Why Is "John Doe" Used as a Name for an Anonymous Person?

The use of "John Doe" as a name for anonymous or unidentified people dates to 13th century England, when the name was first used in legal documents to protect the identity of witnesses. The concept of a false alias in legal documents is actually quite old; the Romans, for example, had their own version of "John Doe" for use in legal proceedings. This name was probably originally chosen because...


Why Is "John Doe" Used as a Name for an Anonymous Person?

Why Is "John Doe" Used as a Name for an Anonymous Person?

Backlink: http://feeds.wisegeek.com/~r/learn-something-new-every-day-rss/~3/EUrigIHYWdk/why-is-john-doe-used-as-a-name-for-an-anonymous-person.htm

The push-button tool being used to shut down Visa, MasterCard, and other sites

Terrific piece by Joel Johnson on Gizmodo about the software tool being used to take down MasterCard, Visa, and Sarah Palin's websites.

LOIC ("Low Orbit Ion Cannon") is an application developed by 4Chan-affiliated hackers designed to--when used en masse by thousands of anonymous users--launch Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on websites. Like Visa.com and Mastercard.com, for instance.

It's a pushbutton application...

The idea behind LOIC is that it can allow you to participate in attacks even if you've no clue how to hack. Just download a copy of LOIC (available for Windows, Mac, and Linux!), punch in the target information like a URL or an IP address and zap.

It's interesting to see the tweets from Operation Payback on Twitter. It looks like they've also gone after Joe Leiberman's site, as well. I'm sure he'll have some choice things to say about it. No doubt he is loving every second of the attention he's garnering from all this.

The push-button tool being used to shut down Visa, MasterCard, and other sites

Backlink: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/xt8s9I9qrUs/the-push-button-tool.html