> Nearly six years ago, Cloudflare founded Project Galileo because we noticed a disturbing trend of disproportionate attacks against at-risk organizations and individuals that were advocating for marginalized groups. Project Galileo was set up to provide protection from cyberattacks for vulnerable targets, like artistic groups, humanitarian organizations, and the voices of political dissent.
I had no idea that existed. But I'm pleased it does.
We are really seing the chickens comming home to roost with regards to globalisation politics of the last few decades. When the wealth growth only happens in the top few percent this is inevitable.
I believe that argument here is that globalisation causes a bunch of interactions that wouldn't have happened otherwise, that leads to strife ("they took our jobs" is one of the plethora of scenarios) and that leads to racism.
While in "in the last few decades" you could dream about owning a computer, today you have a supercomputer in your pocket that you can use to complain about the remainder of unresolved issues of our imperfect human society. And we are reading your messages from all the continents in the world. Think! before talking about "globalization" as inherently "bad".
I'm not agreeing with OP, but I don't find the "but there's iphones now" argument all that convincing. Having a gadget when you can barely afford rent or medical care is a small comfort.
Anti-racism sites are being knocked offline... and some people still think that white nationalists and nazi's are completely uninvolved in the street violence we've been seeing. Yeah right. This is Anonymous/4chan M.O., and it and "Antifa" are fake labels which white nationalists are using to cloak their violent plans.
We need another rule for when the ironic goatfuckers have been taken over by actual goatfuckers and the latter are now ironically pretending to be the former.
Other labels which may be useful are "ha ha only serious" (ironic racism is in and of itself still racism), and "stochastic terrorism", the circulation and planting of propaganda, ideology, and conspiracy theories that leads to mass shootings.
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.
As the ability to coallese around an idea instead of an organization increases due to the cost of communication continuing to drop I think we'll continue to see more and more actual movements that can not really be thought of as an organized movement. Occupy wall street was an actual movement, BLM has no centralized leadership, 2011 london riots were actually reasonably well coordinated, but lacked any centralized leadership.
Antifa are very well organised and very much a real thing. Of course like minded people get involved locally as well, so there are probably a lot more people 'identifying as Antifa' than long term Antifa people, but they are a persistent organised group and some people are into it full time. Luis Enrique Marquez is a well known example.
Antifa doesn't really have leadership, it doesn't even have set of rules to follow. There are even disagreements between people regarding their approach.
It is just bunch of smaller groups that use the term to identify themselves.
Yes, I agree completely. I think those attributes, for a movement like that, are a strength. They're pretty effective at doing what they're aiming to do.
It is outright silly to discount either neo-nazi or antifa involvement. The only worthwhile discussion to be had would be to figure how much of the police provocation dumped onto them (or in case of neo-nazis collaborated with). Don't ignore all the Neiman Marxists out for activism tourism.
Feeling doubtful about this Wikepedia article and the recent MSM coverage of "boogaloo" stuff.
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.
Why not arrest and interrogate the ones causing violence and find out if they’re white nationalist, antifa, or something else? It’s not like we’re forced to just spitball conspiracy theories here.
We have. Unfortunately it turned out to overwhelmingly be locals, and people who maybe got a bit too swept up in the groupthink mentality of a protest - which doesn't help either side and so nobody really cares to mention it.
Several of the "anonymous" (the hacker pseudo personality) accounts were moving in support of the protestors. It wouldn't surprise me if that triggered a backlash internally.
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.
> So you probably have people from 4chan/Anonymous who are for the protestors.. and people from 4chan/Anonymous who are against it.
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.
FBI field office in Washington stated that they had no intelligence currently that Antifa was involved.. in the Washington area.. as of the 3rd of June, with the caveat that it was early and they were still looking at facts and investigating.
Yes, I read that headline too. It's important to read more than just the headline.
if they didn't have evidence as of 3rd of June, then where does trump accusation come from, did he pulled it from where sun doesn't shine?
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.
