Can you shut up somebody?

In the Internet era, any attempt to gag anybody has just the opposite effect: You end up telling the whole world about this otherwise-anonymous person

In showbiz, it is said that there is no such thing as bad publicity, but on the Net, it seems that there is no such thing as true censorship that actually works, and this could be a good thing. When a government tries to reduce access to certain sites deemed to contain objectionable political material, the hue and cry that gets raised soon ensures that this government does a rollback.

The same seems to be true of hackers too. Once upon a time, they used to launch DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks on popular sites so that they would get written about. But now, they have launched an attack on Twitter and Facebook to stop a professor of economics.



Dumb move?

This gentleman is associated with the republic of Georgia, and the hackers are actually hacktivists (activists who use hacking to make their point). But in some ways, we have to ask do their methods work? Here are some reasons why they don't:

>>Irritating to users: If a particular user's account gets hacked, then nothing much happens, but when one whole service gets taken down for one person, then the hacktivist merely gets negative publicity.

>>Free publicity: Hacktivists who try to gag somebody actually end up doing just the opposite by giving more publicity. Until now, perhaps only people associated with Georgia and Russia probably knew about this professor; but by taking down Twitter and Facebook, they have told the whole world about this blogger.

>>Public sympathy: No hacktivist can survive without public sympathy, and by taking down two popular social networking sites, the hacktivists have unfortunately lost this. If anything, they have just made the case of the blogger stronger than ever, and no doubt when things return to normal, more people will follow his blog postings.

Time to think

Many of the hacker types are people who don't like any form of oppression and are allergic to authority and in some ways, the Internet mirrors this attitude to a good extent.

But people like the ones who have bought Twitter and Facebook down should understand one thing this is a matter between Russia and Georgia, and should be settled by these countries, with perhaps the intervention of the UN or other countries that are sympathetic to their cause. Please don't involve the whole world in your battles.

They should also realise that something like this doesn't help in the long run. A classic case in point is the attacks on the White house site in July, which are said to have been caused by North Korea. People have forgotten it already, just as they will forget this attack in a few weeks.

The man behind the mess
The blogger whom the hackers tried to silence is a refugee from the Abkhazia region, a territory on the Black Sea disputed between Russia and Georgia. He writes under the name 'Cyxymu' but identified himself by the name Giorgi and says he taught at Sukhumi State University.
Source: www.nytimes.com

QUICK TAKE
>>Hackers took down Twitter and Facebook recently
>>They did it to silence just one blogger
>>But they have given this person more publicity and sympathy