The Lulz Boat has docked to tweet out a press release regarding the intentions of LulzSec, the group that hacked Sony, the CIA and several gaming targets over the past week.

Unlike most Anons, LulzSec doesn’t ascribe their actions to any greater political, moral or social ideal. As the press release- copied below- indicates… they’re really just doing it for the lulz. However, the group points out that not all hackers hack for notoriety, and whether users of the internet realize it or not, most are easily hacked. So they’re really doing everyone a public service by illustrating inadequate security procedures across the internet. Also, the lulz.

Interestingly, today’s LulzSec tweets also deny a feud with the frequently linked entities 4Chan, /b/ and Anonymous. @LulzSec tweets:

Saying we’re attacking Anonymous because we taunted /b/ is like saying we’re going to war with America because we stomped on a cheeseburger.

Full text of the LulzSec press release:

Dear Internets,

This is Lulz Security, better known as those evil bastards from twitter. We just hit 1000 tweets, and as such we thought it best to have a little chit-chat with our friends (and foes).

For the past month and a bit, we’ve been causing mayhem and chaos throughout the Internet, attacking several targets including PBS, Sony, Fox, porn websites, FBI, CIA, the U.S. government, Sony some more, online gaming servers (by request of callers, not by our own choice), Sony again, and of course our good friend Sony.

While we’ve gained many, many supporters, we do have a mass of enemies, albeit mainly gamers. The main anti-LulzSec argument suggests that we’re going to bring down more Internet laws by continuing our public shenanigans, and that our actions are causing clowns with pens to write new rules for you. But what if we just hadn’t released anything? What if we were silent? That would mean we would be secretly inside FBI affiliates right now, inside PBS, inside Sony… watching… abusing…

Do you think every hacker announces everything they’ve hacked? We certainly haven’t, and we’re damn sure others are playing the silent game. Do you feel safe with your Facebook accounts, your Google Mail accounts, your Skype accounts? What makes you think a hacker isn’t silently sitting inside all of these right now, sniping out individual people, or perhaps selling them off? You are a peon to these people. A toy. A string of characters with a value.

This is what you should be fearful of, not us releasing things publicly, but the fact that someone hasn’t released something publicly. We’re sitting on 200,000 Brink users right now that we never gave out. It might make you feel safe knowing we told you, so that Brink users may change their passwords. What if we hadn’t told you? No one would be aware of this theft, and we’d have a fresh 200,000 peons to abuse, completely unaware of a breach.

Yes, yes, there’s always the argument that releasing everything in full is just as evil, what with accounts being stolen and abused, but welcome to 2011. This is the lulz lizard era, where we do things just because we find it entertaining. Watching someone’s Facebook picture turn into a penis and seeing their sister’s shocked response is priceless. Receiving angry emails from the man you just sent 10 dildos to because he can’t secure his Amazon password is priceless. You find it funny to watch havoc unfold, and we find it funny to cause it. We release personal data so that equally evil people can entertain us with what they do with it.

Most of you reading this love the idea of wrecking someone else’s online experience anonymously. It’s appealing and unique, there are no two account hijackings that are the same, no two suddenly enraged girlfriends with the same expression when you admit to killing prostitutes from her boyfriend’s recently stolen MSN account, and there’s certainly no limit to the lulz lizardry that we all partake in on some level.

And that’s all there is to it, that’s what appeals to our Internet generation. We’re attracted to fast-changing scenarios, we can’t stand repetitiveness, and we want our shot of entertainment or we just go and browse something else, like an unimpressed zombie. Nyan-nyan-nyan-nyan-nyan-nyan-nyan-nyan, anyway…

Nobody is truly causing the Internet to slip one way or the other, it’s an inevitable outcome for us humans. We find, we nom nom nom, we move onto something else that’s yummier. We’ve been entertaining you 1000 times with 140 characters or less, and we’ll continue creating things that are exciting and new until we’re brought to justice, which we might well be. But you know, we just don’t give a living fuck at this point – you’ll forget about us in 3 months’ time when there’s a new scandal to gawk at, or a new shiny thing to click on via your 2D light-filled rectangle. People who can make things work better within this rectangle have power over others; the whitehats who charge $10,000 for something we could teach you how to do over the course of a weekend, providing you aren’t mentally disabled.

