Anonymous Shuts Down Westboro Site

Originally posted by inimalist
the point about pedophiles is 100% wrong though. sure, I'm happy they get arrested, but the vast majority of child porn cases never pierce mainstream media coverage, or get a quick summary on local news. Anonymous sends a hoax letter to WBC and it gets picked up. It is this media image itself that will kill anonymous faster than anything. After Assange, anything Anonymous does gets headlines. To the public, it makes them seem much more powerful and dangerous than they really are. its that paranoia that will make people willing to sacrifice internet privacy such that they might be safe, much, again, like the anarchists or terrorists of modern time.

I disagree: I did not hear of the anon thing on any place except for the internet.

Child porn? Every single damn arrest gets put on local TV. Sometimes, if there was enough porn involved, it makes it to national TV.

How many times have I heard "anon" in the national news: 0. I've only read about their exploits on the internet by bloggers and online-only new reports.

That's part of the reason why we have so many laws and precedences on child porn and very little progress in "net neutrality" for things other than child porn. Child porn, forgive the phrase, is 'sexier' media coverage: we get to "out" a pervert and it makes us feel better to scoff at a scumbag. It's also more "shocking" than covering an obscure site hit by a bot-net of 50,000 anon machines.

Now, that's not to say that my anecdotal experience actually proves or disproves which gets more media coverage. But, I assure, you, "hacking" gets virtually no coverage.

to be fair, there are probably more child porn cases than hacking ones, but like, Chinese hackers made international news several times over the past few years, stuxnet, etc. Not all the same thing, but this stuff does get into the public sphere.

And Anonymous had media coverage (though it might have been local) long before Assange, and I think even before their scientology campaign. The last time I saw any major coverage of child porn was an article in Macleans a few years ago about how little coverage pedophile net rings get in the media... then again, there is a huge difference between American and Canadian media, and I do pretty much exclusively get my news from the net.

The other part to this is that, like we agreed on before, Anonymous' targets are pretty low key at this point. As the stories I mentioned above proove, if they did something big enough, the media would eat it up like crazy. Going after churches... idk, that to me seems to be a high-risk low-reward type of strategy.

Originally posted by inimalist
to be fair, there are probably more child porn cases than hacking ones, but like, Chinese hackers made international news several times over the past few years, stuxnet, etc. Not all the same thing, but this stuff does get into the public sphere.

And Anonymous had media coverage (though it might have been local) long before Assange, and I think even before their scientology campaign. The last time I saw any major coverage of child porn was an article in Macleans a few years ago about how little coverage pedophile net rings get in the media... then again, there is a huge difference between American and Canadian media, and I do pretty much exclusively get my news from the net.

The other part to this is that, like we agreed on before, Anonymous' targets are pretty low key at this point. As the stories I mentioned above proove, if they did something big enough, the media would eat it up like crazy. Going after churches... idk, that to me seems to be a high-risk low-reward type of strategy.

Americans LOVE their "low-brow" news stories which include child pronz.

Anyway, yeah, I don't think Anon is going to get in trouble for hacking the website of the most hated church in America.

the thing is, there are also reports that they have caused some nuiscance to website for epilepsy sufferers, etc. They deny it and say it was scientology posing as them, so idk.

But like, its hard to tell what is going to strike a cord with people and what is going to be manufactured into news.

Originally posted by inimalist
the thing is, there are also reports that they have caused some nuiscance to website for epilepsy sufferers, etc. They deny it and say it was scientology posing as them, so idk.

But like, its hard to tell what is going to strike a cord with people and what is going to be manufactured into news.

The thing about anon is...that...they are anon.

