I was actually going to post an interesting article about how the Bitcoin is taking over online currency and is favored by hacktivists and internet moguls alike. However, I found this report this morning DDoS cripples Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox after trading resumes on CNET by Steven Musil. It appears that the hackers could have had an alterior motive besides anything to do with hacktivism, possible theft. Regardless, check out this video too. If you don't know what the Bitcoin is it might be time to learn, it could be the next answer to a global form of currency. Notice the groups that starting working with it right away....Friday, April 12, 2013
Hacktivists Battle: Bitcoin, why?
I was actually going to post an interesting article about how the Bitcoin is taking over online currency and is favored by hacktivists and internet moguls alike. However, I found this report this morning DDoS cripples Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox after trading resumes on CNET by Steven Musil. It appears that the hackers could have had an alterior motive besides anything to do with hacktivism, possible theft. Regardless, check out this video too. If you don't know what the Bitcoin is it might be time to learn, it could be the next answer to a global form of currency. Notice the groups that starting working with it right away....
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Hactivism: Are we there yet?
After looking at several articles detailing the efforts of hacktivists and what has become as a result, I have came to the realization that there is a huge variance in opinions on whether hacktivism is a good thing or even effective. I feel that even though hacktivism has had an absolute ton of press coverage, especially Anonymous, it's effectiveness has yet to be seen across the board. One exception to this is the SOPA piracy bill that was removed from the table in Washington, but only after bigger names such as Google and Craigslist got involved. With that said, I do believe that there exists a strong chance that hacktivism will become a mainstream form activism eventually as more of the youth, that basically lives there lives on the Internet, becomes involved in the near future.
I have personally come to the conclusion that some forms of hacktivism such as DoS attacks are just the same as physical activism such as "sit-ins". I would like to do more research on people who have stolen information and what kind of activism has been done with it. I do not mean credit cards and personal info, I mean more of governmental documents and things that aren't supposed to be exposed to the public eye; such as the efforts by Wikileaks. I am also curious about foreign laws and court cases outside of the U.S. just to see a more well rounded view on the subject. The Internet is world wide and so should be my research. One final thought that I have is to think of what you can do. Most people I talk to don't have any idea about most of the bills that are circulating Washington, even though the implications of them affect us all. The Internet could literally change overnight and most people wouldn't have one thing they could do about it. Write your state politicians and get involved because the Internet should be as free and democratic as we want our normal lives. A piece of legislation I discovered through this exploration, that is on the table right now, is what I believe to be a huge problem for Internet freedom, the CFAA bill of 2013. Take a look at my Terms of Use at the bottom of this blog.
I have personally come to the conclusion that some forms of hacktivism such as DoS attacks are just the same as physical activism such as "sit-ins". I would like to do more research on people who have stolen information and what kind of activism has been done with it. I do not mean credit cards and personal info, I mean more of governmental documents and things that aren't supposed to be exposed to the public eye; such as the efforts by Wikileaks. I am also curious about foreign laws and court cases outside of the U.S. just to see a more well rounded view on the subject. The Internet is world wide and so should be my research. One final thought that I have is to think of what you can do. Most people I talk to don't have any idea about most of the bills that are circulating Washington, even though the implications of them affect us all. The Internet could literally change overnight and most people wouldn't have one thing they could do about it. Write your state politicians and get involved because the Internet should be as free and democratic as we want our normal lives. A piece of legislation I discovered through this exploration, that is on the table right now, is what I believe to be a huge problem for Internet freedom, the CFAA bill of 2013. Take a look at my Terms of Use at the bottom of this blog.
Monday, April 8, 2013
Hacktivists: Fighters of privacy AND open sharing?
