UK Parliament to ban DoS Attacks

Ian Hill writes "It seems that the UK government is not as technologically withdrawn as you may think. This bill is an amendment to the Computer Misuse Act 1990 which bans Denial of Service attacks by name. It states that a person is guilty of an offence if they cause, or intend to cause, 'degradation, failure or other impairment of function of a computerised system.'"

Degredation of a computer system?

[restauff]

Every time I download a big movie or file from a fast server, I cause degredation to my connection, and so my computer system. How does one define at what point it is intentional, and at what point serious damage is done to the system?

slashdotted

[Jacer]

I don't think that counts, because we don't have any malicious intent. We just want to read the news which they have chosen to make available, so what if a bunch of people want to do it at once, with or without slashdot's help. But if some vengeful geek were to post a my website hosted on my cable modem in an effort to kill my connection, then I might get pissy.

Re:Degredation of a computer system?

[Boss, Pointy Haired]

In the same way that me bumping into you in a crowded street by accident does not constitute an assault, whereas me hitting you does.

How hard I hit you is kind of irrelevant, but is of course a factor in assigning punishment.

Re:Ha anyone told Rep. Howard Berman ?

[DeltaSigma]

One must wonder if this would make effective grounds for a citizen of the U.K. to sue any copyright holder's carrying out a DoS attack on them under the respective acts. Or would that stop short merely giving a P2P server based in the U.K. grounds to sue?

Man, we really need more lawyers on slashdot. People can complain about the slime they'd bring with them but we've already got so many trolls one would hardly notice the difference...

SPAM == DOS

[RichMan]

So will SPAM creators be targetable under the provisions? Massive amounts of email can easily be shown to take up CPU memory and processor time as well as all the messages consuming disk space. A small system can easily be overloaded by SPAM, so SPAM is clearly a source of degradation and impairment of function of the computer. Simply filling up an inbox on a system can prevent access to other mail and is demonstratable as denial of service.
SPAM is sent deliberatly with knowledge of the load affects.

Re:First Criminals

[ScottKin]

If the upgrades don't work it's not Microsoft's fault - the more likely scenario is that you have a perfectly-good OS from Microsoft that has been tainted by crappy 3rd-party programs, shareware, hacked/cracked warez and who-knows-what-else installed on your system.

It's something I like to call "Responsible Computing"

ScottKin

Re:First Criminals; This is *NOT* funny

[antientropic]

Read on:

the act is without authorisation if the person doing it [...] does not have the permission of the owner

If you operate a public webserver you implicitly authorise Internet users to connect to it. A slashdotting is just a group of people doing something that has been authorised by the operator of the server, even if it is a very large group of people.

Re:First Criminals

[Linux Ate My Dog!]

You are not the Internet Community. The Internet Community I know was about sharing links, about sharing resources in a new structure, of saying you attach your subnet to me and then you can route my mail through you and isn't this WWW thing cool? The Internet Community I know was about taking care of information, of wanting it to be free and to be accessible. If anything, bandwidth and bottleneck issues have been researched by the Internet Community for years -- that's exactly what P2P is all about.

You are that new Internet Community that thinks that just because the word 'Internet' is involved, all notions of reality, responsability, or reasonable, have been thrown out the window. Well, to that I say 'Bullshit', and if you don't get it, the law will, as is evidenced by the bill being discussed in the UK.

As I explained, as a user of a standard webhoster these things are not within my control. You are just blaming the victim because it is easier for you. The Internet luminaries I know would die of shame if their networks were causing their downstream users crashing problems, or throughput problems, or service problems. You are just another version of "gimmie, gimmie, gimmie".

Be reasonable. That is all I ask. The existance of the slashdot effect for the last couple of years now should be a very big pointer that something very unreasonable is happening. It's making content inaccessible while nominally trying to get people to see it. I am sorry, am I the only one that sees the utter, utter, utter ridiculousness of that notion?

Re:First Criminals; This is *NOT* funny

[peddrenth]

"somebody in UK, please write your queen about this"

Concerted attempts have been made to wield the clue-stick in the direction of parliament, however, they're still thick as pigshit when it comes to computers:

The bill, as it stands, would outlaw everything which causes somebody else's computer to slow down without the owner's permission. Read the bill if you think I'm exaggerating.

That means, anytime you use a computer for anything, you are to some extent a criminal if this gets passed. Again, our MPs need some computer experience, p.d.q. if they think this is a good solution to d.o.s.!

(p.s. side issue, but if a program of yours is insecure (even with GPL's disclaimed liability) and your program causes someone else's computer to slow down, or to divert any resources away from its normal functioning, you'll have broken the law if this piece of legislation gets passed. Software liability by the back door?)