n.
A scheme where a fine or fee is paid using a massive number of small electronic payments, particularly when each payment generates a transaction cost greater than the payment itself.
Example Citations:
After the Pirate Bay founders were fined $3.5 million, they swore they wouldn't cough up a single cent. Instead, they've come up with a DDo$ plan of attack that'll cost the IFPI instead of themselves.
—Andi Wang, "Pirate Bay Founders Plan a DDo$ Attack on the IFPI," Gizmodo, May 11, 2009
P2P-ers furious over the Pirate Bay case are being asked to get back at lawyers for the entertainment industry via the counter-intuitive route of ostensibly giving them money.
By sending very small amounts of money of 1 SEK ($0.13) to Danowsky & Partners, who brought the prosecution, through the Swedish web-based payment service internet-avgift, the ruse could make lawyers lose out after fees for the transaction are taken into account. The cunning so-called Distributed Denial of Dollars attack (DDo$) is apparently the brainchild of Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm.
—John Leyden, "Pirate-pursuing lawyers get DDo$ money transfer slap," The Register, May 12, 2009
Earliest Citation:
Everyone sends a small amount of money in an electronic transfer to the law firm that represented the music industry. Suggested amount is 1 SEK (equivalent to 0.13 USD. Apparently the law firm's bank account is only allowed 1000 electronic transactions before it starts to cost them, the account holder money.
The charge per transfer at this point is, wait for it... 2 SEK. Thus after the first 1000 SEK, if people send just 1 SEK it will cost the law firm more than the money they receive to process.
DDo$ is a clever abbreviation for the phrase distributed denial of dollars, which is in turn a play on the black-hat hacking phrase distributed denial of service, or DDoS (hence the cleverness).
