And other than their own claim, what makes them members of Anonymous?

That is total bullshit.

People pay for everything. Corporations pay nothing whatsoever. I'm not talking about dodging taxes, I'm talking about the simple fact that any tax you leverage on them will simply be added to the price of whatever they're selling, so whatever money a corporation pays in taxes was first taken from its customers.

It's an absolutely horrible precedent. It is a step back more than 2,000 years. The closest thing in real history was the very first firefighters in ancient Rome - a private enterprise that made its owner one of the richest men in Rome through a simple principle: Whenever there was a fire, he'd show up with his firefighters (slaves, btw.) and offer the owner of the house to buy it on the spot and make him a tenant in his (formerly) own house. The price he offered was ridiculously low. If the owner sold, they'd put out the fire. If not, he'd let it burn to the ground.

So, will this be a personal/private cop? No, that would be too obvious. They'll all make sure it looks all clean, because it's only the first step.

But it does mean that if ever Facebook runs afoul of the law, there'll be one less cop willing to raid them...

So then name two people who are in Anonymous. Presumably non-Human "things" cannot be in it.

How do you easily identify Anonymous?

That argument only holds true if passwords were actually randomly generated. Humans are incapable of intentionally generating entropy. If forced to add a capital letter to a password, users will most likely place a single capital at the beginning or end. Numbers and special characters will replace similar looking letters. Passwords will still be based off dictionary words. The effective increase in entropy produced by such requirements is many orders of magnitude less than what the increased keyspace would otherwise suggest. The minor increase in the difficulty to brute force the passwords is more than offset by the significant increase in the difficulty to remember, and more importantly, type, those passwords. You're much better off just requiring a few more characters.

There is no "they", as there is no organized entity or group for "they" to refer to. There are only individuals who happen to carry the moniker for a specific event.

Oh really? How's that been working out for you so far? How many - even of that self-selected few - actually compile their mobile OS from hand-verified source, pray tell?

Actually, while its had for people to grasp a market of a billion people, its even more staggeringly harder to grasp the idea of a non-market of 3.5 billion people.

Keep in mind that the median worldwide household income is under $10K/yr...

"Doing things right" is an incredibly nebulous statement that nearly no judge should be in a position to determine. Hell, even plenty of so-called experts don't know the right way to do things. If the security industry at large actually knew what they were doing, websites wouldn't be instituting such asinine password rules, and my own employer wouldn't have recently cited "industry standard practice" as a reason for requiring I include special characters in my domain password.

If this really can work for ~3.5 billion people who currently don't have a decent mobile OS (a claim about which I remain skeptical), I guarantee you that at least 3.49 billion of them won't give a damn whether its FOSS or not. Of the remainder, most surely won't care whether its GPL, BSD, or PirateBay licensed.

You say "they" as if they are some kind of coherent organization with enrollment.

Huh? The authors of the creation story surely knew how long a day is.

You could not know before the sun was created unless you were God and had a good idea what you were going to implement, but afterwards, not a problem to figure out how long a day was.

 

Obviously, you've never used one of them. They are "the same thing" in the same sense that a Lada and a Veyron are both cars.

Tools matter. They don't replace skill, but if you want to get really great results, you need both skill and the right tools.