Live data from Hacker News

How one man tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price

arstechnica.com

1–10 of 162 posts

Re: How one man tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price

#2
Based on my own minimal experience, the majority of these IRC channels are just a small group of "Anonymous" doing whatever they want, different channels will get publicised at different times through different means, "Anonymous" doesn't exist in any way beyond being a label people use, I guess it could be compared to "emo" or "jock" in high school; they have no "leadership" but people join these groups and label themselves as such.

> The show was run by a couple of admins he identified as "Q," "Owen," and "CommanderX"—and Barr had used social media data and subterfuge to map those names to three real people, two in California and one in New York.

isn't Q the bot that runs on quakenet as a proxy admin?

Re: How one man tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price

#5

Isn't anonymous less an organized group with leaders and more a bunch of people who hang out and occasionally someone says "hey, it would be cool if we all did " and whoever is listening joins in?

Yes, but traditional media has a hard time grasping the concept. It's just a lot of directionless guys that latch onto whatever cause seems palatable at the time and requires no more effort than running LOIC/other simple DDOS programs. Basically the definition of script kiddies, there's just a large concentration of them on one message board system.
Post reply on HN