Taking on an Online Extortionist

An anonymous reader writes "When an online exortionist comes a knocking, threatining a DDoS, do you pay or fight? For many, paying may seem like a sensible option when compared to going out of buisness. CSO Magazine has a riveting article about how an online gambling site and a DDoS specialist teamed up to take on such an extortionist. When everybody else was rolling over and paying, this company risked its very existence to fight back. From the article: '"The attack went to 1.5Gb, with bursts up to 3Gb. It wasn't targeted at one thing. It was going to routers, DNS servers, mail servers, websites. It was like a battlefield, where there's an explosion over here, then over there, then it's quiet, then another explosion somewhere else," says Lyon. "They threw everything they had at us. I was just in shock."'"

oblig Churchill

[isecore (132059)]

"We will fight them in the CAT5, on the routers, in the packets. We will never surrender"

Or however he said it :)

Re:oblig Churchill

[sqlgeek (168433)]

"We shall not flag nor fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France and on the seas and oceans; we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets and on the hills. We shall never surrender and even if, which I do not for the moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, will carry on the struggle until in God's good time the New World with all its power and might, sets forth to the liberation and rescue of the Old."

Re:oblig Churchill

[Knara (9377)]

The sad thing is that I remember that speech entirely because its used as an intro to the Iron Maiden song "Aces High"

Re:oblig Churchill

[3770 (560838)]

Would you have been happier if you remembered it because you were there in person?

God knows your /. ID is low enough that it might be true. ;)

age discrimination!

[Tumbleweed (3706)]

God knows your /. ID is low enough that it might be true.

Watch it with the age slurs there, sonny. That could get ... dangerous. :)

Re:age discrimination!

[Xenophon Fenderson, (1469)]

*grumble* . . . get off my web site, you damn kids!

Re:oblig Churchill

[PatMouser (1692)]

Bah.

Re:oblig Churchill

[mikael (484)]

Humbug.

Re:oblig Churchill

[donutello (88309)]

We shall fight in France and on the seas and oceans; we shall fight on beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets and on the hills.

Hey, sounds like our last family vacation!

HALF of the article -- anyone get mopre

[by Anonymous Coward]

Online Extortion How a Bookmaker
and a Whiz Kid
Took On an Extortionist
and Won Facing an online extortion threat, Mickey Richardson bet his Web-based business on a networking whiz from Sacramento who first beat back the bad guys, then helped the cops nab them. If you collect revenue online, you'd better read this. Saturday, Nov. 22, 2003, 7:57 a.m.
Origins of an Onslaught

The e-mail began, "Your site is under attack," and it gave Mickey Richardson two choices: "You can send us $40K by Western Union [and] your site will be protected not just this weekend but for the next 12 months," or, "If you choose not to pay...you will be under attack each weekend for the next 20 weeks, or until you close your doors."

Richardson runs BetCris.com, an online wagering site, one of hundreds of sites ensconced in Costa Rica that take bets from Americans (and others around the world) without concern for U.S. bookmaking laws. Richardson received the e-mail just as he and his competitors were preparing for the year's busiest wagering season. With pro and college football, pro and college basketball and other sports in full swing, and with Thanksgiving and Christmas about to create plenty of free time, BetCris and the others stood to rake in millions over the holidays. Richardson was even planning an advertising blitz for the season to drive new traffic to his site.

If BetCris went down, he knew his customers would find another online bookie, "which will cost you tens of thousands of dollars in lost wagers and customers," the extortionists reminded him.

Despite all that, the e-mail didn't have the fearsome effect on Richardson that the extortionists hoped it would. He just asked his network administrator, Glenn Lebumfacil, if they should be concerned. "I saidGod, in hindsight, what an idiotI said, 'We should be safe. I think our network is nice and tight,'" recalls Lebumfacil.

