Dan Savage's advice to Silvio Berlusconi.

This is from back in January but I never got around to posting it:

I have a problem. I like to think of myself as a pretty powerful guy: Let's just say that, in my current gig, I have at my disposal the seventh largest GDP in the world. And it wasn't just handed to me: I worked my ass off for it. Built my own media company from the ground up, and charmed and networked and elbowed my way to the top of my field. Along the way, I've been known to indulge occasionally -- OK, often -- in my fondness for extracurricular women, the younger the better. (Still in high school? Don't mind if I do.)

So here's my question: Why can't I get away with it anymore?

—Confused Italian Approaching Obsolescence

Reply:

Ah, but I haven't answered your question: Why can't you get away with it anymore? Because, CIAO, in some ways luck is like a first wife (it dries up), and in some ways luck is like a first husband (it runs out).

Your luck, like your wife, stuck around for a long time, CIAO, and things might have stayed as they were, if you hadn't come to see your good fortune as the natural state of things. Once a man does that, CIAO, he can begin to take his luck for granted and to presume upon it. And we all know what happens to men who get overconfident: They get sloppy, they get caught, they get indicted, and sometimes they wind up getting sent places where there are no ladies.

The most recent DDoS attacks against LiveJournal have gotten me thinking...

...about some differences between Russia and China.

In Russia, if they don't like what's being said on a site, they launch a DDoS attack.

In China, if they don't like what's being said on a site, they simply block it using the Great Firewall of China (防火长城). LiveJournal, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ are all blocked by the Great Firewall, as of the current time. (You can use http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/, a Dutch internet freedom initiative, to see if any given site is reachable from within the Great Firewall. For now.)

This difference says quite a bit about the two societies.

It's notable that when LiveJournal came under attack, the response of Russian bloggers was to move to sites China already blocks.

Olga Khrustaleva, in The Moscow News:

Meanwhile, many bloggers are developing new ways to express and share their views. Some, following Kaspersky’s example, are starting their own websites, while others are creating Facebook and Google+ accounts.

Victor Davidoff, in the Moscow Times:

These attacks resemble military training maneuvers to test various methods of jamming LiveJournal so that it can be quickly and effectively disabled — without shutting down the country’s entire Internet like Egypt did — during an emergency. This plan is theoretically more effective than pulling the plug on the Internet, but bloggers note that if these are rehearsals, they are undermining the plan itself. Now that bloggers’ main communications resource has been brought down again, most of the best-known bloggers have already created mirrors of their blogs on other social networks.