The tl;dr of it all is that, according to at least one Anon, this "Ryan" fellow was a former moderator of the IRC and was the legal owner of the AnonOps.ru and AnonOps.net domains. Apparently, two others, "Nerdo" and "Owen" (whom you may remember from the HBGary fiasco), revoked his IRC credentials. Ryan somewhat predictably responded by DDOS'ing (with help from 808chan) and essentially taking his domains and going home. Some Anons responded by getting "Ryan"'s docs and now it's all just a bunch of circle jerking.
It's funny to see the mainstream press completely fail in doing any reporting on Anon. Half of the time, it's just too chaotic, by the time you think you understand how it works and report on it it completely went the other way around.
The other half of the time, they just tell you nonsense, either because they don't know themselves or they want to fool you.
It's like herding cats. But it does give amusing reads.
You can only hear that from someone that still mix up anarchy with chaos.
a good example to end this discussion quickly is to point that international law is anarchy, and is pointing to a pretty stable direction. And I do not see anyone claiming for a global earth goverment. just see how little UN has to say in anything.
Well little is a relative term. UNs had a big impact on politics in my country. I also found the quote a pretty amusing and quite valid tidbit, given that Anarchy simply means a gov. without ruler.
It was just a comment. I did not disagree with international politics being an anarchic system contrary to chaos. Just the UN bit.
I do in fact see it as a very clever observation.
The UN is just a face to the power. Do you think the global nations agreed on Israel for example? No, the powerful nations decided, UN just delivered the news.
Of course UN has some power. but it's mostly a messenger.
I don't know if that's something to be worried about or not, but it just seems like common sense to try and cover your tracks if you are doing something that The Authorities don't approve of.
Sure, Tor might be broken (though there is no evidence of anyone getting in trouble for doing something through Tor), but it might also not be broken. We don't know. We do know for sure that when your IP address is 1.2.3.4 in the logs, they are going to call your 1.2.0.0/16's ISP and be on your doorstep in hours.
To be honest, I guess it's good for society that criminals are so stupid. The downside for me is that I don't get to read anything interesting when the media covers these stories -- all I get is "we got a bunch of IPs and people using their real names to harrass Sony executives' kids".
Use I2P. Just connect your IRC client to a certain port on localhost and you'll be rerouted to the I2P IRC server. If some government seized the I2P IRC server, nobody would still have any idea of who you are.
IRC operators and Channel operators are very different.
IRC servers have IRC operators. They are volunteers who make sure that the server remains connected to the network (They can split/reconnect leaf nodes and hubs to/from other servers based on pre-defined rules in the IRC daemon's configuration. This allows you to rebalance the network, and reconnect servers if a central hub goes down/becomes unresponsive). They are also in charge of "policing" the network, they have the ability to kill (ban) users who misbehave, re-assign control in channels which are "taken over", and so on.
I've never been on Anon's IRC network, but most IRC networks these days use a "network services" scheme to automate the policing of channels (e.g. ChanServ/NickServ on DALnet/Freenode/Other networks, X/W on Undernet. They are essentially sophisticated robots that have IRC-operator priviliges. They can make someone a channel moderator, automatically ban users by ip/hostname/etc, as well as numerous other functions... I believe EFnet is one of the few "major" networks that doesn't have a services scheme). In any case, a channel takeover, or what this wiki entry referrs to as internet relay chat takeover, can only happen temporarily. Most servers will reset the channel to pre-split conditions upon reconnection. Moreover, any IRCop can reset the channel's operators/moderators/numerous other settings.
The problem in this case was that an IRCop misbehaved, not a channel operator :)
(I grew up on IRC...can you tell? ;)
edit: I'm aware I'm not using proper terminology for most of these things; this is on purpose.
It's been many years since I was on IRC, but IIRC you couldn't use netsplits to get oper rights, just an @ for a channel takeover -- until services came back online and you got booted.
Man, netsplits and +++ATH0 CTCPs and really wicked channel bots ... those were rather a lot of fun. Almost 15 years ago.
Probably some are, but the only ones we tend to hear about are those which are not. The more visible ones are also likely to have the most and loudest followers.
