If these black-hats win, they'll not be giving shit to the script-kiddies. Period.

Lunacy is what we have already[1]. Reality is a bit more relative.

1 - Doing the same thing again and again, expecting different results. Buying the latest firewall or virus software has never, and will never be a guarantee of security.

If that's their motivation, then they will fail.

History proves that bad ideas always poison themselves before too long. It's just simple evolution/ or rather emergence.

Or maybe the current situation is just a local maxima, which we are trapped in?

Every company out there has at least one person who re-uses passwords between systems. Even if it's "only" the admin or a temp - there only needs to be one weak link in the chain.

Security problems are an annoyance foremost, and rarely a disaster. 50% of the windows clients reading this thread could be part of some botnet and they'll never know.

Society as a whole needs to treat security with more respect in order to improve it. Even if that means hiring lots of black-hats on expensive contracts who maintain their own guild-ethos and ungooglable secrets.

Who else is going to tame the corporate beast if not the people themselves? Government? It doesn't seem wise to institutionalise and sanction the use of such dangerous tools.

And isn't that, in a way, the point of this?

Possibly - anonymous itself could just be three guys in a basement. Then again, it could have started off in a single basement but grew because of the insinuation that it was a large distributed, anonymous organisation.

Both/and?

If the internet automatically detects censorship as damage and routes around it, we're going to be seeing larger and more intricate self-defence mechanisms as it moves from a simple chaotic knowledge-base towards sentience.

Doesn't matter if you don't believe it, the internet will just route around you.

That's the stated goal. But all ideologies have at least one secondary goal which is of greater importance to the members - e.g. religions may preach love and peace, but will do anything (including contradicting the primary message) to protect the secondary goal of sustaining the religion.

Example - if they just manage to get all security companies out of business, then what's to stop new security companies popping up in the future once their movement starts to decay and their numbers drop? Nothing. It would be stupid to only have that as the single goal because it's short-sighted.

So there is a secondary goal at work here, just curious what it actually is.

I mean, if they got their way, completely. What would happen? Anyone motivated enough could find an exploit of their own and hack anyone else. But presumably this would eradicate the script-kiddie element as it would require an element of skill.

Is this just another way of the internet evolving itself? If you're an asshole or are part of a company which fucks someones shit up for profit, then in that potential future you'd be vulnerable to backlash. This isn't the chaos ensuing from giving automatic weapons to the mob, as the weapons would only be in the hands of those parts of the mob who give enough of a shit to actively study things which are beneficial to the internet as an organism; thereby sustaining a symbiotic relationship.

Or are they just a bunch of bored script-kiddies? Either way it's interesting.

Ya, and when lampposts where first invented, the crazies took turns seeing who could sit atop them the longest.

Remember - Youtube didn't even exist for the 2004 US Presidential election. We have a long way to go, but probably within our lifetimes, such behaviour will become the exception rather than the norm.

Certainly within those individuals lifetimes prospective employers will commonly and frequently use the simple tools required to determine a candidates "internet retard" score, automagically picking up acts of wanton, traceable, internet vandalism such as this.

The joke is on the crazies, not with...

I saw the Google IO video on Wave and was blown away. Not least because I've been pondering some applications of the "making the world a better place" variety which require such an infrastructure, and the lack of such is a major obstacle to say the least. I'd bet my place in the signup queue that I'm not the only one who feels like their lofty goals are suddenly within reach.

One of their aims is to be as revolutionary as email. When you think of it - blogging, twittering, commenting etc, all follow the email model of a static-content push.

I'm that confident they've got it right that I'm not really wasting much energy in advocating it. Partly for my own selfish reasons - when companies start wanting to make their experience "wave-aware", I predict it'll be like the dot-com boom for a while again. Hopefully with less talk of synergy and pondering whose 'thinking' is in or out of which conceptual boxes. But you can't have everything I guess.

Ever read the history of Facebook? Zuckerberg sounds like a total dick. I hope he tries to fight Wave, I for one, won't mourn the demise of Facebook.

As if.. my latest project is gonna both make the world a better place and get me laid.

Just you wait and see!

..whether because you think your project will make the world a better place or just cause you think your coding style is gonna get you laid.

Motivate yourself - doesn't matter how or what, as long as it's something you care enough about to put ahead of other stuff you obviously find more fun. Like asking questions on Slashdot.

Internet Technology is also a lot younger than Library Technology. I'm sure some sceptics saw Alexandria burn and patted their own backs. But where would we be if we'd just given up on that whole library idea back then?

I mean, I get the point that the internet of today and yesterday needs work to compete with the benefits libraries still provide. But to ignore the potential of tomorrow is to stand flat in the path of progress.

True, but it doesn't seem like a scalable solution for financing web-content in general - significantly increasing the percentage of "professional bloggers" who can actually earn a living by doing so.

TV as we know it, and print media are dinosaurs in the sense that they are going extinct, and nothing can save them. It's a shotgun approach/one-to-many relationship which categorised the vast majority of 20th century communication.

Now we live in a universe where many-to-many communication is the norm, and rapidly expanding our ability to store, process and filter information. With many-to-many, a soap company can tell exactly how many house-spouses in Delaware are interested in their product, rather than printing an ad in a paper, or playing an ad on local TV and just guessing as to the impact.

But we have vested interests at work. Does the New York times reduce its print rates, and demand more for its web rates? No. Instead they put up a wall and make it harder to see their online ads. Can I charge higher advertising rates than NYT? Not likely more than a relatively static percentage. And so we are.

To be clear, since many AC's seem to be struggling on this point - tv/print - overvaluated. Online ads - undervalued.

That and lack of a decent micropayment solution.

Oh come on. Seriously - I thought we'd all agreed years ago that micropayments were doomed to failure?

The lack of a decent micropayment is the lack of micropayments as a decent solution.

..web advertising rates have risen to the point where they accurately reflect the value they can provide clients rather than being bogged down by the dinosaur media forms of print and tv commanding increasingly outdated and thus artificially inflated prices.

Until we wake up to the future, we'll still be uselessly dreaming of the past.