No, seriously, you should expect this.

Earlier we learned a French retailer, E-Flicker, has sought to register both Anonymous's well-known question-mark/empty suit logo and the activist collective's tagline, "We are anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us."

Anonymous responded with the video below but in poking around Pastebin.com we found a few pages intended to assist Anons in their next move against E-Flicker. One examined server vulnerabilities behind one of the company's websites and the paster's conclusion is that E-Flicker, in trying to monetize Anonymous--in the collective's words, make it "the whore of the world"--is vulnerable to at least one particular kind of hack attack:

The URL: http://www.eflicker.fr/contact.php is vulnerable to cross site request forgery. It allows the attacker to exchange the method from POST to GET when sending data to the server.

"Cross site request" forgeries can, in the words of CodingHorror blogger Jeff Atwood, let attackers "initiate any arbitrary action they like on a target website."

A deeper look at recent Pastebin posts indicates Anons--or those sympathetic to Anonymous--are digging up other vulnerabilities as well. One page purports to identify SQL injection vulnerabilities for eflicker.fr. An SQL injection can give a hacker the ability to attack databases and glean fun stuff like credit card numbers and user passwords.

A third Pastebin page appears to offer code meant to assist a HOIC DDoS attack on eflicker.fr and related subdomains. The High Orbit Ion Cannon is a different flavor of the Anon-beloved LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon). Spiderlabs.com reported in January that HOIC makes it hard for a targeted website to determine if it is actually being DDoSed or not, using "randomization techniques" to "evade detection."

But a wrathful Anonymous may not stop with cross site request forgeries, SQL injections or the tried and true DDoS attack. E-Flicker head Apollinaire Auffret has already been "doxed"--his personal info including phone numbers and email addresses published for all to see--in multiple locations on Pastebin and elsewhere.

Mr. Auffret, it goes without saying, should have expected this.

via Anonymous: Operation AnonTrademark [english] - YouTube.

Screencapped from the filing.

In a perfectly reasonable move that definitely won't come back to bite them in the ass, a French retailer is attempting to register Anonymous's logo and tagline with INPI, France's trademark agency. Good luck with that, guys!

TechDirt (with a hat tip to Asher Wolf) reports that the company, called "Early Flicker" and which seems to exist largely as an Ebay storefront, has filed an application that, if granted, will make the retailer the legal owner of both (in France, anyway).

Anons have, naturally, already released a video response that looks like something out of Babylon 5. The masked man proclaims with a computer distorted voice that that their logo and tagline have been "defiled" and promises retribution. You know, the usual:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=057cL0EhzMo

You know what they say: There's no such thing as bad publicity, unless it attracts hordes of angry hackers intent on disrupting your Internet business.

(h/t to Wired.co.uk)

(Illustration by David Saracino / New York Observer.)

Patent trolls--or, as a new study drolly dubs them, "non-practicing entities"--have a business model that's simple, elegant, and dastardly: Buy broad patents and start suing companies that could conceivably be infringing upon them. And the costs are adding up to a nice chunk of change: Two researchers estimate the costs at no fewer than $29 billion, reports Ars Technica.

Plus, that's just direct costs for things like lawyer bills and licensing fees. A previous study by the same pair put indirect costs at the stratospheric tab of $83 billion.

As Ars points out, the sample size for this particular study was rather small, with just 82 respondents out of 250 surveyed. (Come on, doesn't anyone want to bitch about patent trolls?) But those 82 companies had to deal with no fewer than 1,184 lawsuits, which comes out to something like 14 lawsuits per company per year. That sounds like a whole of billable hours to us.

But the lawsuits weren't entirely evenly spread out: 59 percent of the suits were against small and medium-sized businesses with a median revenue around $10.8 million. That doesn't leave much financial cushion for dealing with legalities.

However, it's also worth mentioning that the data comes via RPX Corporation, which exists largely to provide a shield against trollery. The company acquires patents, then licenses them to members for an annual fee--meaning the group surveyed may very well be fighting off a greater number of suits.

The authors suggest a taxonomy of trolls:

"There are really two different worlds of trolls out there," says Meurer. "There's a talent in finding good patents, finding good targets, and matching the two. Just like the very best financiers go to Wall Street and get paid tons of money, I think the 'big game hunter' trolls also have a rare talent."

Now, who does that sound like? Oh, right: ambulance chasers.