OOOOOOOO, I done pissed ‘em off now.

Apparently, despite the fact that they have spawned several pop culture memes (LOLcats, Rickrolling, etc.)and launched Net-wide attacks on Scientology and Ashley Tisdale (of all people), no one has bothered to walk into the wide-open door that is 4chan and document this weirdness. This weekend, my little posts on this blog became the Number 1 search on Google for “4chan” plus “Tisdale.”

This is funny for two reasons: First, I’m pretty sure it was /b/ itself who made that happen when someone found my blog and posted it to the site. In one day, my pageviews jumped 60 percent. Impressive-sounding, no? Until you realize that /b/ raised my viewership by, like, 40 people. The second reason this is funny is that /b/ gave me a rough idea of the size of “Anonymous,” which appears to be several orders of magnitude smaller than they would have us all believe … about 40 people. Oh, another funny thing was the threat attempt some little turd left in my comment queue, ordering me not to “talk about /b/.”

Despite their Fight Club mentality, /b/’s “raid” tactics were fitful and hamfisted. While there were some talented people attempting to game Google and Digg into giving life to their phony Tisdale-has-AIDS story, the majority were spamming Tisdale fan boards with pornographic images and launching DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks on Tisdale sites. Their weapon of choice for this latter tactic was LOIC, an acronym that took me a few minutes to track down. Called Low Orbit Ion Cannon, it’s essentially a piece of software that acts as a sort of DDoS for Dummies. Using LOIC’s handy point-and-click interface, the teenage wasteland of /b/ can overwhelm web servers by pinging the hell out of them with useless requests for information. True hackers infect scores of computers with worms and use these zombie networks to launch DDoS attacks. However, LOIC is good enough for /b/tards with too much time on their hands.