As The Ends Justify Those Pesky Means

[billroper]

It appears that somebody decided to launch a DoS attack against Senator Lieberman's campaign website and e-mail service on the eve of Election Day. Now, as Brendan Loy -- who I discovered because he is also interested in hurricanes -- points out, using an inexpensive shared server for a critical campaign resource isn't necessarily the best choice, since it is more vulnerable.

But this sort of shit just pisses me off. And before you ask, it would piss me off if somebody did it to Lamont too. Or some other candidate that I didn't care for, because we don't need this sort of shit in our electoral process.

Maybe I'm just reading the wrong websites, but I don't see reports of this happening to candidates that I don't approve of.

Or maybe the ends do justify the means and I'm just an old fogey.

But I don't think so.

Comments

[giza.livejournal.com]

Eh, maybe it's just me, but I had some issues with the tone of that post. It really smacks of knowing all of the answers, which kinda rubs me the wrong way.

Among other things, I counted 4 uses of the word "incompetent" in the post. It kinda smacks of the egotistical attitude of, "I'm so smart and these other people are total morons", which is something I've seen quite a bit of in the geek community.

The poster seemed to be attacking Lieberman for having a "low budget" webserver. I really don't see how that's relevant. If they found inexpensive webhosting, I say more power to them.

I take serious issue with the fact that the author port scanned the machine. That is generally considered a nono nowadays, at least without the owner's consent of the machine that is being scanned. He may have violated his ISP's AUP by doing the port scan.

He proceeds to jump to conclusions about how "MySQL and IRC shouldn't be publically accessible". It is quite possible that there are legitimate reasons for this. Maybe not, but I'd prefer to give the web host the benefit of the doubt.

I disagree that a Firewall is somehow "necessary" on a UNIX box. It might be helpful to have, but one can accomplish lots of with things like TCP Wrappers and Portsentry.

So yeah, maybe I'm just bitter or in a particular bad mood today, but I'm taking that post with a grain of salt.

</rant>