Operation Payback Shuts Down IFPI Site 376
newtley writes "Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music's main IFPI (International Federation of Phonographic Industry) website is down. Not coincidentally, there's an Operation Payback post addressing the Pirate Bay crew's lost sentencing appeal: 'Dear IFPI, MAFIAA and other parasites, The recent verdict in the Swedish Appeal Court (ThePirateBay spectrial) provoked this statement from Operation: Payback. We emphasize our statement with a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack aimed at the IFPI's website.'"
Once again we prove... (Score:2, Troll)
Re:Once again we prove... (Score:5, Insightful)
Whether Anonymous is right or wrong is for you to decide. But under either case, you don't mess with them.
What a utterly stupid statement. That's justification for doing nothing about bad behavior by any individual or organization simply because they engage in bad behavior, and those who engage in bad behavior are not to be messed with.
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That is presuming that what Anonymous is doing is bad. not all will agree
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I'm sure they're shaking in their boots. I mean, Anonymous went and took out a website that no one visits. What will they do now? How will they bribe politicians without ifpi.org?
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Agreed. While I don't always approve of the things Anonymous does (such as what they did to Boxxy), you can't deny that they know how to get things done.
Seriously, am I the only who's thought about what we could do if we could get get Anonymous to focus on digging up information on corrupt politicians / cops / other government employees?
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If /b/tards could be effectual, they wouldn't be /b/tards. Instead, we'll be subjected to their normal blather of incoherent teenage rage. In other times, they would be painting anarchy symbols on overpasses. These days, they take down web sites nobody cares about, so at least they've been sectioned off to a place where they do less damage.
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Really? How did the "Great Tumblr Takedown" go? Oh that's right, it backfired.
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Umm, DDoS is not that difficult, all you need is a botnet. To get a botnet you need to engage in some pretty evil and destructive behavior (infecting people's computers on a large scale). Nothing worthy of respect, either from technical or from moral standpoint. Common sense is questionable too since temporarily shutting down someone's website will not change absolutely anything in any positive way.
What the hell is the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
I bet 99% of people on either side of this issue have never been to ifpi.org, what exactly is this supposed to accomplish?
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If your side seems powerless and morale is low, a symbolic victory is better than none at all.
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Exactly, if they really wanted to hurt them, wouldn't an attack on something that would cost them real money (like a RIAA-blessed streaming music service) be more damaging?
Re:What the hell is the point? (Score:5, Funny)
Exactly, if they really wanted to hurt them, wouldn't an attack on something that would cost them real money (like a RIAA-blessed streaming music service) be more damaging?
I got a better idea, we need to hit them financially. Let's distribute pirated copies of their movies for free, using P2P. Just think, if we can get 1 million people to download their movies, that means they will have lost $20 million in sales, since everyone knows that every time a movie is pirated, it equals exactly one lost sale. That would show them.
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To piss them off.
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"For example, the Patriots didn't win America's freedom by going up against the Redcoats in the field, they won it by temporarily occupying remote British farmhouses of zero strategic value."
My revision of history must be out of date, it says the Americans got routinely pounded in the field until they decided they needed to be a professional army and brought in foreign advisors. I suppose it's cleaner to leave out the Prussians and the French but leaving out all the major engagements seems a bit silly.
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And your sarcasm detector is broken. Read the second paragraph.
And who noticed? (Score:2)
So, the IFPI's site got shut down... and how many people noticed and cared? I know I've visited it a few times (in a "know your enemy" context) but I would imagine this isn't going to affect any of the major players in the copyright troubles or the general public. I guess it is kind of like picketing somewhere that no one really wants or needs to visit.
While I would not wish to recommend or encourage illegal action, it is possible that targeting (lawful) content distributors would be more appropriate and ha
terrorists (Score:2)
Don't listen to, or view recorded media? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Don't listen to, or view recorded media? (Score:5, Insightful)
The only way to fix things is to: 1) make corporate lobbying illegal and put all politicians' dealings in the open, and 2) perform an evidence-based reform of copyright law to restore it to a reasonable length and scope.
