What happened to Anonymous? Why at this time they are not doxxing websites, leaking stuff, or shutting down porn websites?

https://lemmy.world/post/19889308

What happened to Anonymous? Why at this time they are not doxxing websites, leaking stuff, or shutting down porn websites? - Lemmy.World

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.

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 if 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.
The chaff can’t perceive the wheat.
I don’t think people who refer to “Anonymous” are referring to “the average 4channer”.
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 poster is more right, anyway. A lot of the dudes got arrested. I think the chances of that are low here, for now.

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.

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.
What about Kiwi Farms?
They shrunk their breakfast sausage product line and focus on grass fed meats.
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.
The delicious irony is that they now get to live in the world they helped create.
As long as they’re able to punch down I don’t think they care

As long as they’re able to punch down I don’t think they care

Interesting take.

This is the truest answer thus far.
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
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
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
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.
Hacking got harder, and the enforced penalties for getting caught became a lot more severe (in the US at least). This meant that most hackers aren’t doing it for luls but for serious business.
Their parents kicked them out of their basements?
We are Anonymous : inside the hacker world of Lulzsec, Anonymous, and the global cyber insurgency : Olson, Parmy : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

xi, 510 pages ; 22 cm

Internet Archive
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
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’re still around; dormant. A sleeping giant.
They will come when we call.

“They” got over it, as Mott 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.
If you’re interested in detail, I can recommend this book: play.google.com/store/books/details?id=ncGVPtoZPH….
We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency by Parmy Olson - Books on Google Play

We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency - Ebook written by Parmy Olson. Read this book using Google Play Books app on your PC, android, iOS devices. Download for offline reading, highlight, bookmark or take notes while you read We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency.

We are Anonymous : inside the hacker world of Lulzsec, Anonymous, and the global cyber insurgency : Olson, Parmy : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

xi, 510 pages ; 22 cm

Internet Archive
I remember when the owner left and it was all bots overnight
Owner of what?
What’s his name? Moot or something
Kinda figured they got caught and either went to prison or got recruited.
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.
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.
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

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…
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.