The Tutu Has Been Donned. Your Move, Anonymous.
For 24 hours, the internet was subjected to, or blessed with, if that's what you're into, the image of me in a tutu with a shoe on my head. (We're still waiting for the Smithsonian to request the tutu for inclusion in its special collections.) Now it's time for Anonymous to hold up their side of the deal.
Gawker posted a picture of me in a pink tutu and a basketball shoe on my head because Anonymous said this was the condition for granting interviews about their headline-grabbing leak of one million Apple device IDs. So far I haven't heard anything more about the leak from Anonymous, and neither has anyone else, from what I can tell. But as you can see from the tweet above, posted by the semi-official Twitter mouthpiece of Anonymous last night, Anonymous says they'll be following through soon.
That's good, because questions have been mounting about the leak since it was published on Monday. Anonymous claims the database of a million UDIDs—the unique codes that identify each Apple iPhone, iPod and iPad—was just a sample of more than 12 million stolen from a laptop belonging to FBI cybersecurity agent Christopher Stangl. This hinted at some sort of massive mobile spying operation. But the FBI has denied they ever had or asked for the data, and Apple has denied giving it to them. Computer security experts have been conducting lengthy analyses trying to pin down the data's provenance, with little luck.
Is Anonymous lying? Is the FBI? Where did the data, which most experts say is real, come from? One person who would know for sure is whoever leaked it. But according to one Anonymous member, the leaker vanished soon after publishing the data and "hasn't been back online since."