Slashdot Mirror
Anonymous Raises Over $54,000 For Dedicated Your Anon News Website
hypnosec writes "Anonymous knocked the doors of Indiegogo in a bid to raise some crowd-sourced dough to expand its news coverage by establishing a dedicated site instead of tweets and tumblr blog posts and managed to raise 27 time as much money as initially targeted. The initial target was to raise $2000 to fund the site development work as well as pay for initial hosting. Anonymous is planning to host news, reports and blogs from independent online reporters under its, already in use, Your Anon News brand."
I think this is good.
It's not like it won't be biased, but the fact is that we have no high-profile news service that doesn't exhibit a strong pro-corporate bias right now. When OWS was active you had to go to R.T. or Al Jazeera to get anything near to fair reporting on it. Don't forget that Erin Burnett spent the very first minutes of her first CNN show bashing OWS in an unfair way. CNN, despite the shrill idiots that constantly say there is a pro-Left bias there, consistently takes the corporate side on all issues.
We need more high-profile news outlets to balance out that corporate bias.
As an Anon, I cannot support this effort. This is totally contrary to how Anonymous operated, and it's an attempt to put an official channel on the name and idea of Anonymous.
This site will eventually be controlled or shut down, or censored. And people will get the wrong idea that Anonymous has sold out, and that's not true at all. The timing for this is just too canny.
Anonymous does not support it.
If they write the website themselves, and have some sort of advertising for income then 2000 is fair. It doesn't have to be some big corporate conglomerate professional website. Sometimes doing things on a shoestring is a good way to start. Why burn a ton of cash if you don't get the people contributing the way you thought you would?
I took a gander at /pol/ during the bombings on Monday. Peel back the casual racism and horrible jokes and you will find what I'd call "crowdsourced news" -- people were transcribing the police scanner in realtime, verifying sources and continually updating what was or was not consensus on various news items. They knew the Saudi they kneejerked into arresting wasn't involved hours before the media was reporting on it for example.
Outlets are already writing out editorials about the new journalism, where many people were getting their news from tweets and blogs instead of mainstream news. I anticipate this new site will be a simple way of aggregating the thousands of pairs of eyes that witness news as it happens. I'm a bit concerned when it comes to their coverage of "exclusive" news, though -- I doubt that Anonymous will be allowed to sit in the White House Press Room, or interview CEOs and politicians.
I mean, if you get read some official statement prepared by a PR committee, how much can you trust it to be accurate? Even if they get facts right, the stated reasons behind it (save the kids, not because we just got bribed) or the declared outcome (cavity searches in airports will protect us from terrorists) are usually lies.
All of the official news could hugely benefit from croudsourced background checks, source verification, etc. We need something like a "lexical analyzer" described in Asimov's "Foundation". To discard all the cruft and extract the essence of official statements.
--Coder
So who is the sucker that chose to underwrite this endeavor and expose his/her name to the public by way of collecting the funds? Sorry, I didn't RTFA as it was /.ed. I know anonymous is all about being faceless while still exposing information to the world, but a website with money behind it is kind of putting a face to the entity.
Who knows but they need to be careful.. They are now making a money trail and this is Law Enforcement's bread and butter. Even if they try to compartmentalize different divisions there is still occasional cross chatter. Stay frosty.
Beware of those who profit off the docile and persecute the unbelievers.
Anonymous does not support it.
News Flash! Today, the Anonymous news site was hacked, apparently by a rogue group called Anonymous. Anonymous posted a manifesto on the hacked servers, stating, "Anonymous is against the biased news that is posted by Anonymous, and we are dedicated to show the world what a pack of tools they are."
The spokesperson for Anonymous stated, "These Anonymous guys are just jerks, why would they do this?'
An anonymous source went on record to say, "Nobody knows what is going on in the community. Also, don't use my name! Ahhhhhh!"
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
The major issue I see with this plan, is most datacenters allow 3 letter agencies to just walk in, and copy drives.
I doubt that they will be hosting the source code for their cracking tools or internal forums for their secret stuff. It is probably going to be just a blog of sorts that they can use as their official channel for news about their activity. Who cares of the govt takes the drives if it's all public info anyway? And do you really think they are going to host it in the U.S.A.?
WTB [sig], PST!!!
So Schrodinger's Cat will definitely be the editor in chief.
For example, in the Rehtaeh Parsons case (Canada), Anon basically showed the RCMP (police) as having put little effort into the case, and have proceeded to dig up evidence and essentially revive the case.
As with the link above, major news outlets in Canada have carried this story, and the reputation of anon seems to be improving in regards to revealing similar issues in gov't or law enforcement.
So long as they can tame the "lulz" area of things, an official news site might be a good/popular reference for some things.