There is no way to justify stabbing someone, but to blame it on ‘the hacker known as 4chan’ is a bit ridiculous. 4Chan is a website, it does not physically abuse people.
This began with idiots stalking this developer at his home address. There are laws against stalking people. Those laws need to be applied to these people so they see, hey, if I act like an idiot and go stalk someone because people on a website are egging me on, I go to jail, so I’d better not do that.
And if they’re to stupid to see that, they are in jail so they can’t stalk people.
Like some of the other people here, I'm not going to assume 100% that this is real until more of the facts come out. That said, I wouldn't put this past people from 4chan in their crusade of nihilism and destruction.
Of course 4chan is not a monolith and there are plenty of peaceful people there (especially outside of /b/) but at some point it becomes obvious that this is a place where some very dark people meet up online to do dark stuff, sometimes out in the real world.
I would be more inclined to believe that the /g/ board (the board implicated) did what was accused if what happened was that he did something far more grave like saying he has an iphone that he absolutely loves and loves using MacOS.
That's a solid joke, but I wonder, does that actually significantly tweak your priors in favor of this being untrue? All of these different boards have their own bizarro codes of honor, so I wouldn't be surprised.
Why would anyone in particular 4chan care about this fork? It's like 20 commits (but apparently 20 weeks of drama) ahead of audacity and you already need a decoder ring to read this thread.
I've had my house egged and repainted, and been physically assaulted at events over baseless personal grudges held by others. You could tell me they hate the guy just for existing, and it'd be 100% believable.
If I had to guess - I'd say it was down to refusing their name suggestion. Which is a really damn petty reason to hate someone, but one I can entirely believe. One of the personal grudges I was dragged into was exactly that petty.
The internet has been well overdue for a good chlorine dosing for a long time.
But the thing is... he claims he's never posted there. So how did they catch wind of him even existing?
It doesn't make any sense to me. Of course what they're saying in those threads is inexcusible but I don't think cookieengineer is giving the full truth either.
/g/ has it's pulse on the happenings in the tech world just as much as hn. I'm sure they knew about the Audacity situation because it's interesting stuff. From my PoV the "4chan raided a naming poll and then got mad when their polling was overridden" story checks out 100%.
tenacity isn't anything special when most of their commits are literally trivial README corrections, while sneedacity has received quite a number of code contributions in just a few days.
A little surprising that software managed to somehow attract this level of drama. If there's any truth at all to these latest claims then 4Chan's got some way more screwed up folks among them than I'd previously heard about.
As for Audacity, I'ma just switch to another tool or tools altogther for the time being until this whole thing calms down a bit and one of the forks takes the lead. I still have KWave, LMMS, Ardour, and a couple few other options, so it's not as if I'll be unable to edit audio when I really need to. We've always got choices in the land of FOSS. ;)
Heck, I bet Blender 3D can even do audio editing if I dig around in it's docs a little bit. I know I can use it to edit video, so composing and exporting audio alone should be totally possible too I imagine.
> cookiengineer claims 4chan members took things considerably further, including into physical harassment. He claimed: "It was attempted murder with an illegal butterfly knife. In the whole state of Germany, butterfly knifes are considered an illegal weapon. There were three witnesses in place that saw the incident. I was slit in the arm. On private property, that you have to physically break into in order to enter."
This is scary to read. I cannot imagine being personally attacked for something as mundane as forking a Github repository and making some commits.
> "I am in contact with GitHub and the German BKA (federal police) as of now, therefore I will not disclose any more information publicly about what happened to anyone. Evidence has been gathered, submitted and will be acted upon. I will not legally let go of this."
It's good to hear that cookiengineer is taking this through the appropriate legal channels. Nobody should have to live in fear.
I don't know what happened there, but some things in cookiengineers posts does not add up. There is no "BKA Heidelberg". The BKA has three offices in Germany, and Heidelberg is not one of them. Also, the BKA will likely not investigate in such a matter. It is doing large scale investigations crossing federal borders, like organized crime or terrorism. It is not working on local crime cases on the described scale. This is done by "normal" local police.
I don't go on 4chan, have no idea what "sneedacity" is, and have only been a critic of the new Muse team, but haven't paid attention to the forks.
For all intents and purposes, I'm an outside observer.
This doesn't make sense to me. Why would 4chan be involved? 4chan doesn't just get involved in something they don't care about. You usually have to piss them off in some way to gain their attention.
In almost 10 years of Github activity, I've never seen 4chan bleed over.
For claiming to have never posted there, you sure seem to know how it works. By contrast, people unfamiliar with it usually have no idea the boards are referred to as /g/ or /b/ or whatever. That doesn't sound like someone who's never posted there before to me.
So some random people showed up at your place here in Germany, you somehow figured out they were from 4chan, you were attacked, then you found all the links of them talking about you... all because of what? Like, what caused this? I don't believe for a second you had nothing to do and you were just a completely random bystander.
