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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/
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 story. She managed to divide the indivisible.
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.
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.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
In response to accusations from Sony, Anonymous denies the allegations and blames everything on Anonymous... uh the other Anonymous.
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.
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.
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.
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.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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)), 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.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
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
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
You have no idea how big anon is. One rogue hacker and a couple of stolen domains is par for the course.
This crap happens ALL THE TIME. Anonymous "turned" on itself years ago. Infighting keeps us strong, routes out the cancer, and confuses the hell out of outside enemies and newbs like you.
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
That Ryan is raging buttmad over what "Teh Internets" has done "to him" is delicious irony.
--
BMO
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.
Sent from my CR-48
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.
Property for sale in Nice, France
What began as a conflict over the transfer of Anonymous from DDoS to identity theft has escalated into a war which has decimated a million scriptkiddies. The Hacktivists and the Rogues have all but exhausted the resources of 4chan in their struggle for domination. Both sides now moronic beyond compare, the remnants of their fad continues to harass Sony, their idiocy fueled by over four thousand years of inbreeding. This is a fight until their mothers tell them to get off the computer. For each side, the only acceptable outcome in the complete elimination of the ROFLs.
The real fact is there isn't a way to define anonymous, and blaming all of anonymous for the actions of one group is ridiculous. 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. All Anonymous means is one who dosn't give their identity, and by that logic most bankrobbers, murderers, serial killers have been anonymous since long before the internet was ever born.
Anon's sites arn't actually illegal to view, so no need for a proxy unless you're bragging about your 1337 ski115. When it comes to the DoS, Anonymous relies on hideing in numbers. When you've got 10,000 script kiddies attacking, plus a couple of skilled attackers with botnets, then it's just not practical to track down and charge even a small fraction of those IP addresses. Expensive, time-consuming, and by the time it's gone through the legal system Anonymous will be on to a new target anyway.
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.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Do you really think that a hack to steal credit card numbers and personal info sounds like a typical move for Anon members?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
This "rogue" group stinks of HB Gary.
Wrong, you are redefining terms. When somebody speaks, you don't get to tell them what they meant. Are you denying any such movement called Anonymous? Because it would seem to me that there is such a movement and they do real things. When people identify them (which is easy because they leave pretty significant clues to what cultural slice of the internet they come from) as Anonymous you can't say "anonymous is just everybody who doesn't give their name", because that's not what the speaker meant. Everybody outside the group gets this. You can refer to a group of people as neo-nazis and generalize them, even though distinct groups may go about things different ways and nobody owns the trademark on the name. Anonymous is no different, they just like to feel different. You're not clever people.
If I can just reach out with my words and touch a butthole, just one, it will all be worth it.
Don't bother trying that. Resistance is futile.
I think that a hack to steal credit card numbers and personal info sounds like a typical move for professional credit card number and personal info thieves. Inciting a horde of witless script kiddies to declare that they are SPARTACUS FOR THE LULZ is just a smart twist.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.
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.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
I find being offended by me offensive.
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.
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
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.
I am officially gone from
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), though it may well be. It's probably meant to be offensive to as many people as possible.
The suffix "-fag" is used extensively for anyone you don't like. And sometimes people you do like, or even yourself.
Is it to be encouraged? Probably not. What are you going to do to stop it though?
You missed one big, key element: Sony has a central leadership structure. Christianity does not. Various sects may, but not Christianity as a whole. Enough shit has gone on at Sony that you can tell it's rotten to the top. A lot of these things wouldn't have happened without upper management knowing about it.
Anonymous isn't an organization, it's a disorganization. Mst of the time it idles in pure chaos, every once in a while a large majority act in the same direction at the same time and something happens. There are no membership requirements or registries (except the sex offender registry). Anyone has just as much right to act in the name of anonymous as anyone else.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
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.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it