Anonymous attacks Early Flicker over trademark attempt, t-shirt maker crying ‘uncle!’

 

The idiotic French t-shirt maker Early Flicker, owned by Apollinaire Auffret, has dropped its attempt to trademark the Anonymous hacking collective’s logo and slogan after Anonymous attacked the company’s website. The conclusion to this story was entirely predictable.

Shortly after the news broke, Anonymous posted a video on YouTube in which their characteristically-anatomized voice intoned, “Their arrogance and ignorance of what they have done will not go unpunished…Anonymous will take down any business they have going on the internet.”

As of now the site is still down, with Anonymous pledging to keep attacking the company until its trademark application is completely withdrawn.

In an online statement, Auffret claimed that Early Flicker only sells “2 or 3 items” per day, but that certainly wouldn’t stop his company from profiting off of an Anonymous trademark.

“The vendor must verify that these images are free for use [or] risk legal difficulties. So I regularly checked for any filing of these models until several months ago (February 2012), when I had the idea to place them myself,” Auffret stated. ”These were then guaranteed to be usable in a free and legal [manner] … for all! Since the tabling, no ban has been established for their use, and not one cent has been claimed through copyright.”

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Alleged Anonymous hacker arrested in China for plotting government attacks

A 21-year-old hacker believed to be working with Anonymous has been arrested by authorities in Hong Kong for allegedly planning to take down Japanese government websites.

The man, who has since been released on bail, was arrested on suspicion of trying “to hack seven government websites between June and August this year,” Channel News Asia reported. He is believed to be a part of the same Anonymous faction who defaced 500 Chinese websites in April, the Next Web added.

The motives behind the planned attacks remain unclear.

The news of this arrest follows after two months of Anonymous-related attacks in China and Japan.

In early June, Team GhostShell took responsibility for allegedly hacking 800,000 Chinese government records in an operation called #ProjectDragonFly. The hack also took down sites like China Bearing Commercial Community (bearing.com.cn), International Club of Dalian (an international community club in Northeast China), and the Aluminum Corporation of China Limited (chalco.com.cn), according to Softpedia.

Anonymous hackers temporarily took down a handful of Japan’s government websites in July, including the Finance Ministry and Supreme Courts.

The attacks were in retaliation to the passing of a strict Japanese law that punishes people for downloading copyrighted content or backing up a DVD.

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Three Baidu employees arrested for deleting posts for cash

Somewhere on the Internet there’s a post, a comment, or tweet, that you would absolutely pay top dollar to get wiped off the face of the planet. There are places where this dirty Internet fantasy can come true. In China, for instance, pay-for-deletion is apparently really big business. Just ask the three Baidu employees who were arrested for doing just that in July.

The Global Times reported that the three fired employees are suspected of “colluding with external partners to delete online messages.” It’s not clear what the deleted posts were or where they were hosted. Baidu is the most popular search engine China, gobbling up about 80 percent of the market, and wielding a great deal of influence. It also owns multiple online properties, including a Wikipedia knockoff and a robust assortment of discussion forums.

Perhaps a business got miffed at a comment thread that tore apart their latest product, or a celebrity was displeased by an embarrassing entry on his or her biography page. We’ll likely never know.

The employees were arrested in July, but the company waited until Sunday to confirm the news.

They were apparently running quite a racket, too. A Baidu source, speaking anonymously, told the Global Times that the employees were charging tens of thousands of Chinese yuan per deletion. That’s at least $1,500 per touch of the “delete” key.

There’s an entire deletion industry in China, in fact. One service firm told the Global Times it offers annual plans for businesses, charging between $24,000 and $31,000 a year to manage a company’s online reputation through strategic bribes and deletions.

 

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Pussy Riot on trial 

Three members of Pussy Riot, a feminist riot grrrl band (with no recordings), and offshoot of anarchist art collective Voina, are set to go on trial today in Moscow.

Maria Alyokhina, 24, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 29, have been in jail since late February after storming the altar of Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral (pissing off the male priests) where they sang an anti-Putin and Patriarch Kirill song calling on the Virgin Mary to “throw Putin out!” (For the uninitiated, Putin is once again Russia’s KGB-in-Chief.)

Independent media was quick to highlight the axis of church and state, but it took mainstream media some time before the story had enough inertia.

What the imprisonment and trial of the three Pussy Riot members represents is no less than church and state working in concert to crush dissent. As I noted several months ago in an article on Pussy Riot and free speech:

To preserve [the established] order, it is essential that Putin, the state, and willing oligarchs exercise a certain degree of control over free speech. Nothing must upset that order. Not journalists nor pranksters such as the anarchist art collective Voina, nor any other subversive forces. The Russian Orthodox Church, once the Russian outcast, has now become a willing enabler of Putin’s totalitarian capitalism.

What a symphony it shall be to hear the words “Pussy Riot” read aloud in court.

