Anonops #10: Stop SOPA

Its Over 9000!!! [Original Video and Audio]

LOLPRAH: OVER 9000 PENISES!

Tom Cruise Scientology Video - ( Original UNCUT )

Message to Scientology

Operation Payback - Anonymous Message About ACTA Laws, Internet Censorship and Copyright

Anonymous Hacks Westboro Baptist Church Website During Live Confrontation

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http://www.thinq.co.uk/20(...)persecute-anonymous/
NATO leaders have been warned that WikiLeaks-loving 'hacktivist' collective Anonymous could pose a threat to member states' security, following recent attacks on the US Chamber of Commerce and defence contractor HBGary - and promise to 'persecute' its members.

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From a single hashtag, a protest circled the world

(Reuters) - It all started innocuously enough with a July 13 blog post urging people to #OccupyWallStreet, as though such a thing (Twitter hashtag and all) were possible.

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Forbes: Stupid GoDaddy Deserves Boycott

More than 70,000 domains lost in less than a week with an organized protest scheduled Thursday. That’s what support for the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act has cost tacky domain registrar GoDaddy so far.

“It’s an obnoxious, annoying, shallow, sleazy company founded by a man, Bob Parsons, who shares all of those attributes,” is what SF Weekly blogger Dan Mitchell says about the company is a post entitled “GoDaddy’s Wall-to-Wall Awfulness.”

In it, he details what makes GoDaddy one of the least classy companies in the whole Internet industry. As Mitchell describes the company’s sins:


. Inane and sophomoric, if often effective, marketing, meant to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Parsons has repeatedly referred to how edgy his company and its commercials are. If you have to call yourself edgy, you aint edgy.

. Arbitrarily yanking sites from the Internet. This fits in with GoDaddys (supposedly former) support of SOPA.

. A CEO who loves killing elephants. Really, if you enjoy shooting elephants, as former CEO (now executive chairman) Parsons (who reliably comes off as a complete jerk) did earlier this year, theres something wrong with you.


There is also the issue of the 2006 phantom IPO that was announced and later pulled, supposedly because of media criticism.

How stupid does a company have to be to take an aggressive stance on a hugely controversial issue and then abruptly reverse itself unconvincingly, to be sure when customers start noticing? If you want to look like a gaggle of idiots, thats perhaps the best way for a company to do it.

What was GoDaddy thinking?

Either the company had a valid reason to support SOPA and I can think of some or it did not. I will presume the company is less stupid and more gutless, so they had a good reason for supporting SOPA but lacked the guts to take fire when that position became known.

SOPA, depending on what side you are on, would either stop sales of counterfeit goods over the web or blow web security and privacy sky-high. While I support the noble goal stopping crime, technical troubles make SOPA unworkable. I have written elsewhere that the only way to effectively deal with piracy is to engineer a better or new Internet.

You have to wonder about the lack of corporate good sense that led GoDaddy into this mess. Did they think nobody would find out about their SOPA support or that customers wouldnt care? Surely, they didnt believe Internet enthusiast customers would actually welcome GoDaddys SOPA support?

I have never liked GoDaddy and dont even admire their success. I think we are past using busty women to sell Internet services as blatantly as GoDaddy has done. Their pricing takes advantage of, well, people dumb enough to buy Internet domains based upon a models bra size. Whod have thought GoDaddy itself would be as moronic as the company seems to believe its customers to be?

After founder Bob Parsons proudly showed off his ability and willingness to go to Zimbawe and shoot an elephant, I think the answer became pretty clear. As IT World said last March, the company went from racy ads to the truly offensive and called Parsons an idiot in the subhead.

If GoDaddy were to just go away, the world and Internet would be a better place. If I had any domains there to pull, they would already be gone.

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Op woensdag 28 december 2011 22:55 schreef summer2bird het volgende:
Door welk land is de SOPA eigenlijk bedacht?

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SOPA opponents may go nuclear and other 2012 predictions

The Internet's most popular destinations, including eBay, Google, Facebook, and Twitter seem to view Hollywood-backed copyright legislation as an existential threat.

It was Google co-founder Sergey Brin who warned that the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act "would put us on a par with the most oppressive nations in the world." Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Twitter co-founders Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman argue that the bills give the Feds unacceptable "power to censor the Web."

But these companies have yet to roll out the heavy artillery.

When the home pages of Google.com, Amazon.com, Facebook.com, and their Internet allies simultaneously turn black with anti-censorship warnings that ask users to contact politicians about a vote in the U.S. Congress the next day on SOPA, you'll know they're finally serious.

True, it would be the political equivalent of a nuclear option--possibly drawing retributions from the the influential politicos backing SOPA and Protect IP--but one that could nevertheless be launched in 2012.

"There have been some serious discussions about that," says Markham Erickson, who heads the NetCoalition trade association that counts Google, Amazon.com, eBay, and Yahoo as members. "It has never happened before." (See CNET's SOPA FAQ.)

Web firms may be outspent tenfold on lobbyists, but they enjoy one tremendous advantage over the SOPA-backing Hollywood studios and record labels: direct relationships with users.

How many Americans feel a personal connection with an amalgamation named Viacom -- compared with voters who have found places to live on Craigslist and jobs (or spouses) on Facebook and Twitter? How would, say, Sony Music Entertainment, one of the Recording Industry Association of America's board members, cheaply and easily reach out to hundreds of millions of people?

