when I learn completely unrelated and seemingly useless facts from slashdot references.

Thats a great example, totally would have missed it otherwise.

Now that you've pointed out how easy it is on routers to the ignorant public, expect someone to pick this up and publish it as the next big 'OMG INTRAWEB IN DAGNER!$' entry that like the regular 'OMG no IPv4 left' we've been seeing for the last 10 years.

You, I, and every other person who's done any significant amount of sys or net admin work knows there are reasons why weak/well known accounts in these cases aren't 'OMG SCARY', but those details are left out by the douche bag blogger who thinks what he does makes him/her a journalist.

As you clearly pointed out the fact that the entire world now knows about this changes absolutely nothing is irrelevant. Its all about the ZOMG factor, PageRank and ad impressions my friend.

Right up until the algorithm for generating the password leaks and a method to extract the serial number over the network is found.

These may seem unlikely, but with access to the machine someone can dump the software for someone else to reverse engineer. Its harder but not that hard for someone who REALLY wants to get in.

The reality of it is however, these things aren't sitting on a network that people who aren't allowed to talk to it ANYWAY are roaming around.

Yes, I do.

I'm paranoid about plenty of things, but that isn't one of them.

They want my eyeballs on their ads and I don't really do anything to piss them off, in exchange my account works.

Of course, I also manage my 'cloud' accounts using software that utilizes local caching for everything, so if they turn off my account tomorrow, still no big deal, technically I do have a backup.

When have you really seen a CLEAR case of someone being 'cut off' for no apparent reason? I never have. I've seen plenty of times when people were cut off for possibly 'unjust' reasons in my opinion, but I've never seen anyone cut off and said 'wow, I never saw that one coming'. You can usually pinpoint the reasons by just listening to the person bitching about being cut off, it generally becomes clear pretty quickly they were doing something that was clearly going to not make the service provider happy or might cause them problems they don't want to deal with.

but it would involve transparent synchronization between all your devices, and that's a problem nobody's adequately solved. But if you had transparent synchronization, you would be in control of your data.

False.

I've been able to adequately sync my calanders, email and documents across multiple machines for years, it just requires me running my own servers to do so.

Now, 'the cloud' really just translates to 'some company running servers for you'.

Email via imap has been this way for years, pop3 as well sort of if you leave messages on the server. Contacts and Calanders? Exchange has done it for god knows how long now and I can still run my own exchange server or let someone else do it in the cloud.

'The Cloud' is not new or different. Software is.

More and more software is finally starting to USE the standard protocols we have for this things so we get more selection of client software, but none of it is 'new' by any sane sense of the word. The 'new' part is that a lot of people stopped trying to invent their own methods to do it.

Google and Apple have helped this tremendously by using the standard protocols themselves and using theirs size and market control to actually force others into moving that direction too. This is one of those rare times when the companies own best interests are actually favorable to us. Enjoy it while it lasts.

You can however, create your own cloud with freely available software, but turning it into something as smooth and well presented as say Google Apps is another story because they have an entire staff of people making sure it works right because THATS WHAT THEY DO.

You don't do it yourself because you probably have other things that you need to do that are more important than maintaining your own server(s) just to get some synchronization. I maintained my own servers until Google AFYD started to really kick ass, now? I pay Google for the privilege of not having to bother with my own machines. I pay in both money tendered and customizability lost, but for me, the trade off is worth it. If I spend even 1 day a year working on my own 'servers' its already cost me more than the multiple domain names and my entire families (all living relations) GAFYD account.

My time is simply far too valuable and important to me to spend it dicking around with all this crap, its cheaper for me to pay someone else when all costs are considered.

Your time may be worth less than mine so it might make sense for you to do it yourself, but not for me.

Wow, you pretty much said the equivalent of "Just look at how she was dressed, she was asking to be raped." or "All people should expect to get ripped off when purchasing a product, therefore we should not hold the seller responsible."

No, what he said is that any woman OR MAN that walks into the cell block of death row at a major prison full of rapists with all the cells unlocked, while naked with a big sign saying 'fuck me in the ass' deserves to get raped, and they do.