This is the Internet, where we screw each other over for a jolt of satisfaction. There are peons and lulz lizards; trolls and victims. There’s losers that post shit they think matters, and other losers telling them their shit does not matter. In this situation, we are both of these parties, because we’re fully aware that every single person that reached this final sentence just wasted a few moments of their time.

Thank you, bitches.

Lulz Security

LulzSec Press Release Confirms: Doing It For the Lulz is a post from: The Inquisitr

Defenders of Wikileaks and all around decent chaps Anonymous and new lulzists on the block LulzSec have begun trading barbs- apparently after some 4Chan users got pissy with LulzSec’s habit of downing gaming services like MMPORG EVE Online. Users on /v/ were reportedly angered after yesterday’s rampage of lulz resulting in several outages. One Reddit user commented:

That kind of already happened when Lulzsec DDOSed MIncraft and EVE Online. /v/ went out in droves and DDOSed to death anything related to Lulzsec. It was like watching a glorious internet civil war take place. “We ride our chocobos to war and enter the fray” was the rallying cry on /v/ today.

The wrath of Anonymous is feared the internet over due to their DDoS habit, but LulzSec has taunted the beast several times on Twitter in the past 24 hours:

It should also be noted that 4Chan is currently down for reasons unknown. Some have criticized LulzSec for hitting softer targets, but the hacking collective just addressed the issue of target severity in response to Twitter criticism:

@Quadrapodacone Hey jackhammer, get some attention span and check our releases page. We’ve hit two agency websites already.

On Twitter, LulzSec has also been promoting a “hotline” (614-LULZSEC) for users to call in desired hacking targets rather than posting them on Twitter. You can follow the lulz in real time by keeping an eye on their feed there.

Update: Reuters has picked up the feud, and reports that calls made to the LulzSec hotline result in the following message:

We are not available right now as we are busy raping your Internet. Leave a message and we will get back to you whenever we feel like.

[Monocle tip to VB]

4Chan, LulzSec Bicker Over Gaming Targets is a post from: The Inquisitr

Lollerskates not included.

[via]

For personal army, break glass is a post from: The Inquisitr

The girl shown in a widely circulated video drowning six newborn puppies in a river has been identified by police in Bosnia after a massive grassroots internet effort to find her.

Much of the effort to identify the blonde teen, who wore a bright red hoodie as she drowned the six yipping puppies, was spearheaded by /b/, who have a history of finding and identifying animal abusers. Users of 4chan were also largely responsible for locating the woman who was filmed on CCTV in Britain last month trapping a pet cat in a trash can for fifteen hours. The cat in that case survived the trauma. 4chan users have successfully stepped in to ID cat abusers prior to that as well.

The puppy drowning vigilante campaign got a boost when Transformers director Michael Bay offered a $50,000 reward for information leading to the girl’s apprehension by authorities:

Bosnian police nab girl who drowned puppies on viral video is a post from: The Inquisitr

Christopher Poole, better known to the internet as 4chan’s moot, spoke at TED 2010′s “Provocation” session.

moot, 21, was revealed as 4chan’s creator by the Wall Street Journal in 2008. He said in an interview with TIME on the same day his identity was disclosed that his “personal private life is very separate from (his) Internet life … There’s a firewall in between.” Which is fitting for a young man backed by an army known to the internet at large as “anonymous,” based in a community known primarily for it’s nameless, anything goes menu of pornography, schadenfraude and extraordinarily crass humor.

Indeed, /b/ wouldn’t be what it is without the ability to post anonymously, and moot is puzzled at the growing trend away from anonymity on the web. moot’s talk on the subject is particularly interesting in light of the growing privacy nightmare visited upon us this week in the form of Google Buzz- even the tech savviest among us found ourselves in awkward situations with current boy or girlfriends, former employers and random one-time acquaintances we may now randomly be “following.”