There's a whole lot going on here, so I'm going to unpack this in a few different points.
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
So, some script kiddies buy a botnet and take down a few websites, and that means that the arson, looting and general violence is all the fault of white supremacists? That makes no sense.
No one suggested it was all the fault of white supremacists, but unless you're suggesting that anti-racism protestors are DDOSing their own websites it does seem reasonable that white supremacists (which is synonymous with pro-racism) are involved.
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.
You’re right, it specifically involves the /k/ board and Facebook groups among other platforms. The levels of subterfuge and dog whistling are a whole meme subculture unto itself.
In one side we have plenty of long running antifa twitter accounts pushing for violence, on the other we have bogaloo meme pages of people who appose gov abusing their 2A rights.
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.
Every White Nationalist group I am in is full of people unanimously happy to sit back and enjoy the show.
Nobody is involved, nobody wants to be involved, nobody is encouraging anyone to get involved. Indeed, there are often reminders of why it is so important not to get involved.
And why would we? An anti-White state is under attack from hordes of Africans and brainwashed Whites whose radicalization they permitted and facilitated. It's like watching two people you hate beat each other to a pulp- it's marvellous!
The media is desperately trying to pin the blame on 'White Supremacists' (I don't know a single one), desperately trying to incite White resistance, so that they may erupt in condemnation of Whites... And yet we are giving them nothing. It's still just blacks and blues fighting it out. It's a lot of fun.
Join some pro-White telegram groups. They're not hard to find. You'll learn a lot!
I would be curious to see how they differentiate between a DDoS and a sudden influx of traffic from new sources, possibly including sources hiding behind tor/vpns/whatever.
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.
Same. I'm sure they're seeing a lot of traffic just out of support, curiosity, etc. Definitely would be interesting to know how they distinguish that from an attack.
DDoS attacks need infected computers (and I'm not sure those would be hiding anywhere), so I would imagine that the logs from one DDoS attack would have a lot of the same IP entries as other DDoS attacks.
I'm sure they could differentiate the hug of death due to sudden popularity vs the continued onslaught of scripted bots just by frequency of requests, right? As in, single IP frequency of pings measured out across a batch of addresses. Those malicious would be more regimented with short recycle times, while those unmalicious would be browsing making their repeated calls erratic. (Honest question, I'm genuinely curious.)
I feel bad for Cloudflare saying this, but I really think this shows we need to democratize DDoS protection. It's become essentially mandatory if you're running a site which might face controversy, and in the long term I'm not sure we can rely on the continued goodwill of a handful of companies to make sure it's widely available.
What does that actually mean in practice? Government subsidized compute doesn't seem like something I'd trust all that much in practice (seems like it'd be ripe for censorship). So it'd have to be decentralized. If only IPFS was ready for prime time....
Agreed. Carrying out a DDos attack is illegal, so these services are protecting sites against illegal activity. If we want to uphold the rule of law, protecting against illegal activity should be acceptable regardless of the contents of a website.
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.
This gives me hope knowing there are people out there stomping out these fake narratives. The only racism I’ve experienced in my life has been over the past ten years and always from left-leaning individuals.
I am happy that you have not experienced this kind of adversity in your personal life. There is no reason, however, why your personal experience should be generalised to the population/world.
>stomping out these fake narratives.
Why is it desirable to temporarily take some website down instead of presenting a strong and coherent counter argument.
In addition to green usernames, a pretty common tell is the "Latin"(-ish) username. The white supremacist segment of the population loves it some Rome.
It is by no means indicative, but over time, if you pay attention, you end up with a bunch of heuristics that can help you identify good-faith arguments versus malicious ones.
The really funny bit with the 88 == HH bit is that it's taking Gematria values of the German alphabet and assigning significance to the resulting number. IE a Jewish technique (from the Zohar & Hebrew numeral system) of converting letters into numbers. I suppose IIXIIX is too long.
