Are any of these outcomes something for law makers to consider though? Or parents?

“We all expect to see rough and tumble, but I have seen little ones acting out quite graphic scenes in the playground and there is a lot more hitting, hurting and thumping in the classroom for no particular reason,” said Alison Sherratt, a teacher at St Mary’s Church of England school in Keighley when discussing her own children. Perhaps she shouldn’t allow her kids to play such violent games? It being her responsibility and all.

Mary Bousted, the general secretary of the conferance said that “The watershed tends to work quite well, but with online TV and video children and young people are probably watching inappropriate content over a range of media.” She also said that “It’s about reminding parents and carers that they have a very real responsibility for their children and that schools can’t do it alone,” with regards to age warnings on games and the effects of not supervising children during gaming.

EA is the longest lasting firm with any ties to tech to make it this far. The aforementioned Paypal did very well, but so did Facebook, losing out to AT&T. That phone firm must have pissed a lot of people off, as it not only defeated the above, but Apple and Verizon too.

Netflix made an appearance in the early rounds, but was defeated by GameStop. The game seller in turn was dominated by Walmart – considering the disparity in customer numbers, that fight seemed likely to only go one way.

The surveyed results are being collected by The Consumerist. In discussing EA, it says: “Though it gets very little attention from the mainstream press, the video game publisher is notorious for buying then destroying smaller companies, gouging customers on game prices and then tacking on costly (and occasionally worthless) downloadable content and generally making the whole gaming experience more expensive and less entertaining.”

Yea, that sums it up quite well.

In a chat with SpyParty developer  Chris Heckler at Games Developer Conferance (GDC), Markus “Notch” Persson said that people were looking at piracy completely the wrong way. While he did say that downloading software without paying for it was wrong, he described it as the same sort of wrong as calling his friend an idiot. Granted we have no idea of the sort of company he keeps, this could happen quite a lot, but either way, we can understand it as far from a big problem.

He did say however, that the stigma being given to internet piracy was being thwarted by some. While he didn’t elaborate on who exactly, he said that “Some people are using that to ruin the internet.” Presumably relating to some of the acts and bills that have recently received so much attention in the online media and throughout the world.

Notch finished up the talk by saying that if treated correctly, pirates could even be turned around. “If you have a model like Minecraft’s, you have lots of opportunities to convert pirates to paying customers,” he said.

The rest of the talk focused on Minecraft’s development and Notch’s own speedy career progression, from a humble programmer to a millionaire founder of a well respected studio.

Source: PCGamer

Unfortunately those domains are now down, but the message posted across them is retained in all its glory for everyone to see in a pastebin posting. It reads:

“YEAH YEAH
WE KNOW…
SABU SNITCHED ON US
AS USUALLY HAPPENS FBI MENACED HIM TO TAKE HIS SONS AWAY
WE UNDERSTAND, BUT WE WERE YOUR FAMILY TOO (REMEMBER WHAT YOU LIKED TO SAY?)”

The posting goes on to say how while a few have been arrested, many more will take their place and that it won’t influence Anonymous much – though Lulzsec is now officially dead it seems. However the finger pointing soon turns to PandaSecurity:

“pandasecurity.com, better known for its shitty ANTIVIRUS WE HAVE BACKDOORED, has earning money  [sic] working with Law Enforcement to lurk and snitch on anonymous activists. they helped to jail 25 anonymous in different countries and they were actively participating in our IRC channels trying to dox many others.”

In response for these actions, the 30 sub-domains listed as part of the post were defaced – Anonymous taking full responsibility.

Things get a bit more personal however with the posting of comments made by the Panda Labs technical director, Luis Currons:

“Will this mean the end of Anonymous? No. It will mean the end of LulzSec, but Anonymous existed before LulzSec and will continue existing. However we probably won’t see any more hacks as the ones LulzSec had been perpetrating, and Anonymous will only use their known childish tactic of DDoS using their LOIC tool.”

“Another problem is that sometimes if you want to infiltrate and you have to be one of the criminals, you have to do things that you shouldn’t. In that case, you need to be with law enforcement. We have to find ways to cooperate even better with law enforcement.”

Anonymous merely laughed at this, posting links to his personal facebook, twitter and similar accounts. This is followed on my lots of passwords and usernames of Panda servers – which according to the AnonymousIRC twitter account, the anons were able to keep Panda out of for quite some time.

Well, another salvo in the online war between law enforcement and the hacktivist anti-sec movement has been fired. Let’s see where it goes from here.

1. “Another problem is that sometimes if you want to infiltrate and you have to be one of the criminals, you have to do things that you shouldn’t. In that case, you need to be with law enforcement. We have to find ways to cooperate even better with law enforcement.”
2. says Luis Corrons, research director of PandaLabs.

