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.
The delicious irony is that they now get to live in the world they helped create.
Omg LOIC… I was trying to think of that name a few weeks ago and just couldn’t remember. That was fun.
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.
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.
Angry and nihilistic teenagers used to have tech skills and laptops. Now they have iPads and TikTok.
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.
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.
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
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…
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
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.
