The hammer of Doom struck the planet last week -- civilization came close to catastrophe; hundreds of citizens practically died; millions uncounted were virtually harmed; the effects on the planet's economy verged on perceptible. Geniuses bent on impressing their peers, the attackers were "crackers", or criminal hackers: renegade programmers, masters of cyberspace secrets that even the RCMP, FBI, NSA, and Bill Gates haven't learned -- demons called Nachoman, Coolio, Mafiaboy, diabolical agents of evil itself. Only one thing can possibly save us from anarchy now: legislation allowing the government total control of the Internet! Chant it with me in iambic pentameter: Privacy can't be permitted to ...
Whoa!
Will everyone please get a grip?
Here's what actually happened: Some hyper folks had to chill, a while.
Of the tiny percentage of humans that muck about with computers, some minuscule fraction found themselves temporarily unable to access certain commercial Web sites, for as long as a few hours. A handful of cyberconcerns lost up to half a day's business. Desperate news junkies were briefly forced to get their CNN fix through a medium with better picture and better sound, called a "television". An IPO was mildly affected, threatening people's God-given right to become stinking rich in an instant for doing nothing at all. The internet was not "paralyzed", not for a moment. The assaults were so lame they took only hours to diagnose and then minutes to counter. They say it's possible everyone else on-line that afternoon experienced an overall system slowdown of as much as 6 per cent. You noticed it at once, didn't you? Wasn't it just awful?
No one's bank account was looted, no credit cards were compromised, no life-support machinery ceased functioning, no air-traffic radars went down, no 911 calls were interrupted, no nuclear reactors lost backup control.
The death toll seems to be holding fairly steady at zero. AOL members and Rogers Cable subscribers probably never noticed the catastrophe, mistook it for the usual sloppy service until they saw the headlines the next day. The most ominous consequence reported so far is that a few pathetic souls, stranded with nothing to do for a few hours, apparently read books. Most are said to be recovering.
Real crackers and ethical hackers alike are united in their withering contempt for the person or persons responsible, who are clearly not hackers of any kind: The distributed-denial-of-service attack was about as sophisticated as the comedy of Tom Green. A pretty fair analogy in the real world might be, say, a 12-year-old nincompoop tricking a few dozen 5-year-olds into helping him superglue all the doors of the mall so nobody can get in or out until the locksmith arrives. That's about how much skill and wit were involved. And that's about how alarmed we should all be. There's a numbnuts on the loose with a tube of glue -- saunter for your lives!
I'm guessing it's only one guy: The attack was just too dumb to require more. The FBI has mistaken him for a cracker or an anarchist hacker, and is hunting for anyone boasting, or at least hinting, in some chatroom or forum or newsgroup or IRC channel. But I think this geek's like the Unabomber: Even if he had any friends to boast to, he has nothing to boast about.
If some fool actually does briefly bollix all the doors at the mall, it does not follow that henceforth everyone who enters or leaves any mall in the world should have to submit to strip-search and body-cavity inspection for tubes of superglue. No reasonable steps can protect us perfectly from such oafs. And if we take unreasonable steps sufficient to do the job, we become far crazier and more destructive than they are.
The FBI has been criticized for failing to apprehend the Unabomber for so many years, until a family member turned him in. It could have nailed him a decade sooner, all right, if it had only had Congress pass a law asserting the government's unlimited right to open any parcel, and requiring fingerprints, DNA and urine samples, and two pieces of picture ID from any American who sought to mail or courier anything.
There was even a precedent. An overreaction nearly that extreme actually occurred once, some 30 years ago, when a bare handful of mostly bungled airliner hijackings somehow made us all agree that people who seek to travel by air have no right whatever to privacy, dignity or politeness, that we should all gladly empty our pants into trays and single-file through metal detectors while humourless strangers dressed like police rummage through our packed underwear, irradiate our computers, look under our hats and ask us impertinent questions. Three decades later, it is transparently clear that nothing has been accomplished by all this effort, expense and ongoing insult: The fortunately rare idiots who wish to hijack airplanes do so with impunity. But it's far too late now for us to disband the useless parasite industry of luggage-peeping louts and all go back to travelling in a state of self respect again.
The Unabomber did not inspire the same sort of wild overreaction and give us armed snipers guarding every mailbox and courier drop in the country, perhaps because his bombs were strictly amateur-night; most of his intended victims suffered little or no harm. He just wasn't that scary.
Well, neither is the nitwit who glued shut all the doors at a few cybermalls last week. The consensus of the experts discussing this tangled situation on-line seems to be that the solution to such "DDOS" attacks is quite simple: competent system administrators. Nachobrain's attack, hackers say, depended heavily on the carelessness and/or cluelessness of his victims. (Visit http://www.slashdot.org for specifics.)
I understand some 20,000 people presently claim to earn their living by trading things on eBay; I realize the loss of half a day's income is no small thing to them. But to me it is not such a big thing that I am prepared to even discuss surrendering forever the right to be anonymous myself, in my own dealings on-line. I do not agree that we should let government tap every on-line conversation, bug every computer, monitor every transmission, control all access the way it's presently controlled in the People's Republic of China, all so that eBay, Yahoo, Amazon.com and other on-line firms won't have to bother taking adequate security measures in future.
The global-village idiot who annoyed them will be caught eventually: He's simply too bent to help but stumble out of concealment sooner or later. Let's quietly hope it's sooner, and meanwhile tell Big Brother his help is not needed, thanks.
Being out of service for only a few hours in a given week is a benchmark of excellence B.C. Ferries would kill to achieve. You want to talk about a real disaster? An event that will strike terror into the hearts of literally millions -- a dread occurrence that will unquestionably spread real, major pain across the planet -- a genuine tragedy certain to cost most computer users data loss, financial damage, lost work time, and dozens of hours of frustration and impotent rage? Brace yourself: Windows 2000 was released on Thursday.