• ArgentRaven@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    A lot of the actual, serious ones that knew what they were doing got caught. Some went to lulsec to be jerks with no agenda and were caught by the Feds. All that was left were script kiddies that downloaded the Low Orbit Ion Cannon and used scripts they find online. Then they left or were overtaken by alt right idiots.

    The original Anonymous are in their 30s and 40s by now. Everyone ages out.

    • seaQueue@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      90s script kiddie here - a bunch of the shit you can do as a minor with low/no consequences becomes SERIOUS FUCKING BUSINESS as an adult with assets. It’s just not worth the risk to keep dicking around with things that might land you in prison or cost you everything you have.

    • Bobby Turkalino@lemmy.yachts
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      2 months ago

      I think the serious ones that didn’t get caught are now working in red team penetration testing, which is an industry that’s been growing exponentially since the years Anonymous did a lot of their big stuff

      • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        2 months ago

        IIRC it spammed websites with traffic, didn’t conceal your IP at all, and some people got arrested for using it to make some websites go down for a very brief period. Basically a way to use people who didn’t know what they were doing as cannon fodder

        • ArgentRaven@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          Yep, that’s exactly what it did. Maybe there was a way to do it, say if you had a VPN, but people picked up pretty quick to ban a single IP.

          • WolfLink@sh.itjust.works
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            2 months ago

            lol your VPN company is going to kick you the instant you turn on LOIC through them. Your packets wont even get to the target site because you are basically attacking your own VPN.

    • Elude@lemmy.ml
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      2 months ago

      Where did they get the name LOIC from in the first place?

      The only place I am aware of, that uses this name, was the Unreal Tournament 2004.

      • Nytefyre@kbin.melroy.org
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        2 months ago

        What about them? Pffft…dude, they’d rather make fun of lolcows all day and pretend that they’re still in their edgy teenage years where worshiping Hitler and dropping the N word was the coolest thing to do to them.

  • Muffi@programming.dev
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    2 months ago

    Angry and nihilistic teenagers used to have tech skills and laptops. Now they have iPads and TikTok.

      • Muffi@programming.dev
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        2 months ago

        I actually teach teenagers programming and 3D modelling. The past 5 years has been the first decline in tech literacy I’ve ever experienced between generations. My personal theory is that only the gamers actually have computers at home now. Everyone else only use their smartphones, and that only gives a negligible increase in tech literacy compared to using a computer.

        • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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          2 months ago

          Yes, computers in their various forms are now so user friendly (and often locked down, because fuck you) that you don’t learn much using them. The golden age for learning tech on the fly seems to have been 1990-2010 or so, because computers were both accessible and still had exposed inner logic.

          • Nytefyre@kbin.melroy.org
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            2 months ago

            I think the dawning of the Chromebooks was really a huge sign. Sure you could install Linux on some of the early models. But then Google just caught on to this and decided to take even that away. So now you had all of these Chromebooks that can only ever run ChromeOS and whatever Google approved that could run on them. You just can’t do jackshit with them because they were also online-only.

            And those were pushed onto everyone, particularly schools.

            • evranch@lemmy.ca
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              2 months ago

              I learned so much at school, hacking crappy computers because I was bored. Boot disks in my backpack, hex editing the typing lesson saves, packing emulators and ROMs in one floppy at time and merging them back together (I even wrote a BASIC program for this because I didn’t know that tools existed to compress and chunk large files). And just exploratory hacking for fun, writing scripts and tools and stuff just to see if I could.

              Chromebooks are the opposite of that, we bought our daughter a Chromebook and on realizing that it was only a tablet with a keyboard it went back to the store. She has my old Linux desktop now and knows a lot more than her friends

        • /home/pineapplelover@lemm.ee
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          2 months ago

          Yeah but this also has to deal with how many pc gamers there are per generation. So what you’re saying is gen z and alpha has less pc gsmers.

          • Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works
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            2 months ago

            In my experience it has more to do with how much less frequently issues happen and/or how often you need to go manually move files/folders around. Just not nearly as much need imo.

            Similar situation with mobile devices, I remember rooting/roming/jailbreaking being much more common in the past.

            • /home/pineapplelover@lemm.ee
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              2 months ago

              Yeah devices are really easy so they just work out of the box. Unless you seek out challenges and issues, you’ll probably be computer illiterate.

      • seaQueue@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        We’ve drastically simplified and made tech accessible to everyone with a smartphone, you no longer need computer skills to get on the internet to shop or participate in social activities. Kids use apps’ platforms for the things we had to build and host ourselves 20y ago.

          • dubyakay@lemmy.ca
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            2 months ago

            I’ve recently switched to Linux (I use arch btw) and it feels like I’m living the early days of the ever expanding internet again.

            Probably helps that I had to join IRC again for support, instead of Discord.