Protect IP and SOPA, of course, represent the latest effort from the Motion Picture Association of America, the RIAA, and their allies to counter what they view as rampant piracy on the Internet, especially offshore sites such as ThePirateBay.org. It would allow the Justice Department to obtain an order to be served on search engines, Internet providers, and other companies forcing them to make a suspected piratical Web site effectively vanish, a kind of Internet death penalty.

There are early signs that the nuclear option is being contemplated. Wikimedia (as in Wikipedia) called SOPA an "Internet Blacklist Bill." Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has proposed an article page blackout as a way to put "maximum pressure on the U.S. government" in response to SOPA.

The Tumblr microblogging site generated 87,834 calls to Congress over SOPA. Over at GoDaddyBoycott.org, a move-your-domain-name protest is scheduled to begin today over the registrar's previous--and still not repudiated--enthusiasm for SOPA. Popular image hosting site Imgur said yesterday it would join the exodus too.

Technically speaking, it wouldn't be difficult to pull off. Web companies already target advertisements based on city or ZIP code.

And it would be effective. A note popping up on the screens of people living in the mostly rural Texas district of SOPA author Lamar Smith, Hollywood's favorite Republican, asking them to call or write and voice their displeasure, would be noticed. If Tumblr could generate nearly 90,000 calls on its own, think of what companies with hundreds of millions of users could do.

If these Web companies believe what their executives say (PDF) about SOPA and Protect IP, they'll let their users know what their elected representatives are contemplating. A Senate floor debate scheduled for January 24, 2012 would be an obvious starting point.

"The reason it hasn't happened is because of the sensitivity," says Erickson, "even when it's a policy issue that benefits their users." He adds: It may happen."

Or it may not. It would change politics if it did.

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Another SOPA Casualty: Imgur To Leave GoDaddy

Yesterday, we discussed the mass exodus domain registrar GoDaddy has been dealing with due to their SOPA support, something GoDaddy backed off of, but only after the damage had been done.

While Wikipedia represents perhaps the most famous of the sites willing to leave GoDaddy’s service, another popular service, Imgur.com, is in the process of moving its domain away from GoDaddy’s index. While Imgur’s popularity is not on Wikipedia’s scale, seeing how it’s the image hosting service of choice for Reddit members, its popularity has grown exponentially over the last year.

Now, it appears as if GoDaddy’s previous SOPA support will cost them another popular domain:

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stillgray twitterde op vrijdag 23-12-2011 om 20:09:59 XKCD and Imgur are both hosted on GoDaddy. They should move to a better host in opposition of #SOPA reageer retweet

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imgur twitterde op woensdag 28-12-2011 om 11:05:25 @stillgray It's in the works. reageer retweet

As pointed out by Gameranx, and other bloggers who fear SOPAs impact, SOPA poses a direct threat to the kind of content Imgur features, which explains their desire to move. Yes, GoDaddy backtracked, but clearly, some doubt the sincerity of GoDaddys new, anti-SOPA stance.

twitter:

peeplaja twitterde op donderdag 29-12-2011 om 17:38:47 Today is the domain transfer day. Remember to move the domains away from godaddy #sopa reageer retweet

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Op donderdag 29 december 2011 18:05 schreef YazooW het volgende:

Heb ik iets gemist ofzo?

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Judge refuses to quash subpoena of Twitter account used by person linked to Occupy Boston

A Suffolk Superior Court judge today ruled against a motion by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union to quash a subpoena for information from Twitter about a user involved with Occupy Boston.

On December 14, Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley filed a subpoena with the social networking site, asking for account information about a user named “p0isAn0n,” who is believed to have ties to the Occupy Boston movement.

Attorney Peter Krupp, on behalf of the ACLU, filed a motion to invalidate the subpoena based on First Amendment grounds.

But after a sidebar conference between the lawyers that lasted mor ethan 30 minutes, Suffolk Superior Court Judge Carol Ball today ruled against the ACLU.

After the hearing, Krupp declined to talk about the specifics of the conversation between lawyers and the judge. But he said the attorneys representing the Twitter user will consider whether to appeal the decision.

“When an administrative subpoena is used to get information that’s protected by the First Amendment, that raises particularly troubling issues,” Krupp said.

Krupp declined to identify the real name of the Twitter personality, who calls himself Guido Fawkes online, and did not say whether he lives in the Boston area. He was not present at today’s hearing, Krupp said.

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'Investeer minder in blauw op straat en meer in internetrechercheurs'

Er moet minder geïnvesteerd worden in blauw op straat en juist meer in internet- en informatierechercheurs. Daarvoor pleit Martin Sitalsing, de korpschef van Twente, in een vraaggesprek dat morgen in de Volkskrant verschijnt.

Volgens Sitalsing zou het politiewerk moeten verschuiven van repressie naar intelligence. 'We moeten onze informatiepositie verbeteren zodat we ons voorspellend vermogen vergroten. Als we informatie goed gebruiken, kunnen we niet alleen meer voorkomen, maar ook meer oplossen.'

Afwijkende patronen
Zo is hij in Twente een project begonnen, samen met onder meer de KLPD en het Israëlische informatie- en beveiligingsbedrijf Athena, om een softwaresysteem te ontwikkelen dat alle openbare informatie scant op afwijkende patronen.

'Door de juiste informatie te verzamelen, kun je mensen tijdig op andere gedachten brengen en criminelen een poot dwars zetten', zegt Sitalsing. 'De politie moet zich veel meer richten op preventie.'

