Or stated differently: Have the ill-winds of fate caught the Lulz Boat's sails? 
 
 Today, quite unexpectedly, LulzSec Security announced its retirement. "This is our final release, as today marks something meaningful to us. For the past 50 days we've been disrupting and exposing corporations, governments, often the general population itself, and quite possibly everything in between, just because we could", according to a statement from the hacker group. "Our planned 50 day cruise has expired, and we must now sail into the distance, leaving behind -- we hope -- inspiration, fear, denial, happiness, approval, disapproval, mockery, embarrassment, thoughtfulness, jealousy, hate, even love". 
 
 My question: "Planned?" Based on other LulzSec communication, the group sounded like it was in this snatch-and-post thing for the long haul -- the Lulz Boat was on a long voyage of piracy and firing its canons at many targets to come. For example, on June 23, with release of documents taken from Arizona Dept. of Public Safety servers, LulzSec writes: "Every week we plan on releasing more classified documents and embarrassing personal details of military and law enforcement in an effort not just to reveal their racist and corrupt nature but to purposefully sabotage their efforts to terrorize communities". 
 
 From that statement, I expected an ongoing release of information. Less than a week ago, LulzSec teamed up with hacker group Anonymous for mission AntiSec (Anti-Security), which seeks to expose any government-classified information that can be stolen. From LulzSec's Twitter feed: "Our next step is to categorize and format leaked items we acquire and release them in #AntiSec 'payloads' on our website and The Pirate Bay". 
 
 LulzSec called on other hackers to join the cause, later bragging about its allies: "The Lulz Boat is sailing alongside allied ships, gathering and sorting booty for the masses. How are the winds for everyone?" By all appearances, LulzSec had embarked on a long campaign of looting servers and posting the booty. 
 
 So was 50 days really the plan all along or have the winds changed? The hacker group surely has made enemies, after hacking the FBI, CIA and US Senate and, more recently, Arizona public safety. The latter data dump revealed names, addresses, cell phone numbers and other personal information of cops. If law enforcement wasn't mobilized before, surely it is now. Ill winds would bring brigadiers on pursuing warships. Has perhaps the Lulz Boat's captain peered through his telescope and spied enemies on the horizon and chosen to take safe harbor? 
 
 Maybe I missed some earlier LulzSec communication about a grand 50-day plan. Please correct me if I did. Perhaps today's announcement is just a big gag -- the Lulz Boat sending a decoy to sea, while it sails for new booty and the enemy fleet moves in the wrong direction. 
 
 If it's over then today's data dump is the last, unexpectedly, since LulzSec had promised many more, and I can't help wonder if the pirates aren't on the run. LulzSec's full statement: 
 
 Friends around the globe, We are Lulz Security, and this is our final release, as today marks something meaningful to us. 50 days ago, we set sail with our humble ship on an uneasy and brutal ocean: the Internet. The hate machine, the love machine, the machine powered by many machines. We are all part of it, helping it grow, and helping it grow on us. For the past 50 days we've been disrupting and exposing corporations, governments, often the general population itself, and quite possibly everything in between, just because we could. All to selflessly entertain others - vanity, fame, recognition, all of these things are shadowed by our desire for that which we all love. The raw, uninterrupted, chaotic thrill of entertainment and anarchy. It's what we all crave, even the seemingly lifeless politicians and emotionless, middle-aged self-titled failures. You are not failures. You have not blown away. You can get what you want and you are worth having it, believe in yourself. While we are responsible for everything that The Lulz Boat is, we are not tied to this identity permanently. Behind this jolly visage of rainbows and top hats, we are people. People with a preference for music, a preference for food; we have varying taste in clothes and television, we are just like you. Even Hitler and Osama Bin Laden had these unique variations and style, and isn't that interesting to know? The mediocre painter turned supervillain liked cats more than we did. Again, behind the mask, behind the insanity and mayhem, we truly believe in the AntiSec movement. We believe in it so strongly that we brought it back, much to the dismay of those looking for more anarchic lulz. We hope, wish, even beg, that the movement manifests itself into a revolution that can continue on without us. The support we've gathered for it in such a short space of time is truly overwhelming, and not to mention humbling. Please don't stop. Together, united, we can stomp down our common oppressors and imbue ourselves with the power and freedom we deserve. So with those last thoughts, it's time to say bon voyage. Our planned 50 day cruise has expired, and we must now sail into the distance, leaving behind - we hope - inspiration, fear, denial, happiness, approval, disapproval, mockery, embarrassment, thoughtfulness, jealousy, hate, even love. If anything, we hope we had a microscopic impact on someone, somewhere. Anywhere. Thank you for sailing with us. The breeze is fresh and the sun is setting, so now we head for the horizon. Let it flow... Lulz Security - our crew of six wishes you a happy 2011, and a shout-out to all of our battlefleet members and supporters across the globe ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Our mayhem: http://lulzsecurity.com/releases/ Our chaos: http://thepiratebay.org/user/LulzSec/ Our final release: http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6495523/50_Days_of_Lulz Please make mirrors of material on the website, because we're not renewing the hosting. Goodbye. <3 
 
