bassdrum said:
As much as I think Anonymous are just a bunch of useless teenagers trying to grab attention, this actually made me laugh. The sheer ridiculousness of this makes me think that maybe 4chan actually can do something amusing every once in a while.
Congratulations on making my day more amusing, Anonymous. If only more of the things you did were amusing pranks and not bullshit about how piracy should be legal.
I don't think it's Anonymous, or if it is they are just showing that they have a sense of humor.
See, the thing is that anyone can claim to be a member usually. I also think that the differance between Anonymous and the hordes of /B/ is not well known, even to many members of the hordes of /B/.
I have mixed opinions on their actions and targets over the years, but then again I figure it's like that for most people. I'd point out that Anonymous has succeeded in landing some pretty impressive cyber-attacks over the years, taking down websites from major goverments and the like even if it was short term (at least from what I'm reading). Anonymous can also ruin a relatively ordinary person's life rather easily if they decide to focus their ire.
Even if you disrespect the group and what it does, I think dismissing them as just a bored group of teenagers is a mistake. Even if that *IS* their membership they have still done enough where you can't dismiss them as a random group of trolls, and truthfully with some of the things attributed to them I think they need to have more than bored teenagers in their ranks. I'd personally suspect that Anonymous probably has a decent core membership (as much as it has one) of computer professionals. Down the road if there was ever some kind of expose I think you'd probably find that a lot of the people involved worked for the IS departments of some of the companies and offices targeted over the years, and probably has it's masses mostly at a collegiate level, with some of the people teaching computer courses in differant places involved. I'm hardly an expert, but given the lack of reported success in tracking them down, I'd imagne a lot of their attacks have been centalized from school computer labs (which would involve the approval of people in the administration) where there are powerful systems that see a lot of potential users and a lot of traffic, making it hard to pin anyone down even if they were located. At the level of some of these operations, I don't think the heavy lifting was being done by 15 year olds on Mommy's computer.