Sitalsing vertrekt half januari bij de politie. Hij wordt directeur van Bureau Jeugdzorg van Groningen. De komst van de nationale politie, de grootste verandering sinds 1993, gaat hij missen. Vanaf volgend jaar wordt de politie centraler aangestuurd.

Eilandjes
De 26 korpsen, die nu nog te vaak opereren als onafhankelijke eilandjes, worden samengevoegd in tien politieregio's. Waar nu nog de burgemeesters veel zeggenschap hebben over de lokale inzet van de agenten, zal straks vanuit Den Haag en de regio meer bepaald worden.

Sitalsing: 'Er is ons verzekerd dat er ruimte blijft voor de lokale inkleuring. Maar de burgemeester kan straks alleen wat zeggen als de openbare orde in het geding is. Het humane aspect van het politiewerk wordt dan een zaak van de Tweede Kamer. Nu kan de regionale politietop hier nog een standpunt over innemen.'

Hoewel Sitalsing voorstander is van de grootscheepse reorganisatie, maakt hij zich zorgen over de toenemende invloed van de politiek op het politiewerk. 'Ik vrees dat de minister zich straks voor ieder lokaal incident moet verantwoorden in de Tweede Kamer. Dat kan handelingsverlegenheid tot gevolg hebben. Het gevaar is dat het belangrijker wordt voor de politie om je aan de procedure te houden dan om het probleem op te lossen. Zodat je aan de minister kunt zeggen: sorry dat de patiënt is overleden, maar de procedure is wel goed doorlopen.'

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GoDaddy bows to boycott, now 'opposes' SOPA copyright bill

GoDaddy, the domain register targeted by online activists in response to its enthusiasm for a pair of Hollywood-backed copyright bills, has finally denounced the legislation in response to a boycott scheduled for today.

Warren Adelman, the company's chief executive, said today that "GoDaddy opposes SOPA," meaning the Stop Online Piracy Act, which is facing a House of Representatives committee vote next month.

A GoDaddy spokeswoman confirmed to CNET this afternoon that "we oppose PIPA, as well." That's the Senate bill known as Protect IP, which will be debated on the Senate floor January 24. (See CNET's SOPA FAQ.)

The idea of boycotting GoDaddy began with a protest thread on Reddit and was aided by Jimmy Wales' announcement last week that "Wikipedia domain names will move away from GoDaddy." It inspired GoDaddyBoycott.org, which urged Internet users and companies to "boycott GoDaddy until they send a letter to Congress taking back any and all support of the House and Senate versions of the Internet censorship bill, both SOPA and PIPA."

GoDaddy did itself few favors by only saying it no longer supported SOPA -- but pointedly not criticizing it -- and declining to answer questions from CNET and customers who asked for further clarification. Accusations of interfering with customers' attempts to leave, which appear to have arisen from a misunderstanding, didn't help.

Neither did gleeful attempts by competitors to lure away GoDaddy customers. At least half a dozen GoDaddy rivals responded with anti-SOPA promotions: NameCheap dubbed December 29 "move your domain" day, offering below-cost transfers with the coupon "SOPASUCKS" plus a $1 donation to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Other registrars such as Dreamhost, HostGator, Hover.com, and Name.com have offered similar anti-SOPA promotions. NameCheap even offered step-by-step instructions titled: "How to transfer a domain from GoDaddy."

After GoDaddy began to back away from SOPA last week, customers-turned-activists demanded a full repudiation. A discussion thread on GoDaddy's support forums said: "Until GoDaddy gets a clue and changes their stance to being opposed to all SOPA-like legislation... my business and I and our network of influence will continue to boycott you."

Today's newly contrite statement from Adelman, the CEO, did just that:

. We have observed a spike in domain name transfers, which are running above normal rates and which we attribute to GoDaddy's prior support for SOPA, which was reversed. GoDaddy opposes SOPA because the legislation has not fulfilled its basic requirement to build a consensus among stake-holders in the technology and Internet communities. Our company regrets the loss of any of our customers, who remain our highest priority, and we hope to repair those relationships and win back their business over time.

SOPA, of course, represents the latest effort from Hollywood's movie and recording studios and their allies to counter what they view as rampant piracy on the Internet, especially at offshore sites such as ThePirateBay.org. It would allow the Justice Department to force search engines, Internet providers, and other companies to make a suspected piratical Web site effectively vanish, a kind of Internet death penalty. It's opposed (PDF) by many Internet companies and Internet users, who often cite free speech concerns.

Before this public relations debacle, GoDaddy had been an enthusiastic supporter of expanding copyright law to deal with "parasite" Web sites. In testimony (PDF) before a House of Representatives hearing this spring, GoDaddy general counsel Christine Jones endorsed Domain Name System (DNS) blocking as a way to prevent Americans from accessing suspected piratical Web sites.

Jones said that DNS blocking is an "effective strategy for disabling access to illegal" Web sites. It can "be done by the registrar (which provides the authoritative DNS response), or, in cases where the registrar is unable or unwilling to comply, by the registry (which provides the Root zone file records -- the database -- for the entire TLD)," she said.

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Veiligheidsdiensten krijgen mogelijk meer aftapbevoegdheden

_{Door Joost Schellevis, vrijdag 30 december 2011 10:55, views: 4.039}

Het kabinet onderzoekt of de veiligheidsdiensten ruimere tapbevoegdheden voor internetverbindingen moeten krijgen. Op dit moment mogen alleen gerichte taps worden gezet, maar straks mogen wellicht virtuele vangnetten worden uitgehangen.

