Wikileaks
by Jeff
Image text: STUDENTS ARE CALLING PRESIDENT JOHNSON EN MASSE TO PROTEST THE BOMBING AND IT'S JAMMED THE WHITE HOUSE SWITCHBOARD. COULD THEY COLLAPSE OUR CRITICAL PHONE SYSTEMS? HAS THE FIRST TELEPHONE WAR BEGUN? STAY TUNED FOR MORE ON THIS DANGEROUS NEW TECHNOLOGY.
First and foremost, the image text appears to be a news wire from during the Vietnam War when Lyndon Johnson was President. The students were calling to protest the War in what xkcd implicates as the first DDOS attack. A DDOS attack is a distributed denial of service attack in which the attackers force too much traffic from many different points to take down a web server, or in the case of the image text a phone network.
The comic is a reference to the group Anonymous, who over the past week or so has been using DDOS attacks to take down servers for companies that aided the governments of the world take down Wikileaks and its CEO Julian Assange. Amazon, Paypal and Mastercard were all targets of Anonymous. Anonymous is a group that was formed out of the forum 4chan.org. (I'm not linking there, find it at your own risk).
The joke in the comic is that Anonymous supports Wikileaks and their ability to make confidential and top secret information public until their own names, phone numbers and addresses are made public.
December 15th, 2010
and also
the image text took a scenario possible back then
the phone and made it look like an attack
which by current standards seems “lame”
and the subtle message here is that though the net seems very important now,
in the end it is just a means of communication
ddos seems to be the best effort
but failed to be truly a War type effect
December 15th, 2010
He is not the CEO, he is the PR guy, one of the creators, a figure head if you will. Anonymous is different then anonymous, for no one wants to be grouped with the B-tards of anonymous.
on a side note, do support wikileaks or at least freedom of speech
December 15th, 2010
Actually, “Anonymous” left his name in the meta data of the PDF he released. Which, in the comic, led to Wikileaks publishing this “leaked” information.
December 17th, 2010
IIRC some time ago wikileaks leaked the email addresses of its own members because one forgot to remove them/not make them BCC in an email.
December 17th, 2010
I think part of the joke here is the fact that Anonymous (a group that can only exist because its members’ names are a secret) is supporting Wikileaks (an organization that exists to reveal secrets.) Would you call that irony?
December 27th, 2010
That’s pretty much the joke. Anonymous supports Wikileaks in the name of justice through transparency, yet they themselves can only exist and, oh my God, perform those supportive actions in obscurity.
January 3rd, 2011
Nobody going to mention the Mass effect 2 reference here???
ok … I will.