Does it strike you that it’s a slow blogging day? It certainly does me.
I’ve already said my piece on the situation in North Korea and on the Mexican election so until something really changes there I can’t see belaboring those two stories.
I think that Democrats in Connecticut would be imprudent to want to dump a senator with some seniority in favor of a newbie but that’s their call, it’s their business.
I don’t think you can generalize too much from the numbskull who posted threatening comments on Jeff Goldstein’s blog. The DDOS attacks he’s been getting are troubling.
There are really only three approaches to dealing with such attacks: technical, law enforcement, and vigilantism.
Securing client stations is probably fanciful. Most people can’t be bothered and that’s probably even truer of the millions of computers outside of the U. S. that have been dragooned unbeknownst to their owners as slaves controlled for DDOS attacks.
N. Z. Bear is trying to muster interest in application-level measures specifically intended to protect blogs. Frankly, I’m skeptical that such things can be effective. (UPDATE: he’s limited the scope of what he’s trying to accomplish some and I think that what he’s proposing is doable but of limited utility. How is it better than opening a new Blogger account?)
The real technical solution is more rigorous and effective policing of servers but there are still a lot of shoestring operations. I wonder how practical it is to expect server operators to administer their servers to limit attacks. It will certainly increase costs and increase the economies of scale—which benefits the largest providers.
My own experience of government’s computer capabilities and, presumably, its resources for dealing with cybercrime is that government is a technological backwater. Perhaps things have changed. Judging from the FBI’s recent IT debacles it doesn’t appear that they have. I doubt that DHS which appears to have this responsibility now is any better.
I think we’re going to start to see a lot more vigilantism. I think it’s a terrible idea but frustration moves people to do weird things.
Somebody write something interesting.
