作者：Molly Sauter
出版社：Bloomsbury Academic
副标题：DDOS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet
发行时间：2014年10月23日
来源：下载的 pdf 版本
Goodreads：3.8（56 Ratings）
豆瓣：无

作者介绍

作者的 Twitter：https://twitter.com/oddletters
作者的个人网站：https://oddletters.com/

Molly Sauter is a Vanier Scholar and PhD candidate in Communication Studies at McGill University in Montreal, QC, researching the politics of disruption in networked communication technology. They are the author of The Coming Swarm: DDoS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet. They hold a masters degree in Comparative Media Studies from MIT, and have held research fellowships at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society, and New America.

作者还是博士在读生，是 DDOS 研究方面的专家

读后感

本来是想读一本 DDOS 技术科普的，结果不小心拿到了这本相对比较高大上的书，其中大部分的内容都和公民不服从运动的思潮有直接的关联，从公民不服从的角度阐述 DDOS 的起源、价值以及意义

第一章的 Quote 里面有这么一句话，我比较喜欢：

I am a fan of the idea that in a democracy we should all be equally uncomfortable. I’ve come to amend that idea for my work. In ethnography we should probably all be equally reflective.
https://tressiemc.com/uncategorized/presenting-selves-race-social-class-gender-and-intersectionality-in-ethnography/

摘录

In physical space, activists demand an audience by occupying public, or quasi-public space. The Civil Rights Movement boycotted buses and occupied lunch counters to demand equality of access to these places. One of Molly’s key contributions in this book is the exploration of the idea that there is no public space on our contemporary internet, only complex, nested chains of private spaces. We might protest corporate malfeasance in the physical world by demonstrating on the public sidewalk outside the respective corporation’s headquarters. But there are no sidewalks in online spaces, and the online alternative of creating a protest website that no one will see is an insufficient remedy. Problematic as it is, occupying a corporation’s website is a way to ensure that dissent finds a relevant audience.

The aim of this work is to place DDoS actions, including Operation Payback, in a historical and theoretical context, covering the use of the tactic, its development over time, and its potential for ethical political practice. Guiding this work is the overarching question of how civil disobedience and disruptive activism can be practiced in the current online space. The internet acts as a vital arena of communication, self-expression, and interpersonal organizing. When there is a message to convey, words to get out, people to organize, many will turn to the internet as the zone of that activity. Online, people sign petitions, investigate stories and rumors, amplify links and videos, donate money, and show their support for causes in a variety of ways. But as familiar and widely accepted activist tools—petitions, fundraisers, mass letter writing, call-in campaigns and others—find equivalent practices in the online space, is there also room for the tactics of disruption and civil disobedience that are equally familiar from the realm of street marches, occupations, and sit-ins?

These negative associations and assumptions are further entrenched by the terminology commonly used to refer to DDoS actions of all stripes: DDoS attacks. By referring to all DDoS actions, regardless of motivation as “attacks,” the public, law enforcement, and even practitioners are primed to think of DDoS actions in terms of violence, malice, and damage. In order to conduct and present this analysis without this bias toward an interpretation of violence and harm, I do not use the term “DDoS attacks” throughout this book, but rather refer to all uses of DDoS as “DDoS actions.”

At its most basic level, a denial-of-service action seeks to render a server unusable to anyone looking to communicate with it for legitimate purposes. When this action comes from one source, it is called a DoS, action. When it comes from multiple sources, it is called a DDoS action. Complex or sophisticated tools are not necessary to launch a DDoS action. A group of people reloading the same website again and again at the same time could constitute a manual DDoS action, if they intend to bring that site down. However, automated tools and methods are much more effective against websites that rely on today’s web infrastructure.
One such automated method is to flood the target machine with “pings” from active machines. A ping is a request for availability, one computer asking another, “Are you there?”
However, when employed as part of a DDoS action, the humble ping is transformed into a “ping flood,” wherein thousands of ping requests a second can be transmitted to the target server. These requests quickly overwhelm the server’s limited resources, and the server is unable to effectively respond to legitimate traffic requests. This is one of the goals of the action: “downtime” on the targeted server.

DDoS actions are considered illegal in most jurisdictions. In the United States of America, DDoS actions are prosecuted under Title 18, Section 1030 (a)(5) of the US Code. The crime described by the statute is the “intentional . . . damage” of “protected computers,” which are broadly defined as computers used, in whole or in part, by financial institutions or the US government. However, as will be discussed later, confusion persists about the legal status of activist DDoS actions, something that presents serious challenges to the organizers of these actions.

Henry David Thoreau indirectly coined the term “civil disobedience” in a series of essays first published in 1849. These essays originally titled “Resistance to Civil Government” were eventually retitled “On Civil Disobedience.” Thoreau’s description of the duty of citizens to refuse to allow their government to override their conscience, interwoven with his own personal narrative of refusing to pay taxes and subsequently spending the night in jail, is one of the most influential texts in the modern understanding of the role and practice of civil disobedience in a Western democracy. Thoreau’s abolitionistmotivated tax dodge is hardly the earliest example of civil disobedience, however. Hannah Arendt, in her essay “Civil Disobedience,” cites Socrates and the events described in the Crito as a foundational episode.

Anonymous, a loose collection of internet denizens that sprang from the unmoderated image board 4chan, has, over the past few years, rapidly increased their capacity to attract and manipulate mainstream media attention.