Electrohippy promises WTO denial of service

UK Internet activist and self-confessed "electrohippy" Paul Mobbs is confident that his Web site will co-ordinate a successful denial of service attack against the Web servers of the World Trade Organisation Today.

At 11.30pm Monday night Mobb's site displayed a page carrying a piece of JavaScript that enables visitors to repeatedly load various WTO Web sites with the aim of bringing down servers. "Hopefully we can get around 10,000 people involved and overload the server and crash it," he says. "We are aiming at the main WTO site but particularly the conference site that will broadcast the meeting."

Mobbs also says that as far as he is aware the WTO has absolutely no come back. "Technically there is no legal problem because this is only doing what a computer system can already do. All laws relate to changing someone's computer system. As a civil matter they could seek an injunction but hopefully the page is going to get mirrored all over the world."

Denny Henke, a US-based cyber-campaigner who runs a number of site on the activism Web server Tao says such sites could well be the future of social protest. "I think that this has its place just as physical sit-ins do in protests. I'm not sure if I'll have time to get involved with it myself because I'll be updating my sites with news of the demonstrations but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of other people do join in.

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