Anonymous hunts down Voldemort for hacking hungry kids' charity A Harry Potter fan's attempt to impress hacktivist collective Anonymous by defacing a charity's website has backfired and his alleged identity handed over to cops. RedSky, a video production firm that produced a documentary to help raise cash for underprivileged kids in New Zealand, was done over by the black hat hacker who …
...that; "Our tactics are not reprehensible unless they're used against someone we like, then they are." has a touch of two-facedness about it.
Likewise deciding who gets to be anonymous, rather than who gets to be "Anonymous", feels like crossing the line between being hacktivists and "teh internet police".
I happen to think they've done the right thing here, but I'm not sure that my opinions are suitable as a substitute for a legal framework and due process.
They don't. Anyone can claim to be Anonymous, and frequently does. The idiot who hacked the website didn't understand this, and so hacked the website to try and "get an in". This caused another group of Anonymous to expose him because he was making them all look bad by associating himself with them.
OK, so "vereyone" is Anon, they have no "leaders", the "99%", blahblahblah. So who set the rules if they don't have leaders? Face it, the whole Anon thing is just one big herding exercise, with the core Anons playing at building a zombie net made up of real people.
"....a 35-year-old man who reportedly lives in Madrid with his mother...." Oh just so LOL! How typical - single male, lives with his Mom, probably a serial underachiever. Tragic.
>"....a 35-year-old man who reportedly lives in Madrid with his mother...." Oh just so LOL! How typical - single male, lives with his Mom, probably a serial underachiever. Tragic.
Tragic? Not necessarily. It is not that uncommon in Madrid for a 35 year old to be still living with their parents.
"....It is not that uncommon in Madrid for a 35 year old to be still living with their parents." Sorry, but it is tragic. It is not only a very grim statement of the state of the Spanish economy, but also how this Spaniard decided to pass his time instead of looking for something useful and productive to do.
By the time I was thirty-five I had been living on my own feet for over twenty-five years, was married with kids and was onto my second house, despite the usual cycle of economic booms and busts. Yes, despite all the wailing from today's youth, it's about time someone pointed out to them that they are not the first to hit hard times. At one of the worst points in my life I held down three pretty sh*tty jobs. Yes, some of my generation did spend a lot of time moaning about their lot and even rioting, but the rest of us knuckled down and got on with life. I don't think I ever considered anything as stupid as trashing a charity, let alone thinking such an activity might impress someone. Time for some of the metrosexuals out there to grow a pair.
Come on, downvoting a Mea Culpa?
Matt Bryant, you sound rather full of yourself, flaunting your own independence and ignoring all the probable and possible reasons for a 35 yr old still living with their parents, but I was very taken with the image of a ragged Dickensian workhouse Matt, aged 10, eking out a meagre existence.
Icon - you didn't work for a guy called Fagin by any chance?
"By the time I was thirty-five I had been living on my own feet for over twenty-five years, was married with kids and was onto my second house"
Haha, judging from your posts I seriously thought that you were just some bored teenager. The fact you're in your 40s just makes this all the more tragic.
"Haha, judging from your posts I seriously thought that you were just some bored teenager"
Couldn't have said it better. Though judging by the vile and self-righteous comments he comes out with consistently on El Reg I was wondering if he was actually a member of Anonymouse.
D'you mind if I ask what house prices were like when you bought your first and second? If you hail from a time when someone on an average wage could afford a suburban 3-bed semi then your comparison is a touch unfair. Here in a nice, but unglamorous corner of SE England a suburban 3-bed semi now costs 10x the median wage.
"D'you mind if I ask what house prices were like when you bought your first and second?...." Well, when I wanted to I couldn't afford a house in London and had to commute in. Now I could probably afford a house in most parts of London but don't actually want to live there, thanks. The first house I bought was over twenty miles from where I worked and my wife had grown up because we couldn't afford a house in her home town in the SE. So this whole idea that it's only difficult for the current generation to get on the housing ladder is a load of male bovine manure. As for "how hard it is now", the unemployment figures were worse and they stayed worse for longer in the 1980-82 recession. In the early '90s recession we still had ridiculously high mortgage rates from Black Monday in 1987. At one point in the small town we lived in over 50% of the houses had been repossessed in the '90s recession, all due to the crippling mortgage rates. So I think you can skip trying to lecture me on difficulties in the house market.