Talking about piracy in the last post got me thinking about some of the bigger stories in the last few years that deal with piracy and content. I came upon an article about Megaupload in the NBC News section on technology titled "Kim Dotcom is the anti-Zuckerberg: Share nothing, encrypt everything, be happy". Basically, Kim Dotcom (yes that's his real name) built a website where people can store information anonymously and share it the same way. Sounds great to most people, as we always prefer privacy in our regular lives. Personally, I think Kim Dotcom knew people would use it to share movies and other copyrighted material. He carries himself as kind of a mafioso sleazebag anyway. But something I never really put into perspective was the privacy idea he touts. The hacktivist group Anonymous supports the efforts of Kim Dotcom and other websites that do this and here is why I think they do. Sites like Google with it's Google Drive, a virtual locker for personal storage, and Facebook both have a heavy account interface with private information. Well that information gets sold and more importantly the government can ask for it anytime they would like without you knowing. In Google's transparency report for 2012, they complied with different governments 88% of the time when they were asked for peoples private information or to delete certain things from their search engine. Sites like Megaupload are almost impossible to determine where information comes from without digging into it's servers further, people do not need an account.
The article from NBC News also mentions the fact that 50% of Megaupload's content was never accessed more than once, meaning it was most likely not movies or music. It also mentions that several world governments and our own military stored information on the site. What would happen if those names of people using Megaupload were released? Contrary to how my opinion my appear, I would hope nothing would happen. People expect privacy. You wouldn't buy a home with government cameras in the closet to make sure your garments or handbags weren't counterfeit. I don't think highly of people like Kim Dotcom, knowingly getting rich off of stealing other peoples intellectual property, but I do support 100% privacy and that is what his site did and what Anonymous supports. It brings back my thinking that government and lawmakers might be scared of technology and thus are making examples of people to thwart these ideas. On the contrary, maybe if it didn't cost the average family over $50 to see a movie, sites like this one wouldn't be as big as they are. Frankly there are hundreds of other sites like Megaupload, it was just the grandest accounting for nearly 4% of all internet traffic at one point. It is apparent that there is and will be to come an absolute huge amount of conflict where intellectual property laws are concerned within the internet. Going back to privacy, here is a very interesting video from the TED conference in 2011 talking about Facebook, Google, and other website's abilities to tailor even your search results just for you. SCARY.
I want to continue this post by falling back to my discussion on Aaron Schwartz for a minute. Speaking about intellectual property, I read a great article in The Wall Street Journal titled "Aaron Swartz believed a wrong made a right". I appreciated the author of this article, David Weidner, because he pointed out Aaron Swartz's flaws, such as depression, as a problem for a hacktivist; contrary to the previous article in this post where I thought the author, Helen Popkin, pretended Kim Dotcom was some kind of god. It's kind humerous to see how Popkin initially touts Dotcom as the "Osama bin Laden" of downloading in some sort of positive light as I don't believe Weidner would ever use analogies like that to describe anyone. This second article by Weidner talked about how JSTOR, the database Swartz hacked, gave away scholarly material for free to Africans and also allowed users to have unlimited downloads. I did not know these things a few posts back on this blog. Swartz took over 4 million articles from the database and that is roughly equivalent to every person in just Botswana, Africa (population 2 million approx.) downloading 2 articles a piece. Whats the difference? JSTOR didn't obviously see one, as they didn't pursue Swartz, but U.S. attorney general Eric Holder did. Why he decided to pursue Swartz is a question many have asked. Personally I think it was to make example out of him. I just can't figure out why the government doesn't go after more blatant offenders more often. Why did they choose Aaron Swartz with such a huge gray area involved?
The article from NBC News also mentions the fact that 50% of Megaupload's content was never accessed more than once, meaning it was most likely not movies or music. It also mentions that several world governments and our own military stored information on the site. What would happen if those names of people using Megaupload were released? Contrary to how my opinion my appear, I would hope nothing would happen. People expect privacy. You wouldn't buy a home with government cameras in the closet to make sure your garments or handbags weren't counterfeit. I don't think highly of people like Kim Dotcom, knowingly getting rich off of stealing other peoples intellectual property, but I do support 100% privacy and that is what his site did and what Anonymous supports. It brings back my thinking that government and lawmakers might be scared of technology and thus are making examples of people to thwart these ideas. On the contrary, maybe if it didn't cost the average family over $50 to see a movie, sites like this one wouldn't be as big as they are. Frankly there are hundreds of other sites like Megaupload, it was just the grandest accounting for nearly 4% of all internet traffic at one point. It is apparent that there is and will be to come an absolute huge amount of conflict where intellectual property laws are concerned within the internet. Going back to privacy, here is a very interesting video from the TED conference in 2011 talking about Facebook, Google, and other website's abilities to tailor even your search results just for you. SCARY.
