Anonymous Under Civil War? 301
Stoobalou writes "Civil war appears to have broken out in the ranks of headless 'hacktivist' collective Anonymous, with claims that a rogue admin has seized control of two key sites used to coordinate the loose-knit group's online direct action. The news follows speculation that a breakaway group of Anonymous members was responsible for the hacking attacks on Sony's PlayStation Network and Online Entertainment Network, which saw personal information, including credit card details, stolen from as many as 100 million users' accounts."
Penny (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/19/ [penny-arcade.com]
Re:Penny (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Penny (Score:5, Insightful)
You know what's really sad? That the closest thing we HAVE to revolutionary spirit is Anonymous. People only see the revolution there because everyone else is too busy with the bread and circuses.
Civil war? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know if I'd call that civil war, more like dissension in the ranks, or mutiny or barratry, and a greater than average amount of anarchy.
Now if you wanted to see Anonymous in Civil War, you should hear the Boxxy [knowyourmeme.com] story. She managed to divide the indivisible.
Re:Civil war? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yea, Civil War is bullshit and the author should be ashamed of himself. It's just the usual Internet drama that happens in every single community at regular intervals.
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The pony thing was hilarious. Even funnier is I decided to watch the show and actually ended up liking it. I'm living in some weird freaky dimension where a little girls' cartoon show is cool...
I NEED TO GET BACK HOME DAMNIT!!
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I don't know if I'd call that civil war, more like dissension in the ranks, or mutiny or barratry, and a greater than average amount of anarchy.
I wouldn't even call it any of those things either. I'd just call it "Anonymous sites getting hacked."
That's the problem with anarchists (Score:2)
I don't know if I'd call that civil war, more like dissension in the ranks, or mutiny or barratry, and a greater than average amount of anarchy.
Now if you wanted to see Anonymous in Civil War, you should hear the Boxxy [knowyourmeme.com] story. She managed to divide the indivisible.
That's the problem with anarchists. They don't think they should have to play by the rules, are even opposed to playing by the rules. But let one of their own spread anarchy amongst their own group and then they tout a different ideology.
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Anonymous has no leadership or ranks so they can't have any of what you mention.
Stealing IP addresses? (Score:2)
Re:Stealing IP addresses? (Score:4, Informative)
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Also don't forget the joys of unsecured wireless. So much better than proxies.
There was never one anonymous (Score:2, Insightful)
Just like there is no true scotsman, there will always be someone up to good and use someone elses name as the blame, Just like how a buddist symbol was hijacked for Godwinite purposes, there will be a lot of anti sony users pretending to be anonymous.
Newsflash! (Score:3, Funny)
In response to accusations from Sony, Anonymous denies the allegations and blames everything on Anonymous... uh the other Anonymous.
Were there lulz involved in hacking Sony? (Score:3, Insightful)
Given how much it has cost them in terms of PR, and how many "gamefags" are pissed off about not getting their PSN fix, the answer is probably "yes".
Therefore some of the less "moralfag" anons may well have had a hand in it. A bit like the schism over scientology protests and all the other things. Anonymous has a limited attention span due to any activity becoming "totally gay" after a while.
I find the whole thing hilarious.
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That's not homophobia. Or at least it's not homophobia from me, I'm merely the observer/reporter here. Notice the quotation marks around those words - Oddly enough those are actually quotations from what I've seen at /b/ and other places.
Apart from the quotations around "yes", they were totally unnecessary....
I'm afraid that's the lingo used in these places though. I'm not sure it's meant to be offensive to people who are actually gay (see the South Park episode about the changing meaning of the word fags),
Not News (Score:5, Insightful)
How'd have thought... (Score:2)
Re:How'd have thought... (Score:5, Insightful)
Law is only loosely related to justice. Laws can be used to persecute people, and justice can be obtained by going outside of the law. The suffragettes also used civil disobedience, and also had internal warfare from women that believed a woman's place was in the kitchen and out of politics. They still managed to get the vote for women, and in retrospect we now see society as a better place for it.
Not that Anonymous are the suffragettes any more than they are a bunch of anarchist computer network destroyers.
Phillip.
