I think it will have an effect. At the very least, those who weren't caught will learn to be a little more careful next time.
I agree. Evolution in action. And, if what they're doing is anything more to them than a lark, the tools they use will evolve to be less traceable, in much the same way the P2P has become harder to track (not impossible, but the bar has been raised.) If the Feds aren't very careful here, they may find themselves creating a true movement where there was none before.
Let's see... your name is Fred Perkins, husband to Patricia Perkins, your IP is 66.95.43.221, and you live at 443 W. McPherson St., Los Angeles, CA. Says here you live on the third floor, and you have a Cheshire cat named Bilbo.
Don't forget the magnesium ribbon and blowtorch to light it and get thr reaction going...
Yes, and when you put in the new drive and install your operating system, be sure to set your system clock back a couple of years first. Judges don't much like it when they find out that people accused of a crime erase all the evidence.
Your bet would be wrong. There is no 'Anonymous' to direct. Anonymous isn't an organization, thus describing it as flat or hierarchical or anything else is meaningless. There are no 'senior members' as there is nothing to be a member of. There is only one thing that binds Anonymous. The Internet. The media and governments of the world absolutely do not understand this. You obviously don't either.
It's like a shifting sea, all you can do is try and get out of the way when it decides to flow over you. That, or put up a dike.
I'm just glad that all they can do with the thing right now is launch DDoSes at commerce and disseminate restricted information. At the point where they can kill people, they will, and will think of it as "just for the lulz." Some people, absent significant social restriction, behave that way. They're usually loners. Those people in a group, connected by the Internet, I don't know where that leads.
You're essentially talking about a hidden, potentially multi-national subculture of sociopaths. Yeah, that does sound like it could be problematic.
It wouldn't be unreasonable to have major organizers being caught (CnC and direction has to come from *somewhere*, after all), or perhaps (but less likely) catching the more technically-minded members.
Odds are the technically-minded individuals (e.g. those best able to cover their tracks) are nowhere near being caught, probably aren't even on law enforcement's radar. On the other hand, a bunch of people who just ran a few scripts that someone else provided without taking the proper steps to protect themselves will get busted.
It is funny though: people with the ability to perform these attacks making the stupid mistake of using Facebook for anything consequential. Facebook is about as private as a municipal swimming pool. I mean, geez, they'd have been better off on IRC.
But why are some people important to you just because they were born in the same country?
"Roman matrons used to say to their sons: “Come back with your shield, or on it.” Later on, this custom declined. So did Rome." -- Lazarus Long
The world is not a peaceful place, it never has been, and never will be. "We deduce the existence of peace because there are intervals between wars." Not all wars involve guns, tanks and bombs... others are waged via economic means, like the one we are in now. Furthermore, the interests of my fellow citizens are more likely to be aligned with my own, because if we fall, we all fall together. That's just the way it is. I also happen to think those who work hard on my country's behalf are worthy of greater consideration than those who do not. I do not wish harm on anyone, but if it comes down to a choice, I put my country first. Otherwise I have no right at all to everything my country has given me.
Don't know about "laws of ethics" but there are innate Natural Rights, which all human beings share simply because they are human. Example: The right (or instinct if you prefer) to own one's self, rather than be owned as a slave.
[citation needed]
Yes. The GP forgets that rights, more often than not, need to be enforced. Other people may not grant you the rights you think you have. Our Founders believed in the concept of an "Inalienable Right", but they also realized that you had to have the power to keep them, because sure as Hell's a mantrap somebody will eventually try to take them away from you.
Does your system of ethics also apply to states, cities and families?
Not my system. It's one that's been in place for a very, very long time, and by which most nations (except mine, apparently) still operate. The world's resources are limited, and people, cities, states and national governments compete for them. Some more effectively than others. Ethical or not, that's just the way it is. Anything else is just whitewash.
Assuming what you say is true, why is is better to choose foreigners over Americans, when deciding who to screw over for you own personal gain?
