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The City of Orlando’s days are numbered. The loosely organized online group Anonymous has threatened to wage war on the city. Well, the city’s website. Following the arrests of members of non-profit group Food Not Bombs for feeding homeless people in a city park without a permit, the “hacktivist” group has released a press release promising to take down a website related to the city everyday, presumably, until the charges are dropped.
“Anonymous” is sort of a generic brand name for internet users gathering together to pull off mass internet stunts. Basically it’s sort of a meta-joke in and of itself, meant to further confuse and infuriate some of the clueless people they target (and the journalists who have to explain it to people).
Anonymous used to do things purely for the LOLs, but over the years demonstrations aiming for great justice and social causes have been pulled off in Anonymous’ name.
You might remember that the City of Miami was once considering passing a ban that would make it illegal to feed homeless people with out obtaining a permit. Well, the city of Orlando actually passed one.
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Members of the activist group Food Not Bombs defied the ordinance and ended up getting arrested.
Anonymous sent a press release to The Washington Post explaining that in retaliation they will start pulling off DDOS attacks against Orlando-related websites. The method overloads a website’s server with repeated attempts to access the site, and temporarily takes it off line.
OrlandoFloridaGuide.com appears to be the first victim. As of this writing it seems to be down. That site is actually owned by a private group, and not by the City itself. Apparently any site promoting Orlando tourism could be targeted.
The group acting in the name of Anonymous seems to be coordinating their efforts partially through the OpOrlando2011 Twitter.
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