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Just reiterating what others have said, its reasonable because he took time to think about it. I know if I was in his position and woke up to find out my servers were being DDoS'd to hell because one of my employees had caused a stir, I may have just stayed in bed.


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Good point on the DDOS. Didn't think of it that way.

I think that's the point --- "DDoS" the CEO to let him know very clearly that some part of his company is not working well.

And I was not saying that you did - I was replying to another commenter and didn't even claim that he did.

The problem with getting worked up about DDOS is that it isn't technically possible to make a clear judgment from it - that's what I was stating. Let me put it like this: A real-world protest can be thousands of people standing in front of a building and thus making it hard for them to do business or it can be smashing in their windows. A cyber protest can be linking thousands of people to an article on a website that you don't like and reducing their quality of service - or it can mean causing their servers to melt.

There are shades of gray in this discussion that you exclude and it is not doing the nuanced point that Stallman was making justice.


Come on, that was a stress situation, their data center was shared and many other companies were feeling the pain. Yes I would also tell them "don't do it", but they made a decision under very high pressure from many sides at once. They since started protecting themselves and I'm sure they won't pay anymore now. I don't see why people keep bringing this up with all the positive things they also do.

By the way, the party that initiated the ddos did stop the attack but a much bigger one took over. Probably state sponsored.


> I thought the "coincidence" he was talking about was that the DDOS occurred on the same day that he jokingly threatened to take down Twitter.

Yes, exactly. He gave twitter a "deadline" of two days, two days before the dyn attack and specifically wanted to (jokingly) point out that he wasn't responsible for it.


For a real DDoS being woken up at night won't make a lick of difference (either your ADS/pipe can handle it, or it cannot). As such, waking up for it makes no sense at all. For this, you should blame your employer.

Perhaps he did, but to be fair a DDOS is more like a sit in than tyre slashing. Inconvenience and delay, but no lasting damage.

"I understand the business reasons for caving to any sufficiently-large angry mob with grievances"

Yup. A DDoS attack was almost certainly going their way, and perhaps physical threats as well.


This entire incident has snowballed from ridiculous to insane.

However, I find it interesting that Playhaven wasn't DDOS'ed for firing the guy. If they had acted rationally and didn't fire him, this wouldn't have been the unmitigated clusterfuck that it has turned into.


This entire incident has snowballed from ridiculous to insane.

However, I find it interesting that Playhaven wasn't DDOS'ed for firing the guy. If they had acted rationally and didn't fire him, this wouldn't have been the unmitigated clusterfuck that it has turned into.


When has he cheered the DDoSing of websites he doesn't like?

Last year he pointed out how Google was effectively DDoSing Sourcehut[1], so it's not like this is something completely new.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34310674 .

Also, example of "disconnecting of websites" were you thinking of? I mean, I can think of entirely reasonable situations, like if an employee created a website on a corporate subdomain solely to harass others, then asking the employer to disconnect that site is fine, right?


Why didn't they (also) go after the site he solicited the DDoS attack from? Or was it just a bunch of people causing problems for them and not a single person initiating technical measures?

There are specific laws against launching a DDOS. What law are you suggesting he violated?

It's not a matter of guilt. It is a practical reality of the ddos abuse on the net. It is massive and breaks network. It is all we can do to keep the net up at times. Serious.

>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.


Coming from a company that regularly goes down to DDoS attacks :thinking:

If the attacks against Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal were actually directed at his account, that he did it himself is the only thing that would make sense to me. The DoS couldn't just last forever and why would one bring 3 websites down rather than just do something to his internet connection?

When you manage to do what happened today, I suppose it's not really much harder to do that instead.


> Then they claim, he's the reason they stopped the attacks.

Attacks have not been stopped though. PSN is still down (or was this morning) and Xbox Live is still under DDOS, it's just being able to mitigate it better than yesterday.


I agree with this viewpoint, though I think it's also possible that a lone actor, frustrated with Obamacare, acted out using the only tools he knew in a 1/2 hour.

It wouldn't surprise me if healthcare.gov was very vulnerable to DDOS attacks - we are talking about a 2013 site which is hosted in a single data-center.

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