It's easy, perhaps, to dismiss this back-and-forth of bored and disgruntled teenagers. And because one of the call-to-arms on 4chan said "We are Anonymous" and involved a denial-of-service tactic, it may be easy to confuse 4chan v Tumblr with the more recent DDoS attacks undertaken by Anonymous.

The blog TorrentFreak has a "behind the scenes look at Anonymous' Operation Payback," examining some of the history and motivations behind the recent series of direct actions that Anonymous has coordinated against pro-copyright groups. And as the TorrentFreak story makes clear, the anarchic nature of the group makes it difficult to generalize too much about who they are or what they want.

"We can safely conclude that this Anonymous group doesn't have a broad shared set of ideals," writes TorrentFreak's Ernesto. "Instead, it is bound together by anger, frustration and the desire to be heard. Their actions are a direct response to the anti-piracy efforts of pro-copyright groups." According to interviews with TorrentFreak, some of Anonymous' members are also frustrated that their actions have not driven media attention to their demands. These have been posted online for over a week and include short, medium and long range goals for revising copyright law.

Rethink Copyright Law... Or Else

While the demands call for an immediate end to piracy lawsuits, Anonymous's call to wean the world away from its current copyright laws seems more measured. In fact, the group does not demand an end to copyright altogether. Within the next 2 or 3 years, Anonymous says copyright lifetime should be reduced to around 25 years. Within the next 10 years, it should be reduced to about 5 years. And in the long term, it should be reduced to between 0 and 1 year.

The list of demands makes no mention of file-sharing, even though many of the group's targets have been those associated with the criminalization - or at least demonization - of file-sharing, groups like the RIAA and the MPAA.

"What we are now trying to do, is to straighten out ideals, and trying to make them both heard and accepted. Nobody would listen to us if we said piracy should be legal, but when we ask for copyright lifespan to be reduced to 'fair' lengths, that would sound a lot more reasonable," a spokesman for Anonymous told TorrentFreak.

Shutting Down Websites, Opening Up Dialogue

It's debatable whether or not DDoS attacks get you heard, let alone accepted. And while the FBI investigations into Anonymous's DDoS attacks may have put a damper on the group's actions, it may be that other forces - those very anarchic forces that gave the group its origins - also serve to undermine and fragment the message that Anonymous is trying to communicate about the problems with contemporary copyright law. And although spats with Gene Simmons make for great headlines, the DDoS attacks so far haven't really made for great political dialogue or legal change.

For the past month, Operation Payback, spearheaded by Anonymous, has targeted organizations like the RIAA, the MPAA, the UK Copyright Office, as well as KISS bassist Gene Simmons with DDoS attacks - either crashing their sites completely, grinding them to an unbearable halt, or in some cases, putting redirects in place so that visitors end up instead at the popular BitTorrent Pirate Bay website.

Anonymous sees itself as the defenders of the Internet, using the denial-of-service techniques as a sort of 21st century form of non-violent civil disobedience. Not a formal political group or organization, Anonymous is rather a loose coalition of individuals who see the crackdowns against file-sharing, done in the name of copyright protection, as contrary to the very freedom of the Internet.

TorrentFreak, reporting on today's attack against the U.S. Copyright Office, points to offline demonstrations being planned for November 5, Guy Fawkes Day. But it's not the sixteenth century Catholic rebel that tried to blow up Parliament that's being honored here. Rather it's a nod to the Alan Moore comic V for Vendetta, in which the revolutionary V (not just a munitions expert, but a hacker) takes on the totalitarian government.

The frequency with which Anonymous is staging its online protests seems to show no signs of abating, and so look for fireworks on Friday, the 5th of November.

It seems the WTO ruled with Antigua after a long series of battles over the fact that US restrictions on online gambling were found to violate free trade agreements. Despite the decision, no new forms of offshore online betting were allowed in the US. In retaliation, Antigua received permission from the WTO to suspend US copyright obligations up to a value of $21 million dollars annually.

Zookz founder Hugh Marshall launched the site in the belief that the Antigua-based company is not subject to US copyright law until those within the space reach a profit of $21 million dollars. Nevertheless, it's unlikely that this is the case as it would mean that the WTO would allow Antigua-based websites to simply give away files or sell them at rock bottom prices in order to stay below the limit. While the actual terms of the WTO's sanction is blurry, John Healey of the LA Times suggests that the annual value limit is likely to represent the loss to US industries rather than the profit yielded. As well, the fact that the site is accessible by global audiences outside of Antigua makes this a particularly suspicious venture.

While the site's 1,500 movies and 50,000 songs represent a relatively small catalogue, it appears that for now, for the price of a Netflix monthly account, Zookz users can access unlimited downloads. Obviously this is tempting. Dubious legality aside, and regardless of how you perceive the RIAA and MPAA, please remember that in this case neither starving musicians nor billionaire record labels receive payment for the downloaded works. If you're still curious about the service, you can register at Zookz.com.

BayTSP, a Los Gatos, CA-based company, is best known for putting the cease-and-desist smackdown on peer-to-peer copyright violators. The site serves infringement information forms to offending parties on behalf of the copyright holders. Think of them as the online debt collectors of the BitTorrent universe, with all the information security risk that implies.