I want to continue this post by falling back to my discussion on Aaron Schwartz for a minute. Speaking about intellectual property, I read a great article in The Wall Street Journal titled "Aaron Swartz believed a wrong made a right". I appreciated the author of this article, David Weidner, because he pointed out Aaron Swartz's flaws, such as depression, as a problem for a hacktivist; contrary to the previous article in this post where I thought the author, Helen Popkin, pretended Kim Dotcom was some kind of god. It's kind humerous to see how Popkin initially touts Dotcom as the "Osama bin Laden" of downloading in some sort of positive light as I don't believe Weidner would ever use analogies like that to describe anyone. This second article by Weidner talked about how JSTOR, the database Swartz hacked, gave away scholarly material for free to Africans and also allowed users to have unlimited downloads. I did not know these things a few posts back on this blog. Swartz took over 4 million articles from the database and that is roughly equivalent to every person in just Botswana, Africa (population 2 million approx.) downloading 2 articles a piece. Whats the difference? JSTOR didn't obviously see one, as they didn't pursue Swartz, but U.S. attorney general Eric Holder did. Why he decided to pursue Swartz is a question many have asked. Personally I think it was to make example out of him. I just can't figure out why the government doesn't go after more blatant offenders more often. Why did they choose Aaron Swartz with such a huge gray area involved?
Friday, April 5, 2013
Back to the topic at hand: Crime, Punishment and the possible Rise of the Hacking Hero!
I found an article in the International Business Times titled "CFAA 2013: Congress' New Draft Could Incarcerate Teenagers That Read New Online", and well it means just what it says. If you look back two posts on my blog, I talk about the CFAA laws currently in place. But here in April there will be a vote on the new CFAA bill and it looks ugly. The author of the article, Dave Smith, talks about how not only could a person get prosecuted for violating the terms of service within a site, but now also for using a site in any way that it wasn't meant to be used listed under a daunting "Terms of Use". This means even teenagers reading news on sites like Popular Mechanics could be prosecuted. These sites do state that you must be 18 years old to proceed, but through links from other sites one could end up on a site they shouldn't be and theoretically go to jail for it. Has Washington lost their minds? Contrary to the stance this article takes, there are limits we need that protect website owner's interests, but this is getting out of control. It goes back to my theory of lawmakers being scared of the new generation. Maybe they think if they slap enough laws down on the table people will be too scared to manipulate the web and speak freely. Try telling that Wikileaks or Aaron Swartz. This new bill will only rile up groups like Anonymous and others to attack more government sites and private information of lawmakers. In my opinion, hack away boys! It feels like our government would be happy with a free democratic society physically and a communist regime online. Hopefully people will write their congressman and get this new CFAA bill thrown out.
Remember the Stop Online Piracy Act? This bill was set up to stop people from stealing music, videos and other intellectual property. Sounds good on the surface, but the reality was that this bill was peppered with little things like law enforcement being able to take down entire domains, or websites, just on the basis of things as small as a person posting a comment with a link to a song or piece of media deemed illegal. Thankfully big guys like Google and Craigslist got involved and the bill eventually died. But that is not end of SOPA, there are more lawmakers drafting new versions currently. Where I am going with this is simply the fact that we cannot let our U.S. government lock down our Internet like China or Iran. This was paramount to Aaron Swartz and Wikileaks. The Internet should remain as free as our physical society. This is the message of most hacktivist groups. Wow, that was a mouthful! I'll end this post with a great video about the new CFAA bill and what it means for people.
Curious to see some bad hackers?
Here is a story I read a few years ago in Rolling Stone. It talks a little about the punishment for these criminal hackers. Keep in mind that these are not Hacktivists, just an interesting story of hacking. Wikileaks is mentioned though. Click Here: PDF Hackers Gone Wild
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
What's on the line for hacktivists and the common public?
