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Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates - Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor for The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues for TheAtlantic.com and the magazine. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle. More

Born in 1975, the product of two beautiful parents. Raised in West Baltimore—not quite The Wire, but sometimes ill all the same. Studied at the Mecca for some years in the mid-’90s. Emerged with a purpose, if not a degree. Slowly migrated up the East Coast with a baby and my beloved, until I reached the shores of Harlem. Wrote some stuff along the way.

Hacking The Power That Be

By Ta-Nehisi Coates
Jun 15 2009, 3:00 PM ET Comment

This makes sense, and yet it's amazing to see:

While demonstrators gather in the streets to contest Iran's rigged election, online backers of the so-called "Green Revolution" are looking to strike back at the Tehran regime -- by attacking the government's websites.

Pro-democracy activists on the web are asking supporters to use relatively simple hacking tools to flood the regime's propaganda sites with junk traffic. "NOTE to HACKERS - attack www.farhang.gov.ir - pls try to hack all iran gov wesites [sic]. very difficult for us," Tweets one activist. The impact of these distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks isn't clear. But official online outlets like leader.ir, ahmadinejad.ir, and iribnews.ir are currently inaccessible. "There are calls to use an even more sophisticated tool called BWraep, which seems to exhaust the target website out of bandwidth by creating bogus requests for serving images," notes Open Society Institute fellow Evgeny Morozov.




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