Not posting this under my main account for reasons, but 4chan harassed me for developing software too. They're a bunch of anonymous assholes that have nothing better to do. Their commentary was degrading and demoralizing.
They thankfully didn't find me in real life, but I pulled down all social media to avoid them.
Edit: I want to say one more thing. Sometimes people defend 4chan and say stuff like "that's just how they are", "they don't really mean it", or "you have to understand their community". But places like 4chan do real, measurable harm to people.
Just recently, Near/Byuu (SNES emulation) took their life after relentless doxxing and harassment. It wasn't 4chan, but these communities all harbor the same type of anonymity-enabled "for the lulz" harassment that brings out the worst in people.
I have to say I usually find the /g/ antics to be funny but they certainly cross the line from jokes to genuinely harassing someone to what the OP post is describing which is horrific.
Is there the wall of shame/hall of fame pages for 4chan-related doxxing incidents? Are those greentexts the only content they share?
In 2000s there used to be external wikis for ops done in a local BBS in my country, and those used to summarize timelines and key informations that led to development. They were probably doing for their own fun but were also useful for defending side.
I don't think there is anything organized but the stuff ends up in youtube "documentaries" and similar. Well known incidents like the reddit boston bomber incident get remembered and turned in to memes.
There was a young teen girl who was bullied into killing herself which she did by drinking bleach (a quite horrific way to die). I don't remember how much of a hand the 4channers had in the actual bullying but after her death she was relentlessly mocked and made into a snide and pitiless meme that has thankfully died out by now.
There has been a long slew of young girls (and some boys) who have been tricked into sending explicit photos and have had their lives ruined over it in connection with 4chan and sites like it.
What I am saying is, where are the postmortem, timeline, “data pack”, summarized thread logs, written by offenders as events occur?
Like “04/01 15:00 target posts a picture[link, deleted] location[link] verified from vegetation, angle of sun and buildings in background. 19:34 A member discovers that face in reflection matches photo[link] taken by target’s acquaintance A”.
From logs like that, defensive sides can learn that you shouldn’t upload a picture with features that can be correlated from satellite imagery, that you generally should not upload your friend’s face, that you should also check reflections before uploading, that it’ll take few hours to analyze a photo, etc. (btw these are why I don’t do Fb/Ig or TikTok — it goes against every fucking best practices I had accumulated)
I say this as someone who has used Audacity and Musescore for years, and who has been subscribed to Tantacrul's Youtube channel since before he got involved with Musescore because I thought his UI/UX rants were hilariously good.
I've been trying to follow this story as closely as I could manage, but even I don't understand what the fuck is going on anymore.
They may have been funny when they were released - but his relentless shilling for muse has made it very clear what the purpose of them was. Dunk on the competition, to big up Muse and his own profile.
They're (IMHO) unwatchable when you follow the money trail and realise what they are, and always were: thinly veiled shills.
He made the Sibelius one before he'd ever used MuseScore, did the MuseScore one before Dorico/Finale because of popular demand even though he'd never used MuseScore before that, and then eventually got hired onto the MuseScore team because of the strength of his critique, and proceeded to lead the effort to fix all of the issues he brought up in that video. He made the Dorico video no more than a couple months after joining the MuseScore team, and a couple months before becoming Product Manager there. The Finale video seems unlikely to come out now, honestly.
So, only the Dorico video is even possible to be a shill. Also, oh my goodness if he made YouTube videos to raise his personal profile, as opposed to all the other YouTubers who make videos anonymously?!?
Even if that was true (and you have no evidence of it), nothing he said in those videos was wrong. And his video about MuseScore was not very complimentary; he called it a “dog’s dinner”.
But to address the wider point, the same complaint could be made about anything anyone ever wrote anything for money. Since some works written for money have lasting merit, the mere fact that something was written for money should not count against it.
There need to be harsh, harsh penalties for showing up uninvited to someone's house based on something that's happened or been said on the Internet. This is little kid shit and they either need to learn or have their toys taken away so they can't keep doing it.
Why does the internet make this magic? There's plenty of real world harrasment that goes on every single day. Usually relationship related. People get killed over it. Often after making a long series of calls to the police.
Besides, on this forum you'll have plenty of people arguing that abuse is just speech and it's wrong to ban people from organizing harassment on the internet. I don't agree, but that's the wellspring of this culture.