As a precaution, Richardson alerted his ISP, but essentially, he says, "We kind of fluffed it off." The veteran bookmaker didn't panic because, in fact, he had dealt with online extortionists before. Two years earlier, hackers crashed BetCris.com with a denial-of-service (DoS) attack, and then demanded by e-mail a $500 protection fee in eGold (an online form of trading bullion). Richardson paid without a second thought. Compared to downtime, $500 was trivial.

That first attack got his attention, though. Richardson consulted another industry veteran who confessed to having a similar problem, and who told Richardson to call a consultant named Barrett Lyon in Sacramento, Calif. Lyon didn't come to BetCris's officeshe had no interest in baby-sitting infrastructure in Costa Ricabut he did recommend some off-the-shelf products that had recently been developed specifically to fight DoS attacks. Lyon thought (actually he hoped) that he'd never hear from them again. Richardson and Lebumfacil were confident they had protected themselves.

When the attack finally came on that Saturday in November, sometime after that first e-mail but before 11:30 a.m., BetCris crashed hard. The off-the-shelf products Lyon had recommended survived less than 10 minutes. BetCris's ISP crashed, and then the ISP for BetCris's ISP crashed. Richardson ran to the IT department, where Lebumfacil was watching the biggest DoS attack he'd ever seen. He remembers feeling sick to his stomach.

At 1:03 p.m., another e-mail arrived. "I guess you have decided to fight instead of making a deal. We thought you were smart.... You have 1 hour to make a deal today or it will cost you $50K to make a deal on Sunday." Then they knocked BetCris.com offline again.

The Extortion Problem

We know this about online extortion: It happens. Evidence of its prevalence or damage is speculative and anecdotal but useful nonetheless in guiding CSOs to understand the nature of the crime. Anecdotally, experts from law enforcement and information security consultants believe that perhaps one in 10 companies has been threatene

Re:oblig Churchill

[mikeswi (658619)]

_Selling_ material was how we justified it to an isolationist Congress and population. Actually, we _lent_ most of what went over because England was running out of money. And we didn't want it back once the war was over.

Plus several squadrons worth of American figher pilots went over to help before we declared war.

Plus our navy was fighting an unofficial war with the German U-boats for about a year before we went to war while we escorted the convoys heading from Canada to England.

FYI, we're just as grateful to England for remaining a friend ever since. Although personally I wish your government would try to hold mine in check rather than just going along with everything Bush does. Your government may be our friend but I don't think your people like us very much at this point.

Even Slashdot?

[troc (3606)]

"They threw everything they had at us. I was just in shock."

I guess that includes getting a mention on Slashdot?

Troc

Re:Even Slashdot?

[alienw (585907)]

Looks like you don't understand how DDOSs work. They get a whole lot of hijacked computers with DDOS trojans installed on them. MSIE makes this quite easy. Then they launch a DDOS at a website. You can't "block" the packets on the server because by the time your server gets them it's too late -- they have already clogged up your pipe. In fact, the traffic will probably overwhelm your ISP unless they are very large. The only place to block them would be on the ISPs main router, and that's pretty hard to do given that there could be thousands of different bots and they aren't that terribly different from ordinary users (other than the amount of traffic they generate).

Re:Even Slashdot?

[Martin Blank (154261)]

I've had some experience with this, having worked at an ISP, and we got assistance from our own upstream provider (telco with terabits of connectivity) to start putting blocks in place. This filtered out a several-hundred-megabit flood on one occasion, and was demonstrated later again when Slammer hit (done on their own starting about an hour or so after the ISP world was so harshly awakened by it).

Re:Even Slashdot?

[Saxerman (253676)]

Speaking of mentions on Slashdot, has anyone else ever seen an article wherein someone was portrayed as such a complete shining genius? Anybody else find this even slightly suspicious?

I don't know... I found the last paragraph grated against his super-hero image:

That's right. Lyon is one of the good guys. Still, Lyon's heroics weren't possible without Mickey Richardson's resolve. It's easy to forget that as Lyon worked to save him, Richardson considered paying off the extortionists. Now Richardson has a better option. Pay Lyon $50,000 a year and he's protected. He doesn't have to worry about paying extortionist's protection fees.

