Anonymous Facebook Attack - Is It Real or Fake?

Some of the Anonymous hacktivist group members

Anonymous hacktivist group has denied that it is organizing or supporting an official attack on Facebook, but acknowledged that hackers associated with the group are pursuing the endeavor.


In the last few days there was a lot of fuss going on about the Anonymous group announcement. The hacktivist group said that they are going to shut down social network Facebook on November 5th.
Well, that's interesting, but I got some information that this Anonymous act may not involve the whole hackers group.


"To press ... #OpFacebook is just another fake! We don't 'kill' the messenger. That's not our style," the @anonops Twitter feed tweeted early this morning. About two hours later, however, the group followed up by saying that "#OpFacebook is being organised by some Anons. This does not necessarily mean that all of #Anonymous agrees with it."


Those mixed messages, of course, highlight the inherent difficulties in trying to track the activities of Anonymous. Given that the group is a loose collective of hackers with no central authority, anyone who says they are a part of Anonymous is a part of Anonymous. As a result, if a few people get together in the name of Anonymous and decide to hack Facebook on November 5, Anonymous is behind the planned Facebook hack.


Those running the @anonops Twitter feed, however, insisted that there are more important things to tackle than Facebook. The group said it prefers to "face the real power" instead of "medias that we use as tools" before pointing to a June column from PCMag's John Dvorak that suggested recent hack attacks might be "false flag events to help the government regulate the Internet."


The #OpFacebook effort, meanwhile, got started when someone set up a Twitter account and YouTube channel that said Facebook is the "opposite of the AntiSec cause" a joint effort by Anonymous and the on-again, off-again LulzSec to go after governments with which they disagree.


Facebook "knows more about you than your family" the group said, and "has been selling information to government agencies and giving clandestine access to information security firms so that they can spy on people from all around the world."


The #OpFacebook effort selected November 5 because it is Guy Fawkes Day, which commemorates a failed plot to blow up England's House of Lords in 1605. Though that has traditionally been a day of celebration in England, Alan Moore's graphic novel, V for Vendetta, painted Fawkes as an anarchist anti-hero and Anonymous has adopted a Fawkes mask as its symbol.


But is the effort worth Anonymous' time? As Sophos security analyst Paul Ducklin pointed out, "Facebook only 'knows' what you choose to tell it. If you want to tell Facebook more than you tell your parents, or your spouse, or your third cousin twice removed, then that should be your choice. And it should be your right. At least, your choice and right in any jurisdiction in which there is at least some personal freedom."


"You can disagree with Facebook's approach, and its underlying attitudes—as Naked Security sometimes pointedly does—but to aim to kill it off entirely to suit your own agenda is arrogant self-righteouness at best" Ducklin wrote in a blog post.


Furthermore, Ducklin suggested that the "We do not forget" part of the Anonymous tagline "seems chillingly close to one of the criticisms levelled against Facebook in the call-to-arms video, namely that Facebook doesn't  'forget,' since it's impossible—according to the video—to delete your information from Facebook."


"Apparently, then, it's morally wrong for Facebook to be 'unforgetting,' whilst for Anonymous, it is a badge of honour" he wrote.

Is The Planet Gliese 581d Really Habitable?

Yahoo : A rocky alien planet called Gliese 581d may be the first known world beyond Earth capable of supporting life as we know it, a new study suggests.

Astronomers performing a new atmospheric-modeling study have found that the planet likely lies in the "habitable zone" of its host star — that just-right range of distances that allow liquid water to exist. The alien world could be Earth-like in key ways, harboring oceans, clouds and rainfall, according to the research.

This conclusion is consistent with several other recent modeling studies. But it does not definitively establish that life-sustaining water flows across the planet's surface.

The new study assumes that Gliese 581d, which is about seven times as massive as Earth, has a thick, carbon-dioxide-based atmosphere. That's very possible on a planet so large, researchers said, but it's not a given. [Video: Life-Sustaining "Super Earth" Gliese 581d]

The Gliese 581 system: Worlds of possibilities

Gliese 581d's parent star, known as Gliese 581, is a red dwarf located 20 light-years from Earth, just a stone's throw in the cosmic scheme of things. So far, astronomers have detected six planets orbiting the star, and Gliese 581d is not the only one intriguing to scientists thinking about the possibility of life beyond Earth.

Another planet in the system, called Gliese 581g, is about three times as massive as Earth, and it's also most likely a rocky world. This planet received a lot of attention when its discovery was announced in September 2010, because it's located right in the middle of the habitable zone. That makes 581g a prime candidate for liquid water and life as we know it — if the planet exists.

Some researchers question the analysis used to discover the planet, and say they cannot confirm 581g in follow-up studies. The planet's discoverers, however, are standing by their find. [The Strangest Alien Planets]

Gliese 581d orbits outside of 581g, far enough away from its star that researchers first thought it too cold for life when it was originally discovered in 2007. But a strong greenhouse effect may warm 581d up substantially, perhaps enough to support liquid water.

That's the tentative conclusion of the new study, as well as several other recent studies by different research teams that also modeled Gliese 581d's possible atmosphere.

Modeling an alien atmosphere

The planet Gliese 581d receives less than a third of the solar energy that Earth does from our sun, and it may be tidally locked (a situation in which one side of the world always faces its sun — a permanent day — and the other faces away, producing eternal night).

After Gliese 581d's discovery, it was generally believed that any atmosphere thick enough to keep the planet warm would become cold enough on the night side to freeze out entirely, ruining any prospects for a habitable climate, researchers said.

The research team tested that possibility in the new study, developing a new kind of computer model that simulates alien planets' atmospheres and surfaces in three dimensions. The model is similar to those used to study climate change on Earth.

When the team ran the model, they found that Gliese 581d probably can indeed host liquid water if it has a dense carbon dioxide atmosphere. Even though the planet is relatively far away from its dim red dwarf parent star, it could be warmed by a greenhouse effect, with daytime heat circulated around the planet by the atmosphere.

The team, led by scientists from the Laboratoire de Métrologie Dynamique (CNRS/UPMC/ENS/Ecole Polytechnique) at the Institut Pierre Simon Laplace in Paris, France, published their results in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The work remains speculative.

To determine conclusively if Gliese 581d is truly habitable, future work will probably have to detect and characterize its atmosphere directly. And that is likely years off, since it requires the development of new and advanced telescopes. Human-made probes won't be getting to the planet anytime soon; with current technology, it would take spacecraft hundreds of thousands of years to make the 20-light-year trek.