Minister Hans Hillen van Defensie schrijft in een brief aan de Tweede Kamer dat wordt nagedacht over ruimere tapbevoegdheden. Nu mogen veiligheidsdiensten, zoals de AIVD en MIVD, wel 'internettaps' zetten waarbij internetverkeer wordt afgeluisterd, maar die moeten gericht tegen een bepaald persoon worden ingezet. Nu onderzoekt het kabinet of het mogelijk moet worden om ook ongerichte interceptie in te zetten. Daarbij wordt een vangnet uitgehangen, waarna de veiligheidsdiensten in alle verkeer dat wordt onderschept kunnen zoeken naar relevante informatie.

Ongerichte interceptie mag op dit moment ook al voor communicatie in de ether; de veiligheidsdiensten mogen bijvoorbeeld satellietcommunicatie onderscheppen. Het idee om deze bevoegdheid naar internetverbindingen uit te breiden werd geopperd in een rapport van een commissie die toezicht op de veiligheidsdiensten houdt. Hillen informeert de Tweede Kamer 'in de loop van 2012' over de precieze plannen.

Bits of Freedom, dat de Kamerbrief van Hillen ontdekte, zet vraagtekens bij de uitgebreidere tapbevoegdheid. Die zou ervoor kunnen zorgen dat de veiligheidsdiensten onschuldige internetgebruikers in hun gedrag kunnen volgen. De afgelopen jaren heeft de overheid al meer greep op internetcommunicatie proberen te krijgen. Zo moeten internet- en e-mailproviders informatie over het internetgebruik van hun klanten bijhouden. In de Verenigde Staten tappen veiligheidsdiensten al langer ongericht internetverbindingen af.

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Privégegevens 270 Nederlanders online gezet na kraak Anonymous

De internetbeweging Anonymous heeft de privégegevens van 270 Nederlanders online gezet, waaronder PVV-Kamerlid Marcial Hernandez en een aantal journalisten, bankmedewerkers en ambtenaren. Dit meldt Security.nl.

Het gaat om creditcardgegevens, namen, adresgegevens, telefoonnummers, e-mailadressen en wachtwoorden. Hiermee is gemakkelijk creditcardfraude te plegen. De gegevens zijn tijdens een aanval op de commerciële Amerikaanse inlichtingendienst Stratfor buitgemaakt. In totaal zijn de gegevens van meer dan 860.000 personen online gezet, waaronder dus 270 Nederlanders, zo analyseerde Security.nl.

Stratfor is een bedrijf dat tegen betaling analyses over bijvoorbeeld veiligheid aanbiedt. Het bedrijf wordt regelmatig aangehaald door mediabedrijven als CNN, The New York Times, de BBC en Reuters.

Abonnement
PVV-Kamerlid Marcial Hernandez had een abonnement bij het Amerikaanse bedrijf, wat hij met zijn Tweede Kamer-mailadres registreerde. Verder zijn er ook accounts door het ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken en Koninkrijksrelaties, Economische Zaken en Buitenlandse Zaken geregistreerd.

Ook journalisten van het AD, Volkskrant, NRC en Het Parool zijn in de lijst terug te vinden, inclusief creditcardgegevens. Hetzelfde geldt voor de ambassades van Peru en Japan in Nederland en organisaties zoals Greenpeace, Amnesty Nederland en het Internationaal Strafhof. Stratfor bood gisteren getroffen klanten een jaar lang gratis identiteitsbescherming aan.

Vooral buitenlandse bedrijven en instellingen zoals Goldman Sachs, het Amerikaanse leger, de luchtmacht en IM Global zijn slachtoffer van de digitale kraak. Anonymous zegt dat het de creditkaartgegevens heeft gebruikt om voor een miljoen dollar aan donaties voor liefdadigheidsinstellingen op te halen.

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Memo to feds: Stop using the same passwords for personal and work accounts

Recent and future government victims of the hacker collective Anonymous may want to stop using agency passwords on nonwork websites, say officials with the Arizona Department of Public Safety, which learned that lesson the hard way.

During the weekend, hacker activists purportedly from Anonymous leaked the apparent passwords and some credit card data of federal subscribers to intelligence publisher Stratfor, according to the attackers' online messages. It is unclear whether the clients, whose government email addresses also were revealed, were using any of the passwords for federal government systems. But in Arizona, Anonymous allegedly unlocked state government systems by stealing and reusing the passwords officers used to access their personal email accounts and nonwork websites, said Officer Carrick Cook, spokesman for the police department.

"People were using the same password for a lot of different things," he said. "Cops are kind of silly when it comes to that and using the same password twice."

A former Anonymous member said some of the functioning passwords came from pornography websites. Jennifer Emick, who became a security consultant after abandoning the group's antics, said the police had registered on the elicit sites using their government e-mail addresses and government passwords. The attackers, who either operated the porn sites or hacked them, entered the customers' passwords into their corresponding government accounts to see if that would open department databases, she said. It worked, current Anonymous members confirmed.

The cyberbandits, who claimed to be angered by Arizona's tough immigration policies, were able to expose hundreds of personal email correspondences, phone numbers and passwords of officers.

"If you are going to sign up for a porn site, use a throw away email account not your real email," Emick said.

