​Hacker group du jour Lulz Security announced last night that it is disbanding. The shady, anonymous band of mischief-makers were behind hacks on Sony, the CIA, the FBI, and PBS, among other things; now they claim to be breaking up. After the jump, portions of their goodbye press release:

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​The hot new amorphous group of internet hackers call themselves Lulz Security -- as in, we do it only for the lulz (a.k.a. laughs) -- and have already positioned themselves against the reigning mischief-making internet kings at Anonymous and 4chan, which likely beget LulzSec, at least in attitude. In the last month, their first as a public force, the squad has meddled with Sony (repeatedly), PBS, the FBI, CIA, U.S. Senate and more, rightfully earning themselves the attention they covet, albeit through illegal means or tactics not yet banned that will be one day. With the group's 1,000 tweet comes their mission statement, a sort of nihilist manifesto for the internet era about not giving "a living fuck" and who the real villains are. If you're already feeling pessimistic about the internet on this rainy Friday, why not go deeper into negativity and paranoia? They're not wrong.

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​Yesterday, the lonely dudes of 4chan enacted their plan to prank the lonely dudes of OkCupid. The trolls had set up fake OkCupid accounts depicting cute single women, with which they'd attempted to lure "forever alone" guys on the dating site to Times Square, where they would all collectively be stood up. The idea was to create an "involuntary flashmob" of confused nerds while the 4channers, who are really cool and socially well-adjusted people, would laugh at them.

Go-time was last night at 7:30! How did things play out?

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​The wild Internet message board 4chan, known for originating almost all memes and spawning the hacker/activist collective Anonymous, is plotting a prank on some unfortunately lonely fellows using OkCupid. The point, if you could call it that, is to create an "involuntary flash mob," in which a large group of people flashily take over a public space, but "involuntarily" by making a bunch of fake online dating profiles and agreeing to meet men at a specified moment in Times Square. The pranksters will know if it worked because there's a webcam pointed at the agreed upon destination.

[Updated below: The fateful day has almost arrived.]

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​On Thursday, April 7 at City Hall in New York City, a coalition of groups, organized in part by journalist Barrett Brown, something of a spokesperson for the recently ubiquitous hacker group Anonymous, will gather in support of WikiLeaks, its founder Julian Assange and U.S. soldier Bradley Manning, who has been held in torturous conditions for nearly a year on allegations that he leaked government secrets to Assange's pro-transparency group. This afternoon, Brown told Runnin' Scared that in the months since the rally was planned, the HBGary saga, in which a computer security firm worked with the government to identify members of Anonymous, only to get hacked themselves, made more urgent the need to recognize the "widespread practice of governments and companies collecting data" on its citizens. The rally, Brown said, hopes to "counter the forces against WikiLeaks" and other anti-secrecy individuals and organizations.

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​Encyclopedia Dramatica, the Wikipedia-esque site associated with Internet pranksters Anonymous, seems to be gone. The Twitter and Facebook pages of E.D. suggest that it's over for good. Where did it go? And why is it gone?

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​In the span of one week, a user of the highly influential social news website Reddit, a man who goes by the internet handle BadgerMatt, experienced the extreme highs and lows of going viral. At a moment when the internet's nerdiest, and often ugliest, underbelly is gaining mainstream attention -- from 4chan's antics, both sour and sweet, to the giant Gawker hack to Anonymous' targeting of Scientology -- BadgerMatt's tale encompasses it all: the power of a crowd, "vigilante e-justice," piles of goodwill and then -- just like that -- how quickly the hive mind can turn on you, leading to harassment and threats. His whole story is below.

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​Over the weekend, Gawker Media was hacked by a group calling themselves Gnosis. Chaos ensued, with a battle for control over the site playing out as Gawker techs took down the Gnosis post and Gnosis replaced it. Gawker seems to have won in that battle -- sort of. As of this morning, there have been no new posts on the site since the management message from yesterday at 3:34 p.m., "Commenting Accounts Compromised -- Change Your Passwords."

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A group calling themselves Gnosis have posted a torrent, which they claim includes all of Gawker Media's source code, along with the previously threatened list of commenter names, email addresses and passwords on The Pirate Bay. The torrent of information currently has zero "seeders," making it impossible to download. For now. (UPDATE: The information is out. A summary of the entire hack is at the bottom of this post.) The group has also posted to Gawker.com under the name of the site's weekend writer Adrien Chen (who says he has no access to Gawker's blogging system), linking to the hacked information. The full hacked Gawker post and a statement of purpose from Gnosis below! Expect the site to go down altogether at some point as Gawker's tech people struggle to win back power.

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​Yesterday, we cataloged a series of strange tweets from Gawker Media' tech site Gizmodo, claiming to be from the amorphous, loosely 4chan-affiliated hacker group Anonymous. In the messages, the hacker claimed to have stolen 1.5 million email addresses and passwords from three Gawker Media sites including the flagship, Gizmodo and Lifehacker. The mystery tweeter also demanded support for WikiLeaks. Minutes later, the messages were deleted, the account password changed and the "hack" laughed off by Gizmodo. Scott Kidder, Gawker Media's director of editorial operations, insisted that there was "no evidence to suggest any Gawker user accounts were compromised, and passwords encrypted / not stored in plain text anyway." Today, the alleged hacker is back and threatening to spill the stolen information. Now, Gawker is confirming the hack, though the original evidence provided still seems questionable.

[UPDATE: 12/12/2010, 5:07 p.m.: It's all happening.]

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