Anti-racism sites hit by wave of cyber-attacks
bbc.com
bbc.com
Regardless of who is behind these cyber attacks, whether its white supremacists, BLM protestors, anarchists, foreign state actors, or edgy 15 years olds in a Discord server with waifu profile pics, the end goal is the same: to make people angry, and possibly incite more riots. And it's going to succeed. And if you think about it too much, you'll just turn yourself into an angry paranoid wreck.
Maybe the internet (or social media) wasn't such a good idea after all? The technology moved faster than our monkey brains could keep up.
I think it’s important to remember the ways in which the internet has evolved that got us here. It’s not just a question of speed, but of incentives.
The internet has long been a tool for huge tech companies to build businesses that can only exist as long as they remain largely unchecked and unregulated, and the stock market has cheered these efforts on.
Now, we’re seeing the cost of giving everyone the ability to post whatever they want without having sustainable solutions to combat weaponized speech without compromising legitimate dissenting speech. This mistake largely falls on the market for rewarding this shortsightedness for so long.
Social media companies have also known for years now that controversy drives incredible amounts of traffic to their platforms, which in turn drives revenue.
We've effectively connected and amplified the voice of every village idiot. Before, you knew who the village idiot was and you could ignore them. Now every village idiot gets a loud ass voice that goes to people who don't know them. All they know about the village idiot is they've got this idea that just crazy enough to work.
All of which is amplified by clustering like people across villages. So your village has an idiot and mine does. Now they're hanging out coming up with conspiracies and acting foolish. Which creates less diversity.
Facebook, Google, Twitter, Etc. are inherently tools against diversity of thought. Google wants to show me the last 10 videos I've watched for ages. Twitter, I don't use so i'm just lumping it in cuz everyone else seems to. Facebook at least shows me posts by people I know but again, people I know. In each of these cases it's up to the user to force diversity of thought into the platform.
Our technological world doesn't promote the healthy and hard dialogues needed for people to grow as people. If I want to talk about black issues, I have to find a place where 1) I will get encouraged to have tough conversations (with likes etc). 2) Others will be encouraged to do the same. 3) Conversations can be nuanced enough that people will learn. 4) It will be real conversations with people who you can build a relationship where at least you recognize their name. 5) It needs to also discourage bad behavior such as trolling or abuse.
I was going to lead into a conversation about how HN does or doesn't do this for me, but I think that'd detract from my overall idea. We need to figure out a way to encourage hard dialogue while refraining from encouraging trolling online. This seems to be a pretty hard thing to do without some sort of good localized human oversight, but IDK.
Those who are able to build networks of bot accounts are able to deeply undermine discourse in dangerous ways, and social media platforms aren’t financially incentivized to deal with it.
Twitter could tell us right now how many bots are on the platform, but they never will because it could tank their stock.
As long as platforms can be manipulated by automation, this intentionally destructive speech will continue to proliferate.
The concept of responding to speech with speech is focused on reason and debate between the speakers themselves. But with automated amplified speech, no debate can exist because, at the surface, there are not multiple human actors. And at a separate layer, those who listen to amplified automated speech can not be reasoned with or debated with, the opinions are not their own and if they were reasonable they wouldn't be listening to the automated speech to begin with.
> can only exist as long as they remain largely unchecked and unregulated
Or they own the regulations (e.g. via regulatory capture) or are large / embedded enough that regulations, while undesirable, serve as a useful barrier to new competitors
For most of the Internet's time, it was a force against this. It was a peer to peer network with a large diversity of subjects. But on the last few years it has become mass media too, with all its problems. If there wasn't Internet, the stupidity would be on TV, that had already become highly centralized (and thus massive) by the time the Internet popularized.
The internet helped to consolidate print and broadcast media into the very single channel you discuss here. Furthermore, the internet, and more specifically the internet’s advertising model, created perverse incentives to encourage media companies to engage with content that users were more likely to click on. Prior to this model existing, media outlets didn’t have fine-grained metrics on what kinds of content sold and what didn’t, and not having to worry about this allowed them to more freely cover broader aspects of the news.