I've always found there to be a rather fine line between insurance and extortion. If the story is true, he probably is one of the good guys, but he's merely tapped into the revenue stream the extortionists created.

So now we're gonna slashdot 'em?

[LordByronStyrofoam (587954)]

Seems kinda brutal to hit them with another DDOS.

That's frightening

[plover (150551)]

It's a brilliant story, and you've got to applaud the guys at the victim site for sticking up for themselves.

It makes me wonder if this new anti-DDoS company can somehow establish relationships with ISPs to track back the zombies and get them shut down more quickly? Seems that would be the sanest and most effective tool -- take away the bots. No bots -- no botnet -- no attacks.

Re:That's frightening

[Talking Goat (645295)]

Or, the ISP's can do as the smart ones have done and deploy Tipping Point [tippingpoint.com] begin to mitigate these attacks the moment they are detetcted on the border routers. It's smart, fast, and really good at shutting down the traffic generated by these botnets by giving the admin the ability to apply vendor-supplied templates, or to create your own. However, you'd need additional deployments inside the network to avoid fratricide, but you can't beat the intelligence behind this aproach.

Re:That's frightening

[Anonymous Brave Guy (457657)]

"Sorry sir, no email for you until you reformat"...uhh huh. That'll happen.

Doubtful, but perhaps it should.

Consider another everyday activity, with a lot of benefits but some inherent risks, which works fine when people take care but goes wrong when they don't: driving. In most places, you don't get to drive without taking a simple test to prove you're reasonably safe and competent. Then if you're caught driving in a way that's hazardous or inconsiderate to others, a nice policeman pulls you over. Depending on the significance of the violation, you get a verbal warning, a formal sanction, or read your rights and your vehicle confiscated.

If a similar principle applied to the Internet, with minor offences attracting a polite warning up to running a grossly insecure system that causes widespread inconvenience to other netizens getting you completely blocked, people would soon learn to respect the technology and others using it. But first we have to get over this strange idea that because it's The Internet, everyone should be allowed to use it, without any traceability or responsibility for their actions whatsoever, regardless of the harm it may cause others. I doubt that'll be a popular viewpoint around these parts.

Never pay

[nuggz (69912)]

If they actually get money, they'll do it again and again.
Any measure of success will encourage more of the same behaviour.

Re:Never pay

[Council (514577)]

From TFI:

To ensure a quick, quiet transaction, the extortionists did what all extortionists (in the physical or online world) do: They exploited the problem of the commons. An ecological principle, the problem of the commons states that people will act in self-interest if it profits them in the short term, even if that act will hurt everyone, including themselves, in the long term. Every act, every threat, every negotiation tactic, every single move extortionists make is designed to make paying the protection fee not only appealing, but in fact, the smartest business decision you can make in the short term, even if you know in the long run that you haven't stopped the problem at all.

Good, some balls.

[vbrookslv (634009)]

Glad to see someone standing up to these thugs. I remember a few years ago, the ISP that I admin'd hosted the connection for http://www.defcon.org/ [defcon.org]. We had someone start a Smurf attack from the Con, targetting our inbound T3's. We were able to track it down, and actually snatch him out of his seat right there at the con. He promptly apologized (I think, he only spoke german, IIRC). The look on his face was priceless. Oh, did I mentioned that me, and everyone else at the company carry Glock 19's? Yeah, we didn't have any more problems for the rest of the con. Everyone was on their best behaviour. A bunch of fine, upstanding individuals. :)

Re:Good, some balls.

[Anonymous Luddite (808273)]

>> and everyone else at the company carry Glock 19's?

Please excuse my asking, oh well-armed-one, but WTF for?

The glock is a fine weapon, and being an admin for an ISP is a fine job, but I can't quite see the relationship between the two things...

Re:Good, some balls.