I get where you're coming from, but my guess is that such a law would cause more harm than benefit. Think of all the potential for abuse. Politicians (and other government officials) could use it to imprison almost anyone who protested outside their homes.
>There need to be harsh, harsh penalties for showing up uninvited to someone's house based on something that's happened or been said on the Internet. This is little kid shit and they either need to learn or have their toys taken away so they can't keep doing it.
Interestingly, this happened on a much larger scale yesterday too,
Step 1 is catching them, and it's the nature of this sort of attack that doing so is deceptively hard. This kind of harassment is basically a flash-mob.
I don't believe that phone based tracking is nearly as easy as people make it out to be. Just because the data exists, doesn't mean it is easy to process. Someone would have to spend tens of hours at least digging through data and unless its a serious crime, its just not worth it.
Once you have the data, it's almost trivial. The data, of course, needs to be acquired through a warrant, which is often really hard to get (which is good) and even then there's a chance it might not exist (logging policies differ a lot), but once you have access to it it's just a matter of running a geofence query and talking to neighbours to get a sense of the criminal's path before the incident so they can identify them in the data. Filtering out everyone who was there 5hrs before and after should be enough to narrow things down to a reasonable level for a human to go through.
Not tracking, identifying. I have a T-Mobile cell booster and it automatically connects to any compatible phone and will start using cell over WiFi. I could let the authorities know that and they can tell T-Mobile to fork over all the cell data for that booster.
Not only that but it can be hard to even get legal access to. I know someone who was shot and the cops weren't able to get access to the location data needed to catch the other guy.
In my country, and where I live (a relatively rural section), there are just such penalties - there’s a non-zero chance that if you show up at someone’s house, you’ll get shot for your efforts.
Obviously I’m not condoning this, but does actually seem relevant to this discussion.
The absurdity is that these trolls clearly found Audacity useful. But because of them not knowing when to stop, they're going to end up with a much shittier product, possibly having just killed the future of Audacity, without the support of real devs like this one.
After all, what serious developer would continue working on this knowing this project is going to endanger their life?
>This site is the most disgusting place in the whole world, and I think all the people that are active in /g/ should get put in jail and be ashamed of themselves for making the world a worse place than it already is.
>They are cyber terrorists, not cringe cancel kiddos.
I sympathize with his case but this post seems a delusional, hyperbolic rant that will make his harassers target him with renewed fervor.
They are trying to get on his nerves, he should go to the police and stop seething on the internet cause he's giving them plenty of what they really want.
Seriously I don’t know how people fail to realize they feed off this type of response. It’s like trying to fight a vampire by throwing your blood at them.
If you have suggestions, I'd love to hear them. Your logic is living proof that we still don't take the very real harm 4chan can do seriously. We laughed at "POOL'S CLOSED" and cheered with Operation Payback because it was fun, but now that 4chan is long dead and what remains is this.
If you want examples other than 4chan, look around. The state of several first-world countries (you probably live in one of them) is the result of threat ignorance.
The grandparent they are agreeing with: "They are trying to get on his nerves, he should go to the police and stop seething on the internet cause he's giving them plenty of what they really want."
seems to suggest trying to make repercussions happen without feeding a harasser with reactions. That doesn't seem to be ignoring the threat, just trying to deal with it more effectively.
There is zero chance of the police doing anything. The harassers are almost certainly not in their jurisdiction.
It's the FBI's jurisdiction, and they're not going to do anything, either. To them, it's just another of the billions of death threats sent every day. Don't call them about it until you're already dead.
It would be great if somebody, occasionally, decided to follow up on one of these felonies. Maybe people would think twice about it. But as it is, going to police is exactly as effective as complaining about it on the Internet: not at all.
So, the moral of the story is, to develop a free software, avoid living in a place where 4chan thugs can physically harass you. So basically, avoid English speaking countries.
Or get enough capital to hire the armed security who guard your house 24 hours a day.
He seems to live in Germany, near Heidelberg (as the German federal police, BKA, of Heidelberg are investigating). The town has a large university, and used to have one of the largest US Military presences in Germany though I think they've all withdrawn now.
I think that they don’t trust the maintainer. However 4chan raids like this are often run by third parties that can benefit from attributing this type of behavior to “anonymous” individuals.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the people who bullied this individual had the goal of getting the original independent fork abandoned while also getting the new fork cancelled on the grounds of hate speech all along.
