Anonymous

Fourteen individuals believed to be part of the hacktivist group Anonymous pleaded innocent on Thursday in federal court in San Jose, Calif  to charges of participating in an attack against PayPal.

A faction of the infamous hacktivist collective Anonymous appears to be branching off from the group's social responsibility mission and getting into the celebrity snooping business.

In recent days, the faction, which calls itself Hollywood Leaks, has posted cell phone numbers of celebrities, nude photos of a rapper, and a confidential copy of a movie script to the Internet.

Anonymous came out with two high-profile attacks on Thursday afternoon. First, the group claimed credit for defacing the site of the Texas police chiefs and leaking documents and e-mails from law enforcement officials. It also claimed credit for taking down the site of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California around 6:30 p.m. on Thursday.

The site was down less than 45 minutes before it was restored.

Anonymous, after a relatively large period of doing nothing, are back with a vengeance. Even without their (arrested) de facto leader Topiary, they've punched Texan law enforcement squarely in their gut: a giant email leak, internal documents, addresses. Anon's back.

Anon explains the motives for the attack thusly:

The Sri Lankan branch of Anonymous claims to have hacked into the DNS servers of Symantec, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and several other large organizations over the past few days.

Posting the news and records of its exploits on Pastebin, the group is taking credit for launching "DNS Cache Snoop Poisoning" attacks against its victims.

Anonymous is a strange organization in the sense that it is not entirely organized. Sure, it has international recognition as a self-dubbed “hacktivist” network that gets involved with protests worldwide and infiltrates the websites and databases of corporations and governmental organizations alike.

But unity among its members hangs on by a threat, and some of them have become disenchanted with Anonymous — some of whom spun off into the other most notable hacker association of the year, LulzSec.

A 22-year-old man was charged with computer offenses by U.K. police investigating attacks on companies carried out by the hacking group Anonymous.

Peter David Gibson, a student from Hartlepool, England, was charged with a conspiracy to impair the operation of a computer or hinder access to a program or data, the Metropolitan Police in London said today in a statement. Gibson had been arrested along with five others by officers in connection with so-called denial of service attacks against several companies, the police said.

The hacker group Anonymous stepped up its BART attack Wednesday, posting a partially nude photo of a man they say is the transit agency's chief media spokesman, Linton Johnson.

Anonymous has been calling for the resignation of Johnson, who suggested that BART officials turn off cellphone service at underground stations earlier this month to thwart a protest against transit agency police.

Exhorts activists to come out on streets on 15 October at Hyde Park to demand participatory democracy  

Online hacktivist group Anonymous has urged activists, artists, musicians and other people to gather at Hyde Park on 15 October to take part in "Operation Unity", a protest against cuts to public services and to demand for "participatory" democracy.

A conservative member of British Parliament who had urged shutting down social networks during the riots says hacking groups made threats against her children.

Louise Mensch, in a post on Twitter from New York Monday, said the groups Anonymous and LulzSec made the threats in an e-mail, The Guardian reported. She did not provide specifics but said the threats were designed to keep her from using the network, as she does often.