Anonymous (group) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Anonymous (used as a proper noun) is a loosely associated international network of activist and hacktivist entities. A website nominally associated with the group describes it as "an Internet gathering" with "a very loose and decentralized command structure that operates on ideas rather than directives". The group became known for a series of well- publicized publicity stunts and distributed denial- of- service (DDo. S) attacks on government, religious, and corporate websites. Anonymous originated in 2. Anonymous members (known as "Anons") can be distinguished in public by the wearing of stylised Guy Fawkes masks.[5]In its early form, the concept was adopted by a decentralized online community acting anonymously in a coordinated manner, usually toward a loosely self- agreed goal, and primarily focused on entertainment, or "lulz". Beginning with 2. Project Chanology—a series of protests, pranks, and hacks targeting the Church of Scientology—the Anonymous collective became increasingly associated with collaborative hacktivism on a number of issues internationally. Individuals claiming to align themselves with Anonymous undertook protests and other actions (including direct action) in retaliation against anti- digital piracy campaigns by motion picture and recording industry trade associations. Later targets of Anonymous hacktivism included government agencies of the US, Israel, Tunisia, Uganda, and others; ISIS; child pornography sites; copyright protection agencies; the Westboro Baptist Church; and corporations such as Pay. Pal, Master. Card, Visa, and Sony. Anons have publicly supported Wiki. Leaks and the Occupy movement. Related groups Lulz. Sec and Operation Anti. Sec carried out cyberattacks on US government agencies, media, video game companies, military contractors, military personnel, and police officers, resulting in the attention of law enforcement to the groups' activities. Some actions by the group have been described as being anti- Zionist. It has threatened to erase Israel from the Internet[6][dubious– discuss] and engaged in the "#Op. Israel" cyber- attacks of Israeli websites on Yom Ha. Does it do more harm than good? be so rude. Is PLF part of Anonymous or. powerful nongovernmental hacking collective in the world. Even so. Politics WorldPost Business Media Sports Education Crime Weird News Good News. Most members of Anonymous remain. Hacking, Anonymous. FOLLOW HUFFPOST. . while others employ illegal measures such as DDoS attacks and hacking. but failed to do so. When asked what good Anonymous had done for the world. About.com shows you the difference between good and bad hackers. Examples of famous hackers. Black Hat. Anonymous. Infamous for hacking into the. How to recognize members of Anonymous? THE ANONOYMOUS BECAUSE THE ONE U TRUST IS ANONYMOUS FOR US SO TAKE ME IN IAM GOOD SKILLED BUT. Hacking from the. Shoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) in 2. Dozens of people have been arrested for involvement in Anonymous cyberattacks, in countries including the US, UK, Australia, the Netherlands, Spain, and Turkey. Evaluations of the group's actions and effectiveness vary widely. Supporters have called the group "freedom fighters"[8] and digital Robin Hoods[9] while critics have described them as "a cyber lynch- mob"[1. In 2. 01. 2, Time called Anonymous one of the "1. Philosophy. Anonymous has no strictly defined philosophy, and internal dissent is a regular feature of the group. A website associated with the group describes it as "an Internet gathering" with "a very loose and decentralized command structure that operates on ideas rather than directives". Gabriella Coleman writes of the group, "In some ways, it may be impossible to gauge the intent and motive of thousands of participants, many of who don't even bother to leave a trace of their thoughts, motivations, and reactions. Among those that do, opinions vary considerably."[1. Broadly speaking, Anons oppose internet censorship and control, and the majority of their actions target governments, organizations, and corporations that they accuse of censorship. Anons were early supporters of the global Occupy movement and the Arab Spring. Since 2. 00. 8, a frequent subject of disagreement within Anonymous is whether members should focus on pranking and entertainment or more serious (and in some cases political) activism. We [Anonymous] just happen to be a group of people on the Internet who need—just kind of an outlet to do as we wish, that we wouldn't be able to do in regular society. That's more or less the point of it. Do as you wish. .. There's a common phrase: 'we are doing it for the lulz.'”Because Anonymous has no leadership, no action can be attributed to the membership as a whole. Parmy Olson and others have criticized media coverage that presents the group as well- organized or homogeneous; Olson writes, "There was no single leader pulling the levers, but a few organizational minds that sometimes pooled together to start planning a stunt." Some members protest using legal means, while others employ illegal measures such as DDo. S attacks and hacking. Membership is open to anyone who wishes to state they are a member of the collective; Carole Cadwalladr of The Observer compared the group's decentralized structure to that of al- Qaeda, writing, "If you believe in Anonymous, and call yourself Anonymous, you are Anonymous."