[clug] Anonymous and Legion
Scott Ferguson
prettyfly.productions at gmail.com
Mon Feb 15 18:06:44 MST 2010
Please note: some of the pages I point to in this post contain offensive
language and images.
A couple of points:-
Anonymous is somewhat associated with 4chan. ie. 4chan and a certain
gamer site (*cough eBaum's World *cough) with financial motivations.
Anonymous (http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Anon)is "officially"
organised by Project Freeweb (http://freeweb.whyweprotest.net/)- until
/b/ hijacked it. Anonymous is somewhat composed of 14 year old script
kiddies with a penchant for goatse (if you need to ask - you don't want
to know). Anonymous for the most part is a group that communicates by
chat (irc://irc.anonnet.org#projectfreeweb and others).
Legion is a reference to the bible - anyone remember the demon who said
"I am legion" - got cast into a herd of pigs... And yes, legion was
first used by the Romans.
So you have a bunch of "Fight Club fan" bois (as someone said - using
there mum's broadband) with a hormones looking to justify their anger at
being social marginalized (because they are obnoxious). And competing to
see who can tell the biggest lies about their exploits. ie.
"spokespeople" who speak for a group who have no leader.
The "attacks" consisted mostly of people browsing the Parliamentry and
ACMA websites with Firefox and using the ReloadAllPlugins extension to
put load on the webservers, and spamming faxmachines with porn (a loop
of paper, 9999 resends). There was no sophisticated ddos attacks, and no
botnets (check with SAGE members, Volante, CSG, BTrusted etc). Despite
the claims there was no "AARP poisoning" and no VOIP rerouting.
The actions and motivations of Anonymous (or large numbers of them) is
similar to Biker Toy Runs (except the bikers behave themselves) - ie. a
good cause does not good participants make.
Worse - Anonymous has hijacked a sensible campaign against a draconian
idea (net censorship) thus discrediting the good work done by EFA, SAGE
and others.
Sections of the groups that lobby for internet censorship have tried to
portray their opponents as pornographer, racist bigots and "pirates".
Anonymous and their Operation Titstorm have done nothing to dispel that
(sic) FUD.
The last bit is the most important bit.
Anonymous has organised a "silent protest" for this coming Saturday
(http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Operation_Titstorm_IRL#Canberra)- it
would be good if some of those opposed to the plans for censorship were
to show their faces their (meet)behind the National Library - in order
to counter the 4chan stereotype, and help keep any socially challenged
participants in check.
Just saying... ;-p
To those who deplore the nature of Operation Titstorm - I wholeheartedly
agree - it's (sic) unjustifiable and sabotages it's stated aims. Having
spend time lurking amongst that mob I continually hear the claims of
"the censorship won't bother me" - so many of the 4chan /b/ ilk just
want to "break things"...
The name Operation Titstorm is supposedly a reference to one of Kevin
Rudds statements
(http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/pms-swearing-on-tv-deliberate-libs/story-e6frg6nf-1111119077923).
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