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Comment by andrewgodwin | Hacker News Reader

Not only that, a DDoS can cost quite a bit in extra bandwidth costs (I've had a couple of small ones chew through a suprising amount). It's a bit more of a substantial repercussion in addition to hitting "brand", and often affects smaller companies proportionally more.

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There is probably a reasonable separation between automated DDoS attacks and manual ones. If I convince 50 million people to click on CNN once at 3:17PM on a Tuesday then that's a reasonable form of protest IMO. If I rent a botnet for 24 hours and try and exploit some hole in your infrastructure then that's vandalism.

From a monetary standpoint they might cause the same amount of harm, but from a social standpoint a manual attack is a much harder target.

I say that the rulings and ideas here are... Backward.

I've seen a few times a website owner who asked that slashdot submissions be linked to a static page because of php content. Instead, slashdot posts directly to a php link, causing cpu, memory to go through the roof along with flooding the net channel empying quota. And he was powerless to stop it, because he couldn't even ssh into the machine.

We techies all know about the slashdot effect. How's it so much different, aside a tool called LOIC vs firefox and f5? Guess it does go down to intent?

> Guess it does go down to intent?

Yes. If I put my hand on your shoulder, it could be friendly companionship or it could be assault. The physical action is the same; context is everything.

One thing about engineers I'm sure we all notice is we tend to think in terms of logical analysis: true or false, black or white. Real life is full of grey.

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