I visit 4chan and the site is full of propaganda from government and entities with enough capital to pay astroturfers or build bots. At this point it is safe to assume that “anon” is not always some edgy hacker kids but a government, bank, large company, etc.
Damn, that's some sci-fi level shittery. Reminds me of something I watched - where a person created an impromptu hacker persona, to expose a corporation corruption.
Then that hacker pseudonym was reused by other corporate actors to cause PR nightmares for each other.
Sounds like GitS:SAC[1] season one. Person is Aoi, created The Laughing Man, an impromptu hacker persona, to expose that micromachine corporations were hiding the fact that expensive micromachine treatments were ineffective against Cyberbrain Sclerosis and that an inexpensive vaccine called Murai existed that was effective. The Laughing Man persona was then used by various corporations to profit in various ways.
Or were you thinking of something else with a similar plot?
Any anonymous website, including 4chan, is extremely easy to "game" in the way you describe, but "the site is full of propaganda from government and entities with enough capital to pay astroturfers" and saying it's safe to assume a government, bank, or large company is secretly weaponizing 4chan to raid this repository owner sounds very similar to one of the standard paranoid conspiracy theories that circulate on the site (Pizzagate, QAnon, etc.).
I'm sure some shady interference from external actors does sometimes happen on the site, but in a scenario like this, I would bet a lot of money 99 - 100% of the people involved are just /g/ trolls who think it's funny to harass the guy. This "it wasn't us!" reasoning reminds me a lot of the Gamergate people who insisted anyone harassing people was actually a false flag by someone trying to make their side look bad.
Sorry, I am not defending 4chan posters at all. I am just saying that “anon” isn’t just some random 4chan posters all the time anymore.
Looking further into the sequence of events, it might as well have been just 4chan being 4chan, but like someone else said, it seems that they played themselves here. There are posters on /g/ who legitimate wanted this tool to remain usable without tracking analytics.
>There are posters on /g/ who legitimate wanted this tool to remain usable without tracking analytics.
Indeed. It's perplexing why they targeted this person for doing a public service. (Not that they should harass the original project or anything, of course. But it especially makes no sense that they don't like the person who's actually on their side in the matter.)
What I am saying is that I have seen a lot of evidence for organized/professional sentiment manipulation in 4chan, and there are tons of collected threads that describe how the organizations that are paid to post in 4chan work. I assume it is a professional service being sold.
For example, every time I tried to make threads around this YouTube video exposing the lobbying practices of Exxon Mobile against climate change fighting measures, my thread would get derailed into racist stuff that had nothing to do with the video and would get the thread eventually locked.
Oh, Internet shills are real. What I personally found funny is apparently shills for Tesla cars is substituted with own lightly trained staffs and they are sort of prone to manipulation themselves.
Yes, but also because someone instigated them to do so.
Maybe the person just did so out of a random thought of finding it funny, or maybe because of personal dislikes or maybe because of other reason.
Let's not forget people which go to extrems "for the lulz" tend also be easy to be used if you are lucky (i.e. just need to pitch the right idea to the right person in a "innocent" way, through it also comes at a considerable risk for you because you can never be sure who they end up harassing in the end).
Correct. The posters in 4chan are often manipulated by propaganda into these extremes behaviors. There is tons of threads in 4chan itself detailing how this happens.
If I run into one re-paste of the threads that details these practices I will link it. The threads in 4chan disappear within days from their official archive. There is also a long term archive hosted by a third party, but apparently you cannot trust it.
I honestly try to not visit the place, except when I want to pick up unknown crypto tokens that will get pumped. Like I said, the site is full of propaganda and sometimes it messes up with your perception of reality.
4chan is still a bit of a black box to me. I mean, I guess that's the point? I am pretty curious who these people are, mostly how old they are. I occasionally go rummage through it to see if it's still 4chan, and it always is. 4chan is one of the few places/things on the internet that makes me genuinely uncomfortable.
4chan mostly is an interesting place because of how extremely toxic everyone is to each other but how little their insults mean to you because everyone is anon. The problem is when they start targeting real individuals and posting their personal info. It goes from jokes to real harm very quickly.
But I'm not sure its really any worse than mainstream social media. Witch hunts start on all of the large platforms. WhatsApp and Facebook are responsible for countless literal witch hunts where the accused were killed or brutally beaten. 4chan seems tame in comparison.