After all, people you have no attachment to or will never even meet are the lion's share of both groups.
The attraction of outsourcing for U.S. employers is that it's far, far easier to thoroughly exploit the foreign worker. No labor laws, no pensions, no 401Ks, no benefits, no sexual harassment, hostile-workplace and wrongful-firing lawsuits, nothing. It helps that foreign workers in developing countries may not even consider it exploitation... it's money they'd never have seen anyway.
The way I look at it is this: there are a lot of benefits to operating in the United States, especially if you're a manufacturer. Good infrastructure, reliable power, water and communications, rule of law, health care (if you're one of those employers that gives a damn), lots of reasons to want to base your company here rather than some third-world paradise. The people who are outsourcing want to get those benefits without offering much in return. Maybe there ought to be some rules put in place: if you're incorporated in the United States, a certain minimum percentage of your workforce should be from here. If you don't like that, move your operation overseas and be done with it.
Other countries have taken steps to protect their domestic industries and workforces: Brazil comes to mind, and China, and even India has made it clear that it wants money and jobs from the U.S. but not much else. I don't see why there's such a furor over the very idea that Americans might want to establish (or should I say, re-establish) some of the protections that served us well in the past. Certainly free trade and the "global economy" haven't done much of anything for us at all. I can tell that a lot of you people here have never worked in industry, are completely unaware of both its importance to our freedom and security, and have no real understanding of just how much of that capability we have lost (not to mention the jobs they once provided!)
As I mentioned earlier, I spent a couple of decades as a contract developer working for manufacturing concerns of all kinds, companies that made everything from screws to space shuttle parts. I eventually gave that up because the work wasn't there anymore... plant closings, companies shifting operations to Mexico (although most of those came back because Mexico has a lot of problems) and other countries. Most of my old customers closed their doors years ago: "free trade" allowed China (and Japan before it) to just come in and wipe them out. Not just free trade, but illegal trade practices (dumping, among many others) to which our government simply turned a blind eye or, in some cases, actively encouraged.
A few are still surviving, ghosts of their former selves (one of my biggest clients had been around for over a hundred years, had a couple of dozen plants around the U.S. and in a few other countries. They have two plants left, one of which will probably be shut down soon. This is real, folks: get off your asses and start understanding what Asia is doing to us. It's not pretty, it's been going on for a long time, and when we're completely hollowed out and can't do anything for ourselves, you tell me how long a "service economy" is going to hold out. We got to be a superpower because we made things, and sold them, and made lots of money. What I want to know is: where do my fellow Americans believe their lifestyles come from? Trees? Magic gnomes? What?
I'd like all of you apologists to explain to me why, given that the current government and private-sector economic policies have failed to maintain our critical domestic industries, that we shouldn't try something else. Put it this way: a nation that thinks it is free, but cannot provide for itself, is anything but free. That's the facts, jack.
The far less visible group are the old money, the ultra rich, the people who actually ended up owning the billions in question, the people who's worth to the economy would only be increased if they were to be replaced by a rock or other inanimate object which had been granted the legal right to own property.
Yes. I think there we can agree, people who's only real value is that they exhale carbon dioxide, which is needed by plants. I'm kinda curious has to how much of the nation's wealth is in such hands, and what exactly they do with it (other than buying mansions and luxury yachts.)
Corpratism is new ethics, and it doesn't surprise me one bit that a journalist would say that taking the job is ethical. Journalism is no longer the "Fourth Estate" and is now firmly embedded in the corporate structures that pay them, and just about anyone in that situation will end up telling you that anything that benefits the corporation is the right thing to do.
Mussolini would certainly agree with you... and you'd both be right, I'm afraid.
So are you arguing that the massive and resource/money hungry status symbols, the expensive luxuries and the wasteful excesses that the richest few percent indulge in don't actually take any resources to provide or that they're trivial?
