AnonTune: Anonymous’ musical platform?

Anonymous members have put into place a musical and social platform nicknamed AnonTune.

Some strange news has been circling about Anonymous recently, or at least individuals who claim to be part of the hacktivist movement which has recently entered the Top 100 most influential people in the world.

Time magazine’s annual ranking has mentioned the non-hierarchical structure with "shock humour" and "disdain for authority" which distinguishes it from other networks used in the Arab spring. Via computer attacks, Anonymous is causing trouble for the FBI and CIA, security and banking companies and even the Vatican...

The group is before all else worried about any kind of censorship, with everything being done to keep freedom of speech on the Internet.

Anonymous is perhaps feeling that such censorship is starting creep in on Pastebin. It is for this reason that they are looking for a similar document and file publication service that is "safer" than Pastebin with this called AnonPaste.

Although AnonPaste is considered suspect, is Anonymous’ own offering a trust worthy site? This is the question also being asked of AnonTune, especially since this project is outside of Anonymous’ normal field of action.

The existence of the AnonTune project was reported by @YourAnonNews on Twitter. A group of developers confirm that part of Anonymous wants to create a musical and social platform. For the moment, AnonTune (a prototype) allows the scanning of YouTube and SoundCloud to build music sharing lists for sharing.

In the future, they will also look at adding other musical services like MySpace and Yahoo! Music, although no hosting of musical files will be done on the site itself. It is therefore more of a link centralization tool rather than a hosting service which takes place (via YouTube for example).

AnonTune will go and look at what users are doing online. After opening an account, users will also be able to select songs "imported" from their iPod. "The music itself will be played via third parties with none of the music stored online – only information about your music. This means that you won’t be breaking any copyright laws".

For the moment, AnonTune doesn’t appear to be anything innovative, with Wired even calling on users to show caution as the system calls on a Java applet. Could it actually be hiding malware? Wired recommends testing AnonTune in a virtual environment. An online demo of AnonTune is also available.