Upon further research into hacktivism I came across a couple of great articles that detail a big question I hadn't even necessarily thought about. Is hacking a crime or just civil disobedience? The first article I read was from PC World, "How Hacktivism Affects Us all". The author, Edel Rodriguez, detailed the ideas of a new generation of people that grew up on the Internet and the fact that we now view the Internet as a common place in the world like a park or physical business. The idea of online protesting as a form of hacktivism came to mind. Normally, people can sign a petition online and cause action, sometimes. However, think about a "sit in" at a physical business and compare it to a common DoS attack on a website. Physically, people block others from entering the business and congest the storefront or business. Online, a DoS attack floods the targeted website with requests for information, just the same a logging onto a site repeatedly. Theoretically, the idea is not illegal, just like peaceful protest, but the government has enforced laws such as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act or CFAA to prosecute individuals involved in these events. So whats at stake here? Would you let the government tell you that you cannot protest anymore?
I started thinking about about other applications where digital activism could be compared to physical activism. Take for instance defacing a business's a sign. When caught, the criminal would probably get a slap on the wrist, at most a month in jail and a few fines. Get caught changing the home page of a business and you would be looking at several years in prison. In some light, it is the same thing. There is no doubt in my mind that stealing information is illegal, but that's not what these two types of hacktivism do. An interesting thing the article mentions, that I never knew, is that the government can prosecute someone under the CFAA law for violating a website's terms of service. Now, picture yourself at Old Chicago. Your plate of spaghetti comes to the table and you decide to pick it up and throw it all over the wall. You will surely be asked to leave, but imagine if the cops were outside ready to haul you away for violating their rules or terms of service. As the article finishes up it talks about a former member of Anonymous saying he did not agree with posting private information about civilians on the web for millions of people to see. This is important because sometimes hacktivists can hurt the very people they are standing up for.
While I agree with not hurting those your are standing up for, there exists some gray area here. There is bound to be some people at any given business that will be subjected to the attack of a hacktivist, that really never had anything to do with the reason the business is being attacked. Compare that idea to the employees at a store that are laid off because the community has decided to boycott the business. Maybe we have a generational gap in lawmaking where they do not realize the importance the Internet is to a younger generation. This idea pushes me into a second article I read.
ProRepublica's article by Christie Thompson, "Hacktivism: Civil Disobedience or Cyber Crime?", talks about the suicide of Aaron Swartz, the founder of Reddit and self proclaimed online hacktivist. Swartz was facing 13 felonies, millions of dollars in fines and 50 years in prison for stealing scholarly articles off of a secure database called JSTOR. While there were claims he intended to sell them, he never did and frankly why would he as he was worth more than a database of articles would fetch. Can you imagine stealing a few dumpsters full of books and facing 50 years in the pen? An idea I've wrestled with is maybe the fact that law enforcement and government officials are scared of these abilities. All Swartz did was violate JSTOR's terms of service, even they didn't want to prosecute him. Sounds like the government trying to do what they consider to be proactive? This article goes into the methods of hacktivism similar to my first article of research. I will say ProReublica's stance seems more in favor of the Hacktivists than PC World. Even the titles of paragraphs used by Rodriguez of PC World like "Online Vigilantes" show the authors view of hacktivists compared to the plain titles Thompson uses. I want to continue to dig deeper into Internet laws and what kind of court cases have came up through hacktivism. For now, I will leave you with a great video that talks about the legacy of Aaron Swartz.
I started thinking about about other applications where digital activism could be compared to physical activism. Take for instance defacing a business's a sign. When caught, the criminal would probably get a slap on the wrist, at most a month in jail and a few fines. Get caught changing the home page of a business and you would be looking at several years in prison. In some light, it is the same thing. There is no doubt in my mind that stealing information is illegal, but that's not what these two types of hacktivism do. An interesting thing the article mentions, that I never knew, is that the government can prosecute someone under the CFAA law for violating a website's terms of service. Now, picture yourself at Old Chicago. Your plate of spaghetti comes to the table and you decide to pick it up and throw it all over the wall. You will surely be asked to leave, but imagine if the cops were outside ready to haul you away for violating their rules or terms of service. As the article finishes up it talks about a former member of Anonymous saying he did not agree with posting private information about civilians on the web for millions of people to see. This is important because sometimes hacktivists can hurt the very people they are standing up for.
While I agree with not hurting those your are standing up for, there exists some gray area here. There is bound to be some people at any given business that will be subjected to the attack of a hacktivist, that really never had anything to do with the reason the business is being attacked. Compare that idea to the employees at a store that are laid off because the community has decided to boycott the business. Maybe we have a generational gap in lawmaking where they do not realize the importance the Internet is to a younger generation. This idea pushes me into a second article I read.