In doing those things, a lot that is wrong with America will automatically correct itself. Alas, things may already be beyond repair...
Re:Don't listen to, or view recorded media? (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, if we stop buying their media, they'll simply assume we're stealing it anyways because there is *no way* that their profits should ever shrink. It is the best option and the easiest to implement though and it's the method I've been using for quite some time already.
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The people who create the entertainment that everyone is ripping off won't notice when there are no longer thousands of web sites dedicated to ripping off those works?
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IT, HR, PR, Legal and the C*s don't communicate with each other. PR will continue to gripe about "Pirates", regardless of whether or not they exist. The Legal dept will continue to go after targets no matter how responsible they are for things. The C*s will blame everyone except themselves for lower sales, because anything else would be their fault, and they'd get the boot and have to take their golden parachute to the ground, rather than staying in the money making role.
Upton Sinclair: "It is d
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It's a lovely thought but "share your creations in public or over the internet" is what we have on YouTube, and quite frankly I've seen enough "America's Funniest/Stupidest/Most Ridiculous/Embarassing" home videos. ;-)
The truth is, even though the Internet supposedly brought the "power to the people" in terms of distribution, it really hasn't. It's turned into a way for the big companies to market even more. For every Justin Bieber who makes it from YouTube to known artist, there are 100,000's of thous
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People also got their heads beat in by "the man".
Of course using your analogy, in this case they found some bureaucrats office in some department no one has ever heard of...
I highly doubt anyone on either side visited this site on any kind of regular basis. I doubt even further that either side really cares that it is down.
Truth is, the media industry is hated by enough people (geeks in particular) that I'd be surprised if the real assets weren't near impervious to this kind of attack.
Yes it serves a purpose (Score:4, Insightful)
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What the companies and politicians know, and piracy apologists are repeatedly failing to grasp, is that it doesn't matter how the websites function.
If the end result of visiting a certain URL is that the visitor is assisted in acquiring copyrighted content without the permission of the copyright holder, and the site at said URL has been designed with that goal in mind, then it really doesn't matter how many iframes and trackerless torrents and mere links and so forth there are.
The end result is the same. T
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If you think that the piracy apologists are bad, just look at folks like you that will go to any length to justify placing the blame on the middle man, that doesn't even possess or transmit the copyrighted materials in the first place. And you end up with all sorts of constitutional problems in doing so. Violations of due process and privacy a
protest? (Score:2, Insightful)
not uncommon (Score:2, Insightful)
Parasites? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Beyond that people, in the US atleast, aren't educated in rhetoric, logic or debate. Which tends to make such discussions a waste of time as the only way of winning an audience like that is to scar
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Take a poll of the American/Swedish/European/World population. See how many can tell you one thing (aside from sword-fighting ninjas) about RMS and how many can tell you one thing about file-sharing or Anonymous. We all know the number will weigh heavily in favor of the latter. People remember Napoleon, not De Tocqueville.
they were MS-DOS'd (Score:2)
truly, they were multiply-sourced in the DOS attack.
MSDOS was finally good for something. anyone got a torrent for the latest release?
This will work about as well as all the others (Score:3, Insightful)
A DOS attack! That'll show 'em!
A bunch of internet vigilantes perform a Denial-of-Access-to-Information Attack in an attempt to get a court judgement in another country overturned in the vain hopes that the majority of people won't view them as little more than spoiled brat troublemakers ...
You know, MLK and his people braved fire-hoses, dogs and shotguns at close range.
The worst you guys have is running out of Mountain Dew and porn.
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I'd rather face angry dogs, than run out of porn...
Talk about hell...
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What government are you referring to? The Pirate Bay guys were convicted in Sweden.
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The Pirate Bay is not the Pirate Party is not "Anonymous" - I'm guessing, but I assume jdpars is talking about "Anonymous" - a multinational "mob."
Even if they could appeal to some government function, they can't - unless some global government came about and I missed the memo.
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Y'know what? It may be called "out of line" by someone, but I'd say the O:P operations are the modern-day equivalent of a lunch counter sit-in, or Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat.
