Spamming for Internet Freedom – Hacktivism

In 2009 the Internet Censorship Bill was proposed through the Rudd government, which was aimed to filter and blacklist websites under “refused classification”. To combat this risk, an internet attack was coordinated under the professional name “Operation Titstorm” where members of Anonymous would send spam to government websites which would disable them for three days.   

This sort of hacktivism allowed for global participation, without a central identity. Matthew George, who was apart of Operation Titstorm said “Anonymous isn’t really a group, it’s an idea” and “there are no ringleaders, there is no set place for Anonymous to meet, Anonymous is everyone and no one”. Without these physical boundaries hacktivists are able use actions such as the “distributed denial of service attacks” used in 2009, in order to protest for the freedom of knowledge. 

This week’s remediation combines themes of the Anonymous group with important words about climate change from David Attenborough, so instead of a menacing video it is a calming lofi audio. 

The Soup Network

Understanding how information is decoupled from matter is already a difficult topic to grasp, let alone when you are a German mother from the 1870s attempting to send your son on the front line a telegram of soup.

To understand centralised, decentralised and distributed network systems, you can still use the example of sending soup. 

Centralised systems have a single-centre which could be a human operator. So when sending soup a human operator would need to process it, which means other users could access the soup and also the German mother’s information could be stored. 

Decentralised systems have multiple hubs, so if the telegraph operator couldn’t come to work there would still be back up operators to send soup.

A distributed system has no centre so the German mother could send the soup knowing that no one would come in contact with the soup or store information about her or her son.    

Week 2 remediation – GIF

Moral of the story is you can’t send soup by telegraph.