renaissance poisson

hm. my thoughts aren't quite this disparaging. it wouldn't be my first or second or third suspicion, but i don't consider it totally out of the realm of the possible that they're right.

and it isn't quite THAT easy to coordinate a sustained DDoS attack on a large site. the big ones we hear about are not done by script kiddies, but by competent hackers. btw, if i didn't know you better, i'd rag on you about the pronoun choice here -- why does it have to be a woman who's incompetent at computer stuff? ;) coincidentally avaaz's CTO has been a woman for the last 5+ years, and judging by their site, she seems quite competent. and, heck, if there really was a 3 day attack, the fact that the site wasn't down for long, and continued to function well, is actually a credit to their network people. earlier this week, the UK organised crime SOCA site went down due to a DDoS attack, and was down for more than a day. anonymous have also claimed to shut down the CIA's site just a day or so ago, and it was indeed down for several hours.

i don't actually suspect total incompetence here; i'm more inclined to put it down to a tendency of paranoia inside avaaz -- when you are frequently smeared and otherwise attacked by the people you're taking on, you come to expect attacks by them. or maybe a miscommunication; something like non-techie saying to techie "OMG; could this be an attempt by the syrian government to shut us down!?"; the techie saying "well, yeah, theoretically it could", and the non-techie running with that.

i'm mostly disturbed by the begging bowl right next to the sensationalist hyping.