The activity of Anonymous is mainly one meant to be protest. Keep in mind, for all the various attention that they get from their activities, no one is referring to them as any sort of `defacement group' or using language that would characterize a pattern of permanently destructive activity. This stuff is online protest, there's a real difference in context of the activity. The 2600 groups press release discouraging these attacks speaks volumes about how politically witless they are, and about how much they are not attacks in a context of warfare.

Context of negative online actions is fairly important, because of timing and application. In this case, using these tools on these targets (Visa etc.) is having very limited effects, but in other contexts the outcomes can be different. The best example of that thus far is Georgia, where similar efforts had a far more consequential effect.

There is a huge difference where there are any sorts of effect on anything kinetic. The difference between taking out a system designed to allow the porn industry to do online commerce, and one designed to route ambulances during a disaster is obvious, but the methods used could be the exact same ones.

These contextual questions, in combination with technical aspects of the types of activity are one of the things that make this a difficult subject. It's made even more difficult when the context switches from one involving some sort of organizational operations by an entity, and a context involving information operations. My impression is also that things can go from bad to worse quickly based on misperceptions and misinformation, & Wikileaks has proved to be no end of that quite purposefully. So much so that it has caused the group & supporters to splinter pretty seriously.

Timing seems to matter an awful lot. Action biases matter a lot too.

I'm going to be far more interested in some respects in the involvement of technology in the attack on Prince Charles's car in the UK. Imagine for a moment if those attacks were part of a riot over Wikileaks material rather than school tuition, and the Prince had been injured fatally. Given the sustained quasi-idiotic protests in Australia , given they're running around protesting over rights they don't have in a country that's not their own, in a different context and this is not too far fetched a scenario. Had that occurred in a less civilized location it might have been an RPG someone shoved through the window rather than a stick...

Avoiding the cables themselves was slightly easier before there were piles of mirrors all over. In this case the original source material isn't so useful as the information itself, so not its fairly simple not to look at it directly. On the other hand, all the global yammering doesn't make it easy. I was entirely able to avoid seeing any of the Iraq & Afghan material with no trouble. Not so the cables. My untroubled conscience is more than enough reward for avoiding material that is fairly useless to me to begin with. It's ironic that about the only thing needed to quash most of the mirroring that's occurred would have been some assertion of copyright internationally, yet no one in the US has chosen to do that. The bright side is I doubt any of this will get any worse.

Solil: I read your blog entry and liked it a great deal. I'd take some issue with your characterization of Metasploit as lowering the bar too far. I'd reserve that characterization for the whole crimeware market personally.