Tag Archives: anonymous

You Can’t Stop the Signal. Well, Unless You Can.

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Yesterday, the “hactivist” group Anonymous threatened to break up President Obama’s State of the Union Address. It didn’t happen.

This could have happened for a number of reasons. They could have tried and failed. I mean, the white house had notification that it was going to happen. Anonymous released a statement saying they were going to like 9 or 10 hours before hand. That gives other people plenty of time to figure out how and to make it not happen. They also could have NOT been planning to hack, or only a small subset was going to and the rest decided they shouldn’t and cut them off. Or, they could have been really intent in their Borderlands 2 campaign.

For whatever reason, SOTU did not get “hacked” last night.

Obamanous.

Obamanous.

Anonymous is a group of hackers. This means they circumvent certain technology  or programming to be used in ways different than the original intended use. As a programmer, I “hacked” systems regularly, meaning I developed programming as a “work around” to the original programming. I do it all the time with WordPress structures. Usually, you want to go in and change the structure itself, but sometimes you have a one off. Sometimes you’re working with third party and can’t change the structure. And sometimes site growth just demands you get it up quickly, and structure change is a lengthy process.

It’s not necessarily best practice, but it is how programming changes happen about 99.9% of the time.

Hacking has gotten a bad rep. I think it’s rather inventive by nature, using the resources and code around you in a creative way to work around a problem. But when most people think of “hackers,” they think of renegade nerds out to disrupt the system, causing havock for havock’s sake. They think of this guy:

WarGames

or these kids

Hackers

or even this guy

Serenity

Ah, the glorification of hacking. They never think of the poor computer programmer, trying to get something changed or updated because a client last minute wanted the product to do THIS instead of THAT.

Anyway, SOTU did not get hacked. Do you know who did get hacked? The state of Montana:

These guys hacked a television show to broadcast an emergency zombie apocalypse. Now THAT’s some quality hacking.

Occupy Wall Street / Tea Party: A Comparison.

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Occupy Wall Street is growing.

I just started hearing about this last week but http://occupywallst.org/ has been posting since July.  Recently people have been drawing a lot of comparisons to the Tea Party for a couple of main reasons.  Some people have funny costumes and signs

Anonymous: working to affect positive social change with just a hint of LOLcats

For every one person who says I should take the tea party seriously there are 10 pictures like this

And their goals are kind of vague yet similar.  They both think the middle class should pay fewer taxes.  Occupy Wall Street believes this should be achieved by increasing the tax burden on the rich.  The Tea Party believes this should be achieved by abolishing the IRS

because the president is a socialist

nazi

vampire that feeds off statues

.

While they definitely have different ideas about what the problems/solutions are in this country, I do believe the Occupy Wall Street people owe the Tea Party a debt of gratitude.  With the exception of Anonymous’ Guy Fawkes Mask and Internet Meme fascination, Occupy Wall Street seems pretty normal.  I can only assume they saw the mistakes the Tea Party made and learned what not to do.

So thanks for acting like a bunch of rabid morons, Tea Party.  Your rampant ignorance paved the way for a more credible grassroots organization.