First, I wasn't lecturing, I was asking.
Second, what you're trying to avoid admitting is that you bought houses when the ratio of median salary to house price was considerably lower. That ratio is key to saving up a deposit. If you need £10k for your 25% deposit and you earn £15k a year, that's achievable within a few years. If you need £50k for your 25% deposit and you earn £25k a year, that's achievable shortly before you turn 50.
It's far harder to get on the ladder now than it was back when you were buying.
"....what you're trying to avoid admitting is that you bought houses when the ratio of median salary to house price was considerably lower...." It certainly wasn't in London! And as for other south-east towns, they were the reason we had 5-times-your-joint-salaries mortgages appear back in the late 80's. And even noob admins are starting on a massively larger wedge than I got as a graduate. I rented for many years before scraping together enough for a deposit despite being employed from degree onwards. Having worked through several cycles of boom and bust I can see why those new to the experience might think it's some gawd-awful and new calamnity, but truth is the politicians are very good at cooking the economy to a boil, spending all the savings when times are good (to buy votes), and then pointing fingers at each other when the markets dip. When the next recession comes around (and it will) you can tell the youth of that day how hard you had it now, etc, etc, "lived in a cardboard box at the bottom of a lake", etc, etc.
Oh my dear Matt, you really are a jumped up full of yourself little pillock. Are we all to be judged by your achievements? I'm sure many people could claim that by the age of 35 they had lived and worked on numerous continents, made and lost millions, created business empires employing hundreds of people if not all of those and many other achievements. That would make your existence pretty humdum.
And living at home in Spain is more of a cultural thing nothing to do with the economy (at least not previously although this is becoming a factor) and certainly not tragic.
"....Are we all to be judged by your achievements?...." Nope, you should be judged by your actions, and sitting around whining "I'm entitled to more, I should get better toys" is what is wrong with a lot of the "protesters" today. The have been recessions before, there has been periods of high unemployment before, quit whining and get on your bike.
So you completely missed the difference, which I thought I'd got pretty much black and white, between anonymous as in "Anonymous Coward" and Anonymous as in operating as part of the Anonymous collective?
The point I was aiming for is that any group of Anonymous (big "A") definately has a right to question whether someone else has the right to claim to be part of Anonymous (big "A"). What I have a problem with is their right assumed here to decree who is and who is not allowed to hide their identity online, or remain anonymous (small "a").
So, saying; "AnonVoldemort is a scumbag, a lying sack of shit and nothing to do with us.", fine. Saying; "AnonVoldemort is actually Terence Smith of 28 Acacia Villas, Ealing, London[1]", is where the problem lies.
We capitalise proper nouns for a reason and that reason is to distinguish them from plain old nouns.
[1] If you are reading this, happen to be called Terence Smith and live at 28 Acacia Villas, Ealing, London, I apologise unreservedly for the analogy collision.
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>don't mess with kids, or cats
Dennis Publishing used to know that... there was once an advertisement of a kitten with a gun to its head - "Subscribe to PC Zone or the kitten gets it!"
(it might have been Game Zone... I can't remember, the 1990s were a long time ago)
Anon has shown restraint and judgement before and will probably will continue in the future. Note they outed the person to authorities, anonymous tip? It's up to the authorities to charge or not and apply penalties as needed. Anon was just acting as a citizen would act. Actually Anon giving the person an option to undo is more considerate than most.
have morals. And that includes anonymous. Considering their hacktivistic nature I would assume they are mostly in line with hurt the people that abuse others(be it politicians, corporations(hey they want to be called people), etc...). They have a few other jabs at things but that's really how I see them mostly.
Rules? You really think so?