ProRepublica's article by Christie Thompson, "Hacktivism: Civil Disobedience or Cyber Crime?", talks about the suicide of Aaron Swartz, the founder of Reddit and self proclaimed online hacktivist. Swartz was facing 13 felonies, millions of dollars in fines and 50 years in prison for stealing scholarly articles off of a secure database called JSTOR. While there were claims he intended to sell them, he never did and frankly why would he as he was worth more than a database of articles would fetch. Can you imagine stealing a few dumpsters full of books and facing 50 years in the pen? An idea I've wrestled with is maybe the fact that law enforcement and government officials are scared of these abilities. All Swartz did was violate JSTOR's terms of service, even they didn't want to prosecute him. Sounds like the government trying to do what they consider to be proactive? This article goes into the methods of hacktivism similar to my first article of research. I will say ProReublica's stance seems more in favor of the Hacktivists than PC World. Even the titles of paragraphs used by Rodriguez of PC World like "Online Vigilantes" show the authors view of hacktivists compared to the plain titles Thompson uses. I want to continue to dig deeper into Internet laws and what kind of court cases have came up through hacktivism. For now, I will leave you with a great video that talks about the legacy of Aaron Swartz.
Monday, April 1, 2013
"What comes to mind when you think of hacking or hacktivism?"
I would like to start by pointing out a question that I have asked several people over the last two weeks. "What comes to mind when you think of hacking or hacktivism?" Almost every answer I hear is, "do you mean China or those guys in funny masks?" This response has been scratching at my curiosity over what people define as hacking and what exactly is hacktivism. Upon searching Google for a little while I came upon the Ic3 or the Internet Crime Complaint Center's website. Ic3 is joint venture between the FBI, the National White Collar Crime Center and the Bureau of Justice Assistance. Funny enough, according to the 2010 Ic3 report the United States was responsible for a whopping 65.9% of online perpetrators. Where was China on the list? How about number 5 accounting for only 3.1%. On a side note, the 2011 report does not detail perpetrators by country, maybe because of embarrassment. We'll see what they say for 2012. With so many hackers in one of the worlds richest economies, are credit card numbers and fake
second mortgages their only motivation?
Well, this leads me into my discussion of hacktivism, or the use of computers and computer networks to promote political ends, chiefly free speech, human rights, and information ethics. This definition was taken from Wikipedia, however an outdated definition of hacktivism can found on the Cambridge Online Dictionary. This is the land of the free, and we do have that little 1st amendment that seems to infuriate leaders worldwide. According to Internet World Stats by Nielsen Online, there were almost 2.5 billion people online worldwide in the second quarter of 2012. So the question is, in this time of people living online do we need hacktivists? Do people really know what groups like Anonymous, WikiLeaks (remember those guys), and Lulzsec have exposed and brought forth into public view? In an age where government Internet censorship is at all time high, do we need rogue reporting and exposure to find the real truth in things? Is the power possessed by these groups too much, posing possible real threats to regular civilians? I would like to dive into this question by looking at hacktivism reports and statistics from around the world. For now, I will leave you with this YouTube excerpt from a CNN report about the group Anonymous.
Well, this leads me into my discussion of hacktivism, or the use of computers and computer networks to promote political ends, chiefly free speech, human rights, and information ethics. This definition was taken from Wikipedia, however an outdated definition of hacktivism can found on the Cambridge Online Dictionary. This is the land of the free, and we do have that little 1st amendment that seems to infuriate leaders worldwide. According to Internet World Stats by Nielsen Online, there were almost 2.5 billion people online worldwide in the second quarter of 2012. So the question is, in this time of people living online do we need hacktivists? Do people really know what groups like Anonymous, WikiLeaks (remember those guys), and Lulzsec have exposed and brought forth into public view? In an age where government Internet censorship is at all time high, do we need rogue reporting and exposure to find the real truth in things? Is the power possessed by these groups too much, posing possible real threats to regular civilians? I would like to dive into this question by looking at hacktivism reports and statistics from around the world. For now, I will leave you with this YouTube excerpt from a CNN report about the group Anonymous.
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