China Votes - NOT

Citizens in Hong Kong appear to be getting tired of not people able to vote for their leaders. In Hong Kong 1,200 elected representatives choose the chief executive. Well some anti-democracy advocates decided to demonstrate the public's opinion doesn't matter through a DDoS attack on the polling system.

A DDoS, for those of you who might not know, is a Distributed Denial of Service attack. What this basically means is that attackers control a lot of computers (called bots) and control them through Handler machines and a botmaster. A machine can become a bot from a variety of resources including accidentally installing malware. In a DDoS, bots will usually try to talk to the servers that are being attacked. Whenever computers try to talk to each other, they reserve space for that conversation much like setting up a meeting. However, in a DDoS the bots that request the meeting don't show up and have thus wasted the space in the server's schedule. If enough bots request space in the server's schedule, the server will be too busy and will crash. Alternatively, the system administrator of the server can say that the server only has time for a certain amount of requests and so although the server will not crash, it will not have anytime for users who actually want to talk to the server. Either way the server is really busy, and not accomplishing anything it needs to.

Hong Kong University seems to have set up a public opinion poll to see who people would vote for if they had the chance. Unfortunately, this was seen as against national interests and therefore the effort was thwarted by through a DDoS which is considered to be patriotic if it is in the "national interest" such as this.

If people want to speak out, should they be able to? At what point does the government become so oppressive that the rest of the wold decides it isn't okay and that the people within the country rise up? What do you think?

For more information read the original article here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/26/hong_kong_vote_hack/