Libertarian Site Suffers DDoS Attack After Supporting Google Worker

cybersecurity

Quillette Magazine, a small but respected libertarian publication based in Australia, suffered a DDoS attack Tuesday after publishing an article supportive of James Damore, the fired Google memo writer.

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The attack, which crashed the site for a day, came after Quillette published the opinion of four scientists on the Google memo. The scientists found that the conservative Google employee’s views on gender differences were supported by substantial scientific evidence.

The Google memo’s “key claims about sex differences are especially well-supported by large volumes of research across species, culture,” wrote Geoffrey Miller, a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of New Mexico, explaining that the memo “is consistent with the scientific state of the art on sex differences.”

“Among commentators who claim the memo’s empirical facts are wrong, I haven’t read a single one who understand sexual selection theory, animal behavior, and sex differences research,” Miller added.

Deborah Soh, who has a PhD in sexual neuroscience and works as a Toronto-based science writer, concurred with Miller. “Sex differences between women and men—when it comes to brain structure and function and associated differences in personality and occupational preferences—are understood to be true, because the evidence for them (thousands of studies) is strong.”

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“This is not information that’s considered controversial or up for debate; if you tried to argue otherwise, or for purely social influences, you’d be laughed at,” Soh said.

Unfortunately, liberal-hacker-activists couldn’t handle the truth, and Quillette’s website took an arrow to the knee. Claire Lehmann, the founder of Quillette, told PJ Media that her website was especially susceptible to attack.

While there are many programs that can be used to protect against DDoS attacks (which are when hackers flood websites with traffic to crash it), Claire said she didn’t have any.

“I’m a small site and my technical skills are not at a high level, so I was unaware that I should have had these protections. Apparently they are fairly standard,” she told PJ Media.

Her site, which has received endorsements from well-known figures such as Charles Murray and Richard Dawkins, has a history of publishing science-based journalism, but this is the first time they’ve suffered a DDoS attack, Lehman says. (Disclosure: I’ve written a few articles on higher education for them. Small world.)

Lehmann, whose site has been dedicated to supporting alternative viewpoints since it launched in 2016, said her work is crucial to helping people see the truth behind things. “It’s important to hear alternative viewpoints so that we can work out what is the truth, and not merely consensus,” Lehmann said.

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“Over the past few years, both academic and media institutions have become highly conformist. And we know that groupthink leads to blindspots, which makes us unable to see what is actually true.”

Quillette recovered from the DDoS attack at approximately 6 a.m. EST Wednesday. It appears to be the only site successfully attacked for supporting Damore.

Follow the author of this article on Twitter: @Toni_Airaksinen.

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