Is Telling People To Visit A Certain Website A Denial Of Service Attack?

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iamtheky sends in the story of a UC San Diego Professor, Ricardo Dominguez, whose focus of research is “electronic civil disobedience,” (for which he received tenure and a fellowship from his university), but who is now potentially facing discipline or even criminal charges from the university for staging a “virtual sit-in” to protest budget cuts. It certainly raises questions about the line between telling people to visit a website and a hack attack to take down a website. It’s difficult to see how just telling people to go to a website should ever qualify as any kind of attack, but the University is said to be contemplating criminal charges.

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