{sigh} sorry you missed the point. Yes, compared to the operating assets of a large corporation a few mansions are trivial. My point is that if you run a multi-billion-dollar corporation, what's important to the society in which you live is not how many cars you have, or how many houses, but whether or not you direct your company to operate in the best interests of the said company's employees and their society. That's all.
What you're really talking about is excessive executive compensation, and that's another issue entirely, but you have to look at that rationally too. For example, Andy Grove (Intel Corporations founder) took in about 2.5 million in salary annually. Plus stock options, of course. He built that company into the huge organization that it is today, worth many, many billions. His pay was insignificant in real terms, and the toys he bought with that money less so. What is important is how he directed that company, what decisions he made, how that company improved or detracted from the lives of all the people into which it came into contact.
Are you kidding? There has been plenty of wailing, for a long time. Our corporate and political leaders paid no attention to it whatsoever, and so here we are.
I spent thirty years developing software and systems for use in industry, and I have been very much aware (since the late seventies, really) of what's been going on in our manufacturing sector. Yeah, I was a contract developer, and the loss of manufacturing directly affected my bottom line.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it will have an effect. At the very least, those who weren't caught will learn to be a little more careful next time.
I agree. Evolution in action. And, if what they're doing is anything more to them than a lark, the tools they use will evolve to be less traceable, in much the same way the P2P has become harder to track (not impossible, but the bar has been raised.) If the Feds aren't very careful here, they may find themselves creating a true movement where there was none before.
New members come in all the time, old members they leave one way or another.
I don't think there are very many ways at all that old members leave such an organization.
At the bottom of the /. screen for this story there is this line:
In Seattle, Washington, it is illegal to carry a concealed weapon that is over six feet in length.
- only now I realize that I have been in violation of that law for the most of my life!
Which means you're either a martial arts expert of above-average height ... or you're very generously endowned.
I don't really care to know which.
You must be a visial basic wiz to have made a gui to track all these ip.
Ha ... CSI reference, I love it. Don't forget to run a reverse algorithmic on those blurry security cam pics.
....or am I???
Let's see ... your name is Fred Perkins, husband to Patricia Perkins, your IP is 66.95.43.221, and you live at 443 W. McPherson St., Los Angeles, CA. Says here you live on the third floor, and you have a Cheshire cat named Bilbo.
Don't forget the magnesium ribbon and blowtorch to light it and get thr reaction going...
Yes, and when you put in the new drive and install your operating system, be sure to set your system clock back a couple of years first. Judges don't much like it when they find out that people accused of a crime erase all the evidence.
Your bet would be wrong. There is no 'Anonymous' to direct. Anonymous isn't an organization, thus describing it as flat or hierarchical or anything else is meaningless. There are no 'senior members' as there is nothing to be a member of. There is only one thing that binds Anonymous. The Internet. The media and governments of the world absolutely do not understand this. You obviously don't either.
It's like a shifting sea, all you can do is try and get out of the way when it decides to flow over you. That, or put up a dike.
I'm just glad that all they can do with the thing right now is launch DDoSes at commerce and disseminate restricted information. At the point where they can kill people, they will, and will think of it as "just for the lulz." Some people, absent significant social restriction, behave that way. They're usually loners. Those people in a group, connected by the Internet, I don't know where that leads.
You're essentially talking about a hidden, potentially multi-national subculture of sociopaths. Yeah, that does sound like it could be problematic.
It wouldn't be unreasonable to have major organizers being caught (CnC and direction has to come from *somewhere*, after all), or perhaps (but less likely) catching the more technically-minded members.
Odds are the technically-minded individuals (e.g. those best able to cover their tracks) are nowhere near being caught, probably aren't even on law enforcement's radar. On the other hand, a bunch of people who just ran a few scripts that someone else provided without taking the proper steps to protect themselves will get busted.
It is funny though: people with the ability to perform these attacks making the stupid mistake of using Facebook for anything consequential. Facebook is about as private as a municipal swimming pool. I mean, geez, they'd have been better off on IRC.