Hopefully the “hooligans” can beat the bullshit rap.

 

 

 

 

 

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Pussy Riot member suffered faintness

The women had to endure in a glass cage

The trial of the controversial trial against the Russian scandal tape pussy Riot breaks on Russian society. A politician of the ruling United Russia party and a prominent cleric criticized the public hearing. Criminal defendants in one of the three women suffered a dizzy spell in the court.

 

 

As a basic defense called their poor treatment by the judiciary. The musicians have hardly slept, according to law, must hold out a little and ate at the first hearing days twelve hours in a glass cage.

Doctors told the women after a short investigation to stand trial. They are at risk because of a protest against Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin in a church of seven years in prison

"The longer the process takes, the more it becomes a symbol of judicial despotism in Russia," wrote the politician Valery Fedotov from St. Petersburg, the hometown of President Putin, in an Internet blog. He wanted to show that not everyone in the party, "such medieval fanatics". The women's protest against Putin in a Moscow church has many very hurt, but is not grounds for a prison sentence, Fedotov said.

The defense accused the prosecution a "false accusation" against. Some plaintiffs were quoted as being completely identical statements "to the same printing error," said one lawyer. Judge Marina Syrowa but again showed a bias against the application.

The chairman of the Socialist Group in the European Parliament, Hannes Swoboda, exercised under its sharp criticism of the Russian judiciary and government. "The court proceedings against the members of the punk band 'Pussy Riot' is becoming a farce," said Swoboda, who is also Russia-rapporteur of the European Parliament on Wednesday.

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Costa Rican vice minister fired for racy YouTube video

 

 "Little man" just got his big mama in big trouble.

Costa Rican delegate Karina Bolaños has been unceremoniously removed from her post as deputy minister of culture and youth after a racy video showing Bolaños dressed in nothing but her underwear surfaced on YouTube.

In the video, Bolaños, 39, is found delivering a should've-been-kept-private message to her extramarital lover, an individual Bolaños affectionately refers to as "Pequis" and "Little man" during the minute-long video.

"I miss you. I love you with all my soul. And everything that you see here is yours," she tells "Little man."

Uploaded to the YouTube channel Tosgf on July 29, the video—titled "Vice Ministra de Juventud Karina Bolaños Haciendo un video a su Amante "Pequis", esta Sola…,"—has already received more than 1.4 million views and spawned a bevy of carbon copies. One search for "Karina Bolanos" on YouTube yields more than a page worth of reprints, each coming from a different channel.

Bolaños told CNN en Español that was removed from her position before she had the chance to defend herself. As she tells it, the video was shot during a time in 2007 when she was separated from her husband. It was unearthed after a computer engineer hired to install security cameras in her home ripped the video off her hard drive and tried to use it as blackmail.

"It is very difficult to prove because he is a computer engineer and he is one of those people that hacks and steals accounts," she told CNN en Español. "And, because my husband is a congressman and I am a vice minister, he took advantage of the situation to get money out of us."

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Westboro Church Protesters Confronted By Zombies

Members of the controversial Westboro Baptist Church showed up to picket at a Seattle-area military base last week, but were confronted with an unusual counter-protest: dozens of people dressed as zombies.

 

Eight members of the church, known for frequently picketing military funerals and other events as a protest against the progression of gay rights, found themselves confronted with the counter-protest while picketing outside of the Joint Base Lewis-McChord on Friday. The playful counter-protest was launched by Spanaway, Wash., resident Melissa Neace, who spread the word of her idea on Facebook.

“We wanted to turn something negative around, into something people could laugh at and poke fun at,” Neace told The News Tribune. “It was the easiest way to divert attention from something so hateful.”

The Facebook group that Neace launched was called “Zombie’ing Westboro Baptist Church AWAY from Fort Lewis!” Soon after its launch the group gained hundreds of members, with many coming out on Friday to let their opposition to Westboro’s position be known.

Though it’s unclear exactly what was officially being protested by the Westboro picketers, who are known for their extreme ideologies, a quote announcing their plan appeared on the group’s website.

“When you goofy, unthankful, flag-worshipping fools decided that you would declare war against the Lord and against His anointed, you put yourselves in the cross-hairs of a raging mad God. We will come to tell you a few things, to wit,” it read.

Picketers dressed as zombies on Friday said that their affiliations with their military and what they called the church’s “hateful” message prompted them to come out to the counter-protest.

“I come from a long line of military, including my husband. So if they’re going to protest my troops, I’m going to protect my first amendment and protest them,” Ashlee Nerad told KIRO.

Westboro’s next picketing is tomorrow at the funeral of Army Sgt. Erik N. May in Valley Center Christian Church in Valley Center, Kan., according to their website. Sgt. May died in Afghanistan on July 14 while serving in Operation Enduring Freedom, according to The Associated Press.

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