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mappum207 karma

Sir Berners-Lee,

Thank you for your work in creating the web, not only as a technology but as the free and open place it is today. Me and many others have grown up on the web, and feel a sort of citizenship to it.

While technically HTTP is a distributed protocol, monolithic services were created from it that control a lot of user data (Google, Facebook, etc.). How do you feel about how centralized the web has become today?

Also, what do you think about new distributed technologies working to make the web less centralized? For instance, IPFS or mesh networks.

mappum184 karma

People keep asking what her brother did, so I'll try to explain it simply.

First of all, he was operating a "botnet". This means he had a virus spread to various computers (usually thousands of them), and each virus was waiting for him to send it commands.

Since he now had thousands of computers in his control, he could command them to all connect to the same website at the same time, in order to overload it and bring the website down. This is called a Distributed Denial of Service attack, or DDoS. Many people also make their bots record passwords/credit card info or send spam.

The other thing he did was gain access to some sort of website hosting service (http://t35.net), and stole the database of usernames and passwords. He also defaced that website.

mappum151 karma

It used to be an IRL stream that just followed his life, but they kept getting SWATted so they shut it down and just let people use the platform they built

mappum103 karma

they lost me as a viewer

I see what you did there.

mappum66 karma

Because Twitch was unprofitable - ad and sub revenue wouldn't have been enough to cover the high bandwidth costs.

But Amazon owns the infrastructure and can operate the platform cheaply themselves.