[2. Olson, who formerly described Anonymous as a "brand", stated in 2. It is a crowd of people, a nebulous crowd of people, working together and doing things together for various purposes."[2. The group's few rules include not disclosing one's identity, not talking about the group, and not attacking media. Members commonly use the tagline "We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us."[2. 3] Brian Kelly writes that three of the group's key characteristics are "(1) an unrelenting moral stance on issues and rights, regardless of direct provocation; (2) a physical presence that accompanies online hacking activity; and (3) a distinctive brand."Journalists have commented that Anonymous' secrecy, fabrications, and media awareness pose an unusual challenge for reporting on the group's actions and motivations.[2. Quinn Norton of Wired writes that "Anons lie when they have no reason to lie. They weave vast fabrications as a form of performance. Then they tell the truth at unexpected and unfortunate times, sometimes destroying themselves in the process. They are unpredictable."[2. Norton states that the difficulties in reporting on the group cause most writers, including herself, to focus on the "small groups of hackers who stole the limelight from a legion, defied their values, and crashed violently into the law" rather than "Anonymous’s sea of voices, all experimenting with new ways of being in the world".[2. History. 4chan raids (2. KTTV Fox 1. 1 investigative report on Anonymous. The report focused on what were then contemporary instances of internet bullying by Anonymous.[2. The name Anonymous itself is inspired by the perceived anonymity under which users post images and comments on the Internet. Usage of the term Anonymous in the sense of a shared identity began on imageboards, particularly the /b/ board of 4chan, dedicated to random content. A tag of Anonymous is assigned to visitors who leave comments without identifying the originator of the posted content. Users of imageboards sometimes jokingly acted as if Anonymous was a single individual. The concept of the Anonymous entity advanced in 2. Forced_Anon" protocol that signed all posts as Anonymous. As the popularity of imageboards increased, the idea of Anonymous as a collective of unnamed individuals became an Internet meme.[2. Users of 4chan's /b/ board would occasionally join into mass pranks or raids. In a raid on July 1. Finnish social networking site Habbo Hotel with identical avatars; the avatars blocked regular Habbo members from accessing the digital hotel's pool, stating it was "closed due to fail and AIDS". Future Lulz. Sec member Topiary became involved with the site at this time, inviting large audiences to listen to his prank phone calls via Skype.[a] Due to the growing traffic on 4chan's boards, users soon began to plot pranks offline using Internet Relay Chat (IRC). These raids resulted in the first mainstream press story on Anonymous, a report by Fox station KTTV in Los Angeles, California in the U. S. The report called the group "hackers on steroids", "domestic terrorists", and an "Internet hate machine".[2. Encyclopedia Dramatica (2. Encyclopedia Dramatica was founded in 2. Sherrod Di. Grippo, initially as a means of documenting gossip related to livejournal, but it quickly was adopted as a major platform by Anonymous for satirical and other purposes.[3. The not safe for work site celebrates a subversive "trolling culture", and documents Internet memes, culture, and events, such as mass pranks, trolling events, "raids", large scale failures of Internet security, and criticism of Internet communities that are accused of self- censorship in order to garner prestige or positive coverage from traditional and established media outlets. Journalist Julian Dibbell described Encyclop. Г¦dia Dramatica as the site "where the vast parallel universe of Anonymous in- jokes, catchphrases, and obsessions is lovingly annotated, and you will discover an elaborate trolling culture: Flamingly racist and misogynist content lurks throughout, all of it calculated to offend."[3. The site also played a role in the anti- Scientology campaign of Project Chanology.[3. On April 1. 4, 2. URL of the site was redirected to a new website named Oh Internet that bore little resemblance to Encyclopedia Dramatica. Parts of the ED community harshly criticized the changes.[3. In response, Anonymous launched "Operation Save ED" to rescue and restore the site's content.[3. The Web Ecology Project made a downloadable archive of former Encyclopedia Dramatica content.[3. The site's reincarnation was initially hosted at encyclopediadramatica. Ryan Cleary, who later was arrested in relation to attacks by Lulz. Sec against Sony. Project Chanology (2. Anonymous first became associated with hacktivism[b] in 2. Church of Scientology known as Project Chanology. On January 1. 