Celebrities, Web, Social Networking
Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails Waves Goodbye to Social Networking
anonymous posts
Omegle.com Lets You Anonymously Mess With Complete Strangers
What are you to do if you like social networking and interacting with people digitally, but don't actually like your friends? Or don't even want to know your conversation partner's identity?
Well, 18-year-old Leif K-Brooks decided he was tired of talking to the people he knew in Brattleboro, Vermont, so he created Omegle. The site lets you anonymously chat with a complete stranger one-on-one. You simply visit Omegle.com, click 'Start a chat' and you're up and running with an anonymous chat partner.
It's fun, awkward, and oddly thrilling. It's sort of a throwback to the early days of AOL and chat rooms, except for the fact that it's one-on-one (so you don't have to filter out 30 other concurrent conversations).
There is no filtering, though, and, since it's anonymous, we're sure that more than a few people are having fun by being completely inappropriate. So, if you're at work, you might want to wait until you get home to check this one out. [Via: Gawker]
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Anonymous Anger on the Internet Increasingly Prevalent
Lesley Withers, a Communication professor at Central Michigan University, told CNN, "... there's a perception of anonymity. People think what they say won't have repercussions, and they don't think they have to soften their comments." Unfortunately for those on the receiving end, those comments are often still quite hurtful, whether they come from a real person or a stranger. Perhaps the most touching indicator of such nastiness was the case of high-school student Meghan Meier, who was so tormented by the mother of a classmate that she committed suicide.
Right now, sadly, there really isn't much that can be done to slow the spread of hate and ignorance on the Internet, other than to try to have a thick skin and remind others that even though they may be hiding behind a meaningless username, their actions still have an impact. [From: CNN]
Hackers Take Out Scientology Web Site
Well, it looks like the war is on. The Church of Scientology's attempts to squash circulation of a video of Tom Cruise last week seem to have been the final straw for a group that calls itself "Anonymous." According to a recent report in Wired, the cryptically-named organization recently stated that its main goal is to destroy the leadership of the Church of Scientology.
The first public salvo was launched over the past couple of days as a group of hackers claiming affiliation with Anonymous took down the home page of the Church with repeated distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks. DDOS attacks flood target servers with requests, so that they become overwhelmed with data and shut down. This results in a site that doesn't work, which is exactly what visitors to the Scienology Web site experienced during the attack. The attacks flooded Scientology's Web servers with as much as 220 megabits per-second, which security experts claim is a mid-sized attack.
While this attack is not the largest of its kind ever seen, it does show some level of organization, "It's not just one or two guys hanging out in the university dorms doing this," said Jose Nazario, a senior security engineer with Arbor Networks. The church has since moved its site to servers run by Prolexic Technologies, a company that specialized in protection from DDOS attacks.
From Wired (via InfoWorld)
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