Cook said he didn't know all the details but one gateway for hackers was the officers' personal Web mail accounts. From the office, some police had forwarded work emails to their personal accounts that displayed their computer credentials. "Once they got into the work email system -- into the mainframe -- they could get into the server," he said.

After the attack, police were instructed to create stronger passwords that contained a certain number of characters, letters and numbers, Cook said. And they were prohibited from using any personal account passwords as government logins. Also, officers now must either contact the system administrator or enter a current password to change their codes. There are no password reset questions, such as, "What is your mother's maiden name?" Cook was unsure if the department has forbidden officers from forwarding work emails to personal Web mail accounts.

He acknowledged the protective measures cannot stop a person intent on penetrating department systems. "I know it's making it more difficult," Cook said, but, "It's not going to prevent another hacking issue."

During the past year, the FBI has arrested about 20 cybercrooks aligned with Anonymous, mainly in connection with attacks on sites, such as PayPal, that stopped servicing the anti-secrets publisher WikiLeaks. Most recently, on Dec. 13, bureau officials announced that they apprehended a Connecticut member for allegedly shutting down GeneSimmons.com, the official fan page of the KISS performer.

Cook said more than 15 individuals around the world have been arrested on charges related to the Arizona crime.

Stratfor's website, which has been down since the weekend, is expected to remain offline another week for review and adjustment, Stratfor officials said.

"We are diligently investigating the extent to which subscriber information may have been obtained," Stratfor Chief Executive Officer George Friedman wrote on the company's Facebook page Sunday.

On Wednesday night, he posted an update, stating, "our investigation and coordination with law enforcement is ongoing." National Journal reported on Tuesday that the FBI is aware of the breach. Nextgov and National Journal are both owned by the Atlantic Media Co.

The FBI declined to comment.

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Occupy Geeks Are Building a Facebook for the 99%

“I don’t want to say we’re making our own Facebook. But, we’re making our own Facebook,” said Ed Knutson, a web and mobile app developer who joined a team of activist-geeks redesigning social networking for the era of global protest.

They hope the technology they are developing can go well beyond Occupy Wall Street to help establish more distributed social networks, better online business collaboration and perhaps even add to the long-dreamed-of semantic web — an internet made not of messy text, but one unified by underlying meta-data that computers can easily parse.

The impetus is understandable. Social media helped pull together protesters around the globe in 2010 and 2011. Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak so feared Twitter and Facebook that he shut down Egypt’s internet service. A YouTube video posted in the name of Anonymous propelled Occupy Wall Street from an insider meme to national news. And top-trending Twitter hashtags turned Occupy from a ho-hum rally on Sept. 17 into a national and even international movement.

Now it’s time for activists to move beyond other people’s social networks and build their own, according to Knutson.

“We don’t want to trust Facebook with private messages among activists,” he said.

The same thinking applies to Twitter and other social networks — and the reasoning became clear last week, when a Massachusetts district attorney subpoenaed Twitter for information about the account @OccupyBoston and other accounts connected to the Boston movement. (To its credit, Twitter has a policy of giving users the opportunity to contest such orders when possible.)

“Those networks will be perfectly fine — until they are not. And it will be a one-day-to-the-next thing,” said Sam Boyer, an activist turned web developer, turned activist again, who works with the New York City occupation’s tech team.

A move away from mainstream social networks is already happening on several levels within the Occupy movements — from the local networks already set up for each occupation to an in-progress, overarching, international network project called Global Square, that Knutson is helping to build. Those networks are likely to be key to Occupy’s future, since nearly all of the largest encampments in the United States have been evicted — taking with them the physical spaces where activists communicated via the radically democratic General Assemblies.

The idea of an open alternative to corporate-owned social networking sites isn’t novel — efforts to build less centralized, open source alternatives to Facebook and Twitter have been in the works for years, with the best known examples being Diaspora and Identica.

But those developments aren’t specifically focused on protest movements. And the Occupy movement’s surprising rise in the U.S. has added new impetus to the desire for open source versions of the software that is playing an increasingly important role in mobilizing and connecting social movements, as well as broadcasting their efforts to the world.

One challenge that all of the new efforts face is a very difficult one for non-centralized services: ensuring that members are trustworthy. That’s critical for activists who risk injury and arrest in all countries and even death in some. To build trust, local and international networks will use a friend-of-a-friend model in Knutson and Boyer’s projects. People can’t become full members on their own as they can with social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

“You have to know someone in real life who sponsors you,” said Knutson.

To Boyer, it’s more important to identify someone as trustworthy than to ensure that their online name matches a passport or birth certificate.

“I respect pseudonyms as long as they treat them as pseudonyms and not as masks,” said Boyer. In other words, someone shouldn’t hide behind a fake name to get away with bad behavior — in an extreme case, infiltrating the movement to spy on or sabotage it.

Thirty-six-year-old Knutson, who lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, started the year as an observer of politics before evolving into a committed OWS activist. His metamorphosis started during public-employee strikes in February against proposed policies of Governor Scott Walker that would affect their benefits and collective-bargaining rights.

“Before this year we had the idea that things maybe were starting to improve a little,” he said. “But when things started happening in February we were like, ‘No, no. Things are getting worse.’”

While organizing a “Walkerville” protest camp in June, Knutson met, over Twitter, members of Spanish protest movement 15M. They had just built a web site, Take the Square, to track occupations around the world, from Tunisia to Madrid. He also met Alexa O’Brien – founder of campaign-finance-reform organization US Day of Rage and a co-founder of Occupy Wall Street. After OWS kicked off, Knutson came to the East Coast for a while, visiting New York, Boston and Philadelphia and joining with other techies in those cities.

