Anonymous has no leaders.
Anonymous is not a hacker network.
It may be that some people who belong to hacker networks use Anonymous as their name, but that doesn't involve Anonymous as a whole.
The reason Anonymous is called Anonymous, what makes it different from another human group is that anyone can be part of it, anyone can claim to represent it.
That's the theory, but in reality there are likely members that are more influential than others. Not official leaders perhaps, but a form of leader nonetheless.
Look at the geese that migrate between canada and the states each year, they all fly in formation with a leader of the flock, able to fly further than they could alone.
What happens when that first goose disappears? Another one leads. Was the first goose the king of the geese? No, just the bird tha was up in front.
But Anonymous is kind of disjoint. It's feudal. You'll realize this if you try to hop on to one of the IRC networks -- there are a million different little channels each representing its own fiefdom. They mostly have some common beliefs, and they all fly the same banner -- but when one group rises to prominence they will often start doing things under their own name. Some recent examples include LulzSec and Goatse Security. There are also the people who run the websites and the IRC channels and who make the DDoS tools and similar skiddie stuff; these guys are by any measure the real "leaders" of the operation, but they prefer to sit on the sidelines and don't usually get their hands dirty. The argument could be made, for example, that Julian Assange is an unwitting leader of Anonymous.
It's an emergent structure, not an intentional one. This is key to its resilience.
I used to post regularly on /i/ a few years ago; it grew into the "Anonymous" of today after the website owner shut it down. There was a Fox News report about the "Anonymous" threat way back in 2007; the "informant" mentioned in the report is Alex Wuori, a self-proclaimed "defector", and I'm not exactly breaking his privacy because literally everyone knows who he is and what he did. The Fox News report centered on the /i/ board of the time.
The other thing about Anonymous is that it is, as you may have noticed, rather old, in Internet terms. The first true Anonymous raid was YTMND vs. Ebaums back in 2006, in which 4chan and 7chan ran DDoS attacks against ebaumsworld.com in retaliation for stolen content.
I don't do any of that anymore, in case anyone's wondering. Being 17 only lasts one year.
"The suspects encoded their communications and penetrated nearby secure Wifi networks, since two of the suspects did not even have an Internet connection at home, the police said."
Spain probably has a pretty rigorous internet/telephony monitoring aparatus as a result of it's internal terrorism problems, but I'm curious how they were tracked down after the wifi network was located. Did the police just search all nearby properties? Is there hardware that can locate the source of individual wifi broadcasts?
They've already been released with charges. One of them hosted the IRC server in his own house.
They were not involved in the Playstation network attack but on national Spanish attacks to the Minister of Culture and some other local websites.
He, at least these last two weeks between the cucumbers crisis, and now this misunderstanding on the PSN, the focus is diverted from bonds speculation :)
I think the term "leaders" is used very loosely here since last I checked they weren't an organisation with "leaders"
I think they're trying to put the blame on anonymous. They found this and thought, we'll blame it on them:
"police found a large quantity of software programs specifically designed to infect third-party computers. The suspects encoded their communications and penetrated nearby secure Wifi networks, since two of the suspects did not even have an Internet connection at home, the police said."
Satire isn't useful? Are you for real? How useful can someone's opinion on the Internet be exactly? Is there a scale of usefulness on which satire ranks near the bottom? I doubt it. You move on, the world need less of you. Pedants.
18 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 46.2 ms ] threadThe reason Anonymous is called Anonymous, what makes it different from another human group is that anyone can be part of it, anyone can claim to represent it.
Look at the geese that migrate between canada and the states each year, they all fly in formation with a leader of the flock, able to fly further than they could alone.
What happens when that first goose disappears? Another one leads. Was the first goose the king of the geese? No, just the bird tha was up in front.
But Anonymous is kind of disjoint. It's feudal. You'll realize this if you try to hop on to one of the IRC networks -- there are a million different little channels each representing its own fiefdom. They mostly have some common beliefs, and they all fly the same banner -- but when one group rises to prominence they will often start doing things under their own name. Some recent examples include LulzSec and Goatse Security. There are also the people who run the websites and the IRC channels and who make the DDoS tools and similar skiddie stuff; these guys are by any measure the real "leaders" of the operation, but they prefer to sit on the sidelines and don't usually get their hands dirty. The argument could be made, for example, that Julian Assange is an unwitting leader of Anonymous.
It's an emergent structure, not an intentional one. This is key to its resilience.
I used to post regularly on /i/ a few years ago; it grew into the "Anonymous" of today after the website owner shut it down. There was a Fox News report about the "Anonymous" threat way back in 2007; the "informant" mentioned in the report is Alex Wuori, a self-proclaimed "defector", and I'm not exactly breaking his privacy because literally everyone knows who he is and what he did. The Fox News report centered on the /i/ board of the time.
The other thing about Anonymous is that it is, as you may have noticed, rather old, in Internet terms. The first true Anonymous raid was YTMND vs. Ebaums back in 2006, in which 4chan and 7chan ran DDoS attacks against ebaumsworld.com in retaliation for stolen content.
I don't do any of that anymore, in case anyone's wondering. Being 17 only lasts one year.
Spain probably has a pretty rigorous internet/telephony monitoring aparatus as a result of it's internal terrorism problems, but I'm curious how they were tracked down after the wifi network was located. Did the police just search all nearby properties? Is there hardware that can locate the source of individual wifi broadcasts?
They were not involved in the Playstation network attack but on national Spanish attacks to the Minister of Culture and some other local websites.
He, at least these last two weeks between the cucumbers crisis, and now this misunderstanding on the PSN, the focus is diverted from bonds speculation :)
lol, they arrested a kid with a laptop running LOIC. Nothing to see here, move along.
I think they're trying to put the blame on anonymous. They found this and thought, we'll blame it on them:
"police found a large quantity of software programs specifically designed to infect third-party computers. The suspects encoded their communications and penetrated nearby secure Wifi networks, since two of the suspects did not even have an Internet connection at home, the police said."
Yep. Be useful or move on.
Satire, at least of the internet variety, rarely has anything to contribute except in the form of noise.
I'm not a pedant, I'm helping you understand the people here. Your ungrateful and angry attitude only proves my point.
I've been here for nearly three years now, I'm not going anywhere and neither is the rest of community which has the values I've just described.
You might enjoy reddit.com/r/programming more, they seem to value humor more.
These goverment people fight back the only way they know: propaganda.