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Anonymous Denies Targeting Westboro Baptist Church
lenwood writes "Last week we discussed news that the hacking group Anonymous was staging an attack against Fred Phelps' Westboro Baptist Church. It turns out that this was a publicity stunt staged by WBC themselves. Anonymous issued a press release disassociating themselves from this."
I was a bit perplexed when I heard they were bothering with the WBC, and figured it was somebody's publicity stunt. There are much better targets in the world than a bunch of loons and their opportunist leader...
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How can a group that by it's very nature has no central control or even consistent make-up release such a statement. How does one member or group of members of Anonymous know whether or not any other part of Anonymous is/was doing something?
... then anyone could do something on behalf of Anonymous, and you couldn't deny it was done by them.
Or maybe that's just what they want you to think ...
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
it was anonymous from an anonymous group did an attack anonymously... just not the same anonymous guy from the same anonymous group doing an anonymous attack...
Anonymous isn't a defined group of people. That's kinda the point. It's very possible that some of them, or even a single person, has severe enough of a problem with the WBC to try to attempt such a stunt. I suspect however that the vast majority have the good sense not to get involved with something so senseless.
Similarly, Anonymous can't "issue a statement" that represents the entire group. This AnonNews website, whoever they are, have no more say in the doings and actions of Anonymous than any other member of the group. Can the SlashDot staff make claims on behalf of every nerd who happens to visit the site for technology-related news, especially on things in which the SlashDot community is deeply divided? Of course not. Same thing here.
This whole thing is freaking ridiculous. You've got two groups of trolls trying to figure out who's attempting to troll whom, and if said trolling is a threat to their own trolling efforts. Why exactly this is considered news is beyond me.
Every time an article comes on here about Anon everybody bashes the news organizations for saying Anonymous has a hierarchy with 'senior' members, leaders, and so forth.
So why are you so quick to accept this? How can this press release saying 'Its not really us' carry any more weight then one saying "It's us".
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But since anyone can act as Anonymous then the WBC claim was legit. I can put up a server, make myself a part of Anonymous, attempt to hack my server, leave Anonymous, then claim Anonymous tried to hack my server.
In fact, how do we know who issued the Anonymous press release? On the anonnews website it says, "Anyone can post to the site, and moderators will approve relevant posts. No censorship takes place!"
Maybe Anonymous should look into LifeLock...
I heard they have scientific proof that god exists. it's on their website. Somewhere. I'm sure. If we all look for it for about 5 or 10 minutes I'm sure we'll find it.
Privacy is terrorism.
Apparently some muckity-muck standards writers decided that "em" was a better tag for italics than "i", because people use italics when they want to "emphasize" something. Slashdot's latest update incorporated this change. Sorry all for the off-topic post.
"ffs...why don't italics tags work anymore?!"
Did they ever work? In the 5-6 years I have been coming to /. it hasn't worked for me once. I gave up long ago and just use caps for emphasis. That doesn't work for properly displaying titles, latin, etc., though.
What REALLY bothers me is that now, since the format change, every few posts into a discussion something breaks and every subsequent post is double-spaced and the moderation tag is missing. Moderation tags are also missing from posts in the comments section of my account page (my posts, as well as all others).
The double-spacing really sucks...it turns every post into a wall of text and effectively doubles the scroll length of every discussion. If it was consistent, I might get used to it, but it seems completely random and sticks out as something "broken" each time I encounter it.
No seriously bro, we're not going after them.
The people at Westover are just loudmouth jerks. It's the seriously fringe nutcases at Landover Baptist who worry me.
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That describes their signs, what they're saying, and pretty much what they're all about, so I think anonymous have to dig -really- deep to find something offensive to them. Like as in "that which offends anonymous won't phase WBC."
Honestly I think faxing them bible quotes would annoy them more. That whole "Love thy neighbor" thing is either crossed out in their bibles, or is pretty narrowly defined. "Do unto others etc" must annoy the shit out of them.
If you think they're not genius viral marketers, you haven't been paying attention to how you heard of them or why you know what they claim to stand for or why TV covers them when they're standing out there with signs. They're not just dumb bigots, they're a sociopathic family of lawyers, who go out and make themselves as publicly offensive as they can, so that people will attack them and towns will ban them and they can make money by sueing them. They're also happy to get donations from actual knuckle-draggers and from right-wing politicians who profit from the Culture Wars, but it's really about the lawsuits and the publicity.
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Please use the correct terminology when referring to WBC. They are fucktards, not retards.
It's not like AnonNews announced they traced the IP address of the poster back to the WBC. Sure. It could have been them. It could also have been just about anyone who has a beef with the WBC. Many people are chomping at the bit to take them down and have tried to recruit 'Anonymous' to do this. But they haven't been successful in the past. For all we know it was the folks from HBGary trying to pick a fight between the two groups to provide ground cover. But again, that is still nothing more than idle speculation.
I don't think Anons will ever do anything against the WBC just because they have no power. WBC may be annoying assholes. But at the end of the day that is all they are. They can pretty much only offend people who allow themselves to be offended.
Anonymous claims they're not an organization. They're just a bunch of random people that get together to do something. Each time they get together, they're a different group of people. Anyone and Everyone is Anonymous because all you need is two or more people to get together and say you're doing something as Anonymous.
Anonymous may also be a community, and since there is no membership requirement, anyone that shows up is, by default, part of the community. Part of the community can claim that other part isn't really part of their part, but then the other part can say the same about the other part.
Either Anonymous *IS* an organized group, with a command and control structure, and someone pulling the strings. Or it's not. You can't have it both ways.
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"ffs...why don't italics tags work anymore?!"
because God hates tags