Through all those connections, Knutson has focused on building the technology for an international occupations network. But the politics are tricky. “Some of the people in Spain are kind of resentful of OWS, because they got all of the credit,” he said, noting that the Spanish occupations started first and are still far bigger.

As a counterpart to Knutson, Sam Boyer focuses on the US occupations, building tech for a collection of interlinked social networks across the country with the working title Federated General Assembly, or FGA. Working on Occupy has brought him full-circle.

When he was an undergrad in 2005, Boyer, who is now 27, took a job at the Student Trade Justice Campaign, an organization focused on trade policy reform. In 2007, he wanted to build an online platform for individual chapters to organize into groups and to link those groups for national discussions – essentially what the FGA is meant to do. But Boyer couldn’t build it, he said. “I didn’t even know how to program at the point that I started with it.”

So Boyer started learning, and falling in love with, Web programming; and he switched from being mainly an activist to mainly an engineer. His specialty is an open-source content-management system for web sites called Drupal, which FGA will run on.

Knutson, Boyer and the other Occupy geeks don’t have to build everything from scratch. “These are standards that have been around for a while, and we are not reinventing the wheel,” said Boyer.

For instance, the projects will rely on set of technologies known as Open ID and OAuth that let a user sign into a new website using their logins and passwords from social networks like Facebook, Google and Twitter. Those technologies let you sign up for a new service by logging into a Twitter or Google account, which vouch for you to the new site without giving over your password or forcing you to get yet another username and password to keep track of.

In the new OWS tech, an activist’s local-occupation network can vouch for a user to another network, and the local networks all trust each other, they all trust that activist. Someone can sign into one network and post and comment on them all.

Some sensitive posts, say about civil disobedience, would be private. Others, like a statement of demands or press release, would be public, but only trusted members of the network could create them.

FGA wants to differentiate itself from the the me-me-me narcissism of Facebook. It has a strong focus on groups — working together on topics like alternative banking or electoral reform.

And there’s a lot of work today. Currently, the group aspects of Occupy web sites are a cacophony.

“You get there, and the first thing you look at is this useless activity feed,” said Boyer. Every comment – whether a brilliant idea, a troll comment or a me-too pile-on – pops into the list as it’s generated. “You’re only guaranteed that one person really thought that post was a good idea – not the whole group,” he said.

In the FGA system, each group has a discussion on what information to push to their home page, such as a description of an event, a blog post or minutes from a meeting. “In the same way that, when you look at Reddit, you know that the articles on top are the most upvoted, the user could know that posts appearing on a front page represent the concerted agreement of the group,” said Boyer.

The activist coders also want to be able to push and pull info to and from the rest of the movement. The idea is that they can have disparate systems that label info with shared tags that will, some day, make it possible to enter a search on any one site and pull precise results from around the world.

Ed Knutson’s job is to get those sites talking to each other, even though the content may be in different languages (English, Spanish, Arabic, etc.) and created with different content management systems, or CMSs, such as Drupal or Wordpress. The Global Square network will connect not through those systems but through “semantic Web” standards designed to link up disparate technologies.

One key standard has the wordy name Resource Description Framework, or RDF, a universal labeling system.

If an occupier wants to post the minutes of a meeting, for example, they might type them in the appropriate text box in the content management software running the site. That software pushes the information to an RDF database and tags it with some universal label – it could be called “minutes” or any other term that all the occupations agree on. The local occupier might also select “Group: Alternative Banking” from a dropdown list, and that label would be added as well. Using the same labels allows all the sites to trade information. So a search for minutes from an Alternative Banking group would pull up records from any occupation with that kind of group.

With RDF, sites can work together even if they run on different content management software, such as Drupal (as in the FGA) or Wordpress (as in the Spanish M15 group).

“The handoff point is that everything goes through RDF,” said Knutson. “You don’t care if they have a Drupal site or some kind of Frankenstein combination of different stuff.”

The problem the coders face will be the same one that’s faced the web for years – getting people to agree on standards and to then adopt them. One long-running attempt to do this quickly is called Microformats – a way of including markup data in HTML that’s invisible to an human visitor, but which can be understood by their browser or by a search engine. Examples include marking up contact information so that a reader can simply click contact information to add it to their address book and annotating a recipe so that search engines can let you search for recipes that include ’spinach’.

These linkage and collaboration capabilities would be useful well beyond the Occupy movement.

“I think any type of small or medium-sized group or a team that has one person in eight different cities,” could use it for collaboration, says Knutson. And he sees no reason against spinning off the tech to businesses.

“Every small and medium business owner is a member of the 99%,” said Knutson. “Furthermore, exploring relationships with businesses… is pretty important to having a tangible impact.”

“A lot of what we are tying to do is build a better conversation so that this cacophonous discussion can be more coordinated,” said Boyer. As an analogy, he recounted an OWS workshop from a conference on December 18 in New York City when the moderator asked everyone to shout out their best idea for the movement.

They were probably all good ideas, said Boyer. But he couldn’t hear any one of them through the noise of the others.

The Web of trust among networks, RDF labels that link data across occupations, working-group consensus on what to post – all are designed to help the right people connect to each other and to the right information. “Let the sheer number of people who are interested get out the way of the many things actually happening,” said Boyer.

But for now, all those ideas are just that – ideas. And whatever does emerge will come piecemeal.