Or

All people buying stereo equipment from the car trunk of some random stranger in an alley deserves to get ripped off.

Facebook's reputation is well known. If you date a known rapist, you should expect to get rapped or your an idiot. If you buy from a known thief/scammer than you deserve to get ripped off. If you put your data on Facebook, then you deserve the consequences for doing so.

For the record, you are NOT Facebook's customer, you are their product. Why do you think its FREE?.

Suddenly, people become beholden to Facebook's rules, which they have no say over.

When did facebook become the government mandated place to store your data?

They have absolutely 0 control over my data because they don't have any of my data. Its not hard really, if you deal with a shitty company you get shitty results. You just don't deal with shitty companies ESPECIALLY WHEN THEY ARE KNOWN TO BE SHITTY COMPANIES.

Anyone who looses data due to something at facebook more or less deserves to lose their data.

Terrorism is about causing fear to get your way.

That doesn't imply violence, but violence is an easy way to achieve fear.

Threatening to force someone out of their job and into financial hardship is just as much terrorism as shooting their mother, though the later is far more likely to get a response than the first, both are still terrorism even though one contains no violence.

Its pretty easy to argue that Assange is a terrorist as he clearly is attempting to put fear into 'corrupt organizations' as he deems them.

No, he's not flying planes into buildings or blowing them up or by attacking Amazon/Visa/Paypal himself, but he is most certainly attempting to use fear to get people to change, thus the very definition of terrorism applies to him.

It doesn't matter if you agree with him or disagree with him, and you don't get to qualify terrorism with your own special terms.

I'm sure you throw censorship out anytime someone does something where you don't get your way even though it would be considered the extreme fringes of censorship, now you get to see what its like on the other side.

The only thing gleened from this is that he likes to be in the middle of controversy.

Thats not a good thing, but it does show his motives.

he sometimes does the right thing

Everyone will SOMETIMES do the right thing if it happens to fit their motives of the time, thats not even a little bit impressive.

Its impressive when people do the right thing even when it completely contradicts their own personal agenda. Neither Michael Moore nor Jullian Assange fall into this category. Everything they do is for personal gain, attention and notoriety, the fact that we occasionally get let in on some secret is just a side effect, not the intended consequence of their actions.

And this act to bail a Reporter out of jail and protect the Right to a Free Press is also very good.

Jullian Assange is not a fucking reporter, stop pretending he is. He's a blowhard attention whore he likes to bring up controversial subjects in order to draw attention to himself. Thats it.

Michael Moore is not doing this for 'the good of the world' or 'freedom of the press' he's doing it because this gives him a massive media bonus in a time when most people forgot he existed. If you think this is anything other than self serving, you're an idiot.

Without wikileaks we wouldn't know that US Soldiers were killing innocent journalists and children (the Pentagon denied the event happened).

Uhm, its a war, I'm fully aware that there are some really shitty unintended casualties in war. If you didn't know this, you're an idiot who needs to educate himself a little. Nothing learned from him was eye opening or shocking once you pulled the spin off it and removed the propaganda.

That Hillary Clinton was stealing credit card numbers from foreign diplomats.

Holy shit, we spy on people? I never knew that. Again, no shit Sherlock.

The content of the ACTA treaty to make backing-up your CDs or DVDs or MP3s and illegal act.

Finally a pseudo valid point.

Lets be realistic, once you remove his own personal brand of controversy from it, Wikileaks doesn't really publish anything spectacular that often and the last two leaks have been major disappointments compared to their hype.

You paint these two men like heros but they are nothing more than self serving media whores. Treat them as such.

100% untraceable implies no tracability.

I most certainly can trace a call back to some point of origin, even if that point of origin is a compromised SIP server.

So, when my trace gets to your SIP server and you can't tell me who did it, I can just assume you did it and be done with it.

I might be right, I'm probably wrong, but either way, it'll stop. You may end up paying the price (in both SIP costs and fines/jailtime) for running a shoddy server, but either way, it will stop.