Now, everything is driven by the click and the online ad model. This is further compounded, yet again by the internet, that subscription revenue fell off a cliff and never recovered as people relied more and more on the internet for free news. A major pillar of media income evaporated a people stopped paying for news, which further drove media outlets to rely even more on the perverse advertising model I described above.
The flaws of the mass media and the internet cannot be separated because their function and purpose overlap in fundamental ways.
I had no idea that existed. But I'm pleased it does.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boogaloo_movement
Edit: RE: Antifa as a "fake label". This might be true in specific cases, but there's an actual anti-fascist movement happening as well.
Starts as a satire and slowly it shift to attracting more and more people with extremist views that replace the sarcastic group members.
[1] https://twitter.com/popehat/status/858722120620265473?lang=e...
The NZ mass shooter and Anders Breivik manifestoes are examples of this. There's an entire nutcase ecosystem out there who cite each other in their murders.
Movement as in organized movement, or just more people identifying as antifa?
It is just bunch of smaller groups that use the term to identify themselves.
I've been members of "boogaloo" groups and followed "boogaloo" pages on FB for years now. They've all been "left" in terms of message and the majority of members. Never seen a single far-right one until now, so I'm wondering how much of this is being manufactured.
I think you may be missing the main point of the protests.
People are out in the streets in order to bring attention to the fact that, in general, police have been doing a bad job.
So you probably have people from 4chan/Anonymous who are for the protestors.. and people from 4chan/Anonymous who are against it.
I wouldn't use that as evidence Antifa isn't involved. I think the video evidence makes it clear there are plenty of people involved in the violence.
4 Chan for the protesters? Have you ever visited their page?
> I wouldn't use that as evidence Antifa isn't involved. I think the video evidence makes it clear there are plenty of people involved in the violence.
FBI stated that they found no evidence of antifa involvement.
Yes, I read that headline too. It's important to read more than just the headline.
He picked an organization out of thin air, accused it of being responsible for looting and riots, even announced that they will be classified as a terrorist organization without ANY evidence? It doesn't look like something that should be happening in a free country. It is especially dangerous, since because antifa isn't a real organization anyone could be labeled as being from antifa and wouldn't have any way to defend themselves.
1. Anytime someone (especially a politician) suggests something both incendiary and unlikely (putting a domestic organization on the foreign terrorism org list), the goal is the same as a stage magician making a joke - it's to distract you. The correct question then to ask is what are you being distracted from.
2. It's hard to say Antifa isn't involved when they stated they are attending. As you say, they are not a monolithic organization but neither are white supremacists or most street gangs - we don't have a problem holding them accountable. Antifa does have a specific ideology based on pre-emptive violence, and they do have ideological founders and a history of violence.
3. Regardless of who you think may be responsible, this is a good point to realize that it's not smart to be associated with violent groups. They don't have the monopoly on use of force (that would be the state[^1] by definition) and therefore they'll eventually attempt to use violence, get noticed and get dismantled one way or another. Usually that process isn't peaceful when both sides are committed to violence, and there's a reason the state tends to win.
As I often point out with software, theory is great but reality tends to be something else. When your claim to fame is that you show up and commit acts of violence against people you don't like, well, you've sort of signed up to be blamed when you attend a rally and acts of violence start happening.
[^1]: The state here should be taken to mean the organized government as a singular entity
Anonymous has had nothing to do with 4chan for like 8years. Anonymous a leftwing organization through and through.
4chan is not an organization but an open forum, so if this was organized there, then you should be able to provide evidence.
You are throwing out hypotheses up that sound plausible and go along with the narrative, which is fine, but then everyone is jumping to treating it like established fact.
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/05/27/the-boogaloo-move...
But now we are supposed to believe antifa and BLM has nothing to do with the death and destruction in the riots. The push for this propaganda is everywhere and it looks like the scapegoat will be the bogaloo meme pages.
