Not the type of hackers I was dealing with
Remember when it was cool to be a hacker? Remember when they used to do cool things like hack into the CIA site or those of major corporations? Remember when they were just trying to instill a little anarchy in the established order?
Well, the good ole days are over. Sadly, many hackers have gotten considerably less ambitious and their targets have gotten decidedly less corporate. The anarchists of yore (yore being, in this case the late 80s and 90s) have been replaced by the petty thugs who like to electronically pick on little old ladies of today.
Take it from one little old lady, it’s fucking annoying. If you tried to check out this site over the past few days, you may have encountered a page with Turkish flags, pics of soldiers, very nationalistic music and a hacker’s name and email address or maybe the other page from one of this hacker’s buddies. The same thing took over jcsunshine.net, the “unofficial fansite” of the web-TV show I host (actually an in-character site that’s going to become part of the show).
I managed to remove the hack and it just showed back up again. Eventually, I had to go through a whole series of procedures that took several hours to complete. Hopefully these will work and there won’t be another successful attack for a while or ever.
That said, those hours I spent could have been spent doing a number of other things, like writing posts and creating independent web content. In fact, instead of writing about this, I could have written about something more important, but they really got the juices flowing
When some big company’s site gets hacked, they can afford to pay people to deal with it and the people creating the content are free to continue doing what they do. Smaller independent media frequently don’t have the same luxury.
While the web is giving people the chance to take the power of mass communication into their own hands and away from the stranglehold of the corporations that run our big media, today’s hackers (or at least some of them) are working against this revolution and for the status quo.
People who hack personal blogs or independent media are in the same boat as cable and phone companies trying to block net neutrality, corporations trying to homogenize online content and spammers. They’re helping forward a pro-corporate agenda, whether they intend to or not.
They’re not anarchistic in the slightest. In fact they’re fighting against the anarchy that the internet has started releasing on our media landscape.
#1 by Crash Override on January 20, 2010 - 6:20 pm
Hack the planet!!
#2 by gsl on January 20, 2010 - 8:09 pm
I tend to believe that a lot of these attacks against indie media is actually perpetrated by corporations who are afraid of indie media. The more they attack, the more we’re winning. You must be doing something right for them to target you. Congrats.