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If you pay attention to any kind of news at all, you already know about the overwhelming support of WikiLeaks that has lead to denial of service attacks on PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, etc. There is no precedent for this kind of civil disobedience coming from the Net.

We all know that protesting in picket lines does absolutely nothing. We know that all-out violent rebellion is out of the question. So, what is the middle ground? Perhaps these digital freedom fighters have given us an answer.

These are not the first denial of service attacks to ever take place. They are, however, the first attacks to strike at major targets because of overwhelming outrage from the public. Because of these attacks, s**t just got real.

I think that the implications of these attacks are far-reaching for everyone concerned. We all knew that there was an information war in progress; has that war been taken to the next level? What do you think? Is this the first shot, heard 'round the world? What are your thoughts on all of this stuff: WikiLeaks, cyber attacks, the Internet as a weapon, etc.?

Cyber attacks are not new. Attacks on this scale are, especially considering that they were not done for profit or personal gain; they were done as an act of defiance to those that would censor us.

It's especially important to note that stopping a denial of service attack is difficult, but not as difficult as prosecuting those that perpetrated it; especially when the protesters were thousands strong.

I don't think there's any truth to that. Your sentence would depend on what criminal act you actually did, rather than just "hacking." Aside from that, "hacking" is a very loose term that mainstream media will apply to anything computer-related that they don't understand.

In the case of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, all you're doing is overloading a server with requests for data. This can happen to a website if it experiences unexpected popularity and can't cope with the flood of legitimate users. It can also happen via a concerted effort to spam the server with data requests in order to make the server crash.

It's extremely difficult to stop a DDoS attack, difficult to separate the attackers from the legitimate users, and exceedingly expensive to find and prosecute thousands of people for something as simple as requesting data from a server in rapid succession. The key here is the numbers involved. Just as they can't arrest and prosecute everyone that participates in a protest or riot, they can't catch everyone that helps in a DDoS. Exceptions include cases where a few people happen to be running botnets. Then you only have to catch and prosecute a handful of people.

This was not the work of a few computer-savvy people. This was the work of thousands of people that are fed up with the bullshit.

Wish there was more we could do to get our voices heard, but I like the aspect of using the internet to do it. You're right, violence wont work and peaceful protesting wont work. I don't have any other ideas besides people leaving comments everywhere and writing on stop signs and money.

You may be interested in this Wikipedia article: Reality hacking.