Re:How'd have thought... (Score:5, Insightful)
Please. Comparing Anon to the suffragettes is just going way over the edge. Anon is nothing more or less than a street gang. They use intimidation and threats to exert power. Yeah it would be a real shame if something bad happened to your network. When you have people afraid to make statements critical of them they are no longer just protesters they are a threat to peoples freedoms. Like the freedom of speech.
They also become a boogie man for more restrictive anti hacking laws. And by hacking I mean things like modding devices that YOU OWN! And what everybody that confuses this vigilantly gang like activity with civil disobedience, forgets is that Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and Susan B Anthony where not anonymous. Now the KKK the rode out and lynched folks that did things that they didn't like, that terrorized people into silence they where anonymous. You are drawing the wrong parallel from history. Of course the Klan saw and still sees themselves as heroes just like Anonymous does.
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So they should be hunted down like they destructive and disruptive force that they are to make the world a better place?
Yea I want want a bunch of script kiddies running around spreading chaos and revenge...
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Who'd = who would.
How is this possible? (Score:3)
Seriously, how can a hacker get into a computer system run by someone who KNOWS that hackers are after them? Hacks of major sites can be explained by the fact that major organizations (like Sony, etc) have many individual members and tons of bureaucratic incompetence. But you read about the hackers that exchanged stolen credit cards on various forums hacking EACH OTHER's websites, deleting all userdata #@#!, and thus forcing all the members of the site onto a competing site.
So, one would expect that Anonymous would make sure their own servers were hack-proof. Couldn't you trivially make something hack proof by running the server in a VM, and using a hardware authentication system for accessing the server that runs the VMs? How are hackers going to get past a measure like that? The server that deals with the outside world is sandboxed, and they can't crack your password to the management system because it changes every minute.
Re:How is this possible? (Score:4, Informative)
No.
Well, VM software isn't free of exploits. Nor are the other hardware and software used in your proposed solution. Plus, the infrastructure required to use RSA-style dongles isn't cheap.
Making it hard to break into isn't the same as making it impossible to break into.
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Just because your authentication system is perfect, doesn't mean there are no bugs on the system to escalate privileges.
I'm definitely no expert, but it's naive to think that it's "trivial" to stop crackers getting into your system, especially if you're being targeted by a guy who knows his stuff and can discover his own exploits, rather than just trying to stop opportunist script kiddies who are relying on published exploits.
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(I suppose to escalate privileges, you first need a valid account, but I don't think it's too stupid to assume that if you can get code to run on the remote system, you will be able to gain root privileges somehow, unless by some fluke chance, or serious perseverance, there are absolutely no exploitable bugs on the remote system).
You also have to take into account that someone could simply bug your keyboard for username/password, steal your hardware token, etc. You'd have to be really committed to do that k
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The most trivial way to make your system hack proof is to never turn it on.
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How are hackers going to get past a measure like that?
The exact same way that they would if it were running on a regular PC? Your VM & hardware auth only helps protect against physical access (which is a losing game, physical access generally equals game over). It does nothing against remote exploits. To guard against those you want to run server processes as non-root users wherever possible and use something like SELinux or AppArmor (SELinux is better for serious security, even if it is a huge PITA), and of course the obvious stuff like disabling unneeded
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You can make anything hack-proof. Just take it offline - this is what Sony has done. If you're online, you're providing a service. That service needs provide access to resources to users. If the attackers are after the resources vital to providing the service, the service has to be secure and have strong autnenticaiton/authorization systems.
Basically, they could have the most secure servers in the world, 100% hack proof servers as long as they're not running PSN, and the servers can't do anything that i
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You are under the false assumption that hackers are smart. Most of them are just smart enough to find some good keywords and search them on Google or wherever and download the tool and do the hack. They often have very little idea on how they are hacking in, just that they are and they are a "Big Man" because of it. The danger from hackers is that they are so many of them, most of them failing until you got one who got in then they share the info with the rest then they all break in.
Re:How is this possible? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not like when crackers hang out on IRC they freely share every exploit available to them. They hoard the secrets, share when it's advantageous or trade when someone has something they want. There's always 'something' out there waiting to be hacked. Especially if you're using off the shelf forum, services, or linux distros.