Sam Boyer hopes to launch in the following weeks what he calls a stepping stone — a roster of occupations around the world called, for now, simply directory.occupy.net. M15’s Take the Square site has provided something like that since May, as have other sites. But directory.occupy.net will be unique in using RDF and other technologies to label all the entries. It will also allow people from each occupation to “own” and update their entries.

“The directory should be useful, but it’s not our big debut,” said Boyer. He’s hoping that will be sometime in the spring, when a rough version of the FGA social network launches.

The Global Square Knutson is helping to build is finalizing its tech and will launch, probably in January, with basic linkages for various Occupy sites to trade messages, re-publish articles and allow cross-commenting on them.

“I’d say it would be a pretty major accomplishment to get a couple of the [web site] systems that everyone is using, like ELGG and Drupal and media wiki and maybe Wordpress” to work together, he said.

But even just having the discussion has been a big deal. “It’s hard to get people to even think about that kind of stuff.”

#Anonymous: Message of Solidarity

SPOILER

Om spoilers te kunnen lezen moet je zijn ingelogd. Je moet je daarvoor eerst gratis Registreren. Ook kun je spoilers niet lezen als je een ban hebt.

quote:

antisec teaser 12/29 (legit)

> Can I haz candy?
> :3

Greetings Global Pirates! Having fun riding the waves of the Global Financial Meltdown? We sure are.

Did Bradley Manning get his fancy LulzXmas dinner yet?

hm... guess not.

Still trying to lock him up for life?
Still think we're just joking around?
That's OK. The time for talk is over.

So now let's talk... about cocks:
It's time to dump the full 75,000 names, addresses, CCs and md5 hashed passwords to every customer that has ever paid Stratfor.
But that's not all: we're also dumping ~860,000 usernames, email addresses, and md5 hashed passwords for everyone who's ever registered on Stratfor's site.

> ...
> WTF?!?!
> Did you say 860,000 accounts????
> Did you notice 50,000 of these email addresses are .mil and .gov?
> fuck men...we're pretty much screwed up now...tinfoil hat please here..
> yeah, for the lulz \:D/
> sounds illegal...
* / me phones police
> holy shit, like frontal crash at 180mph!!!
>
> lol xD

We almost have sympathy for those poor DHS employees and australian billionaires who had their bank accounts looted by the lulz (orly? i just fapped).
But what did you expect? All our lives we have been robbed blindly and brutalized by corrupted politicians, establishmentarians and government agencies sex shops, and now it's time to take it back.

We call upon all allied battleships, all armies from darkness, to use and abuse these password lists and credit card information to wreak unholy havok upon the systems and personal email accounts of these rich and powerful oppressors. Kill, kitties, kill and burn them down... peacefully. XD XD

Is that it? 0h hell n0.

On New Years Eve, there will be "noise demonstrations" in front of jails and prisons all over the world to show solidarity with those incarcerated.
On this date, we will be launching our contributions to project mayhem
by attacking multiple law enforcement targets from coast to coast.
That's right: once again we bout to ride on the po po. Problem, officer? umad?

Candiez, pr0n and cookies for LulzXmas:

quote:

Now The Largest Game Companies In The World Have Dropped Support For A Bill The Internet Hates

Nintendo, Electronic Arts and Sony Electronics — some of the largest video game companies in the world — have all pulled their support for an online bill that could encourage censorship online, according to an updated list of supporters of the bill.

Those three companies all supported the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) when it first entered Congress, according to a report from Joystiq in November.

SOPA, along with the PROTECT IP act in the Senate, give content-producing companies the right to order a take down for a website that they believe is infringing on a copyright. If you even host links to content that infringes on a copyright, you have to take it down.

If not, the copyright owner can request that the infringing site has its advertising and transaction revenue cut off. Or it can request that a domain name — like businessinsider.com — be blacklisted and rendered inaccessible.

quote:

Presidential Candidate Ron Paul Slams SOPA

A few days before the election circus in the US will start with the Iowa’s caucus, presidential candidate Ron Paul made a comment on the pending SOPA bill

“They want to take over the Internet,” he said.

“Can you imagine how much we’re going to be curtailed in the spreading of out information if we lose the Internet?”

Paul says that while SOPA is claimed to stop piracy, it’s mostly going to invade the privacy of citizens and restrict their freedom.

Ron Paul currently leads the majority of Iowa polls.

quote:

Hackers plan space satellites to combat censorship

Computer hackers plan to take the internet beyond the reach of censors by putting their own communication satellites into orbit.

The scheme was outlined at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin.

The project's organisers said the Hackerspace Global Grid will also involve developing a grid of ground stations to track and communicate with the satellites.

Longer term they hope to help put an amateur astronaut on the moon.

Hobbyists have already put a few small satellites into orbit - usually only for brief periods of time - but tracking the devices has proved difficult for low-budget projects.

The hacker activist Nick Farr first put out calls for people to contribute to the project in August. He said that the increasing threat of internet censorship had motivated the project.

"The first goal is an uncensorable internet in space. Let's take the internet out of the control of terrestrial entities," Mr Farr said.

quote:

SOPA Debate Highlights Congress’s Ignorance

The divide between new technology and what the government understands about it threatens the U.S., says Clay Johnson of Expert Labs.

