MasterLeaks Gets PayBack

So, in addition to hackers shutting down the sites belonging to Visa, MasterCard, Assange's bank, the lawyers prosecuting Assange, WikiLeaks itself and nearly taking down PayPal, there have been plenty of other troubles that have oddly worked in WikiLeaks's favor, or at least been countered.

Let's take a look at WikiLeaks's host site, EveryDNS. EveryDNS opted to drop the wikileaks.org domain after it succumbed to the DDOS. Plenty of people will say the government intervened as well, but for now we'll act as if it was all decision by the site. After the main domain was removed, two more sprouted up; wikileaks.ch and wikileaks.nl, both supported by EasyDNS (not to be confused with EveryDNS). Following that, hundreds of mirror sites began popping up all over the web. When we say you can't kill something on the Internet, we mean it. Despite the main website being taken down, all of the mirrors and supporters continue to keep the site up and running as if nothing ever happened. The World Wide Web is a tricky place to fight.

One of the more notable effects here is the response of the US government. Interestingly enough, it's not what WikiLeaks is releasing that's embarrassing the US the most, but it's our government's response to the matter. For example, Peter King—a key Republican Congressman and soon-to-be chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee—wants WikiLeaks to be declared an international terrorist organization, and for Assange to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act. The government has been bashing both Assange and his site from the start, as well as helping to convince a number of corporations to stop supporting WikiLeaks to begin with. Nevermind the cables; the government essentially wants to shut down Assange's site and silence him forever. Is that not a bigger embarrassment, and the whole point of WikiLeaks to begin with?

There is also an official name for the mass DDOS war taking place. An appropriate title in my opinion, it's been dubbed Operation: Payback.

DDOS

Let's begin with an explanation of what happened to WikiLeaks last week. The site came under a mass distributed denial of service attack. From who, we know not. But it managed to shut down the site for quite a while.

A DDOS attack is simple. The basic goal is to overload a server until it crashes. You see, in order to connect to a server, your system sends a packet of data to the server, called a SYN. The server responds with its own packet, called an ACK. When you receive the ACK, it is sent right back to the server, and thus you are connected. Now, if the ACK is not sent back, then the server sends up to four more to try and get a response from you. This is what DDOS uses to its advantage.

When a metric crapton of random computers all send a ridiculous amount of SYNs to a server, the server has to reply with an equal amount of ACKs. In a DDOS attack, the computers do not respond, thus causing the server to send four ACKs instead of just one. When as many computers do this as fast as possible, it effectively quadruples the bandwidth usage of the server. If enough people do it, it can't handle the traffic and shuts down. WikiLeaks had this issue.

Now, in light of MasterCard, Visa, PayPal and other companies refusing support to WikiLeaks, sites like 4chan are coordinating the same attacks on them. In the past 24 hours, MasterCard's and Visa's sites were both temporarily shut down. PayPal was pretty much brought to its knees. A number of transactions made during this time have not gone through or screwed up because of it; these sites—especially PayPal—rely on the Internet.

What I'm trying to say is, a War of the Internet has begun. On one side is WikiLeaks and its supporters; on the other, the US government and every corporation it can get to fall in line with it.

WikiLeaks, WikiLeaks, WikiLeaks...

So, Julian Assange has been arrested, much to my dismay. Whether or not he will be extradited to Sweden, I don't know. But I do know WikiLeaks has a pretty bleak future at the moment.

Details for all the WikiLeaks news to be posted over the next few days in segments. This'll be a looooong topic.

Midterms!

No, not the tests.

The midterm elections are tomorrow, and with a baffling amount of people telling me they have no clue why they're important, I'm going to use this opportunity to explain why.

First off, a government is only effective if its members can all agree on what to do. In our case, if they don't agree, it's essentially impossible for any form of legislation to conceivably pass with a president and a Congress that can't agree on what flavor of ice cream is their favorite. A Democratic president requires a Democratic Congress, and a Republican president requires a Republic Congress. Otherwise, the president won't approve of Congress's policies, and vice versa. At this point you end up with a stagnant political atmosphere that is perpetually at a standstill. It's a battle between Congress, shooting down what the president proposes and bashing him left and right in the media, and the president refusing to pass what Congress approves. Nothing gets done, similar to Woodrow Wilson's last two years as president (Congress turned Republican halfway through is term and blocked the US's entry into the League of Nations). However, if both parties agree, everything runs smoothly. For the most part, anyway.