Also, it's a lot easier to preach being secure than it is to actually be secure. Since for anonymous to function without everyone getting clinked up in FPYITA prison they're missing out on the whole 'authentication' part of authorization how secure can anything be? You authenticate that I'm the fake person I say I am? Great. That'll do you a lot of good.
So thats how. There's no such thing as hack-proof, and really, no such thing as anonymity. The FBI is probably monitoring the 'interesting' parts of anonymous and will kick down doors en mass in 6 months or a year after they've rooted out who's a teenager and who's actually a foreign agent. (Sorry teenagers, your doors will be kicked down too, tough lesson but you know not what you do..)
Consider this: If you were part of an foreign agency intent on disrupting American commerce (or committing crime) - wouldn't it be easier to just infiltrate anonymous and rile them up to go attack targets to spread cyberterrorism investigators thinner so that your agency could conduct their activity with that much less attention?
The non-car analogy would be calling in a bunch of fake 911 calls on the east side of town 30 minutes before you rob a bank on the west side.
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You could still hack the VM and gain control of it. Sure they can just revert it but if you got in the first time you can get in a second time with zero effort unless they rebuild it. In which case you're at the exact same place Sony is right now.
Why do you think VMs are hack proof?
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This. Only a small minority of any Anon operation are highly skilled, and they aren't always the ones doing the important stuff. A few are script kiddies and the majority are just average computer users who manage to follow the instructions.
Dissension always points to government invovlement (Score:2, Insightful)
Anytime a civil war breaks out in a Latin American country, one side is always funded and instigated by the U.S. government. Instigating dissension as a means of disrupting an organization is an age-old government technique that J. Edgar Hoover turned into an artform. Looks like our government boys have finally taken an interest in Anon, and the discrediting campaign is in full swing now.
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Do you really think that a hack to steal credit card numbers and personal info sounds like a typical move for Anon members?
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There are pro-government patriotic black hats like The Jester and ichsun ("skill of 1000 hackers") who have done things in the interest of their governments. But they could actually be government-backed while pretending to be independent.
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So... Japanese government is behind this? lol
I would have thought that the giant robots smashing the opposing server farms would have given that away...
Is it really civial war? (Score:5, Insightful)
It sounds to me that there are individuals who don't follow the same ideology as a majority of the group called Anonymous. But since the word Anonymous is the generic word for "The concept of many online community users generally considered to be a blanket term for members of certain Internet subcultures, a way to refer to the actions of people in an environment where their actual identities are not known" (from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(group)) [wikipedia.org], how can you discern on sect from another.
If you are Anonymous in the collective term, then where one goes, you all go. It is part of the concept of Anonymous. True that only a small sub-group has made the decision to perpetrate a company and steal information, but their actions reflect on all those who associate themselves with Anonymous. If Anonymous as a whole disagrees with what some members do, punishment will be within and will likely be pretty swift.
This to me is not Civil war, but punishment for breaking of the ranks.
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It doesn't sound like you understand Anonymous any better than the media does...
No, it isn't. You only follow the group if the group is doing something that you find amusing, interesting, or worthwhile. For example, when the Scientology protests happened awhile back, the protesters identified themselves as Anonymous and so the media called them that. But back online, forums occupied by "Anony
What? (Score:5, Informative)
Oh fucking please. Anonymous was a cohesive group that is now in "civil war"?
Anonymous is /b/ on 4chan and a bunch of other chans. There is no "leadership" - there is more or less "consensus" for varying values of "consensus" when it comes to a protest or a network attack. Anonymous is about as cohesive as a fist full of jelly.
>Ryan
Ryan is extremely angry because a small group of Anonymous rescued all the old data from Encyclopedia Dramatica by getting it from archive.org before Ryan could get it deleted and then put up their own mirror of the old ED wiki. That's what this is about. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Here's the rebuilt ED wiki, hosted in Switzerland:
http://encyclopediadramatica.ch/Main_Page [encyclopediadramatica.ch]
That Ryan is raging buttmad over what "Teh Internets" has done "to him" is delicious irony.