As part of the operation, the TeaMp0isoN Twitter posted a pastebin link that included download URLs of governmental information and contact details. Most of the files in the first link include contact details of Nigerian governmental officials and company heads, including those people’s email address, job title, description and full name.

Quite a few of the files I looked at seemed to be empty apart from some title designations. Perhaps this was a bit of a rushed job by the organisation?

As part of the Pastebin post, TeaMp0isoN announced those involved with the hack including: “@_TeaMp0isoN ; @_f0rsaken ; @_MLT_ ; @phantom4life ; @C0RPS3_TP ; @aXiom_tp ; ap0calypse.” The hackers also gave “Shoutz to: Che_Hackera.”

The text accompanying the download links says: “Tonight we’ve got some databases from some influential sites in Nigeria. Contained within are admin passwords as well as tons of other information from these databases.”

It seems a shame that Fileserve was used for the download links, considering you need to have a premium account if you want to download more than one file every 10 minutes. I can’t imagine there are many Fileserve account holders in Nigeria.

Posted online earlier today, the hacked call makes references to several well known individuals within the organisation, including TehWongz, TFlow and Cola. The former of the two is considered by both the FBI and Scotland yard to be a “bit of an idiot” and a 15 year old “doing this for attention,” a “bit of a wannabe.” They later discuss how he was arrested at his school and that he’s published a sort of manifesto about becoming a hacker.

The name calling is nicely juxtaposed with the FBI admitting to failures in the past: “We are here to help. We cocked things up in the past, we know that,” but that “it’s not that much of a hardship.” Good job guys.

TFlow and Cola are said to be currently under investigation. Interestingly though Scotland Yard claimed to be holding off arresting them in order to allow the FBI to build more of a case against them. Whether this is to allow the individuals to commit more hacking crimes, or to simply gather more evidence of past crimes is unclear.

One very interesting part of the conversation was the topic of Ryan Cleary, a person associated with Anonymous in the past, who many believed was a plant. The fact the phone call suggested that “indecent images” found on his hard drive would be used to convict him suggests otherwise.

Since the posting of the video, the FBI has confirmed the attack, stating it would hunt down those responsible. On one of the Anonymous related twitter accounts, a comeback was posted: “The #FBI might be curious how we’re able to continuously read their internal comms for some time now. #OpInfiltration”

Along with the posting of the video, a Pastebin post was also made. This shows the email address of many individuals including those at the FBI, the metropolitan police and officers from other organisations around the world.

The companies that MegaUpload used for its data storage were Carpathia Hosting and Cogent Communications and they were initially expected to begin deleting user data as soon as 2nd February. However hopes  for a stay of data execution came when Carpathis released a statement saying that the quoted date was not based on any information that it had provided to the government or anyone else. The unfortunate caveat though was that it wouldn’t be able to get any data back to users itself.

“Carpathia Hosting does not have, and has never had, access to the content on Megaupload servers and has no mechanism for returning any content residing on such servers to Megaupload’s customers,” read the statement.

Giving users that have been unfairly impacted by the ongoing trial of Kim Dotcom – the owner of MegaUpload – and his staff a little whilte longer to get hold of their files, both Carpathia and Cogent have now announced that there will be at least a two week grace period in which people can continue to access their files.

“The hosting companies have been gracious enough to provide additional time so we can work out some kind of arrangement with the government,” said Ira Rothken, MegaUpload’s U.S. attorney.

MegaUpload’s staff were arrested on the 19th January as part of a crackdown on copyright infringement though Mr Dotcom faces charges for moneylaundering as well.

According to the Pastebin posting,”"Captain”, TehWongZ aka CharrieWong” was arrested by the federal authorities and in an effort to avoid jailtime, agreed to snitch on other members of the organisation. With plenty of metaphor and over the top imagery, the posting says that they “have taken full control of our mighty warship, and completed the mutinous nature of marooning TehWongz from Destructive Security. No further involvement with TehWongz will occur, I doubt any of you will recognize our actions of being iniquitous but an action to be celebrated. ”

Apparently without the captain of the ship, the new organisation will be able to work at peak efficiency. How that wasn’t achieved before TehWongZ was arrested is still up in the air, but it’s good to see the Guy Fawkes masks staying positive in the face of adversity.

The new “warship” that they have got a hold of purportedly lets them crack local wifi security, which could make for some interesting hacks in the future.

Anonymous has made a few mission claims in recent months that haven’t born much fruit – or so it seems – leading some to suggest that the entire collective has begun to fracture.