Why Anonymous Can't Take Down Amazon.com 392
suraj.sun writes "The website-attacking group 'Anonymous' tried and failed to take down Amazon.com on Thursday. The group's vengeance horde quickly found out something techies have known for years: Amazon, which has built one of the world's most invincible websites, is almost impossible to crash.... Anonymous quickly figured that out. Less than an hour after setting its sights on Amazon, the group's organizers called off the attempt. 'We don't have enough forces,' they tweeted."
FFS (Score:5, Insightful)
And even if you haven't, there's still a ton of suited fatcats chortling merrily about the concomitant stock price rise as they stuff their faces with expensive food and drink this holiday season.
Y'all better step it up, or this might be your Waterloo.
"impossible" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:FFS (Score:5, Insightful)
Have these guys ever disrupted any company significantly? TFA mentions they've taken down the RIAA, MPAA and Mastercard front pages, but none of those have affected their core businesses. It seems like in order to have a Waterloo, they would first need to have some real accomplishments beforehand.
Re:FFS (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:FFS (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:FFS (Score:4, Insightful)
It got the issue on the front pages again, it got lots of attention and they drew enough attention to mastercard that icelandic regulators are dragging them over the coals as to exactly why they cut off an icelandic company.
in many ways the "hacktivism"(I know, I shudder when I use the word too) actually seems to have achieved at least as much as most regular protests.
Trying to DDoS amazon though was always going to be like pissing at a thunder storm, you can't saturate pipes that thick with a few bored teenagers.
Wrong weapon (Score:5, Insightful)
Any victory would have been a phyrric one... (Score:4, Insightful)
Any victory of Anonymous would have been a phyrric one. It would have alienated tons of people they can now still win over. If i try very hard, i can come up with something more stupid than attacking Amazon shortly before Christmas, but it would be quite a challenge. For >50% of all people their christmas presents are more important than the fate of Julian Assange (even if he is shot "trying to escape"). Unluckily they've got a vote too. So converting them from indifference to hostile would neither help Assange nor Wikileaks.
CU, Martin
Re:LOL - you actually believe that (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no such thing as an impregnable commercial website.
Never has been.
Never will be.
It doesn't actually have to be "impregnable", it just has to be able to scale larger than the resources their opposition is able to muster. They got that.
Re:Wrong weapon (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably Slashdot stories about Amazon denying hosting to Wikileaks harmed more the company than the combined Anonymous attack. There is no firewall against social attacks.
Except most people probably agree with Amazon's decision. It probably helped them. Surely you have noticed that Slashdot is not very representative of what we might call the "general population," falling somewhere to the left of where most people are, at least in the United States, Amazon's largest market.
Anonymous Makes Assange Look Like a Terrorist (Score:4, Insightful)
Assange is being called a terrorist by prominent government types, and not just in the US. He's not, even if the US or other countries have laws prohibiting publishing leaked classified material - whether or not he's bound by those laws. Terrorism is an effort to make political change by credibly threatening violence, typically by actual violence followed by explicit or implied threats to repeat it. Assange does not threaten violence, and the only change his (and Wikileaks behind him) efforts try to make is to reduce secrecy. Terrorism is arguably underwritten by violence against noncombatants, and only actual state actors (and their direct partners) are exposed in these Wikileaks releases. To call Assange a terrorist for that is to call any journalist who ever publishes a secret leaked to them a terrorist, even though Assange is not as recognizable a journalist. Indeed, it's because our journalists, especially in the US, have become nearly unrecognizable as people who would tell the public what many of these leaks reveal that Assange is not as recognizable as a journalist; if "real" journalists were busier exposing America's state secrets that Americans should know about, Assange would be more clearly one of them. But then he probably wouldn't be leaking these secrets, since others would be, and he wouldn't have an audience.
But now Anonymous "defends" Assange by actually terrorizing corporations and some (ie. Sweden and Switzerland) governments. That's terrorism: the violence and the threat (do what you did to Assange, and you get hit again) is designed to counteract the political activity that harassed Assange, which makes it equally political action - that's terrorism. Those targets might have had it coming. But now it's easy for the people calling Assange a terrorist to get people to believe it. Many won't distinguish between Assange and Anonymous; many will believe that Anonymous is really Assange; many will be unable to distinguish between "Assange the leaker" (which he isn't; he's the publisher) and "Anonymous the terrorist", especially as many think Assange is a "computer hacker" (which he isn't).
Geeks are becoming familiar with the "Streisand effect" when some controller tries to suppress some released info, which draws attention to it. But that's closely related to the effect where Assange's "defenders" make public perception of Assange worse, because his "allies" are what Assange's enemies call him. You're known by the company you keep, and Anonymous has now made Assange known as a terrorist.
Re:Wrong weapon (Score:5, Insightful)
Except most people probably agree with Amazon's decision. It probably helped them. Surely you have noticed that Slashdot is not very representative of what we might call the "general population," falling somewhere to the left of where most people are, at least in the United States, Amazon's largest market.
I agree for the most part. However I am not sure that the /. mantra of "a US liberal would be considered a right wing fascist in Europe" is true or not... I'm starting to think that's a myth.
Just this morning I read this story [latimes.com] about the pretty crappy way immigrants are treated in Germany. And I know for a fact that in Italy it's even worse, they are very draconian in that regard. And lately in the news are all those budget cuts in Ireland France UK and other EU countries, due to their huge government debt problem... cuts in SOCIAL BENEFITS! Reduced wealth redistribution. This is actually happening in Europe as we speak. It would be UNIMAGINABLE in the USA still, there is no way in hell there will ever be any reduction in welfare or unemployment or healthcare benefits..... at least not while Obama and Pelosi and Reid are still alive. So all in all I would say in many respects, USA is quite liberal even compared to Eurozone.
Re:misguided attack (Score:5, Insightful)
Good idea. That really worked with Modern Warfare [imgur.com].
Re:FFS (Score:5, Insightful)
Most large British retailers use 3D Secure (or Visa's thing), in my experience.
It annoys me -- every time I log in to my online banking I'm reminded not to put my banking passwords into other websites, but that's exactly what the 3D Secure system requires.
Re:FFS (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh give it a rest, anonymous. Do you have any idea how bad your pathetic excuses look? You aren't playing eleven dimensional chess here. You aren't fighting the good fight. You are a bunch of clueless angry loons looking for any excuse for a bit of mindless destruction. Anonymous is a goddamn clown cannon, lobbing retarded circus freaks in random trajectories, hurting what you try to help and helping what you try to hurt. You are a joke.
Re:Anonymous HAD the resources. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, that would be REALLY cost-effective -- pay AWS for cpu time and traffic (Amazon.com itself is not within AWS realm so traffic between EC2 and Amazon.com is not free) in order to try to hurt the retail web site. Doing that would have been colossally stupid; and quite profitable for Amazon.
I guess this is based on common mis-conception that Amazon.com itself runs on AWS systems. This is not true; ask any Amazonian and they can explain separation (which is due to historical reasons more than anything else; but there are strong security concerns too).