This requires your bash have networking support compiled in (some distros don't, or didn't in the past), I'm not sure why you wouldn't use nmap, or even netcat: `nc -z $my_host_to_scan 1-1023`
Rails is nice, but it's really really slow. At my job we use Jetty as the server with Play or Lift as the framework -- I think most of the devs like Play better, though. Really easy to run as an unprivileged user and do backends through nginx as well.
From what I know of Anon and Lulzsec a lot of what they do isn't actually 'hacking.' The sheer amount of boxes they have lets them DDOS any site pretty easily. If not DDOS they usually do SQL injections.
Neat. I updated one of my VMs running debian Sid from 2.6.32 kernel to 3.2.0-1-686-pae just to see if it would work. It works on the 3.2 kernel. Kind of scary. I checked to see if I had access to any 'real world' servers running and exploitable kernel and none of them seemed to.