 So what do you think is going on here? Please answer in comments. ||||| Summary: Pastebin is looking for more manpower to monitor the site's content for sensitive information, such as what hackers dump on the site. The hacktivist Anonymous group is calling the move censorship. 
 
 28 year-old Jeroen Vader, the owner of Pastebin, says he plans to hire more staff to help remove "sensitive information" posted to the site. Pastebin, which has over 200,000 members as of this weekend and 17 million unique visitors per month, is the de facto choice for hackers who want to publicly post data they have stolen from their targets. Hacker pastes ranges from something simple, like a list of sites that have been hacked, to very detailed information, including administrator credentials for website servers, credit card numbers, phone numbers, e-mail addresses with corresponding passwords, and even home addresses. 
 
 Pastebin currently relies on an abuse report system, which gets 1,200 warnings a day. It's not keeping up, so it's about to get some more manpower, according to a BBC interview with Vader: 
 
 I am looking to hire some extra people soon to monitor more of the website's content, not just the items that are reported. Hopefully this will increase the speed in which we can remove sensitive information. This will give us more time to look at trending items in detail if they haven't been reported yet. Often articles contain a lot of information, and part of that can be a person's details. This does not mean straight away that it should be removed. Reading all those items, and determining which ones are hurtful, and which ones aren't, requires a lot of time. That's why we rely on the abuse report system at the moment. But there are plans to improve on this. 
 
 This has led to many speculating that Pastebin is specifically targeting the hacktivist groups Anonymous and LulzSec with its new initiative. The hacktivist groups uses Pastebin quite frequently; for example, the Anonymous China hacks this past week used Pastebin multiple times for multiple leaks. 
 
 Even if Anonymous or LulzSec decided to attack Pastebin in retaliation, it wouldn't be a huge blow to the site. Every single day for the last three months, Pastebin has been the target of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Vader says the longest continuous attack, in February, went on for more than 48 hours. He said none of the attacks have been claimed, but he has heard that many hackers like to test their DDOS skills on Pastebin. 
 
 Whether Pastebin will become a target isn't known, but it's clear Anonymous isn't very pleased with what's happening. The YourAnonNews Twitter account summarizes the group's stance quite succinctly: 
 
 Srsly Pastebin, f*** you - @Pastebin to hire staff to tackle hackers' 'sensitive' posts | http://bit.ly/HixoFQ All aboard the Censor Ship! 
 
 For its part, Pastebin is reportedly trying to calm everyone down. Here's what a Pastebin admin reportedly posted on the Anonymous Central Tumblr: 
 
 Hey guys, I'm from Pastebin.com and would like to speak to someone from @anonops via email. Could someone email admin@pastebin.com please? Would like to set some stuff straight, as a lot of news sites are reporting false stories now about how Pastebin is against Anonymous all the sudden. 
 
 So far, all the comments are asking whoever made the post to present his case publicly. After all, it's the Anonymous way. 
 
 See also: ||||| British police announced today that they arrested a 19-year-old hacker in Scotland's isolated Shetland Islands who used the nickname "Topiary" online. Here's what we know about this core member of the hacking group Lulz Security, from interviews and leaked chat transcripts. 
 
 Topiary was the most visible member of the world's most visible hacking group. Earlier this year Lulz Security captivated the internet with a 50 day hacking spree in which they attacked the FBI, the CIA, and Sony, leaked tens of thousands of emails and passwords, boasting all the while on its massively popular Twitter account. Topiary was a LulzSec cofounder, the group's unofficial spokesman and aesthetic center. The last two were crucial roles in a group that relied as much on media savviness as hacking ability. He also helped fund LulzSec operations. 
 
