WarTools: Big Brother, we are watching you

A few days ago an anti-media campaign page at http://nowar.julez-edward.be/ was shut down and had to take a different approach (see now http://bush.julez-edward.be/). The original page allowed visitors to flood CNN with requests for their home page. After a few million hits the Belgium government apparently asked them to stop.

Now there is another webpage that will let you do something similar, but with an interesting twist. http://www.kbiz.ca/wartools/ bills itself as a "news media search, monitoring and counter-propaganda tool for the activist community". It lists a number of media websites that you can search to see how they are reporting certain subjects.

What it doesn't advertise is the fact that you can use this page to continuously make search requests, up to 100 times per minute, thus flooding search pages (and more importantly their search stats) with the search words you enter.

While superficially this might be considered a tool for denial of service attacks, most big media companies have far more bandwidth than this page could ever begin to interfere with, and should probably not be regarded as a DOS tool.

Its more important purpose is to use search words, in numbers that are large enough to get noticed in search stats, to send a message to the operators of these websites.

This is a rather creative and interesting way to get their attention and tell them "we are watching you now, so don't make any wrong moves".

Where and how does one draw the line between a denial of service tool and something used to increase the popularity of certain pages, or in this case search words? Certainly WarTools, if it could be considered a hacker's tool (which is questionable), is probably more 'dangerous' for its content than the traffic it generates.

Check it out and get a copy for your own computer or website. Let's get a few copies spread around before they shut this one down too.