story
Hacking the Internet Archive and only placing an alert with a provocative message, I could see my teenage self do that. My judgment of the character is going to depend on what it turns out they've actually done
Of course, my grown up self (or late teen also, as I've done responsible disclosures back then as well) would rather have seen them do a coordinated vulnerability disclosure, but alas, I just meant to remark upon the "special place in hell" for not having a plan or motive bit
*Edit:* wait, I just saw in the article (I opened the thread before the link was changed) that this quote refers to a DDoS, not the alert() message that the thread was initially about
> the site was experiencing a DDoS attack, posting on Mastodon that “According to their twitter, they’re doing it just to do it.
That's indeed just destructive and not related to (hacker) curiosity...
If there's a call you wouldn't make unless it was free, the infrastructure isn't at capacity, and you're not acting otherwise in a detrimental fashion to other users of the infrastructure-- there's no harm to that organization.
Toying with the system, learning how it works and finding what you can make it do, there's a certain art to it and I'd encourage anyone to at least tinker with the systems they own (and everything else within reason and ethics), but there's two sides to nearly everything
Still awful, but nowhere near as awful as the former.
There are so many other possible targets that would get even positive reactions from people. The only kind of people that might be happy about TIA being down is maybe some big corporations that want to control and sell the information being freely preserved there.
The action is reprehensible either way, but if this is truly just an old-fashioned Anonymous attack with no ulterior motive beyond just being bad that's honestly kind of refreshing.