When members of Congress earlier this month considered the Stop Online Piracy Act — better known to anyone who actually hangs out on the Internet as #SOPA — the most notable feature of the debate turned out to be the sheer ignorance of the elected officials discussing it. One after the other, members of the U.S. House of Representatives professed — nay, bragged about — approaching this weighty legislation from the vantage point of someone who is not “a nerd” or a “tech expert.”

Nerds and tech experts, and plenty of savvy Internet users who don’t consider themselves either of these things, cringed in unison. They retaliated with an Internet meme, of course, an open digital letter informing Congress that it is finally “No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works.”

The episode — and the backlash it engendered — raised serious questions about how much personal expertise is required of elected officials with the power to regulate technical niches, from stem cell research to Internet commerce. But, perhaps more importantly, it raised this question: Where do members of Congress get their expertise? They don’t all arrive in town as born experts on medical cost curves and equity derivatives.

“If the pharmaceutical industry, for instance, chose to ignore Washington,” said Clay Johnson, who works on just this question as the director of engagement at Expert Labs, “then we’d be having hearings about biopharm drugs or hearings about the FDA where you’d hear members of Congress saying, ‘I’m not a biologist, but…’ or ‘I’m not a bio-scientist, but…’”

This doesn’t generally happen, though.

“If you look at just about any other industry,” he went on, “you see members of Congress very well versed in biotechnology and pharmaceuticals. And that’s because there’s a lobbyist there who’s constantly telling them what it is that they want.”

The tech world, Johnson argues, doesn’t do this very well. Congress could be more educated about the Internet and technology. But he turns this problem on the people who’ve been complaining about it: if your member of Congress doesn’t know how the Internet works (or why SOPA would in fact harm its basic architecture), that means no one with a vested interest in its regulation has turned up in Washington to try and explain it to him or her. Yes, like some septuagenarians elsewhere, many 70-year-olds in Congress don’t get technology. But techies don’t get Congress very well, either.

Johnson writes about this challenge in his new book The Information Diet. The most dangerous special interest in Washington, he argues, is the electorate that’s completely disconnected from the levers of power in the capital. Activists and voters tend to write off their representatives as cloistered sell-outs who only listen to lobbyists with the largest checkbooks. But in their cynicism, they decline to engage representatives themselves — and this of course only leaves more empty scheduling time and attention bandwidth for lobbyists to fill.

“To date,” Johnson said, “I’ve never heard a congressional scheduler say, ‘Oh gosh, my congressman is so busy meeting with constituents here in Washington, D.C.’”

People who care about tech issues and Internet regulation need to become essentially special interests themselves (by which Johnson doesn’t mean caricatures of shady back-room lobbyists, but rather active constituents lobbying their cases on issues like SOPA).

The tech community’s libertarian roots have generally kept the industry far from Washington, as has the long-held belief that good technology can always innovate its way around government regulation. But that time is over. There’s just too much commerce taking place on the Internet now. The Internet has become too important to escape Washington’s intervention.

“This is the point where it’s time for the tech community to understand that they have to participate,” Johnson said. “And by participate, I mean meeting with a member of Congress, calling a member of Congress on the phone. It means wearing a suit and tie and looking like a professional, not showing up in a hoodie, and blue jeans and flip-flops in the halls of Congress. And it means running for office, too.”

It also means recognizing that automated form letters aren’t an effective means of advocacy in Washington.

All of this is terribly important, Johnson believes, because the disconnect between technology and government is becoming one of the most important problems the country faces (right up there, he says, with health care and climate change). The definition of literacy is evolving. Eventually, people who say, “I’m not a computer person” will be as disconnected from society as someone who says today, “I don’t know how to read.” And we can’t afford for those people to be elected officials and government employees charged with regulating technology.

Techies often talk about a concept called Moore’s law, a rule-of-thumb about computer chips that in essence says that technology becomes half as expensive and twice as fast, every 18 months. In applying this idea, Johnson makes his own prediction that you could walk into any government office and see two computers on every desk: one, about a decade old, that’s assigned to the government employee, and another one, much newer, that the employee brings in from home to actually do her job.

“Those two computers are an example of government being disconnected from Moore’s law, while the rest of society is connected to Moore’s law,” Johnson said. “As technology advances, you’ll see that gap between those two computers get further and further apart. And if government can’t acquire and use technology to the fullest extent, how is government going to regulate and understand technology? We’re looking at a future where we may all be in flying cars, but our government employees are driving around in Buicks.”

quote:

SOPA Avalanche: Gaming Giants Nitendo, EA Sports & Sony Electronics Drop Support for Bill

Under increasing pressure from activists and heavy internet hitters such as Google, some of the largest gaming companies in the world have joined GoDaddy in reversing their support for a bill many view as a threat to a free and uncensored internet.

As reported by Business Insider, the updated list of supporters released by the House Judiciary Committee no longer lists former supporters Nintendo, Electronic Arts and Sony Electronics.

This reversal comes on the heels of Reddit's successful boycott of GoDaddy, which has seen countless domains moved from the hosting site – including Wikipedia's – and which caused the company to reverse its position on SOPA.

With these gaming giants now similarly switching their support, and as more pressure builds on those who are currently supporting SOPA, the question is whether or not these moves will precipitate further corporate defections.

The bill, which gives content-producing corporations the right to order the blacklisting or take down of sites which merely link to other sites where actual copyright infringement is taking place, has been opposed by activists and internet giants alike.

That opposition is creating an uncommon scenario in which the mobilization and launching of internet activism coupled with the potential for concurrent corporate activism is sending some of the world's largest companies careening.

And not a moment too soon.