Two LulzSec Members Plead Guilty To DDOS Attacks

[Radelaide]

Is it just me, or is Asperger's Syndrome now becoming the new "it" disease. I'm pretty sure most people are self-diagnosed sufferers who just want an excuse to be an uncouth ****.

Well, it's certainly become the media's new favorite disorder. I wouldn't call it a disease as it's not catching, it just means the person in question's mind functions differently than the "average" person. And with all disabilities, there is a range from high functioning to low functioning. It's also surrounded by many misdiagnoses and it's over diagnosed (much like ADD and ADHD) by professional psychiatrists for kids that don't have it, while sometimes ignoring kids that do.

What bothers me about saying he's a "sufferer" is that it seems like they're trying to say that the person in question is mentally incompetent. But that's far from the case, a person with Asperger's approaches the world differently than other people and their interactions with it are a reflection the way they see it. But most are perfectly rational and reasonable people, capable of understanding their own actions and the consequences of them.

Actually, it bothers me because it shows the inherent bias of multiple cultures towards people with "mental disabilities". I have ADD and though it's become much more common in the past decade, I'm sometimes treated like there's something wrong with me. There isn't.

I'm not trying to come down on you, it's just calling it a disease is kind of offensive. Sheldon on the Big Bang Theory is also offensive in the same way. Some people with Asperger's certainly do behave like terribly offensive, uncouth idiots regardless of whether or not they're diagnosed. But other people do too, regardless of age, gender, skin color, or culture. Saying he acted out this way because he's Asperger's doesn't excuse his actions, it may be part of the legal plea but it just makes me want to slam my head into the table.

As someone who suffers from pretty severe depression/anxiety, I know exactly where you're coming from. I'm sick of hearing that every John, Dick and Harry has it. But I know people IRL who say they have Asperger's but they're just using it as an excuse to be assholes.

I'd like to see medical records on this kid (only including his diagnosis) on how severe his "disorder" is. I think the attorney he's using it just using it as an excuse to get his sentence reduced.

Disease probably wasn't the correct term, so I apologise, but it still fits the point.

 

[Ogargd]

Why does it matter if he goes to prison there or in the US if he's still going in prison anyway?

US prisons are notorious around the world for their poor treatment of prisoners and often harsh sentencing, and the fact that in the US friends and family won't be able to visit him.

 

[viranimus]

Much as I said, I was not aware that overloading a server with traffic was made a crime. Would you care to cite the source of the longstanding US law that makes it illegal to overwhelm a server please so as I do not make this error again?

Actually that's a very interesting topic.

A website costs money to keep up and running, especially when high traffic is involved. And these are not personal websites with a visitor counter in the double digits.
Now, like I said, that means money is spent to keep it up and running.
Which means that purposely flooding it with traffic with the express intent to make it shut down, (IE: Unlawful blocking of service) is in fact a crime.

The "hackers" do not own the site, the IP, or provide monetary aid to keep it running.
Therefore any attempt to bring it down is, currently, by law, Vandalism. If you have a problem with that being vandalism, stay off the internet. As I've said before, if you like the internet you've enjoyed in the past, there are rules that have to be obeyed. Taking someone down just because you disagree with them, is against the rules.

But there are some flaws with that. First off the likes of Sony do not pay other organizations to host their servers. They host and regulate their own servers. So it is not as if being inundated with trivial request is going to hit a overload bandwidth kickoff that many hosting services utilize to generate income. In the course of expense there is no additional money lost regardless of it they receive one request or 1 trillion per millisecond.

Secondly, in many cases these people (No I will not refer to them as hackers because no actual hacking occurred) DO in fact provide monetary aid to the company. Sony again is a perfect example. I think it goes without saying that there is likely not a single one of the ones who were supposedly behind the Sony attack that did not buy Sony products along the way.

But to claim vandalism? DDoS attacks do not destroy data or damage it. Once the protest is over that data is the exact same as it ever was. In the case of some cracks the data might be modified as in replacing a webpages background from a sunset to a bag full of donkey phali, but those are not the DDoS attacks we are looking for.

And the question I posed is what specific law was created to make it illegal. Applying and reworking an existing law that does not quite fit is what I was trying to point out. Ive yet to see a specific US law mentioned that specifically states DDoS attacks or actually properly reflects the actions involved with the supposed crime.

I would like to see the legally ratified laws of the internet if these laws do exist. That is why I ask, because I did not get the memo that the laws had yet been drafted.

