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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Late Night Open Thread: V for… Colbert?

Late Night Open Thread: V for… Colbert?

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Thurday night’s Colbert Nation included a section titled “Corporate Hacker Tries to Take Down Wikileaks“. As Adrian Chen described the results in WonketteGawker:

Anonymous has attracted plenty of attention from all sorts of news organizations; but their recent pro-Wikileaks hack attacks have finally landed them on the most important show in all of television: “The Colbert Report.” Colbert dug into the twisted saga of Anonymous vs. the security firm HBgary, which ended with HBGary employees’ inboxes spilled all over the web. Colbert at his geekiest, and good press for Anonymous—here’s a rare mainstream outlet portraying them in almost heroic light, compared with usual darkness

If you click on the WonketteGawker link, you can watch the full 3:30min clip (Adrian Chen being a paid professional blogger with actual tech skills) without running the risk of seeing a subsequent guest appearance by… let’s say Mike Huckabee. (Nobody wants to be exposed to Mike Huckabee without advance warning.) But you won’t see the image that appears at the top of this post, which flashed on the screen for a fraction of a second during Colbert’s interview with a certain guest (not Mike Huckabee) discussing the ethics of the HBGary/BoA/Wikileaks meshugess.

I don’t know whether this was an OMGtehanonymoushaxxors moment, or (more likely) Colbert funning with his audience, witting and otherwise. But I do know that this represents some kind of 11th-dimensional Escherian level of pure undiluted Meta, next to which Inception looks like a couple of freshmen stoners…

Reader Interactions

29Comments

  1. 1.

    freelancer

    As someone whose chosen handle means “unaffiliated”, I have to officially distance myself from Anonymous, now that they have decided to attack Colbert.

    Poop.

  2. 2.

    SRW1

    So the HBgary guy actually did stick his willy into the hornets nest. Am I right to guess that means he doesn’t need any blood flow to that organ for the next few days?

  3. 3.

    freelancer

    ETA: Inception will win Best Original Screenplay, maybe a few effects awards, that’s it. It won’t win Best Picture, though it should, IMFO.

    ETA: Shit, I can’t edit anymore? Great redesign. What makes this so recent, then? Did you hire the Boy who could fly as your web editor?!

    FYWP and FYTBWCF!

  4. 4.

    Yutsano

    But I do know that this represents some kind of 11th-dimensional Escherian level of pure undiluted Meta, next to which Inception looks like a couple of freshmen stoners…

    Kind of like Paprika, which barely got mentioned as an influence for Inception even though they’re both very similar story lines. But Paprika is, well, good.

  5. 5.

    nhoj

    Also the Huckabee interview is horrible. Colbert lets him start out with the lesson of the financial meltdown is that the cause was government debt.

    Oh and gay people are termites.

    No really.

    nhoj+4

  10. 10.

    freelancer

    @Sly:

    can still manage to edit a comment if I open the edit feature in a new tab or window.
    EDIT: Checking…
    @Mark S.: Yup.

    I hate you more than WordPress…

    Edit To Add: No I don’t! But not by much.

  11. 11.

    MikeJ

    @freelancer: I keep reading that people can’t edit, but I hadn’t noticed any problem myself. Perhaps I’m just not as observant as I thought.

    Aaah. On edit I see the problem. Since I hadn’t tried to edit, I just assumed that having the edit link meant it would work. The full screen grey is an interesting failure mode.

  12. 12.

    bkny

    ‘the obama administration advised one of the largest banks in america …’ – brilliant summation. notice how quiet the crowd got while they let that comment sink in.

    i had missed the world of warcraft connection .. i hope that guy’s tech career is over. lol

  17. 17.

    kdaug

    @Southern Beale:

    In other news, I had a deep thought this morning. Just a little one.

    Noted, and stoled. Not so much a new arrow in the quiver, more a new, sharper arrowhead.

  20. 20.

    Tone in DC

    @piratedan:

    @Yutsano: OMG somebody else has seen Paprika?

    well at least they haven’t made Cowboy BeBop into a live action flick yet starring Keanu Reeves.

    There is NO need to give Hollywood any ideas, though.

  23. 23.

    Sentient Puddle

    I don’t think much of Anonymous, but I do find the whole story to be quite interesting. And the big thing that sticks out to me is that, for a supposed computer security company, HBGary was amazingly vulnerable to attack. Anonymous got in to the back end of the web site through a pretty well-known attack, cracked the weakly-encrypted password table, discovered that the admins were reusing those passwords for various other accounts, and then just totally went to town.

    I really have to shake my head at the fact that something like this actually happened. It doesn’t really prove that Anonymous are l33t hax0rz. They may well be, but it’s more that their target was ridiculously incompetent.

  24. 24.

    Ginger Yellow

    “But I do know that this represents some kind of 11th-dimensional Escherian level of pure undiluted Meta, next to which Inception looks like a couple of freshmen stoners…”

    Inception looks like a couple of freshmen stoners next to anything. Nothing wrong with that of course.

    “well at least they haven’t made Cowboy BeBop into a live action flick yet starring Keanu Reeves.”

    Instead they made it into a live action flick starring Nathan Fillion.

  25. 25.

    piratedan

    @Ginger Yellow: GY I havta admit I’m a huge Firefly fan as well, especially so since they made the cast adopt a Chinese paois slang when cursing which I felt was an especially nifty choice. I’d love to see Cowboy BeBop brought to the big screen but I have to admit its one of the few series where I can watch it in the original/sub or listen to the dub. Just not sure who/how I would cast a live action one.

  27. 27.

    PWL

    I think Colbert made a good and very disturbing point: What was the Justice Department doing connecting B of A up with these sleazebags?

    As if I needed further evidence that this is a “Wall Street government”–and apparently one that doesn’t mind condoning Nixonian tactics…

  28. 28.

    N W Barcus

    I haven’t seen the Anonymous segment yet, but I hope it’s accurate. My one criticism of Colbert is that he doesn’t get tech enough to understand when his tech-related guests are feeding him BS.

  29. 29.

    A Humble Lurker

    @bkny:

    ‘the obama administration advised one of the largest banks in america …’ – brilliant summation. notice how quiet the crowd got while they let that comment sink in.

    I find it rather interesting that the Obama administration apparently gave B of A the number of a guy who’s turned out to be pretty bad at his job.

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