We need more people doing this, not less.
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And if it happened to YOU because someone doesn't agree with your opinion. No matter what the topic? Is it still ok?
Re:Well, somebody's showing... (Score:5, Insightful)
It was "illegal" for those who were participating in lunch counter sit-ins.
The point was, the law was wrong, not the people.
The same is true today. The problem is with the MafiAA types, not the people doing the protesting.
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themselves the curtain of non-violent protests
It is a non-violent protest, though.
but it's still an act of agression
Alternate suggestions? The government is practically bowing down to rich corporations. What are some ways that you could get the government to listen to you without being 'aggressive' over extremely rich corporations? They may not be doing much, but at least it's something.
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Y'know what? It may be called "out of line" by someone, but I'd say the O:P operations are the modern-day equivalent of a lunch counter sit-in, or Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat.
Not even close. This is more a bunch of babies pissed they missed nap time, then any sort of civil disobedience ala Rosa Parks/MLK.
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Since when is agressive attack equivelent to non-vilent protest? You seem to be quite confused about the methods used in those events, or confused by what a DDoS attack is.
What would be similar is if a bunch of individuals quietly sat down in the lobby of the IFPI and simply refused to move. Attacking them is the opposite of what Rosa Parks or the Greensboro 4 did.
Re:Well, somebody's showing... (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure but DDOS isn't the correct protest, TAX is. (Score:4, Interesting)
Rather than trying to crash the server, Anonymous should be building a targeted spider of all the sites related to the offender. These sites should be carefully and constantly farmed of their content with due care to make sure the site isn't ever actually brought down.
So instead of a DOS, you levy a TAX. Yes, tax the site, as in "that was a very taxing experience".
There are several important results of TAXing a site.
(1) bandwidth charges go up, so there is TAXing and taxing both.
(2) You are never really stepping over the line legally because you didn't "interfere" with their business.
(3) You have an affront-in-depth because you can TAX the core site, and all the accomplice sites. So not just IPFI but Sony Music, and all thier ilk.
(4) The each TAX collector gets the best use of their action.
(5) you are likely wearing out the gear a little too.
So, to use the physical analogy, take all your sit-in participants and, instead of "blocking the door" you make a velvet rope maze of sitters that complicit actors would have to navigate.
Think of it this way... If you block the door to a bank you will get rousted by the man. If you get 1000 people to go to the bank, stand quietly in line, and when they reach the teller have them perform a cash-only or information-only transaction (e.g. "can I get change for a ten?" "I need to check my balance.") Go get a brochure, read it, then go ask a question in person or on the toll-free number like "This says the interest rate is good for six months. Does that start on the day I open an account, the end of the month I open the account, or the start of the month I open the account?", get the answer, thank the support guy and hang up.
So sure, fill out forms; File polite inquiries, visit their sponsors and members; fill out forms and file polite inquiries.
If brochures are available, ask for one. Recommend they contact a friend. Recommend they contact an enemy. Ask for more information by every possible venue to every reasonable destination.
Get their site to _vomit_ _up_ as much bandwidth and postage. Buy one share. Get the actual share certificate printed up and mailed to you. Then sell the share to your friend for a loss. Make sure he gets his share certificate as well. Buy his share for a loss on the same day and get your new certificate. (best done in a bg circle not just two guys. 8-)
A reject connect attempt is cheap compared to actually fetching a web page or sending out an email that was composed by a support-desk guy, or even a support desk automation.
Find business reply coupons and _use_ them.
At first it isn't as splashy, but you know what, when they run to their government buddies and whine "but they are using our free services exactly as offered" their buddies will probably laugh.
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How are they wrong? Is it because they're taking action (even what little action they are doing counts) against a corrupt government? Just because something is illegal that doesn't mean it's wrong. There may be no other choice at this point.
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I'll grant that they are breaking the law, but they are doing it to protest that the law is unjust.
If you don't like their approach, suggest an alternative, that has any chance of success. (And define success.)