So if we're discussing India we have to post in Hindi or Urdu?
I have one doubt about the same, please do the needful and revert.
Nothing says you must use Anonymous' lingo ... but then again, nothing says that you don't either.
Now behave children..... (Forgot to login....oldage--)
Well! If anyone here has earned the appellation "oldfag" you certainly qualify. 111 ... I'm impressed.
Till then, it's still 'dura lex sed lex'.
Luthor.
But why are some people important to you just because they were born in the same country?
"Roman matrons used to say to their sons: “Come back with your shield, or on it.” Later on, this custom declined. So did Rome." -- Lazarus Long
... others are waged via economic means, like the one we are in now. Furthermore, the interests of my fellow citizens are more likely to be aligned with my own, because if we fall, we all fall together. That's just the way it is. I also happen to think those who work hard on my country's behalf are worthy of greater consideration than those who do not. I do not wish harm on anyone, but if it comes down to a choice, I put my country first. Otherwise I have no right at all to everything my country has given me.
The world is not a peaceful place, it never has been, and never will be. "We deduce the existence of peace because there are intervals between wars." Not all wars involve guns, tanks and bombs
Don't know about "laws of ethics" but there are innate Natural Rights, which all human beings share simply because they are human. Example: The right (or instinct if you prefer) to own one's self, rather than be owned as a slave.
[citation needed]
Yes. The GP forgets that rights, more often than not, need to be enforced. Other people may not grant you the rights you think you have. Our Founders believed in the concept of an "Inalienable Right", but they also realized that you had to have the power to keep them, because sure as Hell's a mantrap somebody will eventually try to take them away from you.
Does your system of ethics also apply to states, cities and families?
Not my system. It's one that's been in place for a very, very long time, and by which most nations (except mine, apparently) still operate. The world's resources are limited, and people, cities, states and national governments compete for them. Some more effectively than others. Ethical or not, that's just the way it is. Anything else is just whitewash.
Assuming what you say is true, why is is better to choose foreigners over Americans, when deciding who to screw over for you own personal gain? After all, people you have no attachment to or will never even meet are the lion's share of both groups.
The attraction of outsourcing for U.S. employers is that it's far, far easier to thoroughly exploit the foreign worker. No labor laws, no pensions, no 401Ks, no benefits, no sexual harassment, hostile-workplace and wrongful-firing lawsuits, nothing. It helps that foreign workers in developing countries may not even consider it exploitation ... it's money they'd never have seen anyway.
... plant closings, companies shifting operations to Mexico (although most of those came back because Mexico has a lot of problems) and other countries. Most of my old customers closed their doors years ago: "free trade" allowed China (and Japan before it) to just come in and wipe them out. Not just free trade, but illegal trade practices (dumping, among many others) to which our government simply turned a blind eye or, in some cases, actively encouraged.
The way I look at it is this: there are a lot of benefits to operating in the United States, especially if you're a manufacturer. Good infrastructure, reliable power, water and communications, rule of law, health care (if you're one of those employers that gives a damn), lots of reasons to want to base your company here rather than some third-world paradise. The people who are outsourcing want to get those benefits without offering much in return. Maybe there ought to be some rules put in place: if you're incorporated in the United States, a certain minimum percentage of your workforce should be from here. If you don't like that, move your operation overseas and be done with it.
Other countries have taken steps to protect their domestic industries and workforces: Brazil comes to mind, and China, and even India has made it clear that it wants money and jobs from the U.S. but not much else. I don't see why there's such a furor over the very idea that Americans might want to establish (or should I say, re-establish) some of the protections that served us well in the past. Certainly free trade and the "global economy" haven't done much of anything for us at all. I can tell that a lot of you people here have never worked in industry, are completely unaware of both its importance to our freedom and security, and have no real understanding of just how much of that capability we have lost (not to mention the jobs they once provided!)
