Slashdot Mirror
UK Anonymous Hacktivists Get Jail Time
twoheadedboy writes "Two members of the Anonymous hacking collective have been handed a total of 25 months in prison. Christopher Weatherhead, a 22-year-old who went under the pseudonym Nerdo, received the most severe punishment — 18 months in prison. Another member, Ashley Rhodes, was handed seven months, whilst Peter Gibson was given a six-month suspended sentence. They were convicted for hitting a variety of websites, including those belonging to PayPal and MasterCard."
Stupid Script kiddies
Peter Gibson was given a six-month suspended sentence.
He has lived a trite and meaningless life. Oh, wait. No. That's Gibbons, not Gibson.
I have zero sympathy for this kind of hacker, but that's a lot of time for a DDOS that apparently they didn't even execute if I read the charges right.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
My personal take is that this is a dual part answer. Anonymous is as awesome as it is terrible. The idea of anonymous is what I think I would champion most.
There are some good things done by the faceless group... and there are stupid childish things done by the faceless group.. neither the same part of the whole, but still apart of the group.
From this we see community, and from internet community, we see weirdos. Just depends on how deep you're wanting to look.
When multiple people are convicted of different things, listing their punishment as a "total" serves purely to make the story more lurid and, thus, to make whatever possibly reasonable point the author intended seem more likely to be incorrect. "Two of the three people credited with hacking financial networks received jail sentences, the longest for 18 months" would still be silly wording but at least not a blatent attempt to exaggerate.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
It's fairly common for these kinds of nonsense figures to include: 1) the cost of doing stuff they would've needed to do anyway, like fix misconfigurations or patch security holes; and 2) salaries for regular staff who would've been paid the salary either way, like a sysadmin who had to take some time away from posting on Slashdot to respond to the incident.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
This is unfortunately flawed thinking.
The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend or a good guy. Just because someone like Assange doesn't like the US government, or banks or whoever else you hate, doesn't make him a saint. Just because Anonymous decided to support WikiLeaks didn't make them saints either.
They attacked PBS for crying out loud, just because PBS aired a documentary that tried to present both sides of the Assange debate.
That isn't supporting any ideal of transparency. That is acting childish.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
The logic of ambit claims will goes like this (figures are examples only): the most revenue (not profit) we have ever taken in an hour is 1.5M, we were off-the-air for 2 hours (rounded up of course), therefore we 'lost' 3M. For that 2 hours our company-wide expenditure was 0.5M which was not bringing in money and therefore a 'loss'. Total 3.5M 'lost'. It, of course, completely ignores the massive spike in payments during the few hours after their system came back as the vast majority of payments that could not be completed in the outage were completed later anyway (that spike may even have driven the peak revenue figure used above). It also ignores the average global revenue for PayPal (USD1.54 billion Q4 2012 https://www.paypal-media.com/about) of about GBP 450,000/hr, the fact the majority of expense would have been incurred anyway and is not additional etc. etc. Usually ambit claims are made with the intent to negotiate down to something sane, but negotiation in criminal matters is something only corporations get to do.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
They attacked because they stopped giving Assange his money. Now who is the bad guy here?
The world desperately needs a non-US based credit card so this sort of miss-guided government action doesn't happen again.
This is screwed up. Even the worst dictators in history have served less time. In 1923 Hitler attempted a coup with something like 600 men. He served just 9 months in jail. This was before coming to power legally (though what came later was contrary to the law of the land from my understanding of what happened). You would think threatening a countries leaders would get you more time than some minor protesting. Yes- this is protesting. It might be criminal although it is no worse than blocking traffic.
PBS Frontline Documentaries are some of the most respected in the world. Making silly assumptions without having any knowledge isn't supporting transparency either.
Trying to block someone from free speech (especially truthful speech) out of fear is the exact polar opposite of what Assange and Wikileaks supposedly stand for. But that is exactly what Anonymous was doing in going after PBS.
Terrorizing people into not speaking the truth is not something that should be celebrated or endorsed.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/wikileaks/interviews/julian-assange.html
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.