I don't like what they're doing, but I dislike it less than I dislike the corrupt legal systems that they are protesting. (OTOH, let's not be confused. It's just a protest. It's not anything that's very effective.)
The "effective" measures that I can think of are all much more illegal, and all requ
yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
the 'peaceful resolution' you speak of, has no effect. people elected someone on various premises, and he fulfilled maybe one out of a few dozen. people elected representatives on various issues, yet they set out to make laws totally against the will of public. they have even gone the extra mile of bringing out laws with NO transparency and democratic process, in the form of acta.
then there is the 'noncriminal', legal ways of doing that eh ? like, battling them in courts, where they have multiples of money to win over you ?
excuse me but what you speak of can only work in an ideal world.
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like, battling them in courts, where they have multiples of money to win over you ?
Like, not buying their music? Like getting voters to care enough about copyright law that it gets changed (because let's face it, most people don't care about copyright law)?
If you're going to get into a fight over this, you should pick a fight that you can win. Like the non-violent methods of MLK, who broke the law in a way that brought attention and public opinion over to their side. Starting a Pirate Bay might possibly be considered that. Doing a vengeful DDOS does not do that. It shows that in fact, t
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Here's a little gem for you:
Ethics is not black and white, and no ethics system that is more inherently "right" than another.
"Unless you don't actually care about your ethics." translates to "unless you subscribe to an ethical system incompatible to mine."
Re:yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
Like getting voters to care enough about copyright law that it gets changed (because let's face it, most people don't care about copyright law)?
i wont even comment on that. i think anyone with little insight would have realized by now that with this capitalist economic system and the current democratic election process, there is no way that people's interests can overcome private interests due to control of those interests on all aspects of life in the economic part. like mass media, donations and so on.
Like, not buying their music?
and, that's the naive bit. your not buying music will not have effect, because they have heaps of cash signing over any band you are buying now. to refuse them, that band has to have a lot of principles, and choose to stay small, or, have a lot of willpower and break out of it like radiohead.
and the above situation does not even take into account the fact that those interests can manufacture laws or conditions that will render your indie music outlets ineffective, like killing network neutrality and asking them big money for transit.
If you're going to get into a fight over this, you should pick a fight that you can win. Like the non-violent methods of MLK, who broke the law in a way that brought attention and public opinion over to their side. Starting a Pirate Bay might possibly be considered that. Doing a vengeful DDOS does not do that. It shows that in fact, those who oppose copyright really are unethical criminals who only want the law changed so they can do unethical things more easily.
you are only saying this, because you dont know enough about history, especially on the subject you speak of.
mlks non violent methods were ENTIRELY organized violation of existing laws. flat out. there were segregation laws, and they have contested those laws, they DISOBEYED them, in an organized manner. so much that, at a point even mlk has exclaimed that, their organization moved like a military structure, very efficiently.
and that only succeeded, because they were moving from states that did not have those laws, and the federal government, a stronger entity than those states, were sympathetic to them in general.
had the federal government been the party observing those laws, things would turn out different, and the nonviolent VIOLATION of law by disobedience, would not succeed. history is filled with such cases.
please dont talk on matters on which you do not have sufficient information, like this assumption of yours regarding 'legal' nonviolent methods of mlk.
If you fight unethically, then even if you win, you find the victory isn't worth winning. Unless you don't actually care about your ethics.
there is no 'ethical' fighting against an oppressor. excuse me, but oppressors are called oppressors, exactly because they do not provide you any acceptable means to refuse their oppression.
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Like the non-violent methods of MLK, who broke the law in a way that brought attention and public opinion over to their side.
the way mlk broke the law, in the organized, military-grade systematic manner, is ILLEGAL. those who do it, are jailed.
the only reason it worked for the organization of mlk, is that they were based in states that supported them, and organized and moved in from there to the states who were segregating. at one point, they even had $1 m budget to spend in their protests and organizations, thanks to the donations collected from the churches, for the VERY objective of DISOBEYING the law in an organized, syste
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There's also the little fact that at those times the ownership of the media was much less centralized, and editors would print an interesting story, even if it went against normal policy. Readers had choice.
