Sweden to Make Denial of Service Attacks Illegal

paulraps writes "Sweden is to pass legislation making Denial of Service attacks illegal. The offense will carry a maximum jail term of two years, and is thought to be a direct response to the attack which crashed the Swedish police's web site last summer. Nobody was charged for that, but the fact that it came shortly after a raid on the Pirate Bay's servers was thought by many to be not entirely coincidental. Sweden's move follows the UK, which is even tougher on web attackers — there the sentence can be over five years in prison."

Re:Slashdottings aren't what they used to be.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm willing to wager that the Slashdot effect is still worse than the digg effect, and will be until digg is a large factor larger than Slashdot.

That wasn't the case when one of my sites made the front page of Slashdot, Digg and Reddit on the same day. In terms of the number of hits, Digg had the most, followed by Slashdot and then Reddit. I don't recall off-hand the absolute values, but I remember Digg bringing about 30% more hits than Slashdot. I remember that because it surprised me. I didn't realize how popular Digg actually was.

The Slashdot hits were distributed over the course of a day. The Digg hits, on the other hand, came within the course of two hours. After that, they dropped right off. The story must have left the front page at that point.

More importantly

[denoir]

What is just briefly mentioned in the article is that conspiracy to make a DOS attack will be punishable. It seems like a very vaguely defined crime and because the tough sentences it would give the police search warrants way too easily. Technically to be a suspect all you need to have is a computer - what else kind of evidence could there be before an attack is actually committed?

Re:Mostly pointless...

[sr180]

In fact, this is also why thePiratebay.org exists and is so successful - since file sharing carries a sentence which is usually much less than 2 years, the police are not allowed to raid or subpoena the ISPs for the identity of the person that is using a specific IP address. (The Swedish MPAA aka APB have treid hard to get a criminal conviction for file sharing for this reason.)

No. The pirate bay exists because its not illegal to link to illegal copyrighted material in Sweeden. The pirate bay doesnt share illegal material, just torrent files, which are essentially a link to where the material actually is.

Re:Are they currently legal?

[the-intersocialist]

IKEA is an abbrevation for Ingvar Kamprad Eltmaryd Agunnarryd (the first two are the names of the founder and the two second are the name of the farm he grew up at and the parish of said farm). IKEA is not a word in Swedish.