Interestingly, what seems to be one of the highest impact points of moot’s talk was the saga of Dusty the Cat, infamously tracked down in 48 hours by anonymous after one anon posted pictures of the cat being abused. Although a contradictory point on the surface, it kind of illustrates how privacy and the net really are an illusion. Ars Technica points out that moot “didn’t speak to the dangers” of mass internet anonymity, but the Dusty anecdote seems to illustrate that we may all be throwing the anonymous baby out with the social networking bathwater:

…he insisted that anonymity is a good thing, yet we’re all giving it up voluntarily. He wasn’t talking about the NSA or tech policy or anything like that. Rather, he said sites like 4chan may go the way of the dinosaur because people are choosing to join social networking sites and persistent identity services. One of the ‘Net’s greatest strengths is disappearing as a result, but moot claimed that sites like 4chan show that a lot of good can come of anonymity, too. He seemed puzzled as to why everyone wants their identity tied to so much of what they say and do online. Do people hold back? Do they censor themselves?

Reflecting on my own long-time internet tenure, I have personally scaled back my disclosure in a big way over the past few years. (Yes, the postings you read daily are the censored me. You’re welcome.) Reading over the Ars Technica post made me nostalgic for the days I said what I wanted on the internet, when real names weren’t required, and I knew and errant status update wouldn’t make it into the eyes of my mother, my boss or my best friend from junior high.

Perhaps it was inevitable, and the march towards living publicly on the internet is an unstoppable force. But it would be a sad, sad day if the last true unfiltered cross section of the web ceased existing. The internet doesn’t just know who you are at all times now- it knows where you are, how you’re feeling, what you’re eating and who you associate with. It kind of makes you long for a time and datestamp and a “‘sup /b/” on your disembodied left boob, doesn’t it?

[Ars Technica, Image]

4chan’s moot talks anonymity at TED 2010 is a post from: The Inquisitr

I could have sworn I saw a timestamped picture of your mom on /b/ just now…

[Graph Jam]

MySpace’s decline, a venn diagram is a post from: The Inquisitr

The group taking responsibility is the infamous “Anonymous,” (the name is a label more than a group, applied to users acting towards a similar objective), organized primarily on the 4chan /b/ message board.

The following appeared on the 4chan /b/ message board this afternoon. It may simply be a /b/tard having some fun, but it might not be either

Hello Members of 4Chan.org. The FBI in conjunction with Secret Service and DOJ is requesting records of IP and posting information from the administrators of this site. We are offering a limited time offer of limited immunity to those who confess to the recent hacking of Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account. Those who step forward with evidence will be treated leniently, while the full force of law will be applied to those captured at a later date.

You may turn yourself in via report to The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) [ http://www.ic3.gov/] or you may call your local FBI office or call (202) 278-2000 and ask to be directed to Special Agent Henry Stewart at Bureau HQ in Washington, DC.

The contact details are correct, although the name given has also been used in spam emails before, so we can’t confirm if there is indeed a Special Agent Henry Stewart.

Either way, the McCain-Palin camp is furious over the hacking, and we know from news reports that an investigation involving the FBI and Secret Service has definitely underway, and that puts the spotlight directly on /b/.

Could the /b/ fun now be over? 4chan has survived other incidents, including terrorist threats and other posts that led to the arrest of people planning homicidal rampages. The lawyers from Scientology couldn’t bring the site down, but hacking the email account of the possible next Vice President of the United States takes matters to whole new levels. 4chan just hit the political radar big time, and no one knows for sure what will follow.

Update: Michaelle Malkin has the details on how the hack to place, and what followed. Looks like a lone individual, with /b/ as the conduit for the information, so certainly less heat on 4chan for now. However the point still remains: 4chan is on the Republicans radar, and in the result goes there way in November, don’t think they’re going to forget the incident.

4chan /b/ in the spotlight over Palin email hacking is a post from: The Inquisitr