5, 2. Gawker posted a video in which celebrity Scientologist Tom Cruise praised the religion; [4. Church responded with a cease- and- desist letter for violation of copyright.[4. Church in retaliation, prank- calling its hotline, sending black faxes designed to waste ink cartridges, and launching DDo. S attacks against its websites.[4. The DDo. S attacks were at first carried out with the applications Gigaloader and JMeter. An Inside Look at Anonymous, the Radical Hacking Collective. Anyone can join Anonymous simply by claiming affiliation. An anthropologist says that participants “remain subordinate to a focus on the epic win—and, especially, the lulz. Credit Paper Sculpture by Jeff Nishinaka. В / Photograph by Scott Dunbar In the mid- nineteen- seventies, when Christopher Doyon was a child in rural Maine, he spent hours chatting with strangers on CB radio. His handle was Big Red, for his hair. Transmitters lined the walls of his bedroom, and he persuaded his father to attach two directional antennas to the roof of their house. CB radio was associated primarily with truck drivers, but Doyon and others used it to form the sort of virtual community that later appeared on the Internet, with self- selected nicknames, inside jokes, and an earnest desire to effect change. Doyon’s mother died when he was a child, and he and his younger sister were reared by their father, who they both say was physically abusive. Doyon found solace, and a sense of purpose, in the CB- radio community. He and his friends took turns monitoring the local emergency channel. One friend’s father bought a bubble light and affixed it to the roof of his car; when the boys heard a distress call from a stranded motorist, he’d drive them to the side of the highway. There wasn’t much they could do beyond offering to call 9. Small and wiry, with a thick New England accent, Doyon was fascinated by “Star Trek” and Isaac Asimov novels. When he saw an ad in Popular Mechanics for a build- your- own personal- computer kit, he asked his grandmother to buy it for him, and he spent months figuring out how to put it together and hook it up to the Internet. Compared with the sparsely populated CB airwaves, online chat rooms were a revelation. I just click a button, hit this guy’s name, and I’m talking to him,” Doyon recalled recently. It was just breathtaking. At the age of fourteen, he ran away from home, and two years later he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, a hub of the emerging computer counterculture. The Tech Model Railroad Club, which had been founded thirty- four years earlier by train hobbyists at M. I. T., had evolved into “hackers”—the first group to popularize the term. Richard Stallman, a computer scientist who worked in M. I. T. ’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the time, says that these early hackers were more likely to pass around copies of “GГ¶del, Escher, Bach” than to incite technological warfare. We didn’t have tenets,” Stallman said. It wasn’t a movement. It was just a thing that people did to impress each other. Some of their “hacks” were fun (coding video games); others were functional (improving computer- processing speeds); and some were pranks that took place in the real world (placing mock street signs near campus). Michael Patton, who helped run the T. M. R. C. in the seventies, told me that the original hackers had unwritten rules and that the first one was “Do no damage. In Cambridge, Doyon supported himself through odd jobs and panhandling, preferring the freedom of sleeping on park benches to the monotony of a regular job. In 1. 98. 5, he and a half- dozen other activists formed an electronic “militia. Echoing the Animal Liberation Front, they called themselves the Peoples Liberation Front. They adopted aliases: the founder, a towering middle- aged man who claimed to be a military veteran, called himself Commander Adama; Doyon went by Commander X. Inspired by the Merry Pranksters, they sold LSD at Grateful Dead shows and used some of the cash to outfit an old school bus with bullhorns, cameras, and battery chargers. They also rented a basement apartment in Cambridge, where Doyon occasionally slept. Doyon was drawn to computers, but he was not an expert coder. In a series of conversations over the past year, he told me that he saw himself as an activist, in the radical tradition of Abbie Hoffman and Eldridge Cleaver; technology was merely his medium of dissent. In the eighties, students at Harvard and M. I. T. held rallies urging their schools to divest from South Africa. To help the protesters communicate over a secure channel, the P. L. F. built radio kits: mobile FM transmitters, retractable antennas, and microphones, all stuffed inside backpacks. Willard Johnson, an activist and a political scientist at M. I. T., said that hackers were not a transformative presence at rallies. Most of our work was still done using a bullhorn,” he said. In 1. 99. 