Laws that apply to the real world but not online world

dangerstat

dangerstat

dangerstat

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Hey guys,

I was just pondering this. There exist a set of laws that apply to both the real world and the virtual world (E.g. returning products). Then there are others that don't. So the ability to protest.

So we've all seen protests, which usually shut down the source of the anger (so usually companies) but if this happens in the virtual world (it'd be a DOS / DDOS attack - and illegal). Why does the right to protest apply online in the same way.

Probably a sensible legal reason, but thought I'd post this anyhow

Cheers


D
 
The computer misuse act is what makes a DDOS illegal.

Not sure that a DDOS is entirely comparable to a protest. A protest in the physical world at least requires 1,000 people or whatever to turn up and logjam parliament or whatever. In the virtual world you can hire a botnet for a few grand and slam the parliament website with millions of zombie PCs without any real effort on anyone's part.
 
Interesting point. But the classic counter is say truckers who complain about fuel prices and use there rigs to block a highway or something which is almost the same as using a bot net surely.
 
not really the same thing at all. Ddos is not a protest. There is no show of support, no message to go with it.

It is just black mail or a financial attack.
 
A DOS attack is a large scale coordinated assault on a web server usually originating from hundreds of PC's infected with a virus, but often involving a few or even one individual. It serves only one real purpose, to bring down or at least severely degrade the performance of the target website. It is an attack on the company. A protest does not aim to do this, but rather just to raise awareness of whatever they are protesting about.

However, causing a blockade, which is the closest to a DOS attack in the real world, is illegal.
 
dangerstat said:
Interesting point. But the classic counter is say truckers who complain about fuel prices and use there rigs to block a highway or something which is almost the same as using a bot net surely.
Click to expand...

Again, you're limited by people who actually get involved in the protest. In a DDOS there is essentially one person behind it - the person in charge of the botnet.
 
vonhelmet said:
Again, you're limited by people who actually get involved in the protest. In a DDOS there is essentially one person behind it - the person in charge of the botnet.
Click to expand...

True, but what if it's something like the "4chan" vs Scientology thing, that wasn't one person. It was a group of people who wanted to highlight how "wrong" they though Scientology was (and additionally for "lolz" but I'll bypass that!)
 
dangerstat said:
True, but what if it's something like the "4chan" vs Scientology thing, that wasn't one person. It was a group of people who wanted to highlight how "wrong" they though Scientology was (and additionally for "lolz" but I'll bypass that!)
Click to expand...

Were they all sat there, thousands of them frantically refreshing some scientology website? Or was that automated too?

The key difference for me would be the number of people actually involved and the effort required.
 
vonhelmet said:
Were they all sat there, thousands of them frantically refreshing some scientology website? Or was that automated too?

The key difference for me would be the number of people actually involved and the effort required.
Click to expand...

I believe that actually did involve 4chan "raiding" the site.
 
dangerstat said:
So when a protest emails a distro list of people to get them to email there MP and protest about something - surely that's not manual?
Click to expand...

Yes, it is, as the individuals actually have to make an effort to send an e-mail to their MP.

An automated solution would just spam the MP.
 
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