Slashdot Mirror
AC = Domestic Terrorists?
Miang writes "A video from a recent FOX 11 (Los Angeles) newscast has surfaced on YouTube. In the segment, reporter Phil Shuman investigates so-called "Hacker Gangs" comprised entirely of anonymous users. The segment, which focuses mainly on users at 4chan, 7chan, and 420chan, seems to confuse /b/ raids and motivational poster templates with a genuine threat to the American public. For added FUD, the FOX team inserted an unrelated video of a van blowing up — twice! Presumably, one is intended to equate anonymous posting with domestic terror. The story and video can be found on the local FOX website, so it does not appear to be simply a clever parody." Cringe as you watch this video explain terms like 'LULZ' and show inspirational poster parodies as evidence of the evils of this terrifying "Group".
It is the same solution that will always work: Make a law forbidding anonymous posts. Make anonymous posting on the internets a felony and not an offense, so that only criminals will be posting anonymously.
Death to all those fanatics!!!! And yes, i will post anonymously.
I actually have some sympathy for the reporters involved in this, because they have no clue what they're getting themselves in to.
Anonymous is what happens when you give people the ability to act without reprecussions, a good portion of the world turns into total a**holes. And they will surely retaliate, for two reasons. The first being the justification that "oh, we're called domestic terrorists, we better at least do something worth that name now".
The second being the justification "Umm, no. You totally misunderstand what we do here. We're just normal internet stupidity. want a sample? How about everyone in your company? We can do a mass raid if you want"
The second already is happening in droves, if you'll notice their forums.
Now, that said, the people i DON'T feel pity for are the "victims".
The male victim, who fails at trying to be anonymous, now has his name, and his story, all over all of the *chans. All he's doing is trying to get revenge because anonymous wouldn't raid his stupid girlfriend and that they told him he was being a moron. He spends most of his time actively trying to spread dirt on the *chans, including warning potential raid targets, making up lies about what raids actually are.
As for the female victim, her story is similarly stupid, but as I do not know the entire thing with all facts for certain, i will refrain from final judgement and spreading rumors.
But for most raid "victims" in general, their main flaw was that they posted too much personal information online, and made a point of either harassing others, who happened to be anonymous, or whining to anonymous for favors.
I am not anonymous, but it pays to know about them.
You never realize how much manually made unmanaged "linked" lists suck, till you have src.link.link.link.link...
Two completely different people. Anonymous Coward is a normal Slashdot user who merely has perpetually bad karma. Anonymous is, as the video states, an "Internet hate machine". He is the very personification of the deepest, darkest desires of the Internet. Which, of course, means he spends half of his time masturbating to strange pornography, the other half attacking easily-angered idiots for his personal amusement, and the other other half debating Bush, pedophilia, and quantum mechanics.
Seriously, /b/ is so mainstream now, it beggars belief. Here is a Slashdot article that mentions it in passing without so much as stopping to explain the term. This was always going to happen. A group of people focused around memes, with a subset of them bent on spreading these memes to other sites? There is no more perfect recipe for notoriety than that. Rules 1 and 2 have completely failed, just as miserably as they would fail in a real-life fight club (where did those new members come from anyway?).
It's a shame really. For a short while, /b/ was a great little internet phenomenon. Anonymity, with all its baggage, and somehow no lawsuits. Now, though, the old guard is quickly moving on. Anybody who's frequented the site can attest to this.
As for the FOX clip... pure garbage. Most /b/tards call images "pictures", and directories "folders", and get confused between wallpaper images and desktop screenshots. The /i/nvasion people are a little closer to "hacker gangs", but even then, the "hacking" only ever amounts to SYN flooding and MySpace phishing.
Despite my pessimistic tone, I predict that "Anonymous" will continue to grow. As more and more attention is given to these "secret websites", more and more people are clamoring to become "hackers on steroids". This new Anonymous will be larger, with more brute force at his call, but at the same time stupider, and less apt to create entertaining content. And paradoxically, he'll be less anonymous than before. I see threads where a bunch of high-schoolers recognize each other based on posted photos and local memes. They greet each other by name and socialize. On /b/.
They say that raiding /b/ is liking pissing in an ocean of piss. But what if the people doing the raiding aren't pissing? What if they think this is a kickass beach where they can hang out and go for a swim with their friends and not worry about taking a piss while they do? It's not cancer, it's a full-on mutation.