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Comment by sev | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I understand the motive of this, other than saber rattling. Are they really fighting for everything to be open sourced to this extreme extent? Or should we assume this is the "script-kiddie" arm of Anon doing this as opposed to the more "noble"[1] work we see sometimes?

[1]debatable, and none of the above is necessarily what I believe

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This is the AntiSec arm, which basically decided to simply attack security vendors and contractors to show them as snake oil salesmen. It wasn't really related to any sort of moral vision or goal, just fucking things up.

To be fair, exposing a snake oil salesman is a morally sound undertaking.

This has absolutely nothing to do with open-source. Please, don't confuse things. Also, it's not because the source code is now public that it became open.

The motive was apparently blackmail and an attempt to shake down Symantec for $50k: http://gizmodo.com/5883024/hackers-publish-symantecs-source-...

Though on twitter, Anonymous says it was Symantec trying to bribe them: https://twitter.com/#!/YourAnonNews/status/16689812134180454...

I dont know where you got that from. If you read the email thread it's clear Anon was asking for money from the beginning. It's clear extorsion. How is that at all Symantec trying to bribe them?

> The motive was apparently blackmail and an attempt to shake down Symantec for $50k

Symantec was the one offering the bribe. Well it wasn't even Symantec, they lied, it was FBI.

Please remove this post as it is misinformation, whether intentional or not.

> According to the email exchange, he also said that he was going to publish these facts and the source code unless Symantec paid him $50,000.

Either I am completely misteading Gizmodo or they are lying. In either case it seems too late to remove the post.

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