Today, even local papers are parts of a media chain, and editors aren't allowed to print something against company policy, interesting or not, or they'll be fired. (Also Fox news recently won a case based on it's right to intentionally lie to people about what the truth was. *None* of the other media c
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I still fail to see any violence.
You seem to be thinking I'm saying something I am not.
Stop reading behind the lines, there's nothing there. I mean exactly what I wrote, and nothing more. There is simply no act of violence.
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Your business place gets it's lobby inhabited by 200 people completing a non-violent sit in, which hampers customers and employees from doing business. Loss of business means loss of income to pay your salary if you work for them. Until the sit in ends, you're out of work. You now have no income to feed your family. Non-violent enough for you?
Thousands of people take to the streets to participate in a non-violent march against your company's practices; loss of reputation puts customers off doing business wi
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I didn't say it wasn't illegal. Anything can be illegal, you just have to pass a law. In some countries, it's illegal to wear a beard, or illegal to eat non-halal.
What I said is that it's non-violent. No-one is hurt, nothing is damaged, the only harm that is done is much the same harm as every form of legal protest does- loss of business. Notably, neither of your two quotes called it an act of violence.
To call it "violent" is a nakedly political statement, and completely false.
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I fail to see the point of your argument. I pointed out that ddos attacks cause business's lose money/profit. Servers are a business tool, just like a fax and a phone. You lose the ability to use it, you lose the ability to conduct business.
Your post, if you want to call it that. Had nothing to do with the loss of income. Your point is about free merchandise. Guess what, I'm not giving away free merchandise with my server. Your friendly ddos attack took my server off line. I'm losing money, and I have to l
Re:yeah (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yea, I agree that a DDOS is ridiculous.
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Like, not buying their music?
Which does nothing. Which scenario do you think RandomMediaExec is going to think of first when the album doesn't sell well:
A) The album sucked
B) People are taking a principled stand against our actions
C) ZOMG!!!!111!11 RAMPANT PIRACY!!!111!! EVERYONE WHO DIDN"T BUY THE ALBUM MUST BE A PIRATE!!!111
Most media executives go with option C even though the main cause may be A or B. Every drop in sales to them is correspondent to an increase in "piracy" in their statistical games.
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Ultimately the right solution of course is try to get the companies to change the business model.
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In particular, nowadays, e-book piracy is emerging. I really hope that the same response that the music industry did to piracy won't happen this time.
Doing RIAA's bidding! (Score:3, Interesting)
then there is the 'noncriminal', legal ways of doing that eh ? like, battling them in courts, where they have multiples of money to win over you ? excuse me but what you speak of can only work in an ideal world.
I suspect that just like there are provocateurs sent by the police in peaceful anti-globalizing demonstrations, there are provocateurs at the source of these kinds of vengeful, reactive actions. And there is no way to insure that there isn't. These actions are in now way controllable under a sensible strategy. The goal of this is pretty simple: present any protest against corporate abuse as the doing of unlawful elements, and not as the expression of public opinion.
This goes exactly against of what you are
so ? (Score:2)
Re:yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
That is not entirely true. Educating the public, and persuading the common people that overly restrictive copyright laws hurt them personally, would probably have a very positive effect.
What effect do you think this direct action is going to have? Because I don't see it as likely to have any effect at all -- at least, not a positive one. Taking a website that nobody visited anyway offline for a few hours is hardly going to make the entire recording industry turn round and say "Oh God, what have we done? The real pirates were us all along!". At best it will be ignored. At worst it will be used to justify new censorship laws.
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people have given their votes to current administration on a number of election promises. NONE of these have been fulfilled, and even this administration pursued acta even more fervently than the former.
so, public's opinion, mattered ZIT.
what makes you think, it will effect anything for this matter ?
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so, public's opinion, mattered ZIT.
