teknoarcanist said:
Therumancer said:
Well, I'm no expert on it but I think people don't quite get that there is a differance between Anonymous and the hordes of /B/ despite efforts being made to enlighten people on this here and there.
My immediate guess would be thatit's some internal drama that snowballed, Anonymous itself may not even be involved on the fringes. I don't follow the site so I can't make an educated guess.
That said like "Encylopedia Dramatica", "Something Awful", and other sites, "4-Chan" seems to have beeen attacked before it's all part of what goes on when sites irritate people and get attention, or have a lot of people constantly involved in one sort of drama or another.
I doubt we'll ever know what happened for sure.
One culprit I think people might not be considering are various goverments. I mean Anonymous *DID* declare war on most of the civilized world, and started taking down some computer systems. While I unlikely, given the difficulty of actually tracking down a "collective" like this and doing anything, it's possible the authorities, not understanding what they are dealing with, decided to try and make a counter-strike on what they saw as the center of activity or whatever. This is extremely unlikely compared to many other possiilities however.
When the 'authorities' want your site taken down, they don't DDoS it. They just send the Party Van.
Man the more I think about it, /b DDOSing itself is like a crippled hive-mind giving itself an aneurysm out of pure spite. Much win.
Actually, I think your wrong here. I myself said it's unlikely, but the problem with groups like the channers and/or Anonymous is that there isn't anyone to "Van". The anonymous nature of the organizations/site means that it's pretty much impossible to determine who did what, or even where they are, heck the people doing it might not even be in the country. This is why even in cases of harassment and cyber-terrorism against some pretty wealthy groups, Anonymous and sites like 4-Chan have never been taken down. Really the only person that could be targeted off the top of my head is Moot, and what are they going to arrest him for? There isn't anything tying him to any direct crime, all he does is run some anonymous image boards where these guys hang out as far as the law is concerned. Even if the goverment DID Van a bunch of people it's not going to accomplish anything, those arrested will probably get Loled, and business will go on like usual because there are a lot of these guys. On the other hand, attacking the 4-chan does hamper the communication a bit, even if it doesn't stop because 4-chan is hardly the only site of this type, or the only place used to communicate (and honestly, while well known, I don't think it's even where the majority of the "serious business" takes place, the authorities always being behind the times).
I've read a bit about informational warfare, and yeah, the goverment is going to resort to things like this. Their attitude is more or less along the lines of doing something they feel a group might try and disrupt, so they go for a pre-emptive disruption of their own to prevent them from acting. Sort of like those Tom Clancy "Net Force" books, but on a much smaller scale, and not as overdramatic.
People laughed at the whole thing when Jessie Slaughter's father threatened to call the "Cyber Police" because there is no such thing. The goverment really has very little it can do about large, loosely-organized, coalitions of hackers. That's why Anonymous is "everywhere" so to speak, and why threats of violence are meaningless. Even if you really are a tough guy and found a couple of people involved and beat the living tar out of them, it would mean absolutly nothing overall, above and beyond the point that most people making threats over the internet couldn't carry them out if they wanted to.
Don't get me wrong though, your most likely correct that it's internal. It's occured to me that some of the fights being picked by "hacktivists" recently are a bit dubious and not the kind of thing that is going to hold that entire community together like some other issues did. A good example of this is the entire "wikileaks" thing, just as a lot of people who have supported a goodly number of actions by Anonymous (like me) have some issues with that cause, I'd imagine there are people on the "inside" who have similar thoughts. It being on a level substantially differant than say making a point to Australia over the kinds of censorship it was engaging in at the time.
