Anonymous Raises Over $54,000 For Dedicated Your Anon News Website 72
hypnosec writes "Anonymous knocked the doors of Indiegogo in a bid to raise some crowd-sourced dough to expand its news coverage by establishing a dedicated site instead of tweets and tumblr blog posts and managed to raise 27 time as much money as initially targeted. The initial target was to raise $2000 to fund the site development work as well as pay for initial hosting. Anonymous is planning to host news, reports and blogs from independent online reporters under its, already in use, Your Anon News brand."
$2000? (Score:1)
First of all, $2000 to get a website won't get you far, unless you like in a very small town of 10K people or so. And given the traffic that will be generated, I'm not even sure $2000 would have been enough to pay for one year of hosting.
My question is: did they pull that $2000 figure out of their asses?
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Given the comment on town size, and bandwith, I suspect the GP was referring to monthly bandwidth more than dev costs. It's anonymous, they probably won't have to bother with dev costs. Even assuming cheap VMs and whatnot, the bandwidth for such a site could be an issue, and including the VM to run it, cost $30-$60 a month (was looking at a relatively cheap Linux/FreeBSD host with 500GB/month). I think the top plan had $100 for 2TB/month. Still not to or beyond the $2000/year number, but not exactly cheap.
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Although you can get an unmetered server for ~150/mo, or colo one for 85/mo with providers I am currently using.
The major issue I see with this plan, is most datacenters allow 3 letter agencies to just walk in, and copy drives.
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Well don't store data then?
Just put the stuff in memory based databases and/or steal the partition setup from Tails; that thing will wipe data faster than you can say "shit didn't mean to do that".
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The major issue I see with this plan, is most datacenters allow 3 letter agencies to just walk in, and copy drives.
I doubt that they will be hosting the source code for their cracking tools or internal forums for their secret stuff. It is probably going to be just a blog of sorts that they can use as their official channel for news about their activity. Who cares of the govt takes the drives if it's all public info anyway? And do you really think they are going to host it in the U.S.A.?
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Re:$2000? (Score:5, Insightful)
If they write the website themselves, and have some sort of advertising for income then 2000 is fair. It doesn't have to be some big corporate conglomerate professional website. Sometimes doing things on a shoestring is a good way to start. Why burn a ton of cash if you don't get the people contributing the way you thought you would?
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Hopefully nobody, but probably whoever wants to reach its audience. Was that a trick question?
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Google adwords, people looking to hire hacking talent, dunno lots of people would probably want to, unsure of who might want to be seen as supporting them.
Re:$2000? (Score:4, Insightful)
You should trust them even less (Score:1)
Than this anonymous coward.
Biased, but that is okay... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this is good.
It's not like it won't be biased, but the fact is that we have no high-profile news service that doesn't exhibit a strong pro-corporate bias right now. When OWS was active you had to go to R.T. or Al Jazeera to get anything near to fair reporting on it. Don't forget that Erin Burnett spent the very first minutes of her first CNN show bashing OWS in an unfair way. CNN, despite the shrill idiots that constantly say there is a pro-Left bias there, consistently takes the corporate side on all issues.
We need more high-profile news outlets to balance out that corporate bias.
Re:Biased, but that is okay... (Score:5, Interesting)
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The corporate news outlets didn't get to be the only players in town by mistake
The corporate news outlets aren't the only players in town.
I get most of my news from Google News [google.com], and right now they have stories from the big corps, but they also have content from Xinhua, Al Jezeera, several local papers and several blog sites.
May depend on events (Score:4, Insightful)
For example, in the Rehtaeh Parsons [www.cbc.ca] case (Canada), Anon basically showed the RCMP (police) as having put little effort into the case, and have proceeded to dig up evidence and essentially revive the case.
As with the link above, major news outlets in Canada have carried this story, and the reputation of anon seems to be improving in regards to revealing similar issues in gov't or law enforcement.
So long as they can tame the "lulz" area of things, an official news site might be a good/popular reference for some things.
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When someone defaces their site? (Score:1)
Who gets blamed?
Not supported (Score:5, Insightful)
As an Anon, I cannot support this effort. This is totally contrary to how Anonymous operated, and it's an attempt to put an official channel on the name and idea of Anonymous.
This site will eventually be controlled or shut down, or censored. And people will get the wrong idea that Anonymous has sold out, and that's not true at all. The timing for this is just too canny.
Anonymous does not support it.
Re:Not supported (Score:4, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's clique not click.
