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alex

Gold Meritorious Patron
Please notice my scare quotes - I don't agree with laws against "hate speech". They are laws against speech.

My point is, several high profile celebrity disasters in the US have shown that American popular culture has NO tolerance for the "ironic" or "humourous" use of certain epithets.

Anon is wide open to a media flap of this sort.

Not only are the laws/social norms that distinguish "hate" speech from other activities, against speech, THEY ARE ALSO AGAINST THOUGHT.

Perhaps it is better to have free speech entirely, and let us each make our own judgements about the people speaking.

Diversity of viewpoint is a wealth, not a burden.

alex
 

lionheart

Gold Meritorious Patron
Not only are the laws/social norms that distinguish "hate" speech from other activities, against speech, THEY ARE ALSO AGAINST THOUGHT.

Perhaps it is better to have free speech entirely, and let us each make our own judgements about the people speaking.

Diversity of viewpoint is a wealth, not a burden.

alex

So your CofS allows members to say DM is a criminal pscho does it? :wink2: (freedom of speech)

So your CofS that you support allows people to think LRH developed OTIII to further bind his disciples to his evil Black Magic does it? :wink2: (diversity of viewpoint)

My goodness, the Cof S has certainly reformed itself! Presumably the broken families will now be freely able to speak with each other, despite SP declares? At events people can now stand up and express the view that the Church is being mismanaged?

Let's hear it for the promotion of freedom of speech and diversity of viewpoint! :thumbsup: Let's hear it for the CofS, the upholders of freedom of speech!

Sorry, for a CofS Scientologist to come on here and pontificate about freedom of speech is an insult to every ex-Scn who is no longer allowed to communicate with family and friends.
 

Jesus666

Patron
DDOS is not illegal, all you do is overload the server :melodramatic: it only helped everyone, just look at all the media attention we got.
 

Zinjifar

Silver Meritorious Sponsor
DDOS is not illegal, all you do is overload the server :melodramatic: it only helped everyone, just look at all the media attention we got.

You are incorrect. 'Criminal Intent' is an essential element of criminal activity, and, an intention to sabotage someone's server is a criminal intent. Combine it with conspiracy to do so and it's compounded.

Zinj
 

Jesus666

Patron
You are incorrect. 'Criminal Intent' is an essential element of criminal activity, and, an intention to sabotage someone's server is a criminal intent. Combine it with conspiracy to do so and it's compounded.

Zinj

It's not illegal in all states/countries

Besides all i did is vamp rape/gigaloading :)
 

johnAnchovie

Still raging
Good on ya Jesus666

Strictly speaking, bombing factories during WWII was illegal, but necessary for the recovery of democracy. Just be careful, just mind yourself. Those bastards are wiley foxes, and I don't want you to get hurt. You certainly caught the broad media attention, brilliant! So now, where to from here?
 

Zinjifar

Silver Meritorious Sponsor
It's not illegal in all states/countries

Besides all i did is vamp rape/gigaloading :)

Just for the thinking impaired:

Dropping a brick is not illegal

It's not even illegal to drop a brick off a roof

It *can* be illegal if you 'should have known' that someone might get hit in the haid and you just didn't give a damn or take any care to keep that from happening.

It *is* illegal if you deliberately dropped the brick off the roof with the intention of hitting someone in the haid.

If you and other brick-droppers *announce* that you intend to drop bricks off the roof for purposes of hitting a very specific person in the haid (and even describe the hoped for damage) you will have just saved the lucky prosecutor the trouble of showing your criminal intent and otherwise proving his case. You might as well just show up at the hoosegow.

As for bombing factories during WWII; I can't fathom what the hell that's supposed to have to do with the price of tea in China, besides being internally stoopid.

Zinj
 

shader

Patron with Honors
[snip]

Pointing out that the C of $ does not conduct any significant income-producing activities on the Internet and so taking their websites offline does not significantly affect there operations whatsoever makes me an "OSA Stooge", eh?

Pointing out that taking down there web sites is an act of denying them Free Speech and is therefore an act of major hypocricy from a group that professes to be upholding Freedom of Speech makes me an "OSA Stooge", eh?

[snip]

Michael "The Sneakster" Hobson
I am *not* anonymous.

Quoted for truth.

I might go further and point out they don't conduct any significant organizing or social-bonding activities via their websites either to my knowledge. And it will take a loooongcat long time to drain their coffers via making them pay prolexic bills.

Email, however, is a _major_ communication tool with their public members.
 

Poofy

Patron with Honors
A Little Overview

Hi guys (Hi Bea!). I thought I would provide you with a little primer on the history of Anonymous. I'll focus myself from the 4chan days and proceed from there.