Anonymous is a mob - not as in The Mob, which for all its criminality is organised - frequently more like a lynch-mob.Anonymous, like any other mob, has no hard-and-fast rules - or, perhaps, has rules which fluctuate with the current population of the mob, who's active at the moment, which tide of opinion has the most current sway.
The nearest I can think of for "rules" is:
1) Piss off the mob, and thy're liable to attack.
2) Amuse the mob, they're liable to like you - until they get bored of you, and what was previously amusing becomes boring, or annoying - at which point see Rule 1.
3) Claim to be part of the mob, and you're likely to invoke either Rule 1 or Rule 2 - pray it's the latter. In this case, so called AnonVoldemort invoked the former, and look how that worked out for him.
Anon, but not *that* Anon.
Just one? Is there any evidence for that?
From time to time we hear claims that "Anonymous" has done something. Apparently the capital 'A' has convinced journalists that this is a single organisation. You seem to be suggesting that it is more a case of having a population of like-minded people within which, from time to time, small groups crystallise out and take part in an action of some kind. By claiming to be part of "Anonymous", they avoid having to think up an identity and the media is happy to go along with this.
But why couldn't there be lots of isolated populations of this type? Each would actually believe that *it* was the True Anonymous. The "rules" of the group would mean that those group members who "sat out" on a particular action would never expect to learn who had taken part. Therefore, it would never seem suspicious to a member if they read in the news that "Anonymous" allegedly did something and yet none of their friends admitted to knowing who'd been involved.
Some of these "Anonymous" groups might even be fairly well-funded organisations, such as law enforcement agents frustrated by legal limits on how far they can go in taking down those who they "know" to be Bad Guys.
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You remind me of the time when intellectually challenged vigilantes could not tell the difference between a paediatrician and a pedophile.
Do we really want to empower people with even less training and accountability than the police?
Of course they won't be in their present state in years to come.
Whatever 'they'll' be called will be playing with what ever tech is available to them.
Some of us remember when phone phreaking was the work of the devil and his/her/its acolytes (Some of us remember when you could buy the Anarchist Cookbook in bookshops, too).
Having some form of anarchistic collective is like trying to herd cats and toddlers at the same time.
You're doing it wrong. You're supposed to use the toddlers like sheepdogs and have them herd the cats. Even though the toddlers are just a bit slow, if you have enough of them you can get all the cats in a tight bunch under the sofa and all the toddlers peering under in fairly short order.
You realise that you just "published" that "fact"?
Expect Black Helis!
<aManfromMars
or the award winning scorn of Matt Bryant... for confirming that you have a basement, so you probably live in it like everyone else that is not him,f or he lives on his own feet, like some sort of recursive athlete...
/aManfromMars?
Allegedly they offered him an out, give us the files to restore as it was before, he refused.
they dobbed him in which is their duty as citizens.
But yes they are scary, any secret organisation with power over you is.
They however so far have done some good, only history will tell if they only made the trains run on time.
It's about simple right and wrong (not morality). Some might say that how Anonymous does things is wrong, but they do it with good intention. That's the difference. Good intentions, defending those without power, supporting freedom of choice and what's right over showing off hacking skills and plain malicious hacking. Prospective Anons don't need to be told this, they just know it.
".....is there something ramshackle about a charity that can't restore its own web site?" Well, seeing as I know proper companies with IT staff that have had problems restoring their websites, why is it so hard to see that a charity, probably without any IT staff of their own, would be stumped? I've helped friends who don't even know what HTML is to set up charity websites, they're f*cked if I or another of my slightly Web-lietrate mates are not around to help them.
Surely you took a back up when you set up the site? Surely you then set up a job to periodically back it up automatically?
hell if you were really good, you'd have even told them that when the machine asks for a blank cd it's because it's trying to create a back up of the website?
"....you'd have even told them that when the machine asks for a blank cd it's because it's trying to create a back up of the website?" My wife has some friends that run a charity for old beach donkeys in Spain. Being a very small charity run on half a shoestring, they cannot afford a hosted service. They are lovely ladies with the best of intentions, but so computer-illiterate that even when I gave them a box with two stickers on - on the lid "These are the CD-Rs" and half-way down "Call Matt to order more when the level drops to here" - they still had problems! Even with written instructions - "take CD-R from the pouch with yesterday's date, place in drive with the side with the label on upwards, close CD drive and follow onscreen instructions" - I still worry they would have problems in the event of a disaster.
