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Well, as witnessed by yesterday's hikoi, that method of voicing one's dissatisfaction continues to be as popular as ever but a new form of protest has come from nowhere and now holds the numbers-one spot.

I refer of course to cyber-protests.

These seem to take two main forms:

1. the creation of online petitions which invite those who share the same opinions to voice their unhappiness by adding their email address to a list of others.
2. human-powered denial of service attacks against specific websites

But have any of these cyber-protests actually had an effect on those against who they are targeted?

Unfortunately, I suspect not.

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Yes, Telecom did come up with its JetSurf DSL plans after a significant number of Net-users signed up to an online petition launched after the disappointment of some minor price-fiddling that occurred back in september of last year.

I would wager however, that the JetSurf plans were more a response to the bad publicity that followed a report indicating the company was falling well short of its own targets for broadband uptake. Odds are that the issue of local loop unbundling versus wholesale access also prompted Telecom to show that it was happy to release a DSL service that suited the masses and could be resold by other ISPs.

No, I'm sorry, but a CDROM with a few tens of thousands of unverified email addresses on it simply doesn't seem to have the same impact as a truckload of paper forms stained with the ink of an equal number of signatures.

If one were to be completely cynical, it could be argued that at the very least, it's harder for the target of the petition to dump 50Kg of paper than 7 grams of plastic.

So what about those man-powered denial of service attacks such as cyber sit-in promised by those opposed to the government's plans for the foreshore and seabed?

Well I saw no signs that any of the government's webservers were crushed by the load this little stunt generated -- hence it was equally ineffective.

It's also worth pointing out that those planning to engage in such "sit-ins" (aka denial of service attacks) ought to be very careful -- since there's a fine line these days between what's considered reasonable protest and what's considered terrorism.

No, I'm sorry folks -- if you really want to vent your spleen, hitting the streets with your placards, chants and paper-based petitions is still a whole heap more effective than throwing up a website or wrecking your mouse-buttons in an attempt to bring down the government('s webserver).

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