ISIS terror fanatics invade Diaspora after Twitter blockade Medieval terror bastards ISIS have moved from Twitter to non-profit social networking outfit Diaspora to spew their cant – and apparently nothing can be done to stop them. "Diaspora is a completely decentralized network which, by its nature, consists of many small servers exchanging posts and messages," the organizers of the …
Came across them when they first launched (one of my old bosses contributed some cash to their development IIRC). Played around a bit, but it was a bit *meh*, especially as it's hard to use social media when there's no-one else on there.
Came across them again when they got publicly hammered for an absolute shed-load of vulnerabilities (most stupid and easily avoidable AFAIR).
Had faded out of my memory until now though
This may be an unintentionally good tactic for ISIS and any others who switch to using anonymous services. Governements, of many different shades, would jump on that activity as a good reason to ban such services and label any user as a terrorist sympathiser. The admins (and podmins) of such services would then be 'terrorist enablers' and the general public would be glad to see them hunted down and put out of operation. The screws would tighten even more on our freedoms of movement and expression, hence leading to greater dissatisfaction in society.
And then we end up in the situation where...
"We attack place X, at Y time, on Z day"
That gets 'leaked' to some media or intelligence agency, the government of the day 'Has to act to protect the citizens' and we end up with closed airports, roads, rail, stop and search in the streets, and shut down telecoms.
Then the terrorist pee themselves laughing because for every one attack that they do actually perform they can terrify us into doing what they want another 10 times for free.
I'm more likely to catch a double decker bus in the face than be victim of a terror attack, but I don't see the government protecting me with a 'bus stop and search' every time I cross the street.
@Ian 62
Then the terrorist pee themselves laughing because for every one attack that they do actually perform they can terrify us into doing what they want another 10 times for free.
Therein lies the rub with respect to wholesale data collection and automated data mining for horizon scanning and risk assessment. They are going to be inherently susceptible to spoofing. And the wider the collection, the greater the susceptibility and the risk will be.
Taking Ian 62's scenario a step further, the obvious strategy for a terrorist group would be to use spoofing to generate the kind of response Ian predicates to create a tactical advantage for an attack at another time and/or place.
Unrestrained government surveillance of information would be objectionable in a free society even if, in theory, it made us marginally safer. The prospect that it actually degrades security needs to be take very seriously.
Those who govern, and the special interests they serve, benefit greatly from government monitoring in terms of political power and economic gain. Human nature being what it is, this is likely to blind them to any downside to their actions.
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How unfortunate that they chose this service, as it makes them worse than the infidel cur. No 72 virgins for these naughty people.
(* You want proof? Let me dust off my theology certificate
Diaspora is a multi-tenanted service, and as such, the glorious messages and images of Holy War against the unbeliever are stuck interleaved on hard disks with pictures of dogs, homosexuals, the uncovered ankles and lower arms of women (and even more sluttish images besides).
Anyone consuming this service cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. Only authorised iron-age technology is allowed in the fight against the infidel. (You know the score - liberal use of scimitars, endless wittering nonsequiturs, splendid beards, a ban on all music but the very worst, women turned into shuffling covered up slave-drones etc.)
In shock news the US and UK governments have surrendered to ISIS, after it threatened to replace the entire internet with non-stop, non-interuptable songs from Justin Bieber and 1Direction.
In a statement today David Cameron said, "I shall grow my beard forthwith. I am sorry for having destroyed Western civilsation with one careless action. I did not realise the power of sonic warfare until this moment. The British government have been ordered by our ISIS overlords to declare holy war on Radio 1. The death penalty has been introduced today for all boy-bands, girl-bands, and solo pop artists. N Dubz will be executed live on News at Ten tonight. We hope to capture Girls Aloud before they can do any more harm.
Don't the dudes in question have some prohibition about pictures of a certain "prophet"? The service in question simply edits their pages to display a small picture of said person and, wala, being the totally OCD'd, can't get past the small crit types that they are they implode. Apart from that, being slightly familiar with the powers of even the lowliest SysAdmins, I find it hard to imagine that anyone could put any content on a server that I had scripting privileges on. These protestations that "There's nothing we can do to stop it." ring hollow.
WIKI= Diaspora*... seems it is a fully founded FOSS internetworking project that can be run in a private, stand-alone version using a minimum of 3 servers, 2 for content, and 1 for domain names...either open or encrypted messaging...hardware= 3 cheap Linux Desktop dual or quad cpu boxes somewhere on the www or ww3 net.
IMHO= this is a complete lash-up for a Black Net that anyone with a little spare time can prototype and provide a production version to users... WIKI provides very ample documentation for either developers or users...
Any type of illegal avtivity can be accomodated over secure black networks...Unfortunately for users, a NSA type operation can use Honeypot Pods / Honeypot content servers to spoof users into giving up personal data... the private domain server makes non-users w/o proper coding unable to access any of this mess...'man in the middle' might be possible on a case by case intercept job.
caveiat= i am a Buddhist techno historian, Chrime. Pron, and War is Stupid...RS.
I mean surely this seems very dated now, but calling it "Medieval terror bastards" seems harsh. It can't be worth than "Saphire and Steel". What does that even mean in the context of a 1970s children's TV series?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYmbt2RVqCg
Ohh you mean that organisation in Iraq? That's named "IS" not "ISIS", they had a rebrand recently.
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