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Anonymous Creates Its Own Social Network
An anonymous reader writes "Google has reportedly banned a handful of Anonymous members from Google+ (it's not exactly clear how many accounts were shut down). The hacktivist group likened Google's actions to the stories of activists being banned from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, as well as governments blocking various websites using Internet censorship tools. As a result, Anonymous has decided to create its own social network: Anonplus."
Talk about an oxymoron.
Sounds just like a sting operation to me. If you are anonymous please go over there to hand over your IP address and a chat log of all your activities. Thank you, The Management
At the time of writing, the forum already had over 100 registered members.
... and of the 100, 89 of them were CIA, 9 FBI, and 2 Interpol.
No, not really.
A terrorist is someone who attempts to force some form of change in public opinion/behavior by means of random violence.
Many terrorists consider themselves "freedom fighters", but they really aren't. If you're fighting for "freedom" then you restrict yourself to legitimate military targets, and you don't kidnap and ransom people.
Terrorists use the populace as human shields, deliberately hide their weapons and identities, deliberately target civilians, and are just generally subhuman scum.
A terrorist is a freedom fighter who isn't on your side.
Imagine some country invaded/occupied the USA, would the rednecks with AR15s be called "terrorists" by the American people? I think not.
I don't think they'd be using the euphemism "Insurgent", either.
No sig today...
Once you strip back the national mythology, many supposedly admirable revolutions in history had the underdogs going after targets with only a tangential connection to the military. Much recent scholarship on the American Revolution, for example, has focused on how the revolutionaries terrorized those they considered Loyalists. Homes were burned down and innocent people were hanged simply for being insufficiently enthusiastic about independence from Britain.
Perhaps there is a line between "terrorist" and "freedom fighter", but it's awfully hard to draw without losing a rosy view of one's own country's history.
Anonminus would have been more appropriate.
By "recent", I mean after the formation of the American national mythology, and that means works of history from long before America's problems with the Middle East. It's hard to call a 1940s historian's recounting of the burning of Loyalist homes (one Wikipedia citation for the event) as "a clear attempt to draw moral equivalence between the founders of the US and the oppressive theocratic fanatics butchering people in the middle east."
It's tiresome that any attempt to show the full picture of early American history is attacked as sympathy with America's enemies.
A matter of policy. Look to the tarring and feathering activities of the Sons of Liberty. Many of the men who supported these actions were later Founding Fathers. The Committees of Safety that superseded the Sons of Liberty were even worse.
I think Google pretty much knows everything that goes on on the internet now.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Public key cryptography, of course. To 'friend' someone, you generate a keypair and give them the public key and your user id. They do the same. Wall posts, comments, etc., are encrypted with a symmetric cipher (with a random single-use key), and the symmetric key is encrypted with the public key of each person who you want to make the message available to. Of course, you are vulnerable to an evil friend publishing your posts, but that is an unsolvable problem (see: DRM). In place of stateful authentication, each post is signed with a private key whose counterpart is held by the server.
Do all the crypto client-side (perhaps javascript, or alternate integrated clients, like gwibber and smartphone facebook apps) and all the server has to do is hold the encrypted content and validate signatures. You could even make a generalized protocol out of it, so that the content doesn't have to be on any particular server, i.e. host your own damn social network profile. That would ease the node-to-node bandwidth requirements of a server farm for the service. If you're familiar with it, think Sone on Freenet, but without the distributed hash table and associated latency.
I'd guess the staff reaction at Google was something like, "You've got to be kidding me, right? Do they understand that we're a business that's required to respond to gov inquiries surrounding illegal activity?"
Honestly it's probably better for both Google and those Anon's that goog closed the accounts. The only people that should be disappointed are investigative authorities. Because otherwise, it was only going to end badly.
I'm guessing you have a penis? I hear that the place isn't quite as nice if you have a vagina.
They also know all the people Googling for open proxies.
which is totally what she said
Don't trust Google and Facebook with your personal information! Store it with Anonymous instead!
The fact that it's "recent" is revealing in and of itself; it's a clear attempt to draw moral equivalence between the founders of the US and the oppressive theocratic fanatics butchering people in the middle east.
Convenient: if the facts don't fit your biases, dismiss the people presenting the facts as biased and move on. It helps if you throw in some outrageous hyperbole, too. (In reality, show me anyone who is trying to draw the moral equivalence you suggest, and I'll show you someone who is regarded by any serious historian as a loon.) Meanwhile, back in the real world, the fact that many of the American Revolutionaries were, in fact, by modern standards, out-and-out terrorists is something that's been known for decades.
Which homes? How many? Why, in particular was each of those homes targeted? Was it a matter of policy, or an occasional slip?
These questions matter. If you're not asking them, you don't care about the truth; you're using the pretense of knowledge to cover your ideology.
Indeed they do; and if you actually care about the answers, you'll do some research. And if you do that, you'll quickly learn that GPP's point is entirely correct: no matter how noble their cause, every revolutionary group in history, including those of the years leading up to 1776, has done things that we'd label terrorism (IIRC, a word that came out of the French Revolution) by modern standards. So have the governments they were fighting, of course. Revolutions are ugly, ugly things, inevitably turning families and friends and neighbors against each other, and even of the best of them quickly descend into horror. This is something that those who casually call for revolution against the modern US government should keep in mind.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.