Wednesday, 27 July 2011 22:21

There is nothing to fear, but fear itself... and Anon of course

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eye-maskAnon has something of a reputation (like you did not know that). Its reputation is often enough to put fear into people or corporations. So when Anonymous put out a call on their IRC channel targeting PayPal and asking for a mass walkout. Many people left, we would be willing to wager that many of these left because they were scared of Anon hacking the internet bank (yes PayPal is a bank). Of course you have to wonder about why Anon would target PayPal in the first place… Well that is a pretty long story.

You may or may not have read our article on the media’s misconception of Anon and the how, when and why it got started. Well if you have not you can read it here; now that you have caught up we can work on the why’s of the PayPal attacks in a way. The Media will tell you this latest call to arms is over the decision of PayPal to allow the government to seize funds that we allocated to WikiLeaks and this is sort of true. But it is more in line with their general philosophy (which is something of a new development) against the way corporate entities and governments treat the average citizen and consumer. PayPal has long been a corporation that finds every way it can to pull money from the people that use its services.  Their fees are legendary in the way they can change even as part of the same transaction.  When you add this to the recent agreement of PayPal to report transactions to the IRS and other governmental bodies (for tax reasons of course), you get a rather shady company.

Now tie this in with PayPal’s parent company Ebay. Here you have another one that likes to stick it to its users. To top things off… Ebay has even tried to make PayPal the only way to pay for purchases on their service. Fortunately for now, there is little chance of this happening in the US. But, it is still interesting to see their motivation as well as their methods (talking about Ebay now).  I have to say that I am in agreement with some of their statements and also find it refreshing to see the big corporations actually fear something.

So, … when you hear about Anon, Lulzsec and Antisec and how they are in an uproar over the Wikileaks debacle you might also consider that they are using this as a cover to launch disruptive actions against some of the larger and more corrupt companies. So far, there has been very little consumer fall out (something that has not always been true in the past) which put some credibility to the rumblings that Wikileaks was just a convenient cover to hide behind for now… At least until they get bored and find something else to get behind.

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Read 3901 times Last modified on Wednesday, 27 July 2011 22:48

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