[vbrookslv (634009)]

THe reason we carried, aside from the stock "Because we can" answer, is simple. We were in a building with a few hundred thousand dollars in routers, and customers such as banks and medical facilities. We were downtown on Fremont and 7th St in Las Vegas. For those who aren't familiar with the area, it's the hood. I regularly had to chase crackheads, as well as hookers with their Johns off of our back steps. We would regularly find people sleeping in our dumpster in the morning.

And to answer the obvious question, our office WAS there for a reason, we were a block from the ILEC's main CO. This made quite a difference in the cost and time to install of new circuits.

Re:Good, some balls.

[ReverendLoki (663861)]

I can't quite see the relationship between the two things...

Because, sometimes that Windows box crashes one time to many...

Just do what we do on IRC

[by Anonymous Coward]

Find out where they live and call their mom.

Extorting a gambling site?

[wowbagger (69688)]

Extorting a gambling site? That strikes me as a LLM (life limiting move, c.f. career limiting move).

Many gambling sites still have connections to, shall we say, respectible businessmen of the Italian or Asian pursuasion, who are used to handling such matters extra-legally.

You might just wake up one day with your computer's monitor (cables severed with an ax) in bed with you.

Or Guido and Nunzio standing over you, giving you tips on the finer points of extortion while they wait for the concrete to set.

Re:Extorting a gambling site?

[daniel_mcl (77919)]

I was just suggesting this as a solution to spamming awhile back; if it's really that expensive to businesses, wouldn't it be more economical for them to arrange to have spammers assasinated? I'm serious about this -- if people are cool with paying Mafia kickbacks to their sanitation company, wouldn't they be willing to pay for something which will save them quite a lot more money?

If such a job were available I'd personally be going through sharpshooter training right now.

fighting back with infrastructure

[Ankh (19084)]

Some ISPs are doing customer-level ingres filtering -- e.g. if the "other end" of the cable modem gets a packet whose src address is not that of the cable modem, drop it on the floor, it's forged.

The ease of infecting home XP systems remotely means you sometimes find teenagers with tens of thousands of zombie computers at their control. They can sell them to spammers, too.

The ease of doing massive DDoS attacks is why I stopped running an IRC server, and also stopped a research project I was doing related to inter-protocol messaging. It wasn't worth the hassle.

Fighting back is hard if you don't know who to fight, but in the case of extortion, (1) document everything on paper, (2) keep timestamped printed IRC logs of all conversations, and full email printouts; (3) ask some other people to print copies of their IRC logs when appropriate. Then contact the RCMP (or if you are in the USA, the FBI, but in the USA you need to show financial damage of $5,000 or more). Don't wait until it's all over before contacting them.

Good luck!

Liam

No protection

[McGiraf (196030)]

The thing with these DOS extortionist is that unlike the mafia or other groups they do not protect you from other extortinist. If you pay them thay can stop their attact, but if someone else try to attack you they cannot do anyting.

Network admins! Prevent this from happening

[bigberk (547360)]

This is an appeal to network admins working at ISPs, whether large or small. You have a responsibility to make sure that spam/attack zombies don't exist on your networks. These days it's a trivial task to check to make sure you're not part of the problem. This can be scripted so that you receive periodic reports of problem hosts on your system, which you can then firewall, disconnect, or restrict access to.

There are so many blacklists these days, so just use rsync to grab fresh copies of AHBL, CBL, DSBL, SORBS, whatever. Then run through grepcidr [pc-tools.net] to see if any IPs from your network(s) are on the blacklists. So easy, and you'll be protecting both yourself and others from malicious zombies.

Re:Network admins! Prevent this from happening

[Sique (173459)]

Most black lists are for smtp servers only, and the origial article was about sending "traffic" (which i read icmp or dos, typically not e-mail).