If the information were secure, this might be fine. However, in some monumental lapse of judgement, the entire site was left open to search spiders and accordingly indexed by Google, allowing anyone with hackerish leanings ample opportunity to create all kinds of mischief.

A Google search for "'infringement information' site:baytsp.com" yields distressing results. Some of the pages have been removed, but you can still have a look at the cached versions:

Whoops!

Not only have the forms been online for Google and the waiting world to view; the forms could also be completed and submitted online by just about anyone.

More technically savvy tricksters could send infringement notices of their own. "And, on top of that," the TechDirt blogger writes, "some have discovered that BayTSP's site has some scripting vulnerabilities such that you could create a fake complaint and get people to, say, download malware or enter credit card data."

Although this recent debacle is simply one more PR disaster for the media industries themselves, my first thoughts were echoed by TechDirt commenter Mechwarrior: "Once this hits 4chan, it's over."

So, what, exactly is Genome, then? Well, it's not really just one thing - it's four:

1. Social Network: Genome a social network like any other. You'll have a user profile, friends, and tools that let you social with them in comfortable, natural ways.
2. Contact Manager: You'll be able to keep track of your contacts' information on Genome.
3. Instant Messenger: Genome will provide an open instant messenger that's integrated with your contacts.
4. Identity & Social Graph Provider: Genome will have an open identity policy so your Genome identity is easily sharable with other sites. That means that other sites and services can query Genome for some pieces of your personal information.

The Genome project has only been in development for three months and most of the details on how it operates, technically speaking, are being kept quiet. However, we got a look at some of their plans as well as some screenshots of the mobile app.

What Genome Is Not

Genome is not an aggregator spock.com profiles or FriendFeed. Genome can function as your central identity, not a collection of your identities out on the web nor a collection of your social web activities.

It's not a competitor to other data portability movements like Facebook Connect, MySpace's Data Availability, or Google Friend Connect. Instead, Genome will work cooperate with them to give users control over their own data. To do so, Genome will not use any closed, proprietary protocols - only open standards.

What Genome Will Let You Do

Because it will use open protocols, the goal is to let users carry their identites anywhere on the web. Updates made to those identities out on the web will make their way back to Genome instead of users having to return to Genome to edit their profiles.

You'll be able to access Genome's service from a web app, a desktop client (they have a Windows, Mac, and Linux client planned), and a mobile app. A Google Android client has already been built, too. In fact, Genome's creators are particularly focused on the mobile market and are working on real-time sync and location awareness in this area. Of course, developers will also be able to build their own web apps and clients thanks to Genome's open standards and API.

We got a sneak peek at the Android app, but be warned, the app is still very much in alpha and may change a lot prior to launch:

To deal with "noise" Genome is implementing something they're calling a "real-life relationships" model. In your real life, says co-founder Chernyshov, "you can control who knows what about you, and you can control what you know about them." Those granular relationships will be available on Genome, yet kept as simple as possible.

How You'll Use Genome (At First)

There aren't too many details on the specifics of how you will use Genome or the technical details as to how Genome operates, but we do that the first public release will only be the beginning of their effort to solve all the problems noted at the beginning of this post. The first iteration of Genome will be focused on the problem of identity management.

In the area of contact and identity management, the problems that Genome wants to solve specifically include the following: you can't import or export data on today's social networks, you can't control who sees what about you, you can't watch who knows what about you, and you can't ask a new web service to retrieve your name, email, contacts, etc. from a social network site. Well, as for that last issue, data portability is supposed to address this, but perhaps Genome's creators aren't interested in waiting for the major providers to make it work.

To start off, you'll be able to import your address book contacts and (possibly) import friends from various social networks. (They aren't sure if they will have that feature ready for the first public launch or not). However, they do plan on supporting Google Friend Connect and, further down the road, they will offer automatic contacts discovery.

Once you add a contact to Genome, it's yours - it's not locked in any way. Unlike a network like Facebook, for example, who locks in your contacts so you have to keep using their walled garden service, the data from Genome can be freely moved about the web. If you add someone to Genome then invite them to join the service, their profile will be automatically linked with the contact you've already created. The details don't need to be re-entered.

Other Issues Being Addressed

As the Genome project progresses, future versions of the service will focus more on privacy concerns, distractions, quality interactions, and advertisements. (More details can be found on this post about Genome.) How these issues will be dealt with is currently under wraps.

Privacy: Privacy levels will be set up to mirror real-life relationships: spouse or significant other, family, best friend, friend, buddy, colleague, business partner, high school acquaintance, contact, etc. Human relationships have detailed nuances - social networks should, too.

Distractions: Social networks today are bogging us down with messages, invitations, pokes, and friend requests. Some of these matter, some of these waste our time, but how can we pay attention to only the really important things? Genome plans to address this.

Quality Issues: The more "friends" you have, the less rich the interactions and the relationships you maintain with your friends on your social networks. Interactions become one-way, more similar to RSS than to real relationships.

Ads: Today's ads are often irrelevant, usually unwanted, and sometimes even inappropriate. Even targeted ads seem to miss the mark. If Genome truly has a solution for this problem, that will be extremely impressive.

Conclusion

At the moment, Genome sounds almost too good to be true - a social networking service that solves all our problems? Nevertheless, it's certainly intriguing. If it can really do what it proposes to do, then it's worth signing up for (sign-up is here).

Facebook Requests: Dan Zen