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Anonymous Hackers Take Down Child Porn Websites
chrb writes "According to Security News Daily, Anonymous has taken down more than 40 darknet-based child porn websites over the last week. Details of some of the hacks have been released via pastebin #OpDarknet, including personal details of some users of a site named 'Lolita City,' and DDoS tools that target Hidden Wiki and Freedom Hosting — alleged to be two of the biggest darknet sites hosting child porn."
It's easier to think about them as an unguided mass that will attack targets at random. Sometimes the targets are assholes and people will cheer for them, but that doesn't make them freedom fighters. They reverted back to trolls some time ago.
How are we even going to know whether or not this is true? Nobody in their right mind would try to verify whether those sites were taken down or not, and even if they did, they sure wouldn't talk about it publicly, what with the risk of the cops showing up just for visiting those sites. Anonymous can pretty much say whatever they want about this with impunity.
Oh no. They hate the bastards. CP'ers DO use 4chan, but only to be met with a hailstorm of shit. They even got a guy a while ago, got his details and put the cops on his arse. So this I guess is a continuation on that theme of internet vigilante-ism. Hell, Pedo bear was created to MOCK CP'ers. 4chan and anon is responsible for a lot of things, good and bad, but CP is not one of them. I am not a channer by the way; I'm just sayin'.
I write professional videogame reviews! http://www.digitallydownloaded.net/
Sigh. Quality of Slashdot readership is steadily going down.
These were TOR sites. That means that the hosting servers are near impossible to track because the TOR network is meant to allow for anonymous hosting.
Subsequently, unless you manage to globally packet-inspect the entire Internet (which is the very thing that the child-porn crusaders advocate, along with introducing a totalitarian global police state to "protect the children") or somehow crack in and identify the location of these servers from whatever data is within, you cannot even tell what country they are in.
Freedom Hosting is an extreme libertarian host service, with 0% censorship rules, which is meant to host sites of political dissidents and other web contents that is likely to get you killed by a mob of raving religious lunatics for breaking whatever taboo in whatever nut-infested country you happen to live.
So Anonymous cracked into some sites hosted on Freedom Hosting and defaced them, stole some meaningless login ids (like those of people logging in with the names of their least-liked politicians or neighbours) and did not even get the IP addresses of the servers or the users because on the TOR network they would be meaningless.
End result: upgraded and hardened CP sites on TOR.
This action defines the very concepts of "pointless", "futile" and "counterproductive". Which not very surprising since it is usually the fate of all vigilante witch-hunts in the long run ...
I believe the word you were trying to use was Vigilante.
Damn the AutoCorrect!
A good carpenter never blames his tools.
If his hammer breaks when trying to hammer in a normal nail, he most certainly will.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Protocols in general are content-agnostic. Unless you want to argue that sharing any kind of content (even by content producers/owners) is illegal, no protocol is inherently illegal.
There are plenty of legitimate uses for P2P protocols, the most widely-used probably being WoW's patch system.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Looking at some of the comments, it seems that a few people don't seem to get Anonymous. Anonymous isn't a group, really - they don't have a common agenda, they don't have common opinions or necessarily common skills. Rather, Anonymous is a label people have claimed and since it seems to be a similar type of person each time (e.g. from a certain part of the Internet, hacks sites or brings them down, may be vigilantes or may well be trolling), people still hold the misconception that they are somehow a unified group. They're not. Anonymous are anonymous. That's the point. There is no link between anything they do except people copycatting each other, and using the label. Thus Anonymous is not a group - I would say it is more of a phenomenon that has arisen, with the help of the Internet.