Feel free to stand in line behind the people upset that white supremacists ruined the swastika (for half the planet), the toothbrush mustache, Norse mythology, American conservatism, the name Adolf, social media, leather trenchcoats, and various numbers and memes and direct your outrage at the proper target when your number is called.
Assuming you are saying this in good faith--EDIT: and, speaking of heuristics, I looked at your posting history and I will confess to some skepticism about the assumption but somebody who has the same question in a more genuine way may be curious as to the answer!--there are a whole lot of white-supremacist dirtbags out there and they want to hurt decent people and, more importantly, waste their time and energy. That makes good filters important because otherwise they will sap your time and energy and make you less effective at the things you want to be effective at. Things like these are heuristics; they help you filter down the garbage. When you see consistent results when some dude with a Latin name (especially an obvious new account) comes into your mentions Just Asking Question over and over again, you, y'know--notice.
Puffy Latin names, anime avatars, new accounts, that kind of thing? One is not necessarily a tell. More may be, and depending on how much of that you see, you may need to tailor your filter to accept false negatives 'cause the alternative is to get brainworms.
(For an example of what is not a heuristic, consider 1488 or "Deus vult"--that's just racist agitprop.)
I would like to see an estimate in how much a person paid in the black market to buy access to the botnets that did this. $5? $50? $100? What is the going rate for 110k requests per seconds?
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.
I'm not sure, but it doesn't sound like much shared among all of them (assuming a good number have popped up). I think many people here regularly deal with those sorts of numbers in legitimate traffic.
> 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.
How much do foreign actors help? There are, of course, US groups that want to attack these sites.
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.
Is the assumption here that racist groups are the source of the DDoS attacks? Might be interesting to know where the majority of the attacks originate. I wonder if the attacks are nation sponsored. Adversaries of the U.S. like to see it on its knees these days, and injecting more FUD is certainly a way to increase anger & hate.
By the way, both of the recent black men who were dealt with by police were FELONS with extensive criminal records.
George Floyd once terrorized, robbed and beat a pregnant women at gunpoint for money and drugs . . . he had at least 9 run-ins with the law . . .
https://twitter.com/i/status/1267678541602308096
. . . and in the case of Manuel Ellis death of March 3rd, he walked up to Tacoma Police Officers and said, 'I have warrants, I need to talk.'
As soon as the police officer got out of the car, he assaulted one of them and slam dunked him into the ground.”
What do you expect ? Police are supposed to give him a lollipop ?
I hate how the internet makes everyone think they're smarter than everyone else. Scheming malicious losers write fake news and propaganda to incite anger in stupid and naive people, then skeptics come across it and become paranoid and angry, and then they make fake news and propaganda to incite anger in stupid and naive people. But in the end, everyone involved is a stupid naive scheming malicious paranoid loser.
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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
"Weaponized" speech is an Orwellian phrase. You can weaponize weapons, but legitimate speech (outside of clear and present danger, like inciting lawless action or shouting "Fire" in a crowded theater) should always be responded to with speech.
It's not the content of the speech itself that is weaponized, it's sheer volume of speech that needs to be responded to that makes it weaponized. And the volume (amount) of speech that must be responded to is so great that even the concept and need to "remain vigilant" against it is a challenge.
The problem nowadays is that it’s getting harder to separate legitimate speech from automated amplified speech.
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.
This point reveals an angle that is rarely recognized: what needs responding to is not the mass amount of speech that comes from automated bots, for automated bots won't listen to the response. What needs responding to is the people who listen to automated bots.
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
>Maybe the internet (or social media) wasn't such a good idea after all?
technology and science aren't apolitical. there isn't a single piece of scientific innovation (short of the polio vaccine and other freely distributed medical advances) that hasn't furthered political aims. combustion, electricity, transistors, nuclear power, the internet, etc etc etc. technologists and scientists think they have the luxury of being apolitical but they don't. the sooner we realize that the sooner we'll start making ethically sound decisions in our work and thereby having a meaningful effect on such misuse.