 Topiary's history with members of LulzSec dates to before they adopted the catchy name and the cocky logo. Last February, he helped plan the hack of the security firm HBGary with future LulzSec members in a secret room on the chat network belonging to the hacktivist collective Anonymous. At the time, he was tentative about being associated with illegal hacking. 
 
 "I'm going to start saying, with future press, that I'm an observer/associate of Anon that agrees with Anonymous actions, rather than say I'm Anon… to avoid being raped by Feds," he said, according to leaked logs. 
 
 That didn't last long. Topiary vaulted into the spotlight a few days later when, as a member of Anonymous, he squared off with the Westboro Baptist Church in a webcast and hacked the Church's website live on-air. He became a favorite source of interviews for journalists, since he displayed a rare willingness to go "on voice"—something most hackers avoid for fear it will help in identifying them. 
 
 After LulzSec spun off from Anonymous, Topiary continued to act as unofficial spokesman while the group rose to fame with a series of increasingly-spectacular hacks. He ran Lulzsec's Twitter feed, and his style of swashbuckling, meme-inflected humor became the group's brand. A former Lulzsec insider tells us Topiary's skills at public relations greatly outweighed his hacking prowess. "We never see him do anything, no hacking or nothin," he said in an interview. 
 
 But Topiary was a skilled and reckless showman, happy to taunt and boast in his accent-tinted English then bask in the attention that resulted. He hosted a videochat victory party with about a dozen non-LulzSec friends the night the group hacked PBS and posted a fake story about Tupac, sharing links to hacked pages as they appeared, and making prank calls to what one person in attendance claimed was the White House situation room. 
 
 When police arrested a British teen for LulzSec-related hacking, he was defiant in an interview. "Worrying is for fools," he told us. 
 
 He's almost certainly worried now. While cracking jokes on Twitter isn't a crime, Topiary was apparently also involved in the illicit financing of LulzSec——servers and botnets don't come free. Topiary helped manage the group's donations via the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, and also apparently engaged in more old-fashioned schemes. Barrett Brown, a former Anonymous spokesman, shared a chat transcript in which Topiary approached him in June in an attempt to get him to help in laundering money for the operation: 
 
 [17:53] Barrett, if I were to need to register (hypothetically) a blank and extremely illicit but untraceable credit card in order to fund something equally illicit, would you (hypothetically) read me a 6-digit verification code if it were to be sent to your phone? 
 
 [17:54] lol no 
 
 [17:54] but Barrett! 
 
 [17:54] no more emails for you Barrett >:p 
 
 [17:55] you guys can figure out how to finance stuff without getting me involved 
 
 [17:55] okay I'm having the code sent to your phone now 
 
 [17:56] oh hey it worked 
 
 [17:57] * Topiary permanently links your number to the card's billing details 
 
 [18:01] your name is now Jenny R. Harper and you're from New York or something 
 
 (Brown said, despite Topiary's claim, he never got the code and has never been associated with LulzSec. "Randomly attacking people and taking overt joy in making problems for innocent people is nothing people can defend," he said.) 
 
 In recent days, as LulzSec disbanded then reformed, Topiary stepped back from the group. "I've been at this non-stop for a while, it's a big time-sink," he told the Guardian. "I just needed some air and a new page in the Anonymous/LulzSec era." 
 
 If it pans out, Topiary's arrest is the biggest blow yet to LulzSec and Anonymous, showing even the most senior members are vulnerable. Another core member, Tflow, was reportedly pinned as a 16-year-old British boy and arrested last week. Also last week, the FBI arrested 16 Anonymous suspects. 
 
 Topiary's once-voluble Twitter account was completely wiped on July 21st save one tweet. "You cannot arrest an idea." 
 
 [Image via Shutterstock]
– Just as it looked like LulzSec was gearing up for an extended reign of cyber leaks and hijinks, the notorious hacker squad decided to hang up its modem—but not without one last hurrah, reports Reuters. "Our planned 50 day cruise has expired, and we must now sail into the distance, leaving behind—we hope—inspiration, fear, denial, happiness, approval, disapproval, mockery, embarrassment, thoughtfulness, jealousy, hate, even love," the group said in a statement. But with LulzSec coming under increasing pressure from law enforcement around the world, some analysts think that the "50 day cruise" is just bravado to cover a sudden retreat in the face of some pretty serious heat. "I can't help but wonder if the pirates aren't on the run," writes a security analyst at Beta News. Even if LulzSec really is going away, they leave with one with their biggest data dumps yet, featuring tech manuals, passwords, and other data from AOL, AT&T, the FBI, the US Navy, and much more.