[sf-lug] Black hats declare war on Scientology

[Christian Einfeldt]

On Jan 24, 2008 11:55 PM, Kristian Erik Hermansen <
kristian.hermansen at gmail.com> wrote:

> What I meant is that it appears the "anonymous" posters' of that video
> utilized festival to craft the voice overlay with textual input...
>

Oh, right.

And that is what concerns me a bit.  IMHO, this attack by Anonymous could
come back to haunt those of us who favor an open Internet.  Anonymous is
prefacing their attack on Scientology on the cult's abuse of copyright, as
well as Scientology's various acts of fraud and murder.  But the problem is,
they are using FOSS tools to do so, and I'm wondering to what extent this
will create a backlash against FOSS in general in the mind of the general
public.

Larry Lessig makes a point of criticizing illegal copying, which I agree
with.  IMHO, we should actively criticize illegal copying (because the GPL
is based on copyright) and we should make clear that we do not support
Anonymous' attack.

I think that it is great that Anonymous has gotten so much public criticism
of Scientology, and has gotten the mainstream media to play that Tom Cruise
video over and over again, but I think that people will get frightened of
Anonymous and maybe people who have CLI-type skills.  I don't think that
this is a real positive PR event for distributed collaboration.
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