Because of this, your claim that you've "never posted to 4chan" doesn't make any sense to me. 4chan doesn't just fuck with people for no reason. I'm not defending them whatsoever, but there is some semblance of a method to their madness.
Further, you're saying "flag this repository for hate speech and violence". But I don't see any of that in that repo aside from some harmless memes. The maintainers of that repo have full names and pictures of themselves - surely they care enough about their safety not to be involved with this? Unless they're incredibly dumb.
In fact, that repository has quite a bit of seemingly legitimate original development work on it that isn't PR'd/cherry-picked from other repos. Why would people interested in simply harming you, randomly, also build up a seemingly legitimate fork of Audacity in the meantime?
Also, if that repository really is violating rules, and you really do have an open police case, then that repo will get taken down by court order anyway.
Lastly, three days after making this announcement, you >>updated<< your personal repository readme with the following text:
> [tackling problems including] defamation attempts by Internet Trolls >>and other (state-level) actors that abuse the power of unverifiable sources.<<
This doesn't sound like a person on level ground to me. This sounds like far-reaching paranoia or some kind of break down. If you were worried about state actors after this incident, why are you working with the German federal police? With Github?
This just doesn't make any sense. It comes off as someone who is emotional, unstable or upset about something, or even trying to cover up a mistake (it's similar to how I've acted when I've screwed something up when I was much younger).
This is a type of drama I've literally never seen on Github - and I've seen a lot. I am forced to assume cookieengineer's claim of not being involved whatsoever is just an outright lie, and thus this whole announcement kind of crumbles (no pun intended) for me.
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EDIT: Looking through the Tenacity fork, wow that whole entire team has drama issues. There are quite a few issues on there about people asking questions and having them deleted, long monologues about censorship and "this is the workplace of tenacity members", etc.
It feels very "kids club". It doesn't surprise me it's attracted weird drama/attention.
Take everything with a grain of salt here. The attempted murder claims are very fishy.
EDIT2: Also, worth pointing out that the federal police here wouldn't normally see a case like this, if I understand it correctly (I might not). Normally the Polizei would handle this sort of thing. It's the equivalent of going to the FBI for someone threatening you in the street.
Most people don't walk around recording evidence all day long. Which attackers know and make use of. So the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and a good system acknowledges that.
In this particular case, there seems to have been evidence submitted to the police, so why you would say there is none is strange to me.
If someone stabs you, and you have enough time to post about it on the internet, for sure you have time to take a few pictures of it. Me, personally, it would prob. be the first thing I would do after making myself safe, so I have evidence to show.
But who knows, the only safe bet is not to believe stuff you read on the internet. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Edit: Sorry for being rational, but there's no evidence on either side.
I have been on the internet for a very long time. Someone telling a story, no matter how emotional or dramatic is merely doing that: telling a story. Until there are real-world facts to back this story up: police report, pictures of any wound, etc. please take it with a grain of salt. There are many implicit biases on the internet and not all of them are obvious. I find it plausible that some people who browse 4chan attacked this person. I also find it plausible that it’s entirely unrelated or fabricated. What do I have which can sway my opinion other than what legally is known as “Hearsay”?
>Until there are real-world facts to back this story up: police report, pictures of any wound, etc. please take it with a grain of salt.
On 4chan you can find a picture of a room, with the window broken in, along with a butterfly knife and red baseball cap that resembles the ones worn by sneed.
I saw the picture, it was uploaded by an anonymous user to 4chan, cookieengineer hasn't claimed it belongs to him and it's honestly too perfect to be true, including the sneed cap. I wouldn't discard a 4chan user setting up that scene just for fun.
He provided reasons for not providing pictures on the github discussion:
> I'm not posting pictures, because I'm certainly not going to compromise the ongoing investigation of the BKA Heidelberg because some kiddos want so-called "proof" which they will turn around and twist around until it fits their sociopathic logical needs.
Tbh I don’t think it’s particularly relevant whether or not he can convince online people whether he was physically attacked. There is clearly evidence of online harassment and that is enough to justify him stepping down.
>These are serious allegations. Allegations of such seriousness should require proof of equally serious merit before conclusions are drawn
No, they don't. This isn't a court of law, _HN_ certainly isn't the cretin-pit that 4chan is, and it fits well within 4chan's broader reputation as a magnet for ill-adjusted harassers to do something as stupid as this.
No one here is going to try to stab a 4channer, or dox a poster, or move for legislation by making the valid assumption that assholes on the Internet stalked a guy for a really stupid reason.
My error. However the article isn’t very well written. There’s a giant subheading which says
“Doorstep 'harassment' prompts departure”
After which I wrote the comment above.
And if someone was stabbed by someone, I’d expect that to be earlier in the article and in the title rather than “Audacity fork maintainer quits after alleged harassment by 4chan”
This began with idiots stalking this developer at his home address. There are laws against stalking people. Those laws need to be applied to these people so they see, hey, if I act like an idiot and go stalk someone because people on a website are egging me on, I go to jail, so I’d better not do that.
And if they’re to stupid to see that, they are in jail so they can’t stalk people.