First, let me start with an explanation of the chans. Chans are essentially anonymous image and discussion boards. Users are offered a list of categories to focus their discussions, shared and newly created images into. Each of these categories is handled as a directory on the web server. Here's a common list:
chan.com/b - Random (anything goes)
chan.com/i - Invasion (raids / attacks on websites)
chan.com/v - Videos
chan.com/f - Flash
chan.com/g - guro (don't ask)

Some of these boards are designed for image posting, some for videos, some for text-only and others for flash. Now, one of the unique traits of the chan 'culture' is that the early versions of these boards did not have working login pages, accounts and user tracking. This meant that all users, with the exception of moderators and admins, would show up as an anonymous poster. Once a topic was created other users could post to that topic and also show up as anonymous. For the sake of this history we will stick with 4chan.

4chan was one of the more popular chan sites after the destruction and closing of an earlier chan site. Over time /b/ (random) and /i/ (invasion) became the two most popular boards on the site. That is where a number of anonymous users started referring to themselves as Anonymous as they began group-coordinating different types of attacks or activities around the internet. At the start they would amuse themselves by picking a website and shutting it down or harassing the users (on a forum, for example). Over time they started to pick larger targets and occasionally move into in real life (IRL) activities.

Some users of the chans went on to create a joke encyclopedia based on the wikipedia idea called Encyclopedia Dramatica. This website is used as an archive of users, sites, jokes and memes (if anyone needs a definition of meme, let me know here). The website is mostly tongue-in-cheek and teasing at themselves and others, but a lot of terminology can be found there to help you understand terms they commonly use. I'll post a small glossary below.

Anonymous, now as the group, eventually departed their parent chan (4chan) when the Invasion board was closed and spread to a series of websites, forums and other chans. Mostly they entertain themselves by occasionally running raids on other internet groups they dislike or that respond to them.

I hope I have covered everything well enough for you to understand where this group is coming from. The amusing fact about this entire event is that the best way to defeat Anonymous is to ignore them. They may not forgive, or forget, but they do get board easily and move on to the next great thing.


/b/tards - Users of the Random board of 4chan
IRL - In Real Life (as opposed to on the internet)
lulz - laughs
lol - Laugh out Loud
-fag - suffix, joking reference to different groups of internet users (tripfags, gayfags [actual gay people], furfags, etc)
over 9000! - Any small or large number. This joke came from an episode of Dragon Ball Z where one character references the ridiculous power of another. Used humorously
for great justice - A joking phrase used commonly on activities that have no value. Also used ironically (attacking scientology, for great justice!)
in before the ... - Used to joke about an expected reply. Earlier in this thread: in b4 teh IP means the poster expected someone to give up his IP to scientology (to be used to track him or her down).
in b4 - see in before
moar - More, misspelled. Commonly used to request more of a set of pictures or memes
 

Poofy

Patron with Honors
Oh, Bea, did you ever post Part 2 of your story? I was unable to find it searching on the board.
 

Alan

Gold Meritorious Patron
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/01/30/confirmed-crusaders-google-bomb-scientology

Confirmed: Crusaders Google Bomb Scientology
Thursday, Jan 31, 2008

An apparent Google bomb aimed at the Church of Scientology is just part of an all-out ideological (holy?) war perpetrated by a group called "Anonymous." The rest of the digital war has been carried out via social media as a highly organized and carefully orchestrated Internet campaign that's getting the group a lot of attention.

Editor's Note: There's a lot to agree or disagree with here. But isn't it fascinating how successful the campaign Anonymous is running has been? It's sort of a proof of concept, really. We listed some things we learned. What other marketing lessons can be learned from this event? Let us know in the comment section.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It's learning good lessons from questionable examples, but the Anonymous campaign has a lot to teach us about online campaigns. (Just to be clear, though, not everything highlighted in this article is condoned.)

Yesterday, it came to light that searches for the terms "dangerous cult" brought back the Scientology homepage as the top result in Google – and it apparently took about a week to do that.

The occurrence was interesting because just a year ago, Google announced they'd taken measures that would eliminate the practice. Those measures included not allowing the anchor text in a mass of links to influence ranking if those words did not appear on the targeted homepage. Thus, John Kerry's website no longer ranked number one for "waffle" and George W. Bush no longer ranked number one for "miserable failure."

However, the word failure did eventually appear on his website, which served to relight the fuse for the word "failure," at least for a time. Wikipedia has replaced it since, and so has a site that shall not be named and should not (EVER) be visited. (This is like the big red nuke button. Just trust me when I say that the second result for "failure" should not be clicked.)

Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan, unsure if it was a true Google bomb, investigated links pointing toward the Scientology homepage, their anchor texts, as well as the keywords on the targeted page. Under Google's explanation, the Google bomb should only work if the targeted words are actually on the page. Sullivan discovered the word "dangerous," but not "cult."

The only use of the word "cult" came from links pointing to the Scientology website.

Then something very interesting happened. In the comments at SEL, a reader points to what appears to be a wiki from Anonymous about how to conduct an all-out media blitz. The master plan includes a Google bomb targeting "dangerous cult," but also " brainwashing cult" and whatever keyword supporters wanted to match with "cult." They also wished to replace Scientology.org with Xenu.net, a site aimed at debunking the religion, as the number one result for the keyword "scientology."

Anonymous didn't achieve the number one ranking they wanted for "brainwashing cult" or for "scientology" ...but they did take them up to the third result. Not bad for a brand new effort.

Ideologies, agendas, and holy wars aside, Anonymous launched one heckuva successful campaign. If you look closer at the wiki, members are instructed not to spam. Naturally, spammy tactics are targeted by search engines and everybody else – plus, content matters. But they are instructed to set up blogs, to utilize email, press releases and press release sites, Digg.com, YouTube, and other social networking sites, as well as comments in comment sections (which sort of walk the line on comment spam).

(Spam is encouraged, however, as a weapon, as are denial of service attacks, which seem to be working – as of 3:00 PM today – to shut down the Church of Scientology's website.)

Part of the reason for the quick success could be that recently Google seems to have placed more weight on buzzy, timely resources, which comes from news sites, social bookmarking, and often social networks and blogs. Google definitely weights Wikipedia, Digg and YouTube pretty heavily.

So what we have here, in a controversial example, is a lesson in buzz creation and SEO. This campaign was highly targeted and highly specific. From the SEO standpoint we can confirm:


Links are crazy important for higher rankings
Anchor text matters
Content matters
Keyword density matters
Link authority matters
Timeliness matters
Generating buzz via social media matters

It also means that a tightly integrated, holistic campaign can make an impact, as utilization of collective media produce a mass effect the search engines (in their current configuration) can't ignore.

Likely, Google will do something about it. Matt Cutts is a bit busy giving tips about Gmail and WordPress right now, though. Until then, we have some valuable insight on how to get more attention online (without waging a holy war).
 

Terril park

Sponsor
http://digg.com/world_news/The_Economist_reports_on_Anonymous_and_upcoming_protests
Woah, the Economist reports on anonymous... and in printed edition too.

Impressive!

I liked some of your presumed colleages ideas that promoting the freezone on pickets of COS institutions would be one of your best weapons. This is probably the best avenue of reaching those still adhering to COS.

I also liked the idea of trying to use Jenna Miscavidge-Hills open letter
in rebuttal to COS denials of disconnection. Also see " Blown for Good's"
comments on the int staff disconnections.

Jenna's open letter used as an URL would be a great picket sign. If Feasible re length.

Those of you I've read seem well clued up in a short time.

I would suggest that in picketing you regard the parishioners and staff members as those you wish to assist. Picket signs saying say " scientology Kills" or similar will only distance them and make them percieve you as " SPs".

" End Disconnection" may work better and hit people where they are at.
Or "End RPF" at AOs.

I'm sure you get my drift here. :)
 

Zinjifar

Silver Meritorious Sponsor
Anonymous didn't achieve the number one ranking they wanted for "brainwashing cult" or for "scientology" ...but they did take them up to the third result. Not bad for a brand new effort.

What makes me suspicious of this whole 'story' is that http://xenu.net has been consistently within the top 3 results on Google for years now. With no 'anonymous' help :)

Sometimes 2, most often 3, but even sometimes #1. The only time it's been off those placings for any time was when Google itself caved to Scientology and removed the front page.

Sounds to me like '50% Off!' a price that's set to double the market rate...

And, it makes me wonder how informed this writer is.

Zinj
 

Terril park

Sponsor
What makes me suspicious of this whole 'story' is that http://xenu.net has been consistently within the top 3 results on Google for years now. With no 'anonymous' help :)

Sometimes 2, most often 3, but even sometimes #1. The only time it's been off those placings for any time was when Google itself caved to Scientology and removed the front page.

Sounds to me like '50% Off!' a price that's set to double the market rate...

And, it makes me wonder how informed this writer is.

Zinj

Not sure if' I'm correct here, but I heard that google having been severely
embarrassed by COS and as a result of their mistaken deletion of xenu.net
kept it at no 2 .
 
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