It depends on the type of the attack. "Traffic" is quite unspecific, but it's not necessarily ICMP echo-request (a.k.a. "ping"). For DoS ping is rather uninteresting, because there are enough sites that don't allow ping to their servers and filter it out some hops before the servers anyway. At least I was recommending to customers to allow ping only from monitoring and maintenance sites. (As a side note: A lot of IPs for servers are not coupled with a specified hardware address anyway, but handled and distributed by loadbalancers and serverfarms, so there is no point in having those virtual servers respond on anything else than the service they are supposed to provide.)

So if you have a site that only allows a very limited number of packet types through, attacking it with something outside of the scope of the firewall is somewhat pointless, except you manage to muster such an high bandwidth that it clogs up the pipe at some hops way before the original site. And traffic that is easily to distinguish from legitimate traffic is also easily filtered directly at the backbone routers of the really big ISPs or exchange points ("drop anything not TPC to the site in question").

To make your attack more effective you have at least to mimick the legitimate traffic a little. Your DoS-requests thus should be at least formally correct (or being incorrect in a quite sophisticated manner to trigger complex fault and exception handling.) If you manage to cause the service to calculate a long or data intensive response, it's even better, because then you are clogging up CPU time now missing to handle requests that generate business for the site ("Give me all betting quotes which are either between 1:1 and 1:5 or between 1:4 and 1:10 or between 1:8 and 1:100 or are better than 1:75" forces the site to answer with a large sheet containing all quotes, but the answer set consists of several subsets to be calculated separately. Not every site has middleware in place to change this to "give me all quotes"). If you manage to make your request variable, so filtering out the DoS request with a single pattern doesn't work, it's much better. If you change your attacking pattern during the attack, so the filters in place have to be changed the whole time by the defending site, your DoS will be further more effective.

In the end for an effective DoS you should a) fill all available bandwidth with traffic indistinguishable from legitimate traffic b) use up as much CPU time on the servers as possible to handle your request c) try to generate an asymmetric pattern (your request should use up much less bandwidth for you than the answer of the site is using) d) make it as variable as possible to avoid static filtering.

EVIL!

[jav1231 (539129)]

Okay, I first read that as "Online Exorcist." I'm thinking, how does THAT work? TO: [e-mail]
From: Father Mayai (Yes, you may!)
Subject: Notice of Eviction

I fought a DDoS and won

[mikeswi (658619)]

Starting Feb 2004, my site was hit by a powerful DDoS attack. It knocked out my web server and it nearly took out my web host's switch in the data center. I never got any demands or letters or figured out who caused it.

Anonymizer.net tried to help me by putting my domain behind a series of rotating proxy servers. Their whole network crashed after 6 hours and they had to stop helping me.

Finally my web host hit on the right idea. I set up a half dozen virtual private servers (VPS) at Globalservers.com (same company that hosts about.com and freeservers) and my host installed a proxy server on each one called twhttpd and set them all to route traffic to and from my web server at his data center.

Then I set up an account at ZoneEdit and added all the IPs for the proxy servers with a failover system. Every time the bastards knocked out one of the proxy servers, ZoneEdit would detect that the server was borked and switch to another one. With the load reduced, the dead proxy came back on its own a few minutes later.

After about 6 months of this, they finally gave up and I won.

Re:I fought a DDoS and won

[mikeswi (658619)]

Most of the filtering was done by globalservers. They have a bunch of very serious routers specifically designed to block DDoS attacks and they have more bandwidth than God.

Once the traffic passed through their routers, it went through the proxy and the proxy would pull the data from my webserver.

My host wrote a script that he installed somewhere (on his switch I think) that filtered out a specific type of HTTP GET. Whoever wrote the attack bot made a mistake because it generated some weird error (408 or 508 or something). His script filtered that out and then the webserver would return data to the proxy servers and from there to the end client.

It was a little glitchy and it nearly ruined my message board (all the users had the same 6 IP addresses and that played hell with session IDs), but it kept the site going despite the attacker's best efforts. He/they eventually moved on to attack other antispyware web sites with less resources.

So...

[Theatetus (521747)]

...is submitting a story to /. the last revenge of the DDOS extortioner?

