Options
TV Licensing website down...
tghe-retford
Posts: 26,449 Forum Member
✭✭✭
...for two days at the time of writing. The likelihood is that Anonymous are behind the denial-of-service attack on the website as part of a wholescale protest against the existence of the BBC and perceived practices within.
They make no case for an alternative public service broadcaster and may well be self defeating as the end of the BBC will merely benefit two men, whose surnames are Murdoch.
I wonder how the BBC and TV Licensing will play this situation down?
They make no case for an alternative public service broadcaster and may well be self defeating as the end of the BBC will merely benefit two men, whose surnames are Murdoch.
I wonder how the BBC and TV Licensing will play this situation down?
0
Comments
http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/011211tvlicensing.html
I didn't know that, thought they were just subcontractors to help with the enforcement.
Capita are the MAIN contractor, that TV licensing is outsourced to, they then sub out many PR functions - for example to other companies, but I believe they admin the website & fund collection, including as you say enforcement - some say harrasment:mad:
Good. That means they're going after licence fee evaders who all ought to be fined for their misdemeanours.
Regarding the matter in hand, that might possibly be down to weekend maintenance - we shall see tomorrow.
I'm not sure if you're trolling or really clueless...
It's very nearly impossible to stop a full on, well organised attack, and even a small scale attack can be hard to deal with...
Otherwise the likes of the Governments own websites, MS, Apple etc would never be worried about a DDOS - and yet they've all been knocked out.
To effectively deal with DDOS's you often need to spend masses of money which I'm sure you'd be complaining about if the DM reported that the BBC spent several million on redundent servers and hosting connections for the TVL site.
Probably clueless, on the subject of Ddoss - insult accepted, we are not all brains of Britain you know!
Not really an insult, just saying you don't have a clue what you're talking about.
And it doesn't take much to understand that DDOS's are hard to deal with, they make the news on a regular basis and if the likes of MS and Apple can't keep their sites fully functioning in the face of a DDOS - not to mention the number of reports of sites for things like concert tickets going down under the weight of demand (which is basically all a DDOS is) making the news virtually every year for glastonbury etc.
Of course it is an insult:) - all I understand is there has, it seems been a Ddos cyber attack on the TVL website, I would not know if they are easy or difficult to resist. I just assumed (wrongly) it seems, that a huge corporation like Capita, would be able to resist a cyber attack - & have the resources to get it back on line very quickly - the Bay with the pirates in, seem to have managed many attemps to stop them - it seems Capita do not have the expertise that the dodgy Bay have - just an observation:)
But the pirate Bay doesn't suffer DDOS attacks - it suffers DNS blocking by the ISP's something completely different and much easier to work around - for example if your site gets blocked by an ISP's DNS servers you simply need to change your DNS server (can be done through your browser, through the OS, or router).
The site is still up and still accessible, you just don't know how to get to it (as it were).
So for example as an end user whose ISP blocks the site, I could get round it by using one of the mirror names for the site (so if Acme.com is blocked, I could use Acme.net, Acme.co.uk, Acme.it etc) as they may not be blocked, I could run my browser through a proxy server to connect to the site from outside my ISP's network (thus ignoring it's dns servers - this is basically what people do to avoid goelocked sites blocking them), or I could use one of the many free DNS services that overide the automatic ones (usually your ISP's) your system defaults to (there are extensions for most browsers that let you do this sort of thing easily).
A DDOS attack actually tries to overwhelm the sites connection to the internet, or max out it's number of allowed connections by opening many thousands at a time (the likes of MS can mitigate that to a degree by various sorts of firewalls, multiple backbone connections and often by simply having multiple server sites with both the previous measures in place*).
It's sort the difference between not being able to get into town because you don't have a map to show the route and no one will give you directions, and not being able to get into town because every route is blocked by 5 mile long tailbacks caused by people parking lorries across the only routes in.
If you're going to make snide comments about how someone or a company's expertise it helps if you have the faintest clue what you, yourself are talking about.
*Measures that can easily cost as much as the rest of the site for a lot of companies.
What is the point of your partisan statement?
Now look what you started
Haven't there been protests outside the BBC lately because of what the UK news broadcasters and the like are not allowed to report as News - NHS marches, Occupy etc. and Anonymous, I would provide a link but Google will do the alleged supression much more justice.
But the BBC did report on Anonymous and Occupy?
Anyway Occupy was stupid, at one point they were occupying Debenhams Nottingham as they'd been kicked out of their slot in front of the council offices for the Christmas fair...
The fact you won't provide evidence to back up your allegations suggests there isn't anything substantial, but that's just cynical me...
It has been going on all weekend. The reason I suggest Googling is because you will see much more than you would from one link. Whether you, I or anyone else agree with Occupy et al is one thing, but perhaps we should all be more concerned if media supression is going on
But we know media suppression is going on, purely because injunctions, superinjunctions, and "whatever they call the level above a superinjunction"s exist...
The difference is most people take the view of what they don't know probably won't hurt them.
Very true. Unfortunately, people do not know that they don't know so opinion will always be fairly limoted. I could rant about freedom of speech and democratic rights here but this is hardly the right place
Here is the Occupy BBC recording from YouTube. There are a few other pages on the internet:
http://youtu.be/ycEA3XrvrzY
Here also is the Occupy London website details:
http://occupylondon.org.uk/events/occupy-the-bbc-march-against-the-mainstream-media/
We will not know whether or not it had a high turn out because....it was not reported on
I saw live footage of that demo and the only reason it didn't get much TV or press publicity was because only a couple of hundred malcontents wearing masks turned up and they ended up just milling around. There was no conspiracy because it was basically a low key non-event.
That did not stop the reporting around St. Pauls Cathedral or other areas earlier this year, and as the Occupy webaite mentions, there was a march against privatising the NHS that went unreported.
It might be tin-foil hat time, but supression of reporting of public feeling does appear to be taking place.