
4chan, eBaum's World carpet bombing YouTube with porn videos - vaksel
http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/05/4chan-ebaumsworld-carpet-bombing-youtube-with-porn-videos.ars
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alex_c
I realize that the mature response would be to shake my finger and say "tsk
tsk, bad 4chan", but I actually think that, as a prank, this is pretty funny:
unexpected, baffling even, but doesn't really hurt anyone or leave long-
lasting consequences.

Yes, long term something like this would make YouTube unusable, and would
certainly do significant harm to the company, even if to no one else.

And yes, I'm aware that plenty of people do consider such content potentially
harmful, but I'd like to see any studies to this effect. My personal view is
that (North American?) society is strangely prudish about porn (which isn't
going anywhere - why stick your head in the sand) while being remarkably
comfortable with violence. This is why I say that, in my view, this prank
doesn't actually hurt anyone.

Anyway, I'm sure this will be controversial, and that there are aspects I'm
not thinking of. Overall though - funny prank.

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nostrademons
I would be tempted to agree, except that I know somewhere there's a ConOps
person who has to remove all that porn. And given that ConOps always has more
to do than time to do it, this is probably in addition to all the other stuff
her regular job requires. Remember that there's a person behind all those
abuse complaints - somebody just had a very rough day.

It's like how I always thought it was fine to scrape big companies' websites,
until I'm the one that has to carry the pager. It's all fun and games until
someone loses a weekend.

(I really shouldn't complain though, considering that I dragged spez into
fixing an XSRF vulnerability in Reddit on a Sunday morning by exploiting it in
a very public manner. If there's a God in charge of overseeing nefarious
hijinks on websites, I think I've got more karmic retribution coming.)

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Jakob
I’d like to know if the "flag" function works out for this. Since it’s a
community, and a big one, there shouldn’t be one who looses a weekend but the
community which solves this by itself.

They should (temporarily?) disable the need to register to be able to flag a
video.

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nostrademons
I would imagine that there's some sort of manual oversight to flagging things
- otherwise, wouldn't 4chan just start an uproar by massive flagging of
popular videos?

I could be totally wrong though - I'm not really familiar with YouTube, and
it'd be just like Google to automate something like this.

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icey
Part of their "operation" is that they are flagging tons of popular videos
that have nothing wrong with them.

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Dilpil
Is eBaum's World actually involved, or is this just another one of those times
when 4channers claim to be from eBaums world?

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Raphael
Why is it against the terms of service anyway?

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ars
Really? Uploading this with misleading titles/tags is OK by you?

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Hexstream
To be fair, most of the videos on Youtube, or at least the popular ones,
AFAICT, have misleading, spammy tags. I'm surprised Google STILL hasn't made a
very major cleanup or instituted obvious procedures like: "A VIDEO SHOULD NOT
HAVE MORE THAN 20 TAGS".