Ah, but it was played beautifully. Dissipating anger into disappointment. The dems acted as place holders until the Bush thing blows over.. In the same fashion they did between Ford and Reagan because of Nixon. Like good tag team partners, the dems tap the repubs to jump back into the ring.. to a cheering crowd... It's quite a sight. Public opinion is everything. It must be carefully controlled.
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Noel Gallagher's opinion (Score:2)
-- Noel Gallagher [guardian.co.uk] on Radiohead's politics
Re:yeah (Score:5, Funny)
DoS, killing people, all the same! Death penalty for jaywalkers!
Re:yeah (Score:5, Informative)
Jay Walkers was framed!!
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Re:yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
Would you rather punish people or fix them? I vote the latter, prison is the former. And as it so happens, prisons tend to just make small time first offenders into hardened criminals with nothing to live for, as you lose pretty much any chance of getting a good job, living in a nice neighborhood, having friends outside of prison, after you have been there. We could instead rehabilitate criminals and help them get into social positions where continuing a criminal lifestyle would be harmful to them, instead of practically unavoidable.
Personally, I don't see the purpose in conviction for revenge. Shit happens, and when it happens to you, you need to get over it instead of spending the rest of your life watching another man suffer in what goes far beyond revenge. Punishment doesn't dissuade crime, wealth does. If we fixed poverty instead of fucking the poor as much as possible and ensuring that there are always more and more poor around, there would be a lot less reason for them to commit crimes. If you don't need the money to live, you are a lot less likely to steal it.
Or we could just be dumbasses and tell people to suck it up and not do bad things as if it will make a difference. The 'suck it up' mentality achieves nothing for society. The "hey, a problem, lets fix it" mentality does.
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Would that it were that simple. But people are different.
Some people would make one mistake, and never repeat it. Others would decide that the chance of a positive personal payoff was sufficient to justify the risk, and to hell with "social good" or anyone else.
Unfortunately, in current society the people who say "...and to hell with "social good"... " are just divided into three classes: The stupid, the powerful, and the sly. The stupid spend a lot of time in prison. The powerful escape punishment. T
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Have you read the post I was actually replying to, which is now at -1? My post was only a joke reply to "Maybe you can prove your point by killing some record execs, let's see who gets the sympathy then."
And you realize that they're DoSing in response to DoSes against P2P sites by companies paid by the MPAA members [torrentfreak.com], so if someone was breaking the law, it were the companies. That's why this was called "Operation: Payback".
And finally, my post doesn't in any way condone their actions, just mocks the silliness
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If they're intimidated by a DoS, they need help.
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Some people consider imprisonment to be the use of force and intimidation. DDOS attacks seem tame in comparison. I suppose maybe you care a lot about whether the use of such tactics is "criminal" but that only depends who is writing the laws.
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The pretense of accountability that is common in western nations is not adequate for me to believe there is a difference between the two. In practice there is zero accountability.
I'd say all parties involved are being assholes. But I am much more afraid of being on the wrong side of the government than anonymous. That tells me the government makes a better use of fear and intimidation and is therefore the bigger bully. Maybe anonymous would do the same if they could, but they can't.
As far as what is rig
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For example, there's at least some pretense of being accountable when it comes to putting somebody in jail or prison in the US.
Mere pretense is WORSE than no accountability at all.
Meanwhile, a DDOS is not more than the net equivalent of a picket line or a sit-in.
Re:Well, somebody's showing... (Score:4, Insightful)
like, bush crowd, and their unwarranted laws, constitutional violations.
who is going to prosecute them ? supreme court ? THEY are the one appointing the supreme court justices.
like, bp oil spill. who is to prosecute them ? the senators who are their collaborators ? the administration which cooperated with them ?
what you say, is only naivete.
and, no, youre wrong, there isnt even the pretense of being accountable when it comes to putting somebody in jail or prison in the u.s.
http://www.alternet.org/rights/144656/%22we_can_make_him_disappear%22:_immigration_officials_are_holding_people_in_secret,_unmarked_jails [alternet.org]
"If you don't have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but you think he's illegal, we can make him disappear." Those chilling words were spoken by James Pendergraph, then executive director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Office of State and Local Coordination, at a conference of police and sheriffs in August 2008.
http://www.thenation.com/article/americas-secret-ice-castles [thenation.com]
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I'm pretty sure that wasn't the objective. It was probably launched for the lulz.
