"Anonymous" is a nice book - it certainly "sounds" like a realistic portrayal of the shadowy Anonymous "organization". What makes me feel like this is a true depiction is that the members aren't protrayed as rebellious zealots or as heroes - the actions and motivations speak for themselves.
The loose-leaf nature of the organization reads true as well - alliances and interests form and dissolve easily, which seems reasonable among a group that is diverse in all aspects - geography, age, skills, interests - and a group that never knows the actual identity of more than a few of their closest allies. Most are identified by consistent personas built up over years by individuals - all aspects of the personas can be built to suit - age, gender, nationality - all are "up for grabs" in a virtual world.
I hadn't really thought of the power of botnets, wherein hundreds, thousands and potentially millions of computers worldwide can be used to initiate a denial of service attack on a target. As the book points out, botnets are what take an attack of individuals (at best, maybe a few thousand) and provide it the power to knock down a commercial-scale website. Botnets are actually non-functioning viruses that can be programmed to "come alive" with commands from the botmaster to achieve goals (e.g. spam, attacks etc.) and those that control the botnets have a disproportionate influence on the activities.
The waning interest of the participants is probably the single-most reason that Anonymous hasn't lived up to the move vocal fear-mongering that was prevalent around the Wiki-leaks events. Arrests, though very significant, probably aren't decisive in stopping campaigns, as for most of the participants, it doesn't seem like a real consequence - most, if not all, are convinced they are doing a service, just having fun, and are completely protected by the shell of anonymity they've created around themselves. The lack of organized structure shouldn't be a surprise given the medium, but I was surprised by the relatively small number of key players, and the semi-random organization.
All in all, a good book, however, not for the language-sensitive, as the harsh on-line language is used at times.
Learned a new term - "lulz" (lols), as in "Doing it for lulz". Lol is short for "laugh out loud", and is used in texting to indicate humour or sarcasm, or a reaction to such, as emotion is sometimes difficult to portray with text-only. Doing it for lols is basically doing it for laughs and fun. This basically describes the motivation for even the most political campaigns - if you want to get a large, anonymous, online crowd, you must make the campaign intersting, short duration and "fun".
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