Very amusing watching the coverage of Anonymous and 4chan in the mainstream "legacy" media. I thought it was funny enough with someone discussing TCP and UDP packets on R4 this morning, and the Low Orbit Ion Cannon is now something people have heard of, though it's still presented as people "hacking into web sites". I tried explaining to the 8 year old about DDoS and DNS & TCP attacks but gave up. If you can't explain the concept to a small child that is trying to get my password one character at a time, I can see why the BBC doesn't bother.
What is funny is a guardian article on 4chan in which the polite commenters of the guardian discover 4chan at the same time 4chan discover them. An amusing conflict of comment philosophies.
Regardless of the rights or wrongs of wikileaks, it's disconcerting that the US can shut down online payments to a remote site that isn't doing anything illegal in its country of hosting -and which may be legal in the US under press freedom laws settled forty years ago. It'd be one thing to say no-US-banks to support transactions with wikileaks (as how US visa cards don't work in Cuba ATMs), but another to say no global debit cards work with wikileaks. Once you start saying that, the issue becomes whose set of morals do you want: the US, Russia's or Chinas'? All this visa and mastercard crackdown does is show the rest of the world that together VISA+mastercard are an SPOF that answers to the phone to US senators. Problem is, of course, if you have a processing co that doesn't answer anyone's phone, who gets to impose morality on it?
Photo: Havana, where people are still proud to own 1980s Ladas, especially in preference to Fiats of the same era