That is a flaw of mass media, not of the Internet. When a single channel broadcasts for an entire population, it must only talk about things most of the population is interested on, so the channel becomes single minded. If people are immersed on those channels, they become single minded too, and single minded people are crazy (AFAIK, always).
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.
On the one hand, I guess you expect something more sophisticated when someone mentions a "cyber-attack" but on the other hand, knowing the context (the article is in the general media, and sophisticated/intelligent/motivated actors don't really have a vested interest in attacking one-off activist groups), you really come to suspect it's nothing more than a DDOS attack.
I was under the impression that these kinds of kids and hackers DDoS-ing sites for fun or activism were virtually all socially liberal, so attacks on government and military websites make sense to me.
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?
There are racists in every profession and walk of life. If you believe that being a hacker / someone with tech skills precludes you from having prejudice I hope you reflect on that belief.
Is there really a racist contingent of hackers out there?
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.
I think you misunderstood me. I didn't mean to generalize this over everything they do but lulz is a good enough reason for the online fake propaganda and trolling in 99% cases. Just go on discord and find 16 year old haxors with waifu pics.
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.
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.
That does read more like a Cloudflare advertisement, and they definitely don't add much in terms of who's being attacked. The graphs are pretty misleading with titles mentioning "since George Floyd's death" which would certainly give you the impression there is a relation but their data doesn't seem to back up that claim directly.
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[ 101 ms ] story [ 2341 ms ] threadI had no idea that existed. But I'm pleased it does.
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.
[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.
Nobody is involved, nobody wants to be involved, nobody is encouraging anyone to get involved. Indeed, there are often reminders of why it is so important not to get involved.
And why would we? An anti-White state is under attack from hordes of Africans and brainwashed Whites whose radicalization they permitted and facilitated. It's like watching two people you hate beat each other to a pulp- it's marvellous!
The media is desperately trying to pin the blame on 'White Supremacists' (I don't know a single one), desperately trying to incite White resistance, so that they may erupt in condemnation of Whites... And yet we are giving them nothing. It's still just blacks and blues fighting it out. It's a lot of fun.
Join some pro-White telegram groups. They're not hard to find. You'll learn a lot!
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.
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.
>stomping out these fake narratives.
Why is it desirable to temporarily take some website down instead of presenting a strong and coherent counter argument.
It is by no means indicative, but over time, if you pay attention, you end up with a bunch of heuristics that can help you identify good-faith arguments versus malicious ones.
Puffy Latin names, anime avatars, new accounts, that kind of thing? One is not necessarily a tell. More may be, and depending on how much of that you see, you may need to tailor your filter to accept false negatives 'cause the alternative is to get brainworms.
(For an example of what is not a heuristic, consider 1488 or "Deus vult"--that's just racist agitprop.)
It’s always one narrative, and it’s always on repeat.
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...
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.
George Floyd once terrorized, robbed and beat a pregnant women at gunpoint for money and drugs . . . he had at least 9 run-ins with the law . . . https://twitter.com/i/status/1267678541602308096
Ahmaud Arbery had an extensive rap sheet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwIazUQWRtc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqHMM5G8Hn8
. . . and in the case of Manuel Ellis death of March 3rd, he walked up to Tacoma Police Officers and said, 'I have warrants, I need to talk.' As soon as the police officer got out of the car, he assaulted one of them and slam dunked him into the ground.” What do you expect ? Police are supposed to give him a lollipop ?
Also, this isn't a "black" thing, many more whites are killed by police each year: https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...
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
technology and science aren't apolitical. there isn't a single piece of scientific innovation (short of the polio vaccine and other freely distributed medical advances) that hasn't furthered political aims. combustion, electricity, transistors, nuclear power, the internet, etc etc etc. technologists and scientists think they have the luxury of being apolitical but they don't. the sooner we realize that the sooner we'll start making ethically sound decisions in our work and thereby having a meaningful effect on such misuse.
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.
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.
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.