HBGary Hired to Take Down Anonymous, Anonymous Takes Down HBGary

Kayeka: The security company is shitty anyway.

More on topic: I found myself indirectly learning a lot more about Anon from that than I already knew. How educational. Of course, all of this would probably be common knowledge to me if I actually had the courage to venture into one of the Chans.

As far as I've seen, the people on the chans are mostly wannabes, and what would be more accurately called Anonymous mostly coordinates on IRC.

You know, I hate to be the guy cheering for Anonymous, but...

Yay, Anonymous!

Tempting Fate when mixed with Hubris is always amusing to see.

I feel sorry for the people that work there. "cash flow problems" is business speak for fucking broke. I do like how his coder just up and refused to do things he knew would cause trouble.

You guys are saying arron burr is an idiot. I say he got paid well to look at 16 yr girls facebook pages. Your move.

Aaron Barr. Aaron Burr is a different person.

Sorry for the typo, leaving it in because it's funny as hell.

It's true and inevitable that innocent people get hurt when big companies get taken down.

But that's how big companies shield themselves from any negative effects. Raise corporate taxes? It'll hurt the economy! Fine them for breaking laws? That might lead to layoffs! Big scandal hurts their stock value? Think of all the poor retirees with their 401ks!

I don't find Anonymous' methodologies particularly compelling from a moral or ethical standpoint, but I can definitely see the humor value in their complete annihilation of a pretentious prick. Anyway, if a security firm is vulnerable to attacks of this nature, I'd imagine they don't really deserve to be in business anyway. (DDOS excepted; you can't defend against that internally.)

One of the reasons that's a problem in the first place is because of the severely top-heavy pay scale of most big corporations.

edited 14th Feb '11 12:37:15 PM by Fighteer

Good point. You shouldn't be allowed to take large chunks of the economy hostage to protect yourself.

Taoist: Screw HB Gary for the obvious reasons.

Screw Anon because they go after innocent people or weirdos to amuse themselves and bully and harass them because they find it funny.

"And while there's not exactly much you can do to influence the behavior of an amorphous superconsciousness, positive reinforcement for the good things it does do seems like a worthwhile effort." - darksidevoid

Why not negative reinforcement for the bad things it does?

EDIT: Also...

"Tempting Fate when mixed with Hubris is always amusing to see." - CDA

Hell, the guy's pic in the OP-linked news story even shows him having the Smug Snake smirk. It's within TV Tropes width limit too... perhaps we could consider using that for that page's image links section?

edited 14th Feb '11 1:20:17 PM by neoYTPism

I'm not even sure the anons who troll people are the same ones who go after the likes of HBGF. That's the thing about amorphous organizations with no membership filter.

From what I've seen of Anon's doings — I think Anon can make a great horror/thriller story. If you are the man on the 'wrong' end.

Negative reinforcement would be good, yeah, but the problem is in actually applying it. You have to tailor things like that in a certain way to avoid simply adding more fuel to the fire, considerably more complicated than the other end of the spectrum. Ultimately, you'd have to get the hivemind to collectively feel remorse, which would be, frankly, difficult as hell.

So I'm not saying it's a bad idea, just very hard to do. And I, for one, am not going to attempt anything of that nature unless I can somehow be sure I'm pressing the right buttons. Anything else would be... unwise. I think positive reinforcement works better, either way.

It's also that the group that took on Scientology, and the group that tried to take down Mastercard are probably made of completely different people. Same goes for any raid Anonymous does.

They call themselves Anonymous because they are anonymous. Constantly shifting members, the person that spearheads one raid could be a participant in another, and openly derisive of a third. You're going to get everything from wannabe nerds, up to people that actually know their shit.

That too. Why do I always forget the important parts? Blah.

Hubris? Hell, I reckon that Icarus would have gone up to this guy and said 'dude, maybe this isn't such a great idea'.

Anonymous, it's Chaotic Neutral at its finest, or worst, depending on your POV.

edited 14th Feb '11 4:00:33 PM by rmctagg09

Half the appeal of being Chaotic Neutral is that you can go from "finest" to "worst" at the drop of a hat, in response to a signal no one else notices.

...I'm romanticizing these guys kind of a lot, I think.

Okay can I just point out something that seems to me like common sense, but maybe not?

Anonymous....isn't a thing. It's a group of people who frequent the Chan sites. They're not one thing, they're not even a hivemind. They're internet users, not bees. Blasting or praising them as a whole is kinda meaningless. Arguing about their merits as an organization, moreso, since they're not one anymore than Tropers are.

To put this into perspective. Imagine how different say, Janitor and shinfernape are. That's likely how different Anon's comprising "members" are.

To be fair, Barr was aware of that description of Anonymous. In fact, the entire point of his little crusade was to take that on board and debunk it, because he thought it was an illusion hiding the group's true nature.

And then he got proven horribly wrong and the internet descended upon him and his company en masse. So it goes.

Which just shows that he's gullible.

Gullible implies that you actually bother to listen to other people sometimes.

The difference is that none of them really have easily accessible names. There might be a few users with common handles here and there, but it makes it really hard to account for and track how big anon really is.

On the other hand though, about 1/4th of anon has any actual skills when it comes to hacking. The rest are a huge legion of other folks who jointly claim responsibility for such disruptions.

It's also that the group that took on Scientology, and the group that tried to take down Mastercard are probably made of completely different people. Same goes for any raid Anonymous does.

They call themselves Anonymous because they are anonymous. Constantly shifting members, the person that spearheads one raid could be a participant in another, and openly derisive of a third. You're going to get everything from wannabe nerds, up to people that actually know their shit.

Exactly. While I've jumped in as a voice in the crowd with anon on a number of occasions, there are some that I stay out of and don't support. Examples being that while I totally supported trashing Scientology, I don't support the way most of anon feels about Private Manning.

edited 14th Feb '11 6:04:19 PM by Barkey

Most people are probably like that, after all even different members of the same hivemind have differing opinions.

But yeah, I support Anonymous on this one, mearly because you don't take down anonymous, it just doesn't happen, The internet would collapse without them. Anonymous is like the backbone of internet culture, it would be like if Russia just disapeared, and I mean if the ground the country existed on just physically stopped existing.