through h4x0r3d's eyes

U.R.G.E (Universal Rapid Gamma Emitter) Beta User Manual - #Twitter #FreedomOfInformation #Anonymous

On the 8th of September a group of four Anons known to myself released the Beta version of their Universal Rapid Gamma Emitter (U.R.G.E.) into the wilds for use by all activists, not just fellow Anons. Already there are rumours going around that it’s some kind of Malware, but I know the guys who programmed it, and they have kindly released it as Open Source and posted up the source code here. This means anyone who understands .Net 4 and various programming languages can check the code out for Malware themselves. They can also develop improved versions if they wish, as it is now released under the GPL.

The idea of the tool is to find out what the top trends are and then generate tweets based on these trends to culture jam your message into the public consciousness. This can easily be done with several web browser windows open and a bit of copying and pasting, but U.R.G.E. is designed to lessen the work load to make Twitter Trend Culture Jamming easier and more effective. What you cannot do is spam Twitter with multiple messages with it, as it follows the Twitter APIs quite strictly. It is designed to help you, the activist, get your message out, not to piss your fellow Tweeps off with it.

Note: You will need .Net Frameworks 4, which can be found here.

Once you have downloaded U.R.G.E. and have unpacked the zip archive, you wll be presented with a folder rather much like this:

The two .dll files you ignore and leave alone, as they are vital to make the program run. Just double click on the executable and it will first load up a little dialogue box and send you to your Twitter account on your default web browser. At your Twitter account it will ask for permission to access your account:

Once you have authorized the application, it will take you to a new window with a pin number:

The pin number can be copied and pasted into the dialogue box like so:

And then once you hit submit the main GUI will be loaded up:

Now for a quick tour of the GUI. On the top left is the Watch Tag dialogue with refresh button. You can put any hash tag you wish in there and it will bring up a list of tweets containing that hash tag in the big window below, once you hit the refresh button. You do not need to put the proceeding hash (#) in front of the hash tag.

On the top right you will see Operation name and Tag person. The operation name is the new hash tag that you want to use within the tweet for whatever cause you are using U.R.G.E. for. If you are, for example, writing articles for Presstorm, you would put Presstorm in there without the proceeding hash (#). If you want the boss of Presstorm to be mentioned within the tweet, you would put 8Presstorm8 in the Tag person dialogue without the proceeding at symbol (@).

The #AntiShock check box is optional, and gives you a choice between one of four hashtags that you can also insert into your tweets for ongoing Anonymous operations. The vast majority of you will naturally not check this box.

The Top Trends text box starts off empty until you hit the refresh button, in which case it will list the top ten world wide trends it finds. Like this:

For this demonstration / manual I decided to use the #ThatsNotRight Tag, so I checked the box beside it. Then I hit the Generate Tweet button, and all that I had selected above was put into the Generated-Tweet window for further editing, like so:

I then did a little bit of editing in the Generated-Tweet box to make a message out of those tags which made sense:

With a little inventiveness, and a little cutting and pasting, I was able to put together a nice little message that made good use of a trending topic to put my message across. All I needed to do is hit the Send Tweet button, and the message was sent.

A little dialogue pops up informing you that the tweet had been sent, which can be annoying as you have to close it each time. In future versions this will be done away with and replaced by an icon on the Gui that flashes either red or green. I look forwards to that minor improvement as much as I look forwards to the choice of skins they are planning to add to it. This beta version is to make sure it works first.

Once the tweet has been sent, the operation name will become the watch tag, and a list of tweets will be dragged up into the large text window on the left. Your tweet might take a little while to appear so it is worth hitting the Refresh button a couple of times until it does.

Here is that tweet in TweetDeck:

You will notice how it says “via U.R.G.E” at the bottom. All Twitter programs do that, including TweetDeck. Even on my Twitter Profile it shows which program I used to generate the tweet.

If you want to send out a series of tweets, you could always re-edit the Generated-Tweet window several times and keep tweeting that way, but to be really effective I would be inclined to refresh the Top-Trends window every ten minutes or less and change around the tags used accordingly.

Hopefully, with further development U.R.G.E. will prove to be a very useful tool for activists, and the developers can be contacted through Twitter via the following accounts:

@_URGE | @MotormouthNews | @YourAnonNews

I have a feeling that this tool, and similar tools to it, will become very useful to activists over the coming months.