Prosecuting a group whose trail goes cold every 24 hours, is difficult. There are always "mult-bit layer forensics recoveries" but with the very small storage space put on those anonymous proxies that ALSO purge their contents every 24 hours, it is highly likely that the "5-th layer"* of retrievable information is out of reach by the time the authorities know where to look and have a subpoena to the owners of the anonymous proxies.\

*In digital forensics, you can retrieve data, fully intact, up to 3 bit-layers. The "magnetic platters" on a hard drive actually do not "flatten" or "ridge" perfectly when they are re-written and there is a "layer" that can be read, perfectly, of up to 3 writes on the same physical locations on the platters. When you hit the 4th bit-layer, it becomes corrupted. When you hit the 5th layer, most of it is garbage. FTK is a program that you can use to recover data and it is one of the most popular with authorities. What does this have to do with anon? Like I said above, the information cannot be retrieved from the "log files" of the proxies when they are deleted every 24 hours. Some set the cleaning to every 48 hours. They do this to provide 'security' for those who wish to remain anonymous such as investigators, shamed pornography searchers, internet trolls, and hackers. The authorities usually get around to figuring out the first proxy server's location, with a subpoena in hand, at around the 2 week mark, in a GOOD scenario. Good luck getting the forensic data 6 layers deep: it's impossible. This means that "anon" WILL remain "anon" if they continue to set themselves up, properly. Additionally, legislation which requires proxy providers to keep their servers logged and archived for, say, 3 months, will fail: hacker groups like anon will just setup their own proxies and clean them after use. Then what? It becomes even MORE impossible to track, then, because the proxy server's owner, and the proxy server itself no longer exist. (Some already do this...and it's much easier to do than one might think.)

What I think would be hilarious is to execute a DDoS attack on a website but have your botnet PCs spoof the subnet of the white-house. 😆 😆 😆 People would say, "Obama hacked shit, n'stuff...."

Feb 24th episode of Colbert had a segment on Anonymous

YouTube video

unfortunatly the Greenwald interview is cut, he is amazing and the interview is pretty good

Originally posted by dadudemon
The thing about anon is...that...they are anon.

Prosecuting a group whose trail goes cold every 24 hours, is difficult. There are always "mult-bit layer forensics recoveries" but with the very small storage space put on those anonymous proxies that ALSO purge their contents every 24 hours, it is highly likely that the "5-th layer"* of retrievable information is out of reach by the time the authorities know where to look and have a subpoena to the owners of the anonymous proxies.\

*In digital forensics, you can retrieve data, fully intact, up to 3 bit-layers. The "magnetic platters" on a hard drive actually do not "flatten" or "ridge" perfectly when they are re-written and there is a "layer" that can be read, perfectly, of up to 3 writes on the same physical locations on the platters. When you hit the 4th bit-layer, it becomes corrupted. When you hit the 5th layer, most of it is garbage. FTK is a program that you can use to recover data and it is one of the most popular with authorities. What does this have to do with anon? Like I said above, the information cannot be retrieved from the "log files" of the proxies when they are deleted every 24 hours. Some set the cleaning to every 48 hours. They do this to provide 'security' for those who wish to remain anonymous such as investigators, shamed pornography searchers, internet trolls, and hackers. The authorities usually get around to figuring out the first proxy server's location, with a subpoena in hand, at around the 2 week mark, in a GOOD scenario. Good luck getting the forensic data 6 layers deep: it's impossible. This means that "anon" WILL remain "anon" if they continue to set themselves up, properly. Additionally, legislation which requires proxy providers to keep their servers logged and archived for, say, 3 months, will fail: hacker groups like anon will just setup their own proxies and clean them after use. Then what? It becomes even MORE impossible to track, then, because the proxy server's owner, and the proxy server itself no longer exist. (Some already do this...and it's much easier to do than one might think.)

What I think would be hilarious is to execute a DDoS attack on a website but have your botnet PCs spoof the subnet of the white-house. 😆 😆 😆 People would say, "Obama hacked shit, n'stuff...."

they don't need to catch anonymous to take away privacy in the name of internet security

You can't really take away internet privacy without just shutting down the internet, I'm relatively sure. Since it's all just a matter of code, it can always be re-written unwritten by someone skilled enough. That's why the "anti-virus vs. virus" war will never end.

because Greenwald is so awesome, but sorry to spam....

YouTube video

huh, seems like Anonymous took my advice, lol!

anyways, remove foot from mouth:

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/technologylive/post/2011/03/anonymous-actively-probing-koch-brothers-corporate-networks-/1

they were on Colbert again on the 28th