August 17, 2004

TalkLeft, hackers to help elect Bush, end "liberalism"

Via TalkLeft comes the Wired News report "Hackers Take Aim at GOP":

Online protests targeting GOP websites could turn out to be more than symbolic during this month's Republican National Convention, possibly blocking a critical communications tool for the party...

So it's no surprise that hardened electronic activists are planning to jam up the servers of GeorgeWBush.com, GOP.com and related websites, once the Republican National Convention gets underway Aug. 29.

"We want to bombard (the Republican sites) with so much traffic that nobody can get in," said CrimethInc, a member of the so-called Black Hat Hackers Bloc. It's one of several groups planning to distribute software tools to reload Republican sites over and over again. These FloodNet programs are similar to hackers' distributed denial-of-service attacks, which overwhelm a server with thousands and thousands of simultaneous requests for information.

The author's blog has a nearly incomprehensible excerpt from Steve Gilliard, last mentioned in relation to the Glenn Reynolds-TShirt action.

TalkLeft itself/herself doesn't state whether she approves of the hacking, so I guess pending clarification we'll have to assume it/she thinks it's all good fun.

UPDATE: TalkLeft has issued the following diktat:

So Cal is right, I wasn't online today due to work. I do not condone this activity. Not in any way. I wouldn't want anyone hacking TalkLeft so I wouldn't wish it on anyone else. It's news worth reporting though.

Posted to Politics at August 17, 2004 11:28 AM

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