This never really got off the ground. Yet as the days go by i want, and increasingly need to know bout groups like anonymous and their more professional counterparts. Hacking is more like a gun then an odd profession/hobby today, useful to know and damn near mandatory in dangerous situations.
These seems a bit... hyperbolic. And again, most hacking is not security intrustion, which seems to be what you're focusing on. And Anonymous almost never even does that - they simply use tools like the iron cannon, which aren't even hacking, or social engineering.
I'll second the TED talks and others like ccc (chaos communication congress), and focus on the security talks if that is what you're interested in specifically. Although if you're ever going to do it yourself, hacking your own machine (get a linux box, a basic one and not one of the fancy distros, they are far easier and far more fun to hack, in the good way) is still the place to start. You can either be a script kiddy relying on tools built by others, or a hacker... but hacking (security intrusion included) requires that, most of all, you understand how these machines and systems actually work. And you'll need a combination of multiple knowledge sources and a ton of experimentation to really figure that out.
This one is pretty interesting, because it illustrates how the most impressive hacks involve thinking about things in novel ways... (in addition to being a security intrustion
):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=njVv7J2azY8One of the most mind-blowing presentations at this year's Chaos Communications Congress (28C3) was Ang Cui's Print Me If You Dare, in which he explained how he reverse-engineered the firmware-update process for HPs hundreds of millions of printers. Cui discovered that he could load arbitrary software into any printer by embedding it in a malicious document or by connecting to the printer online. As part of his presentation, he performed two demonstrations: in the first, he sent a document to a printer that contained a malicious version of the OS that caused it to copy the documents it printed and post them to an IP address on the Internet; in the second, he took over a remote printer with a malicious document, caused that printer to scan the LAN for vulnerable PCs, compromise a PC, and turn it into a proxy that gave him access through the firewall (I got shivers).