There’s a scene in the movie ‘Blazing Saddles’ where the Waco Kid, being asked why he’s ended up in prison for drunkenness, bewails the fact that when he was the well known gun-slinger everyone wanted to try and get him, so they could be the new number one. He tells how he eventually hung up his guns when he heard a voice yelling ‘Draw’, turned around to fight, and nearly shot a 5 year old child.
He turns his back on the little brat, who then shoots the Waco Kid in the ass…..
Life in the online world gets like that, too.
Apparently Twitter was hacked last night by an outfit called the Iranian Cyber Army. The story broke on the Mashable web site – I have to say that were I not receiving Tweets from Mashable I wouldn’t have known, as I’ve been getting (I think) Tweeted over the period of the hack and I can quite happily see their home page. The fact that this is now being reported as a DNS based attack means that it wasn’t so much Twitter that was walloped as that traffic to Twitter was diverted elsewhere for a while …
Anyway, let’s face it – this is a slap in the face to Twitter (indirectly) but isn’t the end of the world. At least some of us – if not most of us who’re not using the DNS system that was compromised – are still Tweeting and the world will not slide to DEFCON1 because the global inanity stream was temporarily interrupted for the Digerati.
But, assuming these chaps ARE who they claim to be – a group with Iranian sympathies – we shouldn’t be surprised. A campaign was organised through Twitter earlier this year to protest about the clamp down on civil rights in Iran. This attack may be regarded by the originators as ‘payback’ and goes to show that in Cyberspace, as in the real world, ‘people power’ is not a one way street. The big boys do sometimes have their day of successful protest as well. Governments can quite easily learn the fine arts of online civil disobedience, and do it with greater ease than the folks running the protest.
When people use a site as a base or launching ground for civil disobedience, campaigning or protest then it will become a target for those who object to the issues being promoted. That kickback may come in the form of debate, negative campaigning against the site, abuse of people on the site, legal efforts to remove or silence the site, or, as here, technical efforts to remove the site. Which means that more and more sites used by people to organise campaigns will either have to become ‘hardened’ to protect against attack or stop carrying legitimate material that someone, somewhere, is pissed enough about to want it removed.
We may be heading in to a period of ‘big boy’s rules’ in cyberspace where sites that permit the exposition of people power are simply taken down by this sort of online activity. But if that happens to your favourite site, and the cause is just, don’t be sad; regard it as a badge of honour that your activities have upset someone enough to want to take you down.
Remember the words of Winston Churchill ‘ ‘You have enemies; that’s good – it means that you have stood up for something sometime in your life’.
No, nothing to do the 1970s TV series with Ricardo Montalban as a bloke who made wishes come true on an Island with a combination of technology, actors and smoke and mirrors. Although….. Nope, this is a review of a
Not very pleasant reading – although there is a chapter that offers a couple of alternative paths to take. Learning to be frugal is something we’re likely to have to get used to over the next few years, anyway, so that will be easy medicine to take – the vast majority of us have no real alternative. And one other thing after reading this book – it reinforces the old saw that Labour are not fit to govern – which is a dreadful thing for those of us who once had such hopes for the Left in the UK.
OK – first of all apologies for the title. It’s just that the trivial background behind this post made me very angry this morning. I may just be having a grump, heading for a cold or suffering from fast-food overdose, but I guess I’m allowed to throw a strop occasionally.
In ancient Jewish society, the scapegoat was a normal goat that was ceremonially loaded with all the sins of the community, and then driven from town in to the wilderness, as part of the ceremonies around the Day or Atonement. The goat would almost certainly die in the desert, and with it would die the sins of the community. The term has passed in to general usage, as we all know, to refer to someone who gets to carry the can when the crap hits the fan.
I think it’s safe to say that these days I rarely agree with the behaviour of Government Ministers. Part of it is a knee jerk reaction (:) ) and part of it is that Government Ministers rarely seem to exhibit a capability in their jobs above that of
A little while ago I turned the TV on to get the lunchtime news, and was staggered to find Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) on 3 BBC Channels – BBC News, BBC Parliament and BBC 2 – and also on Sky news. I took a look at what was going on, and was seriously unimpressed. There’s a line in an old Billy Bragg song that refers to ‘those braying voices on the right of the House’ and it’s as relevant today as it ever was, with the exception that the braying voices now seem to come from all sides of the House.