this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2025
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DDoS attacks are illegal, but what is the legal amount of times a person can call a website? I'm sure enough people doing just a few calls per second couldn't get a person into too much trouble. Has the law even defined the difference?
The legal difference would be intent; are you trying to access the website, or are you trying to bog it down? Proving intent can of course be difficult, but OTOH I don't know how much longer American courts are going to care about silly things like proof
So, exactly what must a person avoid doing to keep from exacerbating X's DDos problem today?
The most illegal part of a DDoS is usually the hacking / exploiting of thousands or millions of devices to make them all request twitter.com
I'm not entirely sure what rules it would fall under if you somehow performed a DDoS using entirely your own hardware and Internet connections. It might even be legal, just against the ToS of basically every ISP. I'm pretty sure if Google or ChatGPT take down a site by sending too many crawlers there's no legal consequences.
There is also the Hug of Death, I don't think that's illegal
No, don't ever organize like this. We are on the left. We are smart and we are righteous. We do not plan and coordinate and work together in this behavior. This would be sneaky and take social skills and foresight. No we need to gather in downtown Chicago with signs and megaphones. Protest in the streets. Only protest. We're not animals like trumpets who do this stuff and get away with it and never let up. They don't know the power of chaining themselves to a fence. They don't get the rush and mighty feeling when the crowd boos you and tells you to go home and throws things at you. No they don't understand. They don't understand we do it for them.
He's claimed DDoS before right after the purge. I'm pretty sure it was just the platform being crushed by normal traffic. I'm skeptical this isn't just operating as funded.
I believe this is one of those things where intent matters, and may vary by location. Willing to bet hitting F5 a few times is safe, even a few hundred times as long as it’s in the realm of just checking if it’s up yet. The moment you have something scripted, you’re at least in the realm of having to explain it to a judge who probably knows fuck all about tech.
Now you will tell me that it's illegal to spam my own F5 key?