
The roots of Anonymous, the infamous online hacking community - matthiasb
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/roots-anonymous-infamous-online-hacking-community/
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madaxe_again
An article which discusses the origin of anon, without once mentioning 4chan.

Impressive.

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Maken
Those guys seem to confuse Anonymous with Batman.

"Anonymous" being just a bunch of people who cares about something, and in
coordination with others who equally cares about it, do something about the
matter seem to be a too abstract concept for most people.

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GlennS
Surely the point of anonymous is that they're a group of people who _don 't_
care. It's a competition to be the most callous.

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cbd1984
Believe it or not, there's a certain amount of dissent within this large
collective of individual human beings.

You've touched on a point the group is divided on: How much heroism (however
defined) should the group engage in? Is it nobler to lulz, or to take up LOIC
against a sea of shitheads, and in DDoSing, convince CNN to notice?

That, or some people are sociopaths, some people are zealots, and deciding
who's who says more about you than about them.

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pnathan
Huh. More intelligent that most media descriptions. It lacks a description of
4chan or Project Chanology.

Probably should be interviewing Gabriella Coleman[1] for a translator of
Anonymous to the world.

> And one of the parts of the story, what I’m reporting on is a few years ago,
> there were briefings on Capitol Hill about this idea about this threat of
> Anonymous. Keith Alexander at the time was saying — suggesting that
> Anonymous had the capability to attack power grids.

Given the right ip address, a telnet session, and a plastic-covered keyboard,
I expect a deranged orangutan could take down power stations by throwing poo
at the keyboard. Some of those SCADA systems are _not_ designed to be error-
tolerant on the control plane in any sense.

[1]
[http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/faculty_bios/view/Gabriella_Colema...](http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/faculty_bios/view/Gabriella_Coleman)

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PhasmaFelis
Are we still pretending that "Anonymous" is a cohesive group? Has the entire
planet's media forgotten what the word "Anonymous" means?

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lutusp
Anonymity and disorganization aren't synonymous. An organization can be highly
organized and yet secret.