As I mentioned earlier, I spent a couple of decades as a contract developer working for manufacturing concerns of all kinds, companies that made everything from screws to space shuttle parts. I eventually gave that up because the work wasn't there anymore
A few are still surviving, ghosts of their former selves (one of my biggest clients had been around for over a hundred years, had a couple of dozen plants around the U.S. and in a few other countries. They have two plants left, one of which will probably be shut down soon. This is real, folks: get off your asses and start understanding what Asia is doing to us. It's not pretty, it's been going on for a long time, and when we're completely hollowed out and can't do anything for ourselves, you tell me how long a "service economy" is going to hold out. We got to be a superpower because we made things, and sold them, and made lots of money. What I want to know is: where do my fellow Americans believe their lifestyles come from? Trees? Magic gnomes? What?
I'd like all of you apologists to explain to me why, given that the current government and private-sector economic policies have failed to maintain our critical domestic industries, that we shouldn't try something else. Put it this way: a nation that thinks it is free, but cannot provide for itself, is anything but free. That's the facts, jack.
Dammit, "whose".
actually I have little beef with executives.
The far less visible group are the old money, the ultra rich, the people who actually ended up owning the billions in question, the people who's worth to the economy would only be increased if they were to be replaced by a rock or other inanimate object which had been granted the legal right to own property.
Yes. I think there we can agree, people who's only real value is that they exhale carbon dioxide, which is needed by plants. I'm kinda curious has to how much of the nation's wealth is in such hands, and what exactly they do with it (other than buying mansions and luxury yachts.)
Corporatism is a system that will fail by design. Not that I believe it was necessarily designed to fail, but it was flawed to begin with.
Yes, but the people who are running that system don't believe that it will. Fail, that is.
Many modern ethical theories allow for you to put more moral consideration towards friends, family, etc.
That's mighty fucking generous of them. Do they also allow me the quaint value of wanting to help my neighbors, too?
No kidding. I wonder if self-defense is in there anywhere.
"aggressively uninterested"
"Dude, I don't care about your fucking problems. Get outa my face before I pop you one."
To reach absolute ethics, we'll one would really have to know the meaning of life, and somehow 42 doesn't make it any clearer.
5X9.
Corpratism is new ethics, and it doesn't surprise me one bit that a journalist would say that taking the job is ethical. Journalism is no longer the "Fourth Estate" and is now firmly embedded in the corporate structures that pay them, and just about anyone in that situation will end up telling you that anything that benefits the corporation is the right thing to do.
Mussolini would certainly agree with you ... and you'd both be right, I'm afraid.
So are you arguing that the massive and resource/money hungry status symbols, the expensive luxuries and the wasteful excesses that the richest few percent indulge in don't actually take any resources to provide or that they're trivial?
{sigh} sorry you missed the point. Yes, compared to the operating assets of a large corporation a few mansions are trivial. My point is that if you run a multi-billion-dollar corporation, what's important to the society in which you live is not how many cars you have, or how many houses, but whether or not you direct your company to operate in the best interests of the said company's employees and their society. That's all.
What you're really talking about is excessive executive compensation, and that's another issue entirely, but you have to look at that rationally too. For example, Andy Grove (Intel Corporations founder) took in about 2.5 million in salary annually. Plus stock options, of course. He built that company into the huge organization that it is today, worth many, many billions. His pay was insignificant in real terms, and the toys he bought with that money less so. What is important is how he directed that company, what decisions he made, how that company improved or detracted from the lives of all the people into which it came into contact.
Where was the wailing before now?
Are you kidding? There has been plenty of wailing, for a long time. Our corporate and political leaders paid no attention to it whatsoever, and so here we are.
I spent thirty years developing software and systems for use in industry, and I have been very much aware (since the late seventies, really) of what's been going on in our manufacturing sector. Yeah, I was a contract developer, and the loss of manufacturing directly affected my bottom line.