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Comment by jebus989 | Hacker News Reader

They use "criminals" 5 times in that short statement. IMO the overuse of emotive language is unnecessary and belies the emotional state of the author. Stay professional and detached—it's a DDoS, I've no doubt it's frustrating but they happen.

I prefer Github's recent response [0], clear and helpful but without the rhetoric.

[0] https://github.com/blog/1796-denial-of-service-attacks

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Rhetoric? You've got people who just attempted to blackmail you and then take your service offline when you refuse. The descriptive term "criminal", i.e. one who breaks laws, is perfectly valid IMO.

While I agree, the term blackmailer or extortionist would had been better.

Which are just specific types of criminals. I don't see the problem.

Criminals are just specific types of people, and people are just specific types of mammals. Being more specific sometimes aids understanding.

I think I get what you're saying here; it's an example of the non-central fallacy[1]. Calling someone "a criminal" calls to mind a set of stereotypes, to which blackmail/extortion don't quite fit (most crimes for which one gets called "a criminal" as a generic term are violent, for just one thing.) Calling them "a blackmailer" or "an extortionist" calls to mind a more accurate set of stereotypes, clustered more closely with how you'd react to kidnappers, con-artists, etc. than how you'd react to, say, a mugger.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/e95/the_noncentral_fallacy_the_worst...

Not all blackmail is a crime.

I blackmail my kids all the time... ("Wash your hands after using the bathroom or you will put 25 cents in this jar")

That's not blackmail ... "wash you hands or I'll tell your sister that you killed her pet fish" ... is blackmail. What your describing is more like extortion.

Of course it's valid, rhetoric != lies.

it's just framing the scenario in good guys vs bad guys terms, it's childish regardless of how accurately the term describes the actors involved..

I agree with your general sentiment wrt to good and bad, but saying these people are criminals is just plainly accurate, and specifically not attributing "badness" at all. It's extortion, which is forbidden for very good reasons and as far as I know, uncontroversially so.

I was actually marveling at how precise the wording is in this piece. Curious how different these things can come across.

Why is it childish to point out when someone is acting criminally — in a literal sense being a bad guy? Is it somehow more adult to act as though you are morally equivalent to an extortionist?

I think people might be being offended-by-proxy by a sort of status-shift 37s is trying to work into its language. Calling someone "an extortionist" still implies a sort of high-status white-collar cunning-and-intelligence, of the kind you'd expect of a person in the tech industry. An evil person, surely, but the respectable, movie-villain-you-love-to-hate kind of evil.

Calling someone "a criminal", meanwhile, degrades their status to that of a common mugger; someone in the lower class who needs to commit crime to survive, and who doesn't have the intelligence required to come up with a clever crime.

Hackers are generally aesthetes--we tend to value our intelligence, curiosity, etc. more than we value our moral fibre. We can appreciate stories like "A hacked into B to see if it was possible, and reported the vulnerability all responsible-like, but then they threw him in jail! How horrible!" because we think the positive-status from the display of intelligence makes it less likely, rather than more, that they were genuinely seeking to harm the people they hacked.

Because of this, I think we here are scared of being potentially associated with dumb, low-status, lower-class criminals more than we are of just being considered evil. People hire "evil, black-hat" hackers. Nobody hires a dumb hacker.

Calling someone a criminal degrades their status from someone who doesn't commit crime to someone who does. It degrades them from someone who adds value to someone who takes value.

There is moral judgement involved with calling someone a criminal, and rightfully so. Taking what other people have created by force or extortion degrades society.

That is the scenario, it's not just framing it that way, it actually is that way. There's nothing childish about it.

It is criminal behaviour. It reinforces to clients that the attack is not legal, and that they are not to be tolerated.

(and as a message to the DDOSer - they're likely to be reading this too and reminding them it is criminal and law enforcement is involved might make them reconsider the attack)

Yes, but you don't have to repeat it five times; it seems that you are pushing the thing

>Stay professional and detached—it's a DDoS, I've no doubt it's frustrating but they happen.

Burglary and murder happen too. No reason to hold your language back. Not even lawyers and prosecutors do, and they deal with those everyday.

For the company loosing millions or the Basecamp client whose unable to enter his account, that "those things happen" is not much of a response.

I like the "criminals" language. It's unfortunate they need to use it, because it points out that many people think this sort of thing is more like youthful hijinks--a type of vandalism, say--as it was when the Internet was younger. Repeating the word criminals is an excellent way to change the tenor of discussion on this topic in the public mind. I hope all companies that are ddos'd will do it, until it becomes redundant.

Actually, it’s not ‘a DDoS’ but a blackmail attempt, using a DDoS. That’s like confusing someone open-carrying a gun and an armed robbery.

> This attack was launched together with a blackmail attempt that sought to have us pay to avoid this assault.

While I know this is a little pedantic, I'm pretty sure the analogy falls down a bit -- denial of service attacks are often illegal (for instance, in the US it's possible for them to be prosecuted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act or even under trespassing or contract laws). Even without the blackmail attempt this could still be considered a criminal act.

So are open carry in most countries. You don’t come off as pedantic, just US-centric.

The US is far from the only country to make DDoS a crime or tort in various situations.

Of course not, and that was not my point.

The original comment said that because DDoS could be illegal, is was different from openly carrying a fire-arm; that assumes that openly carrying a firearm isn’t illegal. It often is, outside of the US -- hence my response.

I would have appreciated you didn’t downvote me before you understood that.

Fair enough, but the comment you had replied to had assumed quite reasonably that DDoS is a criminal act, and I can only assume your response quibbling about that was $SOMETHING-centric. Apologies for the downvote but that impression changed my interpretation of your later comment.

Personally I would rather them show some emotion, as it shares their frustration and anger at these idiots. Also, "criminals" reiterates to the attackers and potential copy-cats, this really is a criminal act and you can be punished.

Github's response would be a whole lot of technical, unhelpful nonsense for most basecamp users.

There's certainly a bit of knowing your audience here.

Yes, "criminals" is much too harsh. Let's replace it with "unfortunately misguided souls xoxo".

Except GitHub's audience is very different from Basecamp's. The first rule of any communication is - know your audience. Well played by DHH.

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