A virtual sit-in is a form of
electronic civil disobedience deriving its name from the
sit-in
A sit-in or sit-down is a form of direct action that involves one or more people occupying an area for a protest, often to promote political, social, or economic change. The protestors gather conspicuously in a space or building, refusing to mo ...
s popular during the
civil rights movement of the 1960s. The virtual sit-in attempts to recreate that same action digitally using a
distributed denial-of-service attack
In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connec ...
(DDOS). During a virtual sit-in, hundreds of
activists attempt to access a target
website simultaneously and repetitively. If performed correctly, this will cause the target website to run slowly or even collapse entirely, preventing anyone from accessing it.
Examples
On December 21, 1995, the first world Virtual sit-in, conceived b
Tommaso Tozzi was created by the Florentine grou
against the French government to protest against the nuclear tests in Mururoa and was defined as
"Netstrike"
On Thursday May 1, 1998,
Ricardo Dominguez and Stefan Wray held a virtual sit-in in which they decided to attack the
World Economic Forum (WEF). They did this to support their particular beliefs against
anti-globalization
The anti-globalization movement or counter-globalization movement, is a social movement critical of economic globalization. The movement is also commonly referred to as the global justice movement, alter-globalization movement, anti-globalist m ...
. With over 160,000 people who attended the virtual sit-in for reasons that they could not take to the streets of New York City protest. More than 40,000 also downloaded software which made a
DDOS
In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host
A ...
attack easier was also recorded.
The attack lasted all of Thursday and Friday night.
See also
*
Electronic civil disobedience
*
Hacktivism
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Virtual Sit-In
Politics and technology
Civil disobedience
Activism by type