I like that phrase. It sounds epic, when in reality it’s nothing so epic. I especially have fun when newspapers and online magazines refer to anonymous as a “hacker group”, occasionally even adding “that gathers on the meme-generating portal 4chan”. Seriously, why do people write about matters they don’t have the slightest idea about? I mean, it’s one thing if i’m blabbering nonsense on my blog, and another if it’s a (inter)national online news portal’s editor who does that.
It’s hilarious though, how easily anon can take down websites. With less than 500 ion cannons in the hive, the website of the swedish whatever office who charged Assange was taken and kept down for hours. Same goes for the swiss bank who froze the WikiLeaks account. With not a whole 1500 in the hive, Mastercard’s main website was down and it announced that even secure transactions were facing connection problems. And when i went to sleep, the hive was closing 2000 and more and more people were demanding an attack on PayPal. (If you wanted to know the hive size or any of the details on the topic, checking /b/ would’ve sufficed, with every third thread being related to Operation Payback.)