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Yeah, respectable people dress up as American Indians and toss things in the harbor.
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The United States wouldn't exist without the murderous terrorism of men like George Washington and his followers. Change can be effected without violence but sometimes it ends up happening anyway.
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Re:Rebels leading the charge! Freedom fighters uni (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the inequality of wealth has a reasonable effect on the level of social cohesion within a country. Obviously people are materially better off now than poor people were in the 1920s. You'd expect that. But it doesn't mean that the poor people today have the same opportunities (despite the best intentions of law makers) to progress in their lives as those who are raised in rich households.
Re:Rebels leading the charge! Freedom fighters uni (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm impressed: I couldn't squeeze that many fallacies into the same sentence if I tried. You're arguing that poor people aren't productive, and that the welfare state, with its progressive taxation, is "slavery"? You're really arguing that people who make millions would be less "productive" if taxed at a higher rate? If you're posting on Slashdot, it's exceedingly likely that you are not wealthy enough for our current plutocratic policies to work in your favor.
You illustrate my point perfectly: you've been convinced by the propaganda of the ultra-wealthy and their lapdogs to argue (and presumably, vote) against your own economic interests and damn our country in the process.
Re:Rebels leading the charge! Freedom fighters uni (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a very dangerous kettle of fish that is being passed around here. I really don't want to reach my hand in, but here it goes anyway.
The previous poster about FDR (being a crook) is absolutely correct. Even a cursory examination of the impacts of his political policies during the depression reveals that unemployment skyrocketed after the formation of the new deal, and that living conditions took serious turns for the worse. Further, he enacted the atrocity that is the federal reserve bank, against the bitter pleas of more sensible men at the time, due to strong influences from foreign powers. (The run-away inflationary cycle of which is what is at least partially responsible for the banking failures of the past few years.) In addition, he created an executive order that seized all privately held gold, and transferred it to government coffers to back the new deal.
The multitudes of destitute people made for a very willing public, eager to be saved from the outcome of their own panic. (the 1930s bank crash resulted from panicked crowds making runs on banks. The natural way that banks make money is by lending more than they have in the vault, and depending upon interest payments for the returns on investment. If everyone makes a run on the bank, the bank will be caught with its britches down, and default on its extended credit. At the time there was no protecting agencies like the FDIC, since there was no national reserve bank. [yes, I called it an atrocity, I'll get to that later.] Because of this the banks of the era HAD to be more sensible in their loaning practices. Despite this, the bank scare caught them at a disadvantage, So, as a matter of consequence, the bank and loan industry crumbled under its own debts, resulting in a massive deflationary spiral, leaving millions unemployed, and many more homeless as people with mortgages got foreclosed on by banks desperate to pay off their debts to remain solvent. Essentially, a substantial amount of the currency that was PREVIOUSLY in circulation, was now stuffed into wealthy people's mattresses. As such, there was a dramatic currency shortage. (Deflation.)
These people were desperate, and would have eagerly accepted a deal from the devil himself. They got pretty much that with FDR and his new deal.
The federal reserve bank.
This new agency had been tried before. It was successfully eliminated by Andrew Jackson, under the incarnation of the "Central Bank". Andrew Jackson is the ONLY president in the history of the united states to pay off the national debt, by halting all deficit spending, paying off it's debts, and dissolving the bank's charter to make more loans. This prior president had some rather choice words to say about it in fact.
** ... are but premonitions of the fate that await the American people should they be deluded into a perpetuation of this institution or the establishment of another like it."
"The bold effort the present (central) bank had made to control the government
**
"Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves."
**
"I am one of those who do not believe that a national debt is a national blessing, but rather a curse to a republic; inasmuch as it is calculated to raise around the administration a moneyed aristocracy dangerous to the liberties of the country."
-- amongst others.
So then-- What is the federal reserve bank, and what does it do?
