Displaying items by tag: Anonymous

Anonymous has announced they intend to bring the social networking (notworking?) site Facebook down on November 5th.  You might be wondering why Anon would go after Facebook when its founder Mark Zuckerberg has been idolized as a geek and a hacker in many biograph

ies and books.

Plus isn’t Facebook a place where information is freely shared by those that want to share it? Most would have thought that Facebook of all places would be safe. However, it is not and here is why.

This first thing is that Facebook has in the past taken liberty with its user’s images, personal information and has been rumored to pass information along to government agencies in people or groups that may use, let’s say inflammatory language. It has also been rumored (one that no one has been able to confirm) that Facebook maybe allowing advertiser (or governments) to view users preferences and possibly actual pages.  We do know that Anonymous believes this at the very least. Now all of this would be good enough reason for the group of hackers with a cause, but there is more and this is possibly one of the real reasons. You see Facebook is getting ready to launch a facial recognition API that can pull data on people tagged in pictures from sources around the net. It is also rumored to be able to match aliases from dating sites, forums, etc. as long as the API can link the real name with the screen name. This massively privacy invading bit of software has already been declared illegal in Germany and w

e have hopes that other countries will follow.  We believe this is what Anonymous is actually alluding to when they say “for the sake of your own privacy”.  

Much of the rest of their press release (shown in its entirety below) also has truth in it. According to the same German lawmakers that want the Facial Recognition API removed, Facebook makes the removal of the data collected by the software almost impossible to delete even after the image that person was tagged in it removed from the profile.  We think this is what Anon is talking about when they say “your personal info stays on Facebook and can be recovered at any time”, but it is also true that what you put in Facebook stays on Facebook even when you leave.

So will Anon bring down Zuckerberg and his social networking/ information collection site, or is this another threat that the group will lose interest in before the date they have set aside. A date that hold special meaning to the British and which was immortalized in the move “V for Vendetta”. Will Zuckerberg prepare and harden the Facebook servers? I guess we will see on November the 5th.

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It seems that some members of the AntiSec group have recently released a large amount of information about law enforcement officers to include their names addresses, social security numbers and in some cases credit card information. Now, I have no love at all for corrupt police officers or ones that abuse their position of authority, but exposing their personal information puts innocents at risk.

You see the bad guys rarely go after the officer in question directly. No, they go after the family the wife, kids etc.  So while I have never had an issue with the things that Anonymous have done in the past. For the most part they go after corporate entities that have no respect for the consumer or anyone else for that matter. However this particular portion of the group has stepped over a line that will lose them appeal from the average person. Now the media can claim they have put innocent people at risk (and they have in truth).  

Anonymous was better off when they were going after the corporations and the government instead of releasing information of this type. Of course on the other side of the coin, I also put blame on the people hosting these sites as they are responsible for protecting that information and failed in that duty not once but twice.

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Anon 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.

Yesterday we were sent a link to some interesting news about a nation-wide crackdown on suspected Anon members. This even included a “hacker” that is fairly close to where I live. The total number of people that were collared was around 15. The FBI and other agencies were very pleased with the day’s activities and went on to say that this was a “major arrest”. However was it really? Do the news or Law Enforcement agencies involved have any clue as to what is really going on? One little indicator that they do not comes up with their timeline; according to most media sources Anon starts as a result of the WikiLeaks incident. However most of the groups involved with Anon pre-date that by many years (in fact Anon does as well).

In what is a rather interesting move for the mischievous group known as ANONYMOUS we are hearing they are working to file a real, legal class action law suit against what they are calling “private Federal Reserve Bank and it's shareholders”. Their claim is simple, they are angry that the Fed allowed the toxic debt that were building in 2008 and 2009 (and before when you really get to it) and now want accountability. They are asking everyone to join in for this. They have posted a PR statement and also Youtube video explaining everything. Since a picture is worth a thousand words we will let them speak for themselves but have also posted up their typed PR Statement.