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Anonymous Under Civil War?
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."
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/19/
This happens literally all the time. Its not even remotely news. Some part of "Anonymous" is always attacking some other part. Someone gets their feelings hurt and takes down a website or two. They get their name dropped and they fall off the radar. It isn't "civil war"; it's actually just the way Anonymous works.
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.
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.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it