Here I would like to announce my support for and participation in the May First General Strike. I encourage all workers worldwide to take a day off, by whatever means necessary (vacation day, sick-out, etc.) and to refuse to obey our corporate overlords on 1 May 2012.
Let the voices of workers, students and the disenfranchised around the globe be heard! Celebrate International Workers Day this year by spending time with family and friends, or with your local Occupy movement.
ALL OUT MAY FIRST!
Via Infoshop News
Of course I can only ever give my personal opinion about this subject, a subject which is changing all the time. I’ll try not to abstract too much and speak from my personal experience and observations of anonymous… It’s like this. I didn’t find the Anonymous IRC (internet relay chat) server until after “participants” in Operation Payback had taken down websites like Mastercard, Paypal and others. I had known about known about Anonymous before that but seeking them out had never really appealed to me until I saw them in the news for “defending wikileaks”. It took a while before I was able to navigate to their IRC, but once I was able to, I started looking around and realized a bunch of things…
What I thought I knew about Anonymous was fairly wrong:
The more I hung around the more I learned about what was actually going on. For the most part Anonymous really is non-hiearchical. At least, as horizontal as the anarchist movement ever is. Also while it may have this reputation, it is not a group of “hackers”alone. Sure there are hackers involved but there are also “everyday internet citizens”, writers, graphic designers, translators, and people with many other skills. Sure there’s the 14 year olds the news talks about but theres also some 60 some year olds if you believe them… My point being that any attempt to generalize about Anonymous is a failure, because whatever can carry that name is so diverse that it really defies stereotyping a lot of the time…
Via Infoshop News
The actions against MasterCard and Amazon are not ‘hacking’. People are just finding a way to protest in a digital space
Richard Stallman
guardian.co.uk
Friday 17 December 2010
The Anonymous web protests over WikiLeaks are the internet equivalent of a mass demonstration. It’s a mistake to call them hacking (playful cleverness) or cracking (security breaking). The LOIC program that is being used by the group is prepackaged so no cleverness is needed to run it, and it does not break any computer’s security. The protesters have not tried to take control of Amazon’s website, or extract any data from MasterCard. They enter through the site’s front door, and it just can’t cope with the volume.
Calling these protests DDoS, or distributed denial of service, attacks is misleading, too. A DDoS attack is done with thousands of “zombie” computers. Typically, somebody breaks the security of those computers (often with a virus) and takes remote control of them, then rigs them up as a “botnet” to do in unison whatever he directs (in this case, to overload a server). The Anonymous protesters’ computers are not zombies; presumably they are being individually operated.
The Wobbly Goblin 