 

[mysecondlife]

"Arrest us. We dare you," the (ugh) hacktivist group tweeted [https://twitter.com/LulzSec/status/93093868379193344] back in July of last year.

The authorities did exactly that. Several alleged members of the group were arrested after a joint investigation by Scotland Yard and the FBI.

[HEADING=2]Epic Fail[/HEADING]


Game Over

Now I want cruel and unusual punishment for those 2.

Sentence to hang by ethernet cord or something.

Or something less excessive.

 

[80Maxwell08]

Why does it matter if he goes to prison there or in the US if he's still going in prison anyway?

US prisons are notorious around the world for their poor treatment of prisoners and often harsh sentencing, and the fact that in the US friends and family won't be able to visit him.

So basically the FBI wants to make him suffer for humiliating them.

 

[nightwolf667]

As someone who suffers from pretty severe depression/anxiety, I know exactly where you're coming from. I'm sick of hearing that every John, Dick and Harry has it. But I know people IRL who say they have Asperger's but they're just using it as an excuse to be assholes.

And I know two people in real life who both have it, and have heard horror stories about third. One acknowledges and addresses his behavior, the other exists in a fantasy reality of his own making and rejects anything that contradicts his own views. The third refuses any acknowledgement of reality, takes medication meant for someone with bi-polar and uses every excuse to be an asshole. He apparently takes his computer into family restaurants with porn for his background. So, I know where you're coming from too.

Assholes of any stripe are frustrating to deal with, but like any disorder it comes in many colors and many strokes. It's the same as saying that someone with Asperger's is the same as someone with autism, a person can have both but they are ultimately different. The thing about mental "disorders" is that they are part of who a person is, you can medicate it and maybe treat it so that the individual in question is better at functioning among other people. But all the drugs in the world and all the therapy sessions will never change the fact, whether it's Asperger's or ADD, that it's part of who you are. Disease implies that it is something a person will eventually get better from, recover from, move on from.

I've also been down that deep dark pit that is depression (more than once), but the difference is I can climb up out of it (if I work at it). Maybe even be free someday. I can't get rid of the ADD (and I don't want to). I'm not going to get better, I can modify my behavior to make someone else more comfortable, but it's not some segmented separate part of my personality. That, in a nutshell, is why I don't think of it as a disease.

But, yes, there are many many assholes in this world and they should all be flogged.

I'd like to see medical records on this kid (only including his diagnosis) on how severe his "disorder" is. I think the attorney he's using it just using it as an excuse to get his sentence reduced.

Disease probably wasn't the correct term, so I apologise, but it still fits the point.

Only if you assume he can get "better". But yes, I hope his psychiatrist is a good one for that to hold up in court. And it certainly doesn't excuse him being an asshole. We're just going to have disagree on the disease point.

 

[Ogargd]

Why does it matter if he goes to prison there or in the US if he's still going in prison anyway?

US prisons are notorious around the world for their poor treatment of prisoners and often harsh sentencing, and the fact that in the US friends and family won't be able to visit him.

So basically the FBI wants to make him suffer for humiliating them.

Putting it like that makes it sounds a bit more acceptable to do =P but due to his mental illness and possible mental fragility I hope they just let him stay in England, ethically speaking.

 

[80Maxwell08]

Why does it matter if he goes to prison there or in the US if he's still going in prison anyway?

US prisons are notorious around the world for their poor treatment of prisoners and often harsh sentencing, and the fact that in the US friends and family won't be able to visit him.

So basically the FBI wants to make him suffer for humiliating them.

Putting it like that makes it sounds a bit more acceptable to do =P but due to his mental illness and possible mental fragility I hope they just let him stay in England, ethically speaking.

Agreed. He's already caught and in jail. It's done let him stay there.

 

[ResonanceSD]

Why does it matter if he goes to prison there or in the US if he's still going in prison anyway?

US prisons are notorious around the world for their poor treatment of prisoners and often harsh sentencing, and the fact that in the US friends and family won't be able to visit him.

So basically the FBI wants to make him suffer for humiliating them.

I'm totally with them if they want to do that. You can't invite them to do something then hide behind "Aspergers" when it suits. Do the crime, do the time, etc.

 

[viranimus]

.

I don't see the relevance of this statement. It's supposed to be harder to DDOS Sony? Please elaborate, you've lost me on this one.

Ok Ill elaborate this one.

A website costs money to keep up and running, especially when high traffic is involved.

Yes it costs money to keep a website up and running, but a company like sony runs their own independent servers, so they are not going to charge themselves more to run their own servers just because of failing to meet traffic spikes. Sonys servers cost them the same to own/operate if they are up and running at 100% capacity or completely offline. So being overran by LOIC zombies has no actual bearing financially.

