On 2014-01-08 07:53, rysiek wrote:
Wait, what? Where the hell did you get *that* bullshit. MIT network was just fine, the pissed people were at JSTOR, and they were pissed not because "the network was brought down to its knees", but because somebody was getting a lot of articles "without paying".
http://docs.jstor.org/summary.html "It was now well into the fall semester and for several days all MIT students and faculty had been unable to access JSTOR, a resource used by hundreds of researchers and students per day at MIT during that time of year. " Aaron Swartz was not charged downloading articles without paying, but with disrupting a network on which his menial inferiors depended. Illustrating that our masters are incompetent and stupid, as well as arrogant. If I had been in the closet and screwed with the network wiring (which I would not have done since the network was wide open to competent attack from safely far away) I would have screwed with the network wiring in such a fashion as to produce no easily noticeable effects. If I had been doing what Schwarz was doing, I would have proxied through a bunch of zombies to disguise the IP, would have rate limited the download so as not to stick out and not produce an obnoxious and noticeable disruption, and would have done a pseudo random permutation on the order so that it was not obvious sequential, thus not obvious the intent was to download the entire database, so that it looked as if particular specific articles were being downloaded. And all that would have been overkill, for if no disruption of the network, no one who had the skills to detect it and do something about it would have cared.