Anonymous Hackers Launch Pastebin Alternative

Members of Anonymous and the Peoples Liberation Front (PLF) recently announced the launch of the AnonPaste service for the uploading and sharing of data.

“Paste services have become very popular, and many people want to post controversial material,” the groups wrote in a joint statement. “This is especially so for those involved in Information Activism. We feel that it is essential that everyone, and especially those in the movement — have a safe and secure paste service that they can trust with their valuable and often politically sensitive material. As always, we believe in the radical notion that information should be free.”

“The site is being billed as a ‘secure alternative’ to Pastebin, the heavily trafficked pasting service that AnonPaste’s creators claim is censoring pastes and giving users’ IP addresses to authorities and ‘at least one private security firm,'” writes PCMag.com’s Damon Poeter.

“According to the PLF, the service will not collect any connection logs, it will not censor or moderate pastes, it will have no ads, it will have a built-in URL shortener and, most importantly, all pastes will be encrypted by the browser using 256 bit AES encryption — meaning there will be no usable paste data stored on the server for the authorities or anyone else to seize,” writes Help Net Security’s Zeljka Zorz.

“AnonPaste, which accepts donations via WePay and BitCoins, was built using the open source ZeroBin software, which doesn’t record the IP addresses of uploaders,” writes InformationWeek’s Mathew J. Schwartz.

“Pastebin.com was originally created for programmers to temporarily store and share snippets of code and configuration information,” writes Techworld’s Jaikumar Vijayan. “Over the years, people have used the site to post and share all sorts of documents and has become a favorite for hackers looking to publicize details of their exploits.”