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BMO
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a fallacy in your thinking: that any group, bearing any label, can proceed without some sort of organization. Even a mob takes its cues form certain charismatic/ loud/ exemplary actors. Anonymous is not immune from this observation. But this doesn't stop dreamers and mythologizers from thinking about anonymous in dreamy ways that may be romantic and inspiring, but simply isn't real.
Anonymous has a structure, and that structure is simply its most active members, coordinating with each other. You can kill this rudimentary structure, and hurt anonymous. Yes, you can do that. 90% of what anonymous does is dome by 10% of its "members". If you were to profile who that 10% were, and take them all out at once, (not one-by-one, there is an organic retirement/ replacement continuum at work here) you would destroy anonymous.
It would of course reconstitute itself, but if you continued this "observe most active members, and then take them all out at once" tactic at a regular tempo, you would kill anonymous, dry the well, poison it, and prevent it from refilling.
Most assuredly, you can kill anonymous, all romantic dreamy notions of what anonymous is to the contrary.
"Anonymous is about as cohesive as a fist full of jelly."
Yes, that's an accurate metaphor. Please note that jelly actually has some cohesion.
You can kill Al Qaeda. You can kill the borg. You can kill anonymous. It takes effort and a longstanding commitment, and the most effective longterm methodology is to neutralize what motivates its organic membership. But for all the romanticizing dreamy anarchists out there: you just don't understand the intrinsic nature of human social organization. We self-organize, and this is a strength we reply on subconsciously, and a weakness to exploit.
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>Most assuredly, you can kill anonymous
No you can't. As soon as anyone does something mischievous online and claims to be anonymous, there it is. All this talk of anon being a group is balls - those who claim to lead or direct it are self-nominated, and are no more representative that those idiot thirteen-year-olds in V masks that keep cropping up on YouTube.
Posting as AC for obvious reasons.
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
if you were to analyze anonymous's larger domain of overlapping grievances, you would characterize what anonymous is about. and you would also describe the motivation that brings people together under the banner of anonymous. this list of grievances can accurately described as internet freedoms. so, for example, anonymous has nothing to do with islamic militant fundamentalism, which, like anonymous, is also largely organic in nature and self-organizing around a set of grievances, also mostly "anonymous"
now if you took away what motivated anonymous: passed a set of laws and enforced them in regards to internet freedoms to the satisfaction of most people identifying with anonymous, then anonymous would dissolve and cease to exist. neutralize the motivation, neutralize the movement. a movement exists to satisfy a grievance. once the grievance is satisfied, the movement becomes history
then, for the cachet, imagine that some islamic militants started calling themselves anonymous. would you agree that that was still anonymous? of course it isn't the same anonymous, islamic fundamentalism, ANY religious fundamentalism, is no friend of internet freedoms. but according to you, it would be the same anonymous, because according to you, anyone can claim the mantle
no, you have to be fighting for internet freedoms to claim the true mantle of anonymous
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>now if you took away what motivated anonymous: passed a set of laws and enforced them in regards to internet freedoms to the satisfaction of most people identifying with anonymous, then anonymous would dissolve and cease to exist. neutralize the motivation, neutralize the movement. a movement exists to satisfy a grievance. once the grievance is satisfied, the movement becomes history
But that doesn't happen in real life. You thought I was an idealistic dreamer. It appears that you are the dreamer, beca
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"But that doesn't happen in real life."
Yes, I agree it won't happen. It's a thought exercise for you to follow to see the flaw in your reasoning. I guess you can't follow it.
"You are analyzing Anonymous without ever experiencing it."
What, is anonymous like having sex or something? And how do you know who I am or what I do?
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
You are misunderstanding what I meant and believe that I am somehow a dreamy idealist.
I used to be one about 30 years ago. Not anymore. I read "The Disposessed" in high school and liked the "structured anarchy" in LeGuin's book, but it was clear even at that age that both planets in the book were gedankenexperiments and nothing more. I was also a Marx fan too. Then I grew up.
Anonymous is not hierarchical. There is no formal admissions process to Anonymous. You either join or you do not. You can lead a group or you can be a follower. You can join for 5 minutes and 10 minutes later, start shouting that "this is stupid and not fun, guys" or you can start your own "faction" with your own idea. Leaders and followers can be interchangeable in the space of 15 minutes. You can watch it happen by lurking in /b/ and in irc. This is how it actually works. It's not some sort of fantasy of how Anon operates.