Beyond that... Despite how people think, the internet is not a physical place. Trying to apply logic of the physical world does not always work in the digital. The issue is far more complex than protesters and picket lines, or stay off my lawn. Thats why you cant simply apply physical world charges to the realm of the digital because it is not the same thing.

If we need anything, what we need is something to put a stop to the shenanigans that prompted the formation of lulzsec. Lulzsec didnt just form literally just for the lulz. It formed as a direct consequence of Sony's actions. You treat the cause, not the effect and most of what prompted lulzsec to do what they did all circles back to what Sony tried to pull with the PS3 jailbreak and their detailed chorus line of sphincterocity that followed. Had Sony not been allowed to continue litigation and laughed out of court like the should have been given the already recently concluded jailbreaking precedent, you would have never seen lulzsec at all.

On the rest of the dissection, youve stated your opinion, ive stated mine, it would be repetitive to continue to speak on it.

 

[ReinWeisserRitter]

And the lesson of the day is "Don't dare someone to kick you in the ass while you're shitting on their lawn", kids. Of all the sad and groan-worthy things announced as news on this site (just like the real world!), egging the police on to arrest you while you're being accused of doing something illegal is one of the most Darwin Award-worthy of late.

At least the smartass got what he asked for, so there's some good to be had here.

 

[Esotera]

i agree with you on the 2nd point you make but (being a guy who isn't a computer expert) explain to me how take down the CIA website without hacking into their computers.

A DDOS is a distributed denial of service. Basically it's like visiting the escapist on some wednesdays - there are a lot more computers requesting to download zero punctuation than the server can handle, so it can only fulfill some of those requests, meaning not everyone can access the site. When a hacker group DDOSes, they generally rent a botnet of computers with malware on them, and access the same page several thousands times every second. The idea is to flood the server with requests so fast that it can't tell which ones are genuine.

Compared to something like an XSS vulnerability or an vulnerable version of apache (server software), where you would probably have to write your own code and take a lot of things into consideration before hacking a site, a DDOS is the equivalent of pressing a big red button and then going to twitter to shout about how 1337 you are. It doesn't have any long-term effects but loses revenue for sites & is annoying as hell for the people in charge of the computers.

 

[karloss01]

I couldn't find the clip from V for Vendetta so i'll qoute it;

"Not so funny now is it, funny man?"

 

[Cid Silverwing]

Hang on. One or more of these LulzSec brats are Aspies?

Suddenly this all makes so much more sense now! *has Aspergers too*

 

[TheRightToArmBears]

They did literally ask for it. They were just being random douchebags, fuck 'em, I say.

 

[templar1138a]

Asperger's Syndrome sufferer, Cleary, who is being...

As someone with PDD-NOS, I don't approve of this phrasing. No one with Autism, Asperger's, or PDD-NOS suffers from it. There are problems that arise, but they can all be worked around to an extent. Any suffering only comes from frustrations that derive from not having found a way to work around the disability, not the disability itself.

Besides, mentioning that he has Asperger's added nothing to the article. It seems more like an attempt to keep the readers interested by mentioning a strange! and bizarre! disability. It makes me think of the same mentality that led to the saying, "If it bleeds, it leads."

 

[Wintermoot]

and this is why you don,t glamorize your hack attacks.

 

[Arcane Azmadi]

"Arrest us. We dare you," the (ugh) hacktivist group tweeted [https://twitter.com/LulzSec/status/93093868379193344] back in July of last year.

The authorities did exactly that.

I think this is the single most gratifying thing I have read on the internet in YEARS!

 

[Dags90]

Its true I'm currently doing it for my degree. Hacking is a less awesome than the films make it out to be, still fun and you learn groovy things about computers but its not like the movies at all.

Spoiler: Are you saying Jurassic Park lied to me?

If the latter, then his defense lawyer is probably clinging onto every last straw she can to have his sentence reduced. If I were in her shoes, I'd do the same... wouldn't you?

I'm pretty sure if you wouldn't you're professionally obligated to quit.

 

[Penguinis Weirdus]

I'm pretty sure if you wouldn't you're professionally obligated to quit.

Under UK employment law and contract law, you cannot be fired for refusing to carry out illegal actions and they cant make you sign a contract that breaks the law, and if it does (this bit I'm not sure about so bear with me) those parts that are illegal you aren't obliged to carry out.

I'm presuming the US has similar laws