            • /home/pineapplelover@lemm.ee
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              2 months ago

              Yeah same I also use Arch (btw) and even though I’ve never had the pleasure of experiencing the Internet renaissance, the community feels something like that with all its nerdiness and geekiness.

      • Übercomplicated@lemmy.ml
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        2 months ago

        As a angry, nihilistic teenager: very fucking true. I am literally the only techy guy in my posh bullshit private international school (in Europe so affordable). The only other dude who uses Linux (I’m using that as a bare minimum for “techy”) isn’t into programming or reverse engineering shit even remotely. I’m all alone (apart from all my non-technical friends). I suppose that’s where the nihilism comes from…

  • Sanctus@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    They fizzled out, members probably moved on to various other groups and projects, while the rest simply went on with their lives. A danger of being decentralized is losing all of your momentum.

  • Kcap@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Not gonna dig through their Twitter feed, but I saw someone a couple months ago ask them this exact question on one of their posts, and they wrote a pretty interesting response. They basically said, we’re still here, trying to fuck the system up, but, with all the information we’ve provided and ported out there to the world, y’all haven’t done dick with it. Laws haven’t been passed, politicians haven’t been ousted, corporations are still abusing the systems. So they were basically saying, what good is them leaking and hacking if the public doesn’t take a more activist approach towards change themselves and hold the people they expose accountable.

    • Don_Dickle@lemmy.worldOP
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      2 months ago

      Well if I knew how to take down sites and child porn site I totally would. Just don’t know what to study and probably don’t want to be another computer cracker using programs found online.

      • ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net
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        2 months ago

        If you’re serious, study cyber security to start.

        Then move towards devops.

        Worse case scenario, you’ll end up in a 6-figure job making complaints into the void as you write bash scripts to speed up a pipeline by 0.1 second.

        Best case scenario, you take down a massive criminal ring that sprouts back up like a weed a few days later.

  • saigot@lemmy.ca
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    2 months ago

    Hacking got harder, and the enforced penalties for getting caught became a lot more severe (in the west at least). This meant that most hackers aren’t doing it for luls but for serious business.

  • EleventhHour@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    “They” got over it, as most people do, and moved on. Remnants still remain, but they were unified due to a critical mass of dissent.

    Don’t expect to see anything like it again until another critical inflection point. Just know that, if you do, shit’s prolly in a bad place…so…

    • Nytefyre@kbin.melroy.org
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      2 months ago

      Yeah I mean, it would really be nice right now to have some body around that can contend and combat the legions of crazy QAnon/MAGA people online. But I guess that really isn’t in their interest.

      It took SOPA/PIPA to get them to act for a while. I don’t know, they run off of arbitrary rules only they themselves know to keep the mystique up. It’s like when we needed them the most - they’re sometimes there. When we kinda sorta don’t need/want them, they just show up randomly.

  • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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    2 months ago

    A meme that comes quickly, goes quickly.

    It’s not an actual organised group, if you didn’t know. Anyone can hack something and then say “Done by Anonymous”.

  • BlueSquid0741@lemmy.sdf.org
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    2 months ago

    Shutting down porn sites? Is that a thing they wanted to achieve? Like free video sites like PH or production companies like Brazzers?

    • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 months ago

      I think that’s a book I have been searching for a long time since I first read it in a library a good time ago

        • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          2 months ago

          Then it must be the book. I remember it as a sort of documentary narrative about events that happened at lulzsec that could be more or less adapted to film

    • Nytefyre@kbin.melroy.org
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      2 months ago

      Oh, I looked at the back of the book. Yeah I didn’t know they dared trying to mess with the FBI, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, NATO and more.

      Yeah, that’s going to paint a lot of targets on you. Wondered what got into their minds to do all of that.

  • Star Wars Enjoyer @lemmygrad.ml
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    2 months ago

    all of the people who were part of Anonymous who were worth a damn at hacking back in the day work for the state department now. The movement could very likely have been a psyop, given how many high-level hackers from that era there are on government payroll.

    I stand in solidarity with the gay furry hackers.

      • nutsack@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        doxing work is very boring. much of it is thousands of hours sifting through the lamest social media content you can imagine.

  • Mikina@programming.dev
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    2 months ago

    it’s also important to keep in mind that the cybersecurity field has adbanced tremendously, with cloidfare, EDRs, and in general it is now way harder to do anything anonymously without getting caught, quickly. This also males the field of hacking way more difficult to get in, which combined with reduced attention span of younger generations probably means there’s not that many bored teens willing to put the time in, and as an adult you have way much more to loose, so for hose who had the skills it would be a lot greater risk.

  • tisktisk@piefed.social
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    2 months ago

    Curious to know what answers you were looking for here OP. What makes you think they aren’t doing these things but stopped identifying themselves as such? Also some dialogue is required about the myriad of things ‘Anonymous’ took responsibility for but were never adequately confirmed as objectively true–and more importantly, what is accomplished with this last feat? I believe the answer you seek lies in these depths