The way Anon operates is unique to the age. The reason why we never saw this before is because communication used to be more difficult. Old Baader-Meinhoff or IRA shenanigans with cell structure and cloak-and-dagger message passing in the dead of night are passe'. Post something anonymously on a popular message board on a website and the world can read it without the message pointing directly at the originator. Entire discussions can be held with everyone being named "Anonymous" out in public. Enormous amounts of people can be organized in the space of an hour. That's what makes Anon effective (for various values of effective). 15 years ago, Anon would have been impossible to pull off, partly for technical reasons and partly for cultural reasons.
To kill Anonymous, you'd have to kill the *idea* of the flash-mob first, which is what Anonymous grew out of. You also have to kill anonymity on the net. The powers that be are working on the latter, but I think a technical "solution" anonymity is impossible without shutting down the internet and the phone system entirely. "The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" - John Gilmore. Not only is that true of the 'Net, it's also true of people in general. It's the "don't effin' tell me what to do" reaction, which is in full force in Syria and Libya right now as an example. People are willing to risk death for "FUCKYOUIWON'TDOWHATYOUTELLME" to quote RATM.
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BMO
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my point is simply that you can't talk about anonymous as a movement and not see that it is subject to the same observations of any movement in all of human history. because it is still composed of human beings
what the internet does to the functioning of anonymous is indeed new, but its a twist, not a fundamental recompositioing of human sociology. people make all sorts of rash, wrong commentary about anonymous's true nature and say all sorts of ridiculous things about its strengths, as if it were the borg
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
>what the internet does to the functioning of anonymous is indeed new, but its a twist, not a fundamental recompositioing of human sociology.
It really is fundamental. Anonymity does something to human behavior that nothing else does. When we are not anonymous, we are self-censoring. When we are truly anonymous, we aren't. It's the "Greater Internet Fuckwad" theory in a nutshell. People tend to say/do what's on their minds. We've never had such access to anonymity coupled with the free access to communication in all of human history. We were always part of the tribe, the town, the city, the county. And if you fucked up, you were ostracized at best or stoned at worst. This is new/different. People can make new associations on the Internet without any of the responsibility that goes with them. Fuck up? Just create another "identity." In the case of Anonymous, you don't even need to create another identity - you just ignore whatever you've said in the past as if it never happened, because that was a "different" Anonymous.
Sherry Turkel has had a lot to say about all of this over the past 20 years.
You are dismissing all of this with a hand-wave saying it doesn't matter.
This makes you look like you are a stuffed shirt - an aristocrat looking down his nose at the peasants, that your arguments in a vacuum (as opposed to Sherry Turkel's research) are somehow based on reality.
I suggest that you go read "Life on the Screen" by Sherry Turkel. It's a little bit dated, but the same basic themes still apply. Then I suggest that you take that concept that all organizations are hierarchical and chuck it in the trashcan of history.
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BMO
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Guess the kid has never heard of samizdat, or the Federalist, or any of the early Protestant pamphleteers, or, well, pretty much anything.
Except, of course, that as best we can tell they did tend to be informally hierarchical. In fact, they probably had to be for one very obvious reason: distributing written materials to a large number people is hard, especially when you're doing it anonymously. EIther they targetted upper members of the existing hierarchy, or they had some kind of informal but effectively hierarchal distribution system, or both - but in any case, some kind of hierarchy was inevitable. The internet doesn't work quite like tha
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Having people who host sites like encyclopedia dramatica and 4chan to switch their efforts to "Safe for Work" sites instead is probably the best way to go about this.
As I see it, the entire internet is collectively self organising itself into cable TV.
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That may be true of the physical realm, where one's appearances, mannerisms, speech, and other identifying pieces of information contribute to the person's leadership ability. And that person over time will then make a "name" that others will automatically follow. That's a normal social organization, where you can identify a person not necessarily by a word, but at least by the senses (sight, hearing, and smell usually).
Anonymous is a different type of entity altogether. It exists only behind a monitor. It
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
i'm not interested in killing anonymous
i'm interesting in dispelling the dreamy mythology of wanna be teenaged anarchists about the supposed untouchability of anonymous and anarchist activity in general
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I think movements in 1850 were composed of human beings. I think in 2011 they still are.