Good guys vs. bad guys

[dmccarty (152630)]

That's right. Lyon is one of the good guys. Still, Lyon's heroics weren't possible without Mickey Richardson's resolve. It's easy to forget that as Lyon worked to save him, Richardson considered paying off the extortionists. Now Richardson has a better option. Pay Lyon $50,000 a year and he's protected. He doesn't have to worry about paying extortionist's protection fees.

From a purely economic standpoint, it makes me wonder who's the real "extortionist"...

Re:Here's a tip

[frikazoyd (845667)]

I would think in the situation that the e-mail was ignored, it would enrage the extortionist into firing a warning shot, one that would for SURE get the guy's attention. In fact, from the article, it looks like that is sort of what happened. He didn't respond, just first sought consultation and alerted his ISP. Then the extortionist sent a second threat, but not until he had crashed a few ISP servers to get some attention.

Re:Here's a tip

[bigberk (547360)]

When they fire that warning shot, you dump all the attacking IPs to a log and circulate the list to AHBL, Spamhaus, CBL etc so that the extortionist's zombie network is now worth half of what it was before. Zombies are only worth anything if they are novel. And you tell the extortionist that for each additional shot, their botnet monetary value will decrease by 10% or whatever.

Re:Here's a tip

[suso (153703)]

Actually, in relation to that, what happens when your spamfilter marks such an email as spam. I guess you can say that's a major false positive.

Re:Interesting article

[snorklewacker (836663)]

They prefer to use cracked ICQ accounts because it adds some misdirection to point to an existing entity, an older account may be less likely to be instantly shut off by automatic processes, and well, they're L33T H4X0RZ and cracking is what they like to do (at least the kids working for the extortionists -- the folks running the show are probably pretty rational organized crime types).

Re:Fight!

[by Anonymous Coward]

Presumably, they will give you some way to pay them (else what is the point?). Point the cops and or feds at that contact, and see what happens.

This is where R'ingTFA comes in...

If no joy from the authorities, I'm sure your local newsrag would be glad to shame the cops into doing something. Of course, if the extortionist is overseas, things might be a little difficult.

Again, this is where R'ingTFA comes in. I'd also add that one downside of moving your business to an unregulated third world country is that neither the local journalists nor the local cops are especially interested in your gringo problems. I don't understand why Scotland Yard bothered with him.

Re:Fight!

[Fishstick (150821)]

If only there was some kind of online medium for news articles where answers to questions like these could be answered!

Oh wait...

You can send us $40K by Western Union [and] your site will be protected

Richardson runs BetCris.com, an online wagering site, one of hundreds of sites ensconced in Costa Rica that take bets from Americans ... without concern for U.S. bookmaking laws

Lyon says, "I could have left it alone, but I had gotten attached, and I started investigating. I came up with some interesting techniques to trace back the attacks." He turned over his work to several law enforcement agencies, but he never heard about it again.

"Um, hello - FBI? Hi. Yes I run a website gambling business offshore in Costa Rica and I just got threated by someone who says they will shut me down unless I wire fourty thousand via Western Union to someone in Belarus who *click* Hello?"

Re:Curious

[Secrity (742221)]

Wormholes.

Re:Curious

[Gzip Christ (683175)]

I've always wondered...when a site is slashdotted, it implies that the site has been hit by high referrals from slashdot, causing it to become slow or go down totally. But how does slashdot itself cope with the high traffic?

It's quite simple, really - Slashdot just doesn't link to itself.

Re:Curious

[dougmc (70836)]

But how does slashdot itself cope with the high traffic?

Lots of bandwidth, lots of hardware. Since it gets `slashdotted' every single day, it'll be pretty easy to predict how much traffic you'll get tomorrow -- approximately the same as you got yesterday, perhaps a bit more.