To be clear, I'm sure Cloudflare is pretty good at determining what is an attack and what is not, I'm just interested in the technical details.
But bigger pocketed foreign actors will want, it's suggested, to spread division and mayhem to keep the US occupied.
That is, the Aleksandr Dugin's 'foundations of geopolitics' strategy regarding the US: support both sides to divide the country thereby keeping the state too occupied to command itself elsewhere.
Now our media, societies and communities are online this becomes possible, much more so than before, to those outside the geographical borders of a country.
The democratisation of the media, virtual communities and targeted-advertising attacks the weakness of democracy: mass emotional manipulation to turn democratic choices into unmanagementable tribal warfare that ends in a totalitarian state.
This article is 5 years old now, but may give a rough idea.
Like other booter services, Asylum, Lizard Stresser and VDO rely on a subscription model, where customers or subscribers can launch an unlimited number of attacks that have a duration typically ranging from 30 seconds to 1-3 hours and are limited to 1-4 concurrent attacks depending on the tier of subscription purchased. The price for a subscription normally ranges from $10-$300 USD per a month depending on the duration and number of concurrent attacks provided.
> One single website belonging to an unnamed advocacy group
> dealt with 20,000 requests a second.
20k requests per second doesn't sound crazy to re-produce. Assuming you only need a 100 byte TCP packet to make a request [1], that's 800 bits. Bump up to 2000 bits assuming some overheads from somewhere, a 100Mb/s internet connection could send 50k requests a second.
Seems like a single person with a decent internet connection could flood them with 20k request per second. If the attacker picks a page that requests database access or a large payload return, you could easily sink a small web server.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14526139/what-is-the-min...
https://blog.cloudflare.com/cyberattacks-since-the-murder-of...
Here is the plot showing something allegedly different happening this month:
https://blog-cloudflare-com-assets.storage.googleapis.com/20...
What's the p-value on a t-test of difference there, cloudflare spooks? By eyeball there is no difference.
Then a completely unsubstantiated assertion: "The category with the biggest increase in cyberattacks was Advocacy Groups with a staggering increase of 1,120x."
What are these Advocacy Groups of which you speak? The BBC implies it's the NAACP or something; Cloudflare spooks don't say at all -for all we know these "activist" websites are terrorists, racists, anarchist revolutionaries, video game fans: nobody but Cloudflare knows, assuming they're not just making it up, or making a mistake in their group-by query.
Rather than reading this BBC report critically as the piece of nonsense propaganda it is, people on HN seem determined to fit it into whatever fantasies about Russians or Evil 4chan Racist Infiltrators or Weapons of Mass Destruction or whatever (mostly imaginary) bugaboos they're troubled by this week. Disgusting. Fools.
A physical comparison would be a security system for a business's property. The security company shouldn't be able to disable the system for a company simply because they don't like the politics of the people operating it. Doing that would essentially be facilitating a crime.
But I'm truly surprised to see anti-racism sites suffering from these attacks.
Is there really a racist contingent of hackers out there? I just never thought of the two going together.
Or is this more likely to be more Russian hacking efforts continuing to do their best to sow division, according to Putin's well-known playbook?
Yes.
I just never thought of the two going together.
Why not? It's not like hacking is a social ideology in and of itself. It's not like racists or other non-socially liberal people can't grasp the idea of hacking.
It’s not like adulthood has some magic turning point where ignorance turns to enlightenment.
I’d wager that far more adults are manipulative, pathological liars than kids tend to be.
There's no profound political or sociological reason behind this like you mentioned yourself, adults are manipulative while kids tend not to be as much.
I would argue it's demagogues who take advantage of societal breakdown to inflame inherent racism.
More generally we also have a choice regardless of circumstances to not be racist. I can see how as a species we're not there yet though.
Still being billed for an universal human right (as health) is a problem, but you can use your phone to call an ambulance wherever you are.