"will never understand anonymous, nor the internet, or routing or torrents."
http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/One_of_These_Things [wikia.com]
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if you have a better idea about how to minimize addict populations
Medicalization of addiction has lower costs and lower collateral damage compared to the ineffective, inefficient "war model" approach to the drug problem. Although it's early days yet on the Portuguese experiment, the results are at least not a disaster (which is what promoters of the war model predicted): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal [wikipedia.org] Increased cannabis use coupled with decreased heroin use and lower death rate from overdoses is not a bad start, to say nothing of the beneficial ef
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Well, if the only way you know how to tell what rights you have is to ask the government, then we really aren't talking about the same thing.
That would be an insightful comment if, in fact, the United Nations were a government, rather than an international debating forum where concepts like "rights" are discussed.
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I wish I could greentext you, but I'll just use the greater than sign to imply greentexting.
>he thinks that by going to /b/ for 10 minutes he can get a handle on what Anonymous is.
laughing.girls.mpeg.flv.zoo
Implying implications, etc.,
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BMO
what (Score:5, Insightful)
Rebellion: Resistance to or defiance of any authority, control, or tradition.
Mutiny: Revolt or rebellion against constituted authority.
How can you rebel when there's no leadership to rebel against?
This is, at best, a schism, and anon has survived schisms before- see Boxxy or the Scientology protests.
Total Annihilation of Anonymous? (Score:5, Funny)
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Questions: (Score:2)
How is this any different than usual?
This sort of emo food fight has been happening in internet groups for decades (literally. I've watched it on usenet in the 80s).
How can you have an insurrection in a self proclaimed anarchy? It's sort of a contradiction in terms.
Anonymous is rock and roll (Score:5, Interesting)
I grew up in a conservative Christian household so I got the full scare story on the ebils of rock and roll before I dipped my toe in the other side. From the Christian POV, rock is monolithic. There's the titular head represented by Satan who is coordinating everything in a top-down hierarchical fashion from AC/DC, Ozzy, and Alice Cooper on down to the Beatles and Pat Boone. Even the most banal, lite rock-friendly artist is promoting Satan's message of substance abuse, loose morals, easy sex and enjoyment of life. Drug messages are backmasked into the music. Sex permeates the videos. Album jackets and psychedelic posters all have their hidden symbols and meanings; it's fun to take a trip, put acid in your veins. (supernaut!)
Then you look at it from the other side and shit, it's just a business. Rebellion is popular so you package it, commoditize it and sell it. Satan has nothing to do with it unless that's just a personal nickname for soulless assholes in suits. You really think it takes a prince of darkness to sell people on the idea of having fun and getting laid? Puhleeeeeeeeaze. Some rocker can declare he's doing something in the name of rock and roll, critics can argue about what rock is, how it should be, but they're all just tossing ideas into the collective memetic cess pool. There's no ecumenical councils trying to establish rock orthodoxy, no pope of rock to excommunicate you if you aren't doing it right.
It's the same thing with Anonymous. There's a vague, poorly expressed ideal with everyone supporting their own irreconcilable interpretation of it. You can't really have a civil war amongst people who were never unified to begin with. That's making the fundamental mistake of assuming Anonymous is top-down, hierarchical, and organized. Organized anarchy? That's as oxymoronic as Christian rock.
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Awesome. Nice metaphor, shame I have no mod points.
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Same someone thinks I was trolling. Curious to see who felt they were insulted by the comparison, Anonymous, Christians, or rock and rollers. :)
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With a knick-knack, paddy whack,
Give a dog a bone,
This old man came rolling home.
A False Flag Operation (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:A False Flag Operation (Score:4, Insightful)
HB Gary is Anonymous. Sony is Anonymous. The RIAA and MPAA are Anonymous. You see, the funny thing about a non-organizational organization like Anonymous is that anyone can claim to be a member.
For those more interested (Score:2, Flamebait)
So they do have leadership (Score:2)
Either Anonymous has no leadership or this entire article is false.
I can't tell... (Score:2)
Does this soil the name of Anonymous or help it?
