You may (or may not) have noticed that since yesterday we here at Hot Air have been using a lot fewer Xweets (Tweets, X-files?) from Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter).
It’s not because we don’t want to. For good or ill, we rely on X to feed our thirst for news in the world, and especially to get the raw data that is impossible to get if you rely on Pravda to fill in the blanks.
X gives you video you will never see anywhere else, clips of news programs, immediate access to news stories and commentary, and the opinions of everybody, prestigious and obscure. It is an invaluable resource and pretty much the only unfiltered source of “news” in the world. We rely on it, and Twitchy, our sister site, relies on it even more.
For most of yesterday, X was down entirely or so slow that it was essentially useless, silencing hundreds of millions of voices and stifling access to any news other than that approved by The Narrative™.
As of today, X is back up, but the API (Application Programming Interface) that allows sites like ours to link to and show Xweets is still broken because X hosts that site instead of a third-party server. That is why you don’t see Xweets on other websites. This deprives you of seeing user-upoaded videos that were hosted on X’s servers.
This is due to what is called a DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, which is just a fancy way of saying that millions of computers and smart devices that have been infected with malware are being used to overwhelm X’s servers with requests for connections. No site, no matter how large and sophisticated, can withstand a large enough DDOS in the normal course of events, just as no business can withstand a crowd of tens of thousands of violent protesters determined to ransack a store by brute force.
This attack is part of the escalating campaign to punish Elon Musk for helping reform government through DOGE. It is a version of the extreme Monkeywrenching campaign to ruin Elon Musk’s businesses and to threaten Elon Musk with personal violence. Tens of violent and somewhat violent attacks have already been aimed at Tesla and their customers.
Families out driving in Teslas have been harassed and even attacked on the street, personal Teslas have been vandalized, Tesla dealerships have been occupied and vandalized, Tesla chargers have been burnt down by arsonists, and Tesla showrooms have even been shot at during drive by shootings.
This is an organized campaign funded through ActBlue, which is run by leftists whose very livelihood is being threatened by exposing government waste. ActBlue is and has always been deeply corrupt, funded not mainly by “small donors” but by billionaires sympathetic to the far left. Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman, Pierre Omidyar, the Rockefeller Foundation, and many similar individuals and foundations pour billions into ActBlue through themselves and straw donors, and it seems (but it is not proven) that USAID money was laundered to boost the resources of radical left organizations like BLM and more violent groups.
These attacks are illegal, destructive, and frightening. as well as disruptive to society, and are intended to send a message to Musk and other people associated with Trump that they are vulnerable to Leftist attacks.
Which also means you and I are, if we use or depend on services such as X or drive a Tesla.
These groups make no bones about being revolutionaries. They say it all the time, and we see it every time we see the disruptive protests on campuses led by people who celebrate October 7th.
“What did you think decolonization meant?” “By any means necessary.” You know the slogans.
They mean them.
A Palestinian revolutionary group has claimed this particular attack, and, for what it is worth, seems to originate in Ukraine. The latter means little, since Internet attacks can appear to be anywhere, and cybercriminals can choose to appear to be from anywhere, so take that one with a grain of salt.
After the X social media platform, formerly known as Twitter, suffered multiple outages across March 10, Elon Musk was quick to pin the blame on a “massive cyberattack” and opined that either a “large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved.” Now, a new prime suspect has emerged as the pro-Palestinian hacktivist collective known as Dark Storm claims responsibility for taking X down. How this ties in with Musk telling Larry Kudlow during a Fox Business Network interview that the attack had been traced to “IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area” remains unclear.
Dark Storm, however, is known to use tactics that are very similar to a Russia-linked group called KillNet which also had a history of attacking western targets, and Ukraine supporting organizations, before becoming a more mainstream attackers-for-hire service. Dark Storm itself was first observed in 2023 and has attacked NATO countries, Israel and the U.S. with large-scale DDoS campaigns as well as ransomware attacks.
Whoever really ahs done this hates you and me, and make no bones about it. They claim to believe we are Nazis, not human beings, which is a convenient excuse for doing to us whatever they want.
Societies always have such people; the dispossessed exist everywhere and always. What makes these particular revolutionaries dangerous is that they are backed by powerful interests.
They are the Brownshirts of the transnational elite, even if they don’t know it.
Read the full article here