That's a good perspective, and a light I hadn't considered it in. The discomfort I have with 4chan is pretty similar to my discomfort with twitter, facebook, et autres. I guess with 4chan there is perceivably less accountability in the event of the harmful situations similar to your description, but I have zero real basis for that belief.
This is hard to understand, I think... mainly because not many people are fond of sites like 4chan and so the culture in there is quite particular, even changing dramatically from one board to another...
What happened, beyond the fact that Audacity's maintainers decided to include some telemetry and made some changes to the PA, was that the community around Audacity reacted with anger, and some people called for a fork to be made.
A developer took the call and forked the project. They assembled a team and unfortunately, now is when the actual shit storm begins, they came up with the idea of asking the community on Github to vote for a new name for the fork... Word of this got to 4chan's /g/ (technology) board and they decided to participate with the name 'Sneedacity' (which refers to a meme you can find by searching 'Sneed feed and seed').
They eventually won the vote but the maintainer, realizing this was obviously a piss-take by 4chan decided it was reasonable not to rename the fork. This should've been the end of it, but because this is the internet what on most cases would've been the correct cause of action became a direct inflammatory action against the /g/ board.
From here on there was numerous threads created on 4chan that more or less meme'd around with Audacity's fork new maintainer. At the moment, there's about 10 threads each one with around 300-odd replies (due to bump limitation). Most of them are quite satirical and at the most perverse and abusive but there is a distinct lack of 'calls for action' which further exacerbated people on 4chan, since there are several claims of this kind made on Github.
Personally I did went through every thread and there is an open debate over the fact that at least part of the new Audacity (fork) team seemed to have been posting self-doxing statements... Because posts on 4chan are anonymous it is virtually impossible to confirm this...
Either way, I'm sure this has been quite an unpleasant experience to the developer that forked Audacity. Its a classic prank going out of control because some people are just likely to push things to the limit, specially if they can do so in total impunity.
Name for a fork of audacity was polled, 4chan trolls/raiders voted for sneedacity[0][1] won, maintainer chose to use a different name instead, 4chan trolls were unhappy and escalated their efforts.
what can be done about these chan sites? can they be further deplatformed or are they all hosted in safe havens now? just last week I was reading about how the bsnes creator was driven to suicide
Better never buy a domain name, apply for a HAM radio license or register to vote then.
(In the US the voter file of the name and address of everyone who registered to vote is public information. It's mostly not free online but you can usually buy a copy of it from the state, with minimal protection against that data being abused)
It's pretty simplistic to just call a victim stupid because they didn't hide their whole life in the case that someone in the future might use information to attack them.
It's also absurd to ask a regular person living in a country like Germany to be ready at all times to defend themselves using knives or guns.
...Okay. I could be totally wrong here, but I was fairly certain the Sneed thing came out of a Simpson's joke w.r.t. Sneed's Seed and Feed, formerly Chuck's.
This would quite frankly be the first time I've heard the Sneed->"special needs"->retards connection, which to be frank, is nowhere near direct enough for what I know of memes with a Channic origin.
>...Okay. I could be totally wrong here, but I was fairly certain the Sneed thing came out of a Simpson's joke w.r.t. Sneed's Seed and Feed, formerly Chuck's.
Correct. Sneed is 100% from "Sneed's Seed and Feed / Formerly Chuck's".
You can use github anon. Like everything, its a pain in the ass and you have to carefully analyze everything you do online to avoid linking personalities.
what? Just use a different username and change the email you use in the commits to the github email (@users.noreply.github.com)... (should be "git config --global user.email 12345+foobar@users.noreply.github.com")
Sure, like another comment said though it is easy to mess up and reveal your identity for all commits in one swoop. I know there is GitMask [1] but it's not open source or decentralized.
Software has always been a social thing. Everything is. What use would Linux be if people didn't write Linux programs? What use would Audacity be if sound was conventionally stored on tapes? What use would Audacity be if there was a better free alternative?
All I'll say is that Cookie also provoked the trolls by changing his Github bio to some of their comments [0]. There's no right side here, but if you're ever put in a position where the majority of your users disagree with the way you're handling a project, it's probably best to step down rather than confronting them. That kind of democracy is what keeps open source development viable.
Am I the only one who would just … walk outside and talk to the 4channers who showed up? Probably offer them a cig and a meme.
I’ve been thinking of tweeting my home address, so this is a relevant concern. What do you even do when someone comes to your house, other than listen to them?
