Anonymous people power!

[Doc Lynam]

What do you think of the social activist group Anonymous, started through the website 4chan? Think doing a Jamie but this time to Scientology or helping Egyptian bloggers get their footage out to the world of state atrocities at anti government rallies.

 

[TWOCHOICEStom]

I think mostly they're very good at raising awareness to important issues. That said, I think they could do with a PR team to try to change their image a little.
People view them as silly teenage hackers causing trouble. They need to sort that out.

I think the biggest thing is that the vast majority of people just don't understand what they do.

 

[SeagullSongs]

I think they're quite a misunderstood bunch. A while ago they took down dozens of child pornography sites and released the details of the people frequenting/behind them.

Forces 40+ Child Pornography Sites Offline | TIME.com

 

[Doc Lynam]

There's a good doc on the BBC interviewing original members and charting its powerful progression.

BBC iPlayer - Storyville: 2012-2013: How Hackers Changed the World: We Are Legion

 

[John Bumlick]

yeah, but this is the best thing they've ever done: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/william-lashuas-birthday

 

[Eggmundo]

There are some right weirdos on that site.

 

[Nibble]

I bet those hackers don't look anything like Angelina Jolie.

 

[shaolinpunk]

Sometimes they get on their high horse about something that they don't need to or is unjustified which makes me a bit uncomfortable. However, when they actually target something/someone that is be an injustice (forcing those child porn sites to shut or the Steubenville incident) they're a means to an end.

Overall I'd say they operate in a bit of a grey area - do people take the rough with the smooth?

 

[Westdene Seagull]

They're a balance to the corruption of government and big business. Look how quickly the US government forced Paypal and co to stop accepting donations towards Wikileaks - they should have done it through the courts rather than leaning on the payment processors. A free internet needs "organisations" like Anonymous.

 

[shaolinpunk]

Timeline of events associated with Anonymous - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Didn't realise just how busy they've been over the last couple of years

 

[Tyrone Biggums]

Libertarian anarchists is what they are on the whole.

 

[father_and_son]

Its as much of an organisation as Al Qaeda is. Neither actually exist in any organised fashion. Its a banner that makes its easier for the modern media to package up the actions of individuals or small groups nicely into a one-paragraph summary for the public to digest without having to explain anything because the public will make the assumptions and join the dots themselves.

Based on the sum total of their actions they represent a combination of people power and anarchy and therefore, on balance I think they are a positive thing. I may not agree with everything that happens in their name, but most of it I do.

DKNY used some photographs that the photographer had already refused to sell them in a marketing campaign. He posted his story onto twitterbook initially, then it hit Redditt and it went viral causing an embarrassing climb down by DKNY all within 24hrs. Had the person who copied the photographer's Facebook post onto Redditt said "I'm from Anonymous and..." then they would have gained the credit, but in reality DKNY climbed down because lots of people shared the story on the internet and they had to rescue their brand name from being dragged through the mud. When lots of unrelated, unaffiliated people all do the same thing, it has power - nothing to do with hacking, secret organisations or mainstream media.

 

[GingerBeerMan]

My favourite part of the article is:

Anonymous’ hackers were able to exploit the PHP site with a SQL injection attack and extract the user database before launching a denial of service attack. “The server was using hardened PHP with escaping,” Anonymous said in its statement. “We were able to bypass it with with UTF-16 ASCII encoding.”

Clever, clever people.