The internet is dead. Long live the internet!

matthewkeys:

Meet Deric Lostutter, a 26-year-old cybersecurity consultant who also goes by the moniker “KYAnonymous.” Lostutter obtained and published tweets and Instagram photos in which members of the Steubenville High School football team joked about an incident in which a 16-year-old girl was raped.

Lostutter’s actions inspired a group of people to take justice into their own hands. A hacker called “Bobcat” vandalized the Facebook page of the Steubenville football team. Other hackers took similar action.

It’s unclear if Lostutter participated in any hacking shenanigans, but if he’s indicted and found guilty of any, he faces 10 years in jail. By comparison, the Steubenville rapists received one- and two-year sentences each.

The classic example of a company responding well to a crisis that’s no fault of theirs was Johnson & Johnson with the Tylenol murders. If they had spun it the way Intel spun the FDIV problem, or the way Google and Facebook are spinning the NSA crisis, they would have said something like this: “It’s a local problem in Chicago. Only a few of our customers have been effected. We are taking steps to make sure that there’s a low probability of any other customers being similarly inconvenienced.”

What a customer would hear: “These guys are clueless. I’d better go with Bayer or Excedrin. I don’t want to die just because I had a headache.”

Instead, what Tylenol did, and it’s something the tech companies would be well-advised to study, it to approach the problem the way their customers would. They immediately withdrew every bottle of Tylenol on dealer’s shelves. The first goal was to protect the people, then save the product. Which they did, after taking the hit, and becoming the leader in product safety. The product came back strongerthan it was before.

If you want to know more, read this case study. It’s a classic.

robertreich:

Conservative Republicans in our nation’s capital have managed to accomplish something they only dreamed of when Tea Partiers streamed into Congress at the start of 2011: They’ve basically shut Congress down. Their refusal to compromise is working just as they hoped: No jobs…

antigovernmentextremist:

In the wake of last night’s revelation that everyone in the world has a creepy NSA-shaped stalker, defenders of online liberty and generally angry internet people Anonymous have leaked a treasure trove of NSA documents, including seriously important stuff like the US Department of Defense’s ‘Strategic Vision’ for controlling the internet.

The documents — 13 in total — were posted online, along with an accompanying message full of the normal Anonymous bluster: people won’t be silenced, they have the memory of trivia-master elephants, the governments of the world will fall, your average press release really.

The documents seem to mostly relate to PRISM and supporting operations, and mostly date from around 2008, supposedly not long after PRISM first reared its ugly head. One of the key things Anonymous has highlighted from the documents is the existence of an “intelligence-sharing network” that shares data gleaned from PRISM with “intelligence partners” around the world. Although we’re still in the process of combing through the documents, you can bet your last Bitcoin that ‘intelligence’ has been shared with British security services.

So the federal government is illegally collecting data on your lives and sharing it with other governments. Photos, videos, who you talk to, how often you talk to them, where you go, search histories, emails, facebook messages. All being shared.

The National Security Agency’s immensely secret project in the Utah desert will intercept, analyze, and store yottabytes of the world’s communications

(Source: grayblue)