From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30500697 it's clear that you actually could do this - why not write something about your experience? It would be interesting.
Meanwhile from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30501144 ("oh fuck off"), all we're going to get is a jammed discussion that's high on indignation and low on information. This doesn't do anyone any good, and it contributes to destroying this place, which is fragile (particularly right now).
The thing to understand is that discussions on a large, open forum like HN simply go straight to the toilet when people start telling each other to fuck off (and I'm not saying you weren't provoked). Smaller technical forums sometimes have a pugnacious culture that can survive this kind of thing and actually get more interesting as people challenge one another, etc., but all that goes out the window when the commenting population is as large as it is here. All it does is open the floodgates for the next round of comments which will be even more nasty and also don't actually know anything. This is not in any of our interests.
The rules on HN are designed to help interesting discussion survive such conditions. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking that to heart, we'd be grateful.
If anyone is interested in a more in-depth explanation, here is a long exchange I had with another user last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27161491. The point is that the rules on HN aren't trying to solve a moral problem (don't say bad things) but rather an optimization problem (how to sustain an internet forum that doesn't suck). I think that understanding this can make them seem less smarmy. At least I hope it can.
As far as I see it, there is absolutely nothing wrong with my top level comment. It contains more substance than almost all other comments here, and referring to people exploiting a war for twitter followers as “idiots” is hardly inappropriate.
If you feel that your own fulminating and name-callings are higher-quality than that of others, ok - but you should realize that it still evokes worse from others and thus has a negative expected value.
The biggest affected sites were https://www.onliner.by/ and https://tass.ru/
Not the people calling themselves “Anonymous” on twitter.
Let me remind you that Russian intelligence services have been waving this very same flag https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/news/fancy-bear...
I suggesting that you should try to differentiate between the work of intelligence services and some “decentralized hacker collective”.
Speculation of the identity of Anonymous doesn't do much because it's an unfalsifiable framework no matter what the claim is. Even higher you said that the people taking down the sites and Anonymous twitter accounts were not the same. They likely are the same because they use the same branding. Whether or not the person behind the screen is a government operative is a separate question subject to speculation (that I am not disputing).
This is completely wrong. You will find all of these things claimed by many “Anonymous” accounts run by different people with zero connections between each other.
You severely underestimate how popular this hobby is.
People have been doing what they can to help. That includes anonymous, who have been hacking various Russian targets and releasing databases.
It doesn't seem like bullshit.
> Why are you so angry?
Because while others actually work to help Ukraine, there are some attention-seekers getting vastly more attention by pretending to do something.
It seems like you have some old ties to various groups that called themselves anonymous, and you're upset with them for some reason. But they're still doing what they can to assist. I don't think it's too productive to say they're bullshit, especially when we can see they're having an effect.
I guess Guccifer 2.0 was also a Romanian cab driver and not Russian intelligence services?
Western intelligence services defacing Russian websites have nothing to do with the majority of content associated with “Anonymous”, they’re deliberately throwing it in to muddy attribution and you’re eating it right up.
> But they're still doing what they can to assist.
“They” don’t exist. “They” cannot possibly be doing anything to assist.
Russian foreign intelligence services are a part of this helpful “group” too https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/news/fancy-bear...
Later it was co-opted by the “Moralfags” i.e. people motivated by various moral causes who attracted tons of clueless people and drove away the real hackers.
This is a sort-of good source on the pre-anonops history of “Anonymous” https://archive.org/details/partyvan-wiki-20111223.7z