The federal reserve bank codifies lending practices (in general a good thing), but by design creates exponential inflati
Re:Rebels leading the charge! Freedom fighters uni (Score:4, Insightful)
I would not consider someone who makes $100 million/year trading oil on a commodities market to be a productive person. No value is added, only value extracted from a system.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE57D3PQ20090814 [reuters.com]
The definition of "poor" is slowly encompassing more and more of the middle class in the US. I'd make sure you're on the right side when the pitchforks come out after the 21st century equivalent of "let them eat cake" occurs.
ok (Score:2)
Re:Rebels leading the charge! Freedom fighters uni (Score:5, Interesting)
The pie is growing, but the wealthy are taking [talkingpointsmemo.com] the vast majority of the increase:
The wealth disparity itself is a problem, but worse is the corrosive effect this wealth has on our political structure: those with money and influence are increasingly able to purchase government policies that further increase their share of the pie even at the expense of the total size of the pie [wikipedia.org]. It's a positive feedback loop: more wealth leads to more power, and more power leads to greater wealth. This feedback is why I'm so dour about our prospects: the cycle seems impossible to break.
The little things we agitate about today: censorship, abuse of copyright, overzealous airport security, our foreign wars, the loss of our manufacturing jobs, are all caused by the increasing ability of the wealthy to pervert government to work in their favor. When power is concentrated in a few hands, the result is inevitably selfish exercise of that power and poor outcomes.
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The little things we agitate about today: censorship, abuse of copyright, overzealous airport security, our foreign wars, the loss of our manufacturing jobs, are all caused by the increasing ability of the wealthy to pervert government to work in their favor. When power is concentrated in a few hands, the result is inevitably selfish exercise of that power and poor outcomes.
The problem seems more spread out than that to me. Consider the anti-Bush villainization, or the anti-Obama villainization now. Most people are still playing my-team vs your-team, and not really caring about the influence of the powerful on the government. If the influence of the powerful was the core problem, people would at least care about it. And actually they still have enough power to be able to do something about it if they wanted to. But nearly everybody is willing to mistreat other people in e
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Blame? Who said anything about blame? Moralizing and pointing fingers doesn't accomplish anything. I don't begrudge the rich for taking advantage of their access to the levers of power. Human nature is immutable.
Ideally, we'd align incentives so that actions taken in self interest benefit all. Unfortunately, we don't have that incentive structure today. If we want to remedy that situation, we need to convince or force those currently in power to be more egalitarian; it just so happens that the people in pow
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It's also a myth that income is proportional to productivity. The market, via the participants, does not work rationally, nor appropriately in a ton of situations. The invisible hand is no match for irrational behavior of the masses, especially behavior instigated though advertising.
You m
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Another point is to consider the efficient market hypothesis and the relative competence of people. If our system allocated resources efficiently, then the variance in personal incomes should match the variance of intrinsic talent. Consider software development: this field is highly unusual because some people can be an order of magnitude more productive than others.
In most fields, the gap is far smaller. Yet income disparity in the United States is on the order of tens of orders of magnitude. The differenc
please (Score:4, Interesting)
standard of living and distribution of income are two irrelevant concepts.
standard of living changes with technology and times, and is not dependent on distribution of income.
currently, average american lives in far better standards than a medieval serf. but, s/he gets FAR less than the economy, than a mere medieval serf got in middle ages :
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html [ucsc.edu]
therefore, a medieval serf's standard of living, COMPARED to the max standard of living in middle ages, comes much higher than the standard of living of an average american, compared to the max standard of living currently.
you need to brush up on your statistics knowledge. the one which does not exist, that is.
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The standard of living is substantially higher - for everyone - than it was 90 years ago. How rich some people is has nothing to do with how much better off everyone is.
I'd suggest you do some reading or research before asserting the above so glibly. The Elizabeth Warren [wikipedia.org] lecture entitled The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class [youtube.com] would be a good start, though her research and the focus of what's presented, uses (IIRC) "50 years ago" as a baseline for comparison.