Talk:Timeline of Internet conflicts

New project

Conflicts on the Internet/Internets are noteable, as they often spill into various aspects of "real life", offline, and often impact on various industries and news media.

This project is going to attempt to compile them all. While some like Operation Clambake are *more* notable, and have their own full blown Wikipedia articles, many of them will be notable enough for a line or two here for archival and encyclopediac reference purposes. This in turn may uncover other items of note as more people join the project that in turn could turn up more data from notable sources that could lead to further Wikipedia articles.

Please feel free to contribute. At first, I recommend we compile by year. As the project grows we can expand/reformat as needed. I do *NOT* envision this as just a list of the 'big' things and events, overlooking smaller, also notable events. Note: by notable events, I don't mean that something for example that happened in 2000 or 2004 should be excluded, simply because people don't talk about it today, in 2006. This will be a combination timeline/compiling of it all, to create an outline for people to follow of Internet conflicts.

Plan for growth

Simple Growth Plan

• 1. Fill in as much detail of notable stuff in the year by year breakdowns under current formatting. Once a given section gets too big, split to an article like Timeline of Internet conflicts (2005) and so forth. At that point, only perhaps the Top 3-5 most notable/influential ones will be listed on the main parent article.
  • 1a. sub pages would be eventually a month by month breakdown--this will free it up for even more detail/smaller scale stuff then.

What fits on here

• 2. Main page items (pre-growth) should be stuff that was the "Big Ones", or firsts, or just particularly notable. Root server attacks. Kevin Mitnick, Dmitry Skylarov. The two City of Heroes ones are listed as notable as for the lawsuit, it was the first time I know of for an MMO to be sued in this fashion, and the first time on their hacking incident that a major MMO (250,000+ users) was shutdown by an active attack thus. First time "major" assaults on a given type of service would warrant as well--the first time the root servers were hit. The first time the whole "internet" was hit--Arpnanet shutdown, already listed. And so on.
  • 2a. It's not about stuff for a general "internet timeline". This is for events that are particularly notable as an item of hostility, or conflict. I don't think I've seen something like this catalogued ever before in one place to show scale of growth as it coincides with the growth of the Internet, but it's already telling as of the page as it appears 48 hours after I made it. It started with one spam incident, which 20+ years later led to anti-spam companies rerouting DDOS attacks against them, taking over 10,000,000 people offline as a side-effect. If someone sneezed on the Internet in 1980, ten thousand people go offline. If someone sneezes at it in 2010, half the world goes dark and people *die*.
  • 2b. THIS IS NOT ORIGINAL RESEARCH, so please let's not bring up that WP policy. I've gone over it in my head and I can't see it. This is simply a chronological breakdown in ever-increasing depth of how conflict and hostility has evolved online since the birth of Internet communication.

The inevitable complaint

• 3. I thought about this extensively for a few days before starting this. Inevitably, things will be referenced here and in child articles that very clearly fall under the purview of "trolling" or "hacking" or other socially negative things. Whatever, let's please deal with it like logical, non-emotional people, as we should, and move on. Whether something is right or wrong, is irrelevant. Did it happen? Was it recorded? Did it have some level of notable affect on many people? It should get listed.
  • 3a. "No tropy cases for vandals or trolls". Irrelevant. There is no WP policy about this (see Habbo Hotel discussion). My threshold which I think we should try to apply is a simple one: if it happened, if it's verifiable by multiple sources as happening (for attack-type situations on various facets of the Internet) and affected a given service(s) that is used by 100,000+ people, it's of note--for the first unique incident. Examples:
    • The root server was attacked in 2002. If a later attack is significantly different and/or wildly more successful, it's may be worth mentioning. A half-baked repeat of the half-baked 2002 attack in 2006 is not worth mention.
    • City of Heroes was the first MMO hacked live, affecting players in a negative fashion. If the same thing happens again in 2007, it's not worth noting beyond a "this happened in 2007 too" update to the original. If a wildly different attack happens to COH or World of Warcraft in 2008, it should likely merit a note. In other words, by this definition the Habbo Hotel Raid thing in 2006 is worth noting (and likely will be soon). However, someone doing something similar in a form of "virtual protest" or trolling to Star Wars Galaxies afterwards is not worth noting, as it did not come "first".
    • Livejournal/Danga/SixApart were accidentally DDOS'd in 2006. The same thing happening again is not worth note. The same thing accidentally happening to say Whitehouse.gov or Google.com (and taking them, or another equally "big name" service down) is worth note.

More to come

Soon. Suggestions?

topic material - pending list to add, find content of

For long/ongoing ones, recommend it be placed in the year section in which it originated.

• Electronic Frontier Foundation et al
• hacking incidents (major defacements; epic scale trolling that disrupts popular sites, services; Kevin Mitnick; Gary McKinnon
• sex.com
• IPv4 vs. IPv6
• legal fights
• The Pirate Bay
• File sharing
• WASTE
• PGP (how the government fights encryption -- incidents))
• Notable controversies surrounding major websites - Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, etc.

Please add more as you think of them. This can be used to easily find the conflicts and fights to add here.