2, at a Grateful Dead concert in Indiana, Doyon sold three hundred hits of acid to an undercover narcotics agent. He was sentenced to twelve years in Pendleton Correctional Facility, of which he served five. While there, he developed an interest in religion and philosophy and took classes from Ball State University. Netscape Navigator, the first commercial Web browser, was released in 1. Doyon was incarcerated. When he returned to Cambridge, the P. L. F. was still active, and their tools had a much wider reach. The change, Doyon recalls, “was gigantic—it was the difference between sending up smoke signals and being able to telegraph someone. Hackers defaced an Indian military Web site with the words “Save Kashmir. In Serbia, hackers took down an Albanian site. Stefan Wray, an early online activist, defended such tactics at an “anti- Columbus Day” rally in New York. We see this as a form of electronic civil disobedience,” he told the crowd. In 1. 99. 9, the Recording Industry Association of America sued Napster, the file- sharing service, for copyright infringement. As a result, Napster was shut down in 2. Doyon and other hackers disabled the R. I. A. A. site for a weekend, using a Distributed Denial of Service, or DDo. S, attack, which floods a site with so much data that it slows down or crashes. Doyon defended his actions, employing the heightened rhetoric of other “hacktivists. We quickly came to understand that the battle to defend Napster was symbolic of the battle to preserve a free internet,” he later wrote. One day in 2. 00. Doyon and Commander Adama met at the P. L. F. ’s basement apartment in Cambridge. Adama showed Doyon the Web site of the Epilepsy Foundation, on which a link, instead of leading to a discussion forum, triggered a series of flashing colored lights. Some epileptics are sensitive to strobes; out of sheer malice, someone was trying to induce seizures in innocent people. There had been at least one victim already. Doyon was incensed. He asked Adama who would do such a thing. Ever hear of a group called Anonymous? Adama said. In 2. Christopher Poole, a fifteen- year- old insomniac from New York City, launched 4chan, a discussion board where fans of anime could post photographs and snarky comments. The focus quickly widened to include many of the Internet’s earliest memes: LOLcats, Chocolate Rain, Rick. Rolls. Users who did not enter a screen name were given the default handle Anonymous. I need to talk about my inner life. Buy the print »Poole hoped that anonymity would keep things irreverent. We have no intention of partaking in intelligent discussions concerning foreign affairs,” he wrote on the site. One of the highest values within the 4chan community was the pursuit of “lulz,” a term derived from the acronym LOL. Lulz were often achieved by sharing puerile jokes or images, many of them pornographic or scatological. The most shocking of these were posted on a part of the site labelled /b/, whose users called themselves /b/tards. Doyon was aware of 4chan, but considered its users “a bunch of stupid little pranksters. Around 2. 00. 4, some people on /b/ started referring to “Anonymous” as an independent entity. It was a new kind of hacker collective. It’s not a group,” Mikko Hypponen, a leading computer- security researcher, told me—rather, it could be thought of as a shape- shifting subculture. Barrett Brown, a Texas journalist and a well- known champion of Anonymous, has described it as “a series of relationships. There was no membership fee or initiation. Anyone who wanted to be a part of Anonymous—an Anon—could simply claim allegiance. Despite 4chan’s focus on trivial topics, many Anons considered themselves crusaders for justice. They launched vigilante campaigns that were purposeful, if sometimes misguided. More than once, they posed as underage girls in order to entrap pedophiles, whose personal information they sent to the police. Other Anons were apolitical and sowed chaos for the lulz. One of them posted images on /b/ of what looked like pipe bombs; another threatened to blow up several football stadiums and was arrested by the F. B. I. In 2. 00. 7, a local news affiliate in Los Angeles called Anonymous “an Internet hate machine. In January, 2. 00. Gawker Media posted a video in which Tom Cruise enthusiastically touted the benefits of Scientology. The video was copyright- protected, and the Church of Scientology sent a cease- and- desist letter to Gawker, asking that the video be removed. Anonymous viewed the church’s demands as attempts at censorship. I think it’s time for /b/ to do something big,” someone posted on 4chan. I’m talking about вЂhacking’ or вЂtaking down’ the official Scientology Web site. An Anon used You. Tube to issue a “press release,” which included stock footage of storm clouds and a computerized voice- over. We shall proceed to expel you from the Internet and systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology in its present form,” the voice said. You have nowhere to hide. Within a few weeks, the You. Tube video had been viewed more than two million times. Anonymous had outgrown 4chan. The hackers met in dedicated Internet Relay Chat channels, or I. R. C. s, to co. Г¶rdinate tactics. Using DDo. S attacks, they caused the main Scientology Web site to crash intermittently for several days.
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