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.
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.
This is the truest answer thus far.
The delicious irony is that they now get to live in the world they helped create.
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
Omg LOIC... I was trying to think of that name a few weeks ago and just couldn't remember. That was fun.
I think they prefer to stay without a name.
Oh man I forgot about LOIC haha. Did that actually do anything?
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
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.
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.
Ah, I always assumed it didn't actually do anything. That would be a very 4chan thing to say; "download this widget to totally pwn the man" and it doesn't even do anything haha.
It pioneered DDoS attacks so, uh, yeah
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.
I think you've found your answer.
What about Kiwi Farms?
They shrunk their breakfast sausage product line and focus on grass fed meats.
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.
Angry and nihilistic teenagers used to have tech skills and laptops. Now they have iPads and TikTok.
I wonder how true that is. Curious to know
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wish I was alive back then where you guys had to build everything yourself. Go on irc and stuff. Sounds cool
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.
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.
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...
What is a computer?
Stop all the downloadin'!
Help computer
mr body massage
how is this so true lol
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.
A danger of being decentralized is losing all of your momentum.
fediverse growth nervously sweats
The other commenter is more right, anyway. A lot of the dudes got arrested. I think the chances of that are low here, for now.
Trust me bro.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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…
Yes, things are pretty peachy in the world right now.
That’s the spirit.
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.
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".
And anyone that performs any successful hack, can also declare themselves as part of Anonymous.
I think they were around for over a decade. Like 4 chan anonymous guy Fawkes mask loose collective
Probably comparable to rage comics.
Anonymous basically became a US intelligence front around the Arab Spring.
Is there some individual news story this relates to?
Shutting down porn sites? Is that a thing they wanted to achieve? Like free video sites like PH or production companies like Brazzers?
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
It is a good Cyber-thriller.
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
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.
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
they basically got put out of business by cloudflare
The loic nerds yeah. There's still a few anons who can actually do shit, probably.
doxing work is very boring. much of it is thousands of hours sifting through the lamest social media content you can imagine.
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.
They (I use that term to mean the average 4channer) were co-opted by alt right propaganda.
Most neckbeard, incel, Andrew Tate followers are what Anon originally was. We just lied to ourselves that it wasn't really racist and that we were fighting a good fight.
Now, its a bunch of sad lonely people that found acceptance in intolerance and hatred.
Well that is kind of depressing.
But its backed by real hard facts and sourced from one of the smallest neckbeards ever.
If you only look at it from that angle, yeah. I bet the next generation of Anonymous is growing right now, though.
The chaff can't perceive the wheat.
I don't think people who refer to "Anonymous" are referring to "the average 4channer".
I remember when the owner left and it was all bots overnight
Owner of what?
What's his name? Moot or something
I think their direction has gone astray mixed with losing general interest mixed with aging mixed with getting caught. I think Anonymous now has just turned into a parody of itself thanks for 4chan (yeah I know it was born there) who turned it into a symbol of just shitposting trolling than doing the right things.
They used to have been prominent during the days when SOPA and PIPA had been brought up. Since then, activity has dwindled.
Kinda figured they got caught and either went to prison or got recruited.
They are waiting for a tangible response, and building.
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.
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.
This is the truest answer thus far.
The delicious irony is that they now get to live in the world they helped create.
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
Omg LOIC... I was trying to think of that name a few weeks ago and just couldn't remember. That was fun.
I think they prefer to stay without a name.
Oh man I forgot about LOIC haha. Did that actually do anything?
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
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.
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.
Ah, I always assumed it didn't actually do anything. That would be a very 4chan thing to say; "download this widget to totally pwn the man" and it doesn't even do anything haha.
It pioneered DDoS attacks so, uh, yeah
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.
I think you've found your answer.
What about Kiwi Farms?
They shrunk their breakfast sausage product line and focus on grass fed meats.
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.
Angry and nihilistic teenagers used to have tech skills and laptops. Now they have iPads and TikTok.
I wonder how true that is. Curious to know
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wish I was alive back then where you guys had to build everything yourself. Go on irc and stuff. Sounds cool
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.
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.
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...
What is a computer?
Stop all the downloadin'!
Help computer
mr body massage
how is this so true lol
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.
fediverse growth nervously sweats
The other commenter is more right, anyway. A lot of the dudes got arrested. I think the chances of that are low here, for now.
Trust me bro.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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…
Yes, things are pretty peachy in the world right now.
That’s the spirit.
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.
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".
And anyone that performs any successful hack, can also declare themselves as part of Anonymous.
I think they were around for over a decade. Like 4 chan anonymous guy Fawkes mask loose collective
Probably comparable to rage comics.
Anonymous basically became a US intelligence front around the Arab Spring.
Is there some individual news story this relates to?
Shutting down porn sites? Is that a thing they wanted to achieve? Like free video sites like PH or production companies like Brazzers?
I ment to type child porn sites.-
You can edit the main post you know.
No, then my question will look stupid!
They got got -> https://archive.org/details/weareanonymousin0000olso_l5h7
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
It is a good Cyber-thriller.
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
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.
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
they basically got put out of business by cloudflare
The loic nerds yeah. There's still a few anons who can actually do shit, probably.
doxing work is very boring. much of it is thousands of hours sifting through the lamest social media content you can imagine.
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.
If you're interested in detail, I can recommend this book: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=ncGVPtoZPHcC.
archive.org link for those who try to avoid Google services
(courtesy of xylogx@lemmy.world who also posted this)
They (I use that term to mean the average 4channer) were co-opted by alt right propaganda.
Most neckbeard, incel, Andrew Tate followers are what Anon originally was. We just lied to ourselves that it wasn't really racist and that we were fighting a good fight.
Now, its a bunch of sad lonely people that found acceptance in intolerance and hatred.
Well that is kind of depressing.
But its backed by real hard facts and sourced from one of the smallest neckbeards ever.
If you only look at it from that angle, yeah. I bet the next generation of Anonymous is growing right now, though.
The chaff can't perceive the wheat.
I don't think people who refer to "Anonymous" are referring to "the average 4channer".
I remember when the owner left and it was all bots overnight
Owner of what?
What's his name? Moot or something
I think their direction has gone astray mixed with losing general interest mixed with aging mixed with getting caught. I think Anonymous now has just turned into a parody of itself thanks for 4chan (yeah I know it was born there) who turned it into a symbol of just shitposting trolling than doing the right things.
They used to have been prominent during the days when SOPA and PIPA had been brought up. Since then, activity has dwindled.
Kinda figured they got caught and either went to prison or got recruited.
They are waiting for a tangible response, and building.
They’re still around; dormant. A sleeping giant.
They will come when we call.
Their parents kicked them out of their basements?