But when you're running your own server, and it normally gets 50 hits/day, and then suddenly a Slashdot listing hits it with millions of hits in one day, well, that's harder to prepare for, because 1) you often don't know you're going to be on /. until it's already happened, and 2) is it even worth preparing for? It's just one or two days, and then things will go back to normal. More hardware and bandwidth may cost lots of money, money that you're not going to spend just so people can see pictures of whatever neat thing you did.

Really, the only sites that get /.ed are the smaller ones. The larger ones already have the hardware and bandwidth needed to handle it. Sure, a /.ing probably shows up on their mrtg reports, but it's probably just a 20% or so increase in traffic, not a 1000x fold increase.

Re:Curious

[MyLongNickName (822545)]

That's the trick. Most people would say "bigger servers" and "bigger bandwidth". But I know the real reason. Notice how you get 'Service Unavailable'? Every so often? I found that if more than 50 people are accessing Slashdot at the same time, that their database cannot handle it. In reality, this site is hosted on an Amiga. Only 50 users you say? That can't be.... just look at my User ID!

All the 813,621 users before you don't really exist. These messages are randomly generated geek buzzwords. "Users" are given personalities, ranging from "Linux lover" to "Windows loser", from "I'm just a troll" to "IAARS", from "Funny" to "I take myself serious, but no one else does".

Those "personalities" alter the pre-populated phrase list according to topic (actually, I am not even sure the topic matters). Think of it as an advanced Turing simulation.

I was fooled for my first three months. Then, I saw the predictable responses, and realized that there was no actual intellegence here. Just the occassional real life person who wanders in and is fooled for a while. The auto-misspell feature was a nice addition, I have to admit.

Want proof? Pick a user id. Peruse messge list. Notice the lack of variety? Notice the lack of real meaning behind each message? And when there is real content, try browsing earlier messages. You will find phrases ripped verbatim from an earlier post.

Of course, you may also be a bot. CommanderTaco is always making tweaks to the message generation algorithm (though his posts, too, are mostly generated by code). I will have to peruse your message history when I am done posting here.

Re:Question

[American AC in Paris (230456)]

I don't have a beef with Mr. Piquepalle anymore, but if suggest you dig through some of his early submissions for an answer. As of late, Mr. Piquepalle has been going the full-disclosure route--that is, he makes no secret of the fact that he's affiliated with the sites he submits to Slashdot. Early on, though, Mr. Piquepalle regularly pretended to be "just some guy" who found sites like Engadget interesting. That's not good; if you're affiliated with what you're plugging, you should be candid and open about that fact. Failure to provide full disclosure puts you in the same boat as the likes of Armstrong Williams, who conveniently forgot to mention that he was being paid off by the administration to plug No Child Left Behind in what were ostensibly opinion pieces. It's a dishonest and unethical practice, to say the least.

But like I said, he's cleaned up his act in recent months, so I no longer have a beef with him. Some folks, on the other hand, still hold this against him--which isn't an entirely unreasonable position to take.

Re:Question

[Just Some Guy (3352)]

Mr. Piquepalle regularly pretended to be "just some guy"

Hey, leave me out of this! I can't even get my own articles accepted.

Re:Rudyard Kipling's "Dane-geld" - extortion poem

[howlinmonkey (548055)]

It seems a good idea to sit in Eastern Europea
And mail out missives with a threat
"We know that you have gold, and if I may be so bold
If you send me some I will not be a threat"

And that is called running protection
And the scum who demand it defend
That you only have to pay them protection
And your enterprise won't have to end.

It is a real temptation to avoid a confrontation
And pay off the bottom sucking filth
Then the business you created won't be immolated
By the bandwidth sucking zombies and their ilk

And that is called paying protection
But after you've paid up today
They'll come calling for more protection
There will never be an end to what you pay

It's a shame to whimper quietly and meet with their demand
To keep the money flowing fast and free
So when they do demand the little money in your hand
I would suggest that you repeat slowly after me.

"We never pay any scum protection
No matter how hard they may lean
For tomorrow you'll be back threatening to hack
Using any zombies you can glean "

I am no Rudyard Kipling, but I think this captures the essence of it :)