The roots of Anonymous, the infamous online hacking community | Hacker News Reader

The roots of Anonymous, the infamous online hacking community

pbs.org

38 pointsmatthiasb14 comments

An article which discusses the origin of anon, without once mentioning 4chan.

Impressive.

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.

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.

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.

The point of anonymous is that there is no point to anonymous.

Did you listen to the end to hear the tacked-on section "blah blah this just in: internet celeb leak was released on a board affiliated with anonymous."

ha. anonymous hasn't been active on 4chan in... 5-8 years.

but what else would you expect from a news site sponsored by the industrial military complex:

http://www.baesystems.com/what-we-do-rus/products-&-services...

Rokar’s Silver Bullet transforms standard artillery into precision guided weapons.

A main supplier of explosive materials to the Department of Defense

The U.S. Military’s Primary Propellant Manufacturer

I watch PBS regularly (I enjoy news hour and frontline a lot) and occasionally there will be a preroll commercial for BAE Systems and it feels like the kind of commercial you'd see for the malevolent megacorp in cyberpunk movies like OCP in RoboCop.

Tangentially related from my rudimentary analysis, BAE Systems comes out on top from the top line item for each county under the 1033 program, that the nytimes added to their wiki for their data dump of the foia [0]. Interesting that A British multinational defense contractor comes out on top for a US Federal Program.

[0] https://github.com/TheUpshot/Military-Surplus-Gear/issues/10

I'm surprised more articles don't mention the time all the main Anon networks got breached by ZF0.

http://www.gonullyourself.org/ezines/ZF0/zf0%204.txt

Anonymous largely has nothing to do with 4chan these days anyway. They had a brief, but important time around 2006-2009 on 4chan but they have no connection these days aside from their shared history.

Except the article/video is suppose to discuss the roots of Anonymous?

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...

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

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

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