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Cat Power (Score:4, Funny)
So Schrodinger's Cat will definitely be the editor in chief.
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We are Anonymous. We are legion. We are decentralized. Therefore, we are unstoppable. To that end, we are creating this highly-advertised, centralized news site that...
...oh. Um... we can still keep your money, though, right?
I am not Anonymous, and I do not endorse this. (Score:5, Funny)
Anonymous does not support it.
News Flash! Today, the Anonymous news site was hacked, apparently by a rogue group called Anonymous. Anonymous posted a manifesto on the hacked servers, stating, "Anonymous is against the biased news that is posted by Anonymous, and we are dedicated to show the world what a pack of tools they are."
The spokesperson for Anonymous stated, "These Anonymous guys are just jerks, why would they do this?'
An anonymous source went on record to say, "Nobody knows what is going on in the community. Also, don't use my name! Ahhhhhh!"
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This is exactly the same problem we encountered in OccupyLA. Many of the original planners were drowned out, or lets be polite and say OccupyLA just morphed into something radically different than originally conceived. It happens in all systems. See: US Gov't and democracy
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The amount of money raised for this is just too canny, IMHO sounds like advertisement for a disinfo op.
Or maybe Anonymous IS the disinfo op itself, and the fake disinfo op would be fought by Anonymous in an epic, fake battle.
To go from speculation to prediction, this would mean this operation will piss off many anonymous supporters eventually.
You'd be surprised how accurate their news is (Score:5, Insightful)
I took a gander at /pol/ during the bombings on Monday. Peel back the casual racism and horrible jokes and you will find what I'd call "crowdsourced news" -- people were transcribing the police scanner in realtime, verifying sources and continually updating what was or was not consensus on various news items. They knew the Saudi they kneejerked into arresting wasn't involved hours before the media was reporting on it for example.
Outlets are already writing out editorials about the new journalism, where many people were getting their news from tweets and blogs instead of mainstream news. I anticipate this new site will be a simple way of aggregating the thousands of pairs of eyes that witness news as it happens. I'm a bit concerned when it comes to their coverage of "exclusive" news, though -- I doubt that Anonymous will be allowed to sit in the White House Press Room, or interview CEOs and politicians.
Hmm, how accurate are "exclusive" news? (Score:3)
All of the official news could hugely benefit from croudsourced background checks, source verification, etc. We need something like a "lexical analyzer" described in Asimov's "Found
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We have that. It's called a brain.
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We have that. It's called a brain.
I do, you probably do. Clearly nobody posting comments on YahooNews does, so we're badly outnumbered.
Come up with some alternative source-sifting method.
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Since no Saudi was arrested, so, the value of /pol/ is what again?
Consensus is opinion, not news, so once again.... you're not convincing me that /pol/ has any value.
Posted anon to avoid the flames of outrage because I dare to question. Though actually it's quite odd - while encouraging questions on the surface
Who's the underwriter? (Score:3)
I had high hopes for Anon. (Score:2)
At first, I was excited by this. A new way of looking at the world! Crowd-sourcing! etc.
Now I'm cynical. Crowd sourcing translates to witch-hunts. The ideas that Anon have adopted are the same old ones that got us in this mess in the first place.
You want news? Go to Slashdot or Hacker News.
Stoned basement-dwelling teenage life dropouts should not be determining what we think is "news"
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Stoned basement-dwelling teenage life dropouts should not be determining what we think is "news"
Don't worry. If this takes off, in a short while the news will be produced by teams of highly-trained sociologists, expert at formatting their corporate masters' propaganda to apparently come from, and be eagerly parroted by, basement-dwelling dropouts.
In other words, the news will be filtered with equal expertise to conventional "old media" mainstream news sources.
Adept cynicism (Score:2)
I think you're right, despite the waves of vast cynicism in that post.
Another way to put this is that the audience defines the product. Our inattentive public wants news-drama, not news-factuality, so any news service run as a business will quickly start with the Justin Bieber and Jodi Arias stories...
whois info (Score:2)
Not sure how they plan on registering the domain and still remaining 'Anonymous' since ICANN won't allow any-old-BS* in the whois record anymore.
[8] -http://www.icann.org/en/resources/registrars/registrant-rights-responsibilities
YourAnonNews does not speak for "Anonymous" (Score:1)
YourAnonNews = Jackal = Christopher Michael Banks. All that needs to be known about this entity can be found at https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Jackal [encyclopediadramatica.se] .
Daily expenses (Score:2)