It could also be true that they did something a lot less friendly, like “bang on the windows and run away laughing.” That would be unsettling to experience, particularly at night.
This is a sad situation. Their Internet notoriety is the source of the problem, one way or another, and they felt like they couldn’t continue. I respect that; family is #1.
History trivia: you might think that sending a bunch of deliveries is a modern thing, made possible by the telephone. But no, if you were sufficiently dedicated you could do it back when you had to send letters to order stuff.
In 1809 this [1] happened in London:
> On 27 November, at five o'clock in the morning, a sweep arrived to sweep the chimneys of Mrs Tottenham's house. The maid who answered the door informed him that no sweep had been requested, and that his services were not required. A few moments later another sweep presented himself, then another, and another; twelve in all. After the last of the sweeps had been sent away, a fleet of carts carrying large deliveries of coal began to arrive, followed by a series of cakemakers delivering large wedding cakes, then doctors, lawyers, vicars and priests summoned to minister to someone in the house they had been told was dying. Fishmongers, shoemakers and over a dozen pianos were among the next to appear, along with "six stout men bearing an organ". Dignitaries, including the Governor of the Bank of England, the Duke of York, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Mayor of London, also arrived. The narrow streets soon became severely congested with tradesmen and onlookers. Deliveries and visits continued until the early evening, bringing a large part of London to a standstill.
The person behind that wrote thousands of letters to set that up.
Dying in a car crash is a lot higher probability for most of us, but the question is whether publishing one's address would raise the probability significantly.
I'm not sure it would. And it's hard to think of what else people can do, other than, as you say, subscribe you to a bunch of fetish mailing lists that I'd probably get a kick out of anyway.
The wikipedia article you linked to only has one death, and it was an uninvolved person. In the 2015 Oklahoma swatting incident, the swatting victim shot the police chief, then surrendered. The cop survived and the swatting victim was not charged.[1] My guess is that the police really screwed up and didn't announce themselves before busting down his door.
The issue with having your address known isn't a random person showing up to your door, because the chances of any of them actually coming to your place is very low. The issue is having the police showing up at your door with guns blazing. This has become a huge issue for live streamers and youtubers and has led to deaths.
>It could also be true that they did something a lot less friendly
I mean, they cut the guy in the arm with a knife, on his own yard, haven't you read that? Surely you wouldn't expect anyone to have a friendly attitude after that.
What? I think that’s also a bad idea. I didn’t mean “advise” in the sense of “I’m a lawyer giving you free advice” I meant it more as “that sounds like a bad idea to me, some random person who isn’t a lawyer”
> I’ve been thinking of tweeting my home address, so this is a relevant concern.
Giving out their home address didn't work out well for Tony Stark in "Iron Man 3" or for this guy in New Jersey [1], but they both had done things to get some people really annoyed with them.
So at the very least make sure that you don't have anyone out there who is really annoyed with you and has only been prevented from forcefully expressing that annoyance because they do not know where you live.
The news article makes me wonder if you could do the same thing except give someone else's address. Mob justice isn't known for calm and logical analysis.
You're right. I wish we did though. IVF is so expensive in America that it's cheaper to fly to South Korea and get the procedure done there, by $10's of thousands.
Even still, would 4chan really dare mess with someone's kid? Generally they try to avoid going to prison, or vigilante retribution.
I guess you're right though. Thanks for pointing that out. I can think of a few ways 4chan could troll someone's child without risking themselves.
Here in Germany there is a YouTuber (only 100k subs) who gets daily visits from many trolls. Police already locked up his very small town for outsiders but his young visitors don't seem to care and regularly get fined.
Thank you for this datapoint. I didn't realize that.
I live in a small town myself, relatively speaking (St. Louis isn't exactly a tech hub), so I was thinking that might guard me somewhat. But, my follower count keeps growing for some reason, and stuff like this has been more and more on my mind.
I appreciate it. If you have any links to further info, I'd be curious to read. Otherwise, no worries.
They thankfully didn't find me in real life, but I pulled down all social media to avoid them.
Edit: I want to say one more thing. Sometimes people defend 4chan and say stuff like "that's just how they are", "they don't really mean it", or "you have to understand their community". But places like 4chan do real, measurable harm to people.
Just recently, Near/Byuu (SNES emulation) took their life after relentless doxxing and harassment. It wasn't 4chan, but these communities all harbor the same type of anonymity-enabled "for the lulz" harassment that brings out the worst in people.