If you were any good you would have realised there are a massive chunk of people aged 50+ that have NEVER even used a computer, let alone tried to record a backup to CD-R, and will need handholding through even the simplest process.
First we had a defaced website with some name about it. Then someone boasting about it. Only problem; the boasting which I have seen so far is someone mentioning that the site was hacked, anyone could have done that IMO.
Then its being told that they demanded the data back and he refused. The snippets otoh show an English convo where this alleged hacker had to use translation tools because he apparently didn't understand English too well. I'm pretty sure you can get someone like that to admit to anything you want.
But this makes me wonder; did the Anonymous types perhaps also have access to the server, did they actually got to see the logs and with that information managed to identify the intruders IP address?
Or did this whole story simply go like so many others: they assumed this guy to be guilty simply because he talked about the hack on social media? So far the shared material doesn't exactly fill any gaps and doesn't even proof anything beyond reasonable doubt.
For all we know it could have been Anonymous itself behind it which then used this situation to make themselves look good.
Oh nm, I see now who his host is lol.
Eh, I work in the host biz myself, and even if he didnt have a backup of his own, we could have gotten him back up and running with our server backups in about .... a few hours if he was on a standard shared server and it would have been no cost.
Course I dont know his current hosts policies, maybe they dont provide backup restorations to users or charge an arm and a leg? I know some hosts do :(
Y'know, I'm not sure whose morals I'd chose to embrace, Anonymous, whose decisions I have no control over or those scheming, lying, self-serving shites know as politicians and corporates whom I also have no control over. The antics of one I find entertaining but the antics of the other keeps my blood at a steady simmer.
" I can't help thinking that; 'Our tactics are not reprehensible unless they're used against someone we like, then they are.' has a touch of two-facedness about it."
It really doesn't have any touch of two-facedness about it. It's natural to want the best for charities. There's loads of actions that are OK in one context and not too good in another. That's not two-facedness.
"Likewise deciding who gets to be anonymous, rather than who gets to be 'Anonymous', feels like crossing the line between being hacktivists and 'teh internet police'."
There's a tradition going back to the beginnings of Anonymous to out those they disagree with to the authorities.
"OK, so 'vereyone' is Anon, they have no 'leaders', the '99%', blahblahblah. So who set the rules if they don't have leaders? Face it, the whole Anon thing is just one big herding exercise, with the core Anons playing at building a zombie net made up of real people."
They set their own rules. You might not be able to understand it, but there's no hierarchy, no core, no formal votes, and so on. Anonymous members self-proclaim themselves as members, they know in a general sense what is expected of them and what is prohibited. It's not unprecedented. The LOD/H (Legion of Doom/ Legion of Hackers) in the late 1980s was real similar. LOD did have an actual leader when it started around 1985 (Lex Luthor of course), but he left to go to college. Since then, no leadership, no organization, no central authority, no organized membership. But, it rolled on until the early 1990s, when the feds decided to take down this "group" of hackers. They really couldn't wrap their head around it when they caught the first few people and they said no, they are not part of a cell; no, nobody appointed them to LOD/H; no, there's no leadership. Unlike now with Anonymous, back then once word got out the feds were looking for LOD/H members, there weren't any after that.
@Ken Hagan, very good summation I think. Regarding there being a "true" Anonymous, I don't know if ANY of them say they are the true Anonymous. I think it bubbled up on 4chan but cannot really say that is the origin or the central focus really. But, actually, Anonymous likes to publicize actions, pre-announcing what they will do, trying to bring people into that specific cause (in some cases just wanting Anonymous people to take part, in other cases encouraging anyone to join into a specific cause). People who sit out do know at least that a particular action was planned; whether it got enough support to actually take place or not is of course another matter.
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