Does it matter either way?
No.
Kind of sounds like a good way to try to clear your name, blame some kind of rogue inside group... take 'swift action' on them (which can't be verified of course), then assure everyone that Anonymous is back to its moral, just ways.
the lulz just keep on coming
Re:It was only a matter of time (Score:5, Informative)
well.
if ANYONE who uses a pseudo-name online has a disagreement with anyone who has a pseudo-name online, then anonymous are fighting.
stop calling any specific group anonymous. everyone is anonymous and anonymous is everyone.
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well.
if ANYONE who uses a pseudo-name online has a disagreement with anyone who has a pseudo-name online, then anonymous are fighting.
stop calling any specific group anonymous. everyone is anonymous and anonymous is everyone.
Perhaps they should change their name to Spartacus?
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Don't bother trying that. Resistance is futile.
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before Anonymous started turning on itself. Maybe they've run out of external targets...
Yep. Anarchy's all fun and games until some anarchists own personal liberty or property is threatened. Then the "That's not fair..." whining starts. Who didn't see this coming?
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Absolute Freedom is great until someone uses their Absolute freedom to hurt you. When you join an organization there is a false idea that everyone has exactly the same goals in mind or all want the same thing with the same priorities. Criminal Organizations no matter what their original intent is, attracts a lot of the less then honorable people. And shortly there is problems.
Re:It was only a matter of time (Score:4, Insightful)
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Shouldn't you have posted this as AC? Now /. knows who you are.
Re:It was only a matter of time (Score:4, Insightful)
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Or hating all of Sony for the SonyBMG rootkit fiasco, SCEx getting hacked, etc. SonyBMG (music label), SCEx (SCEA, SCEJ and whatever the European one is, SCEE?) (game console), SOE (software), and whatever the name of the Sony hardware division is. They may all be called Sony, but they are all different divisions that dont have any say/control/knowledge what the others do. SonyBMG used to be pissed about the hardware division creating mp3 players around 2000, as they saw anything that played mp3's as a pira
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And so far every one of them has f*cked up and screwed people over at every chance they've had.
Sony blew it multiple times.
Anon... well they're not trying to sell me anything or sue me so I don't care.
Re:It was only a matter of time (Score:5, Insightful)
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When somebody speaks, you don't get to tell them what they meant.
This is incorrect, because you did not mean what you wrote right there.
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Since when did my wife start posting to /. ?
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If there is no way to define anonymous then it is perfectly logical to blame anything done under the tag to anyone who uses the tag. By anonymous' own words anyone who uses the anonymous tag is anonymous. It's impossible for anonymous to deny anything attributed to anonymous.
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All Anonymous means is one who dosn't give their identity [...]
No, that's what anonymous means. When you capitalize that first letter it's no longer a concept; it's a proper name representing a unique entity.
Re:It was only a matter of time (Score:5, Insightful)
Sony calling anon evil for the actions of this group is more or less no different then calling all Christians evil for the actions of Westboro baptist church, anyone can be a christian, and even take some portions of the christian beliefs out of context, yet you don't see the media or anyone hounding Christians as a whole for the actions of one group that claims to be Christians.
Or for that matter, calling all Muslims evil for the actions of Al Qaida (maybe a couple thousand people out of a population of well over 1 billion, or about 0.0002% of Muslims). But it sure happens far more than you might think.
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All information is incomplete. We only think terrorist groups are terrorists because our media spins it that way.
Q: What do you call people who use terror tactics for political ends?
A: Freedom fighters, if they' achieve those ends, terrorists if they don't.
Re:uhhh... (Score:5, Funny)
A hacker collective? That's like spiders suddenly becoming social animals.
well to be fair, they did invent the web :)... they are social, just among themselves ... no facebook though
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well to be fair, they did invent the web :)... they are social, just among themselves ... no facebook though
Well, yeah. You need friends to properly use facebook.
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Spides can be social (Score:2)
That's like spiders suddenly becoming social animals.
Spiders can be social. See for example http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14094404 [npr.org] about groups of spiders working together to build massive webs.See also http://www.pnas.org/content/105/31/10843.full [pnas.org] for a take on some of the relevant science.
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