Now, with 37 seats up for election in the Senate and all 435 in the House, it's possible for the Democrats to lose their majority rule in Congress and be replaced by those dreaded Republicans (is the bias here obvious yet?). If this happens, we get that stagnant government I mentioned. On the other hand, if the Democrats stay in power, all of Obama's changes, including health care reform, will continue to be put in place instead of being repealed under Republicans.

On a somewhat less important note, if the Republicans gain power in Congress—more specifically the Tea Party members—then the far-left liberals like myself are likely to shoot someone. Probably ourselves. It's preferable to someone like Christine O'Donnell being in charge of this country. As was said in Religulous, clearly you don't need to pass an IQ test to be in Congress...

To Put the News in Perspective

A quote from Don't Worry About the Government, which has been mentioned on this blog before, has managed to put the news from the last ten weeks into a single sentence:

"It's the same shit."

Tea party candidates are saying the same über-conservative pledges to get into office, a Chilean mine disaster came and went, people are still complaining about BP, and the rest of the nation's politicians are still bashing one another over midterm elections.

Maybe I'm just jaded from my daily news readings, but it's still a good point nonetheless.

More Than Simple Fans

After going to my first OSU football game the other day, I've come to the conclusion that absolutely nobody takes football as seriously as Ohioans do. What's seen on TV is comparatively little of the stunningly huge crowd that attends the games. Two hundred thousand people, easily, were tailgating outside (and FYI, they make the best food in the world), and flooding into the stadium. The stadium itself seats roughly 150,000; there were no empty seats. Amid the screams of the thousands of fans and the band running through the stands and playing their fight songs, it's pretty clear that when it comes to football, Ohio deserves it's place as the most dedicated fanbase in the country. Just to prove a point, I loathe football with a passion; but the energy of everyone there, along with the food and the awesome halftime show, made it a somewhat unforgettable experience. It was great.

Update

Time for the latest news in my scambaiting. This is what I've accomplished so far:

• Convinced a paraplegic in Bahrain I'll pay him $9,000 for a surgery.
• Gotten three photos of a girl from Senegal who looks suspiciously like Martha Jones from Doctor Who.
• Agreed to give a Nigerian orphanage $25,000 to feed the starving children.
• Promised an investor from the Ivory Coast I would help him invest on buying a London property.
• Promised to help an American soldier in Afghanistan I'd help him smuggle a case of money out of the country in exchange for a share of what's inside.
• Told a Nigerian man I'd help him sign for his family fortune which his brothers are trying to take from him.

If any of these stories are true, I'll be sure to save you all a seat in Hell.

Back Again!

Good news! I seem to have acquired a relatively consistent and easy to obtain Internet connection, meaning I now actually have the time to post semi-regularly on here, seeing as how I'll be using my own PC from here on out.

As a celebratory measure, I've decided to share my latest undertaking to the minute percentage of the world that ever happens to view this blog. For those of you who have ever heard of 419Eater, you don't need to read this. For those of you who haven't, let me explain. 419Eater is a community of tech-savvy people who spend their time and resources in an attempt to waste the time and resources of others; "others" being online fraud artists. All those emails that fill your spam inbox with promises of wealth of fame for a small fee are a gold mine for people like us (we're appropriately called scambaiters). By leading scammers on and getting them to perform complicated steps and a virtually infinite number of favors for an American payoff, not only do we get to revel in our creativity and joy, but we also distract them from targeting otherwise unsuspecting web-surfers. It's good fun for a good cause.

"That smile speaks volumes..."

Back to the point, I recently signed up with 419Eater and I'm already working on four separate fraud artists. I will certainly keep you updated on anything I happen to receive that results in my tear ducts shriveling from so much laughter.