23 ms·

The Now-Defunct Firms Behind 8chan, QAnon

217 points by headalgorithm 6y ago

s9w 6y ago
> hate-filled anonymous message board 8chan not as hate-filled as Twitter. I don't think people like him have actually been on these sites.
- mathgorges 6y ago
  As someone who spent a decent amount of time on 8chan and boards like it in high school, this comment legitimately confuses me. Can you expand please?
  - s9w 6y ago
    It depends on who you are on what you define as hate. The sites both have a very clear political preference. And both are harsh towards the other. But the chans due to the way the work have less of a vendetta style activism and mostly ignore or ridicule outsiders. There's some rough language - I would say on average the chans are certainly more direct and less signaling, but the lows are pretty equal for both sites. Death wishes are very common on both. And of course what you interpret as hateful is massively defined by your beliefs. If you define using wrong pronouns as such, then you're gonna have a bad time on the chans. But so would you on Twitter for having a photo with a MAGA hat. The chans can be surprisingly humane and supportive. Truly so and not just for social points. Their usual dismissive description is not matched by the actual content. Which is understandable since honestly at the moment, a very good chunk of the content is by bots and organized groups. Related: I recently posted a long article on all sorts of c++ stuff on a technical Reddit. It also contained criticism of Git. People got their god damn pitchforks! They told me to give up my job, told me I'm a bad coder, they went through reddit and git histories, looked up accounts on other sites and sent me things to my private E-mail that carry a prison sentence in my country. And the mods didn't even remove any of it. Because I criticized Git. But they do insta-ban people for using the wrong pronouns. Things are not like they seem if you're not in the 'in'-group. Deviate just a little and people come for you - on Twitter like on Reddit. There's no such thing on the chans.
    - theplague42 6y ago
      One regularly talks about killing Jews and one doesn't.
      - charlchi 6y ago
        In South Africa, twitter users make regular calls for the killing of white people, about as regularly as 4chan/pol has calls for killing jews. The other day twitter refused to remove of an extremely hateful image of 2 white people's decapited heads being held up by 2 black women. So no, they are about the same. One platform will ban hate speech from some groups but not from others.
      - swebs 6y ago
        Twitter does all the time, just with a different target. Someone even set up a satirical subreddit to take all the hateful messages posted on Twitter and replacing "white/men/etc" with "jews" just to prove the point. https://old.reddit.com/r/menkampf https://old.reddit.com/r/menkampf
      - s9w 6y ago
        Twitter talks about killing men, white people, Trump or conservatives. It's honest to god not much different.
- happytoexplain 6y ago
  I have, a lot. Your comparison is nowhere near realistic.
  - olah_1 6y ago
    The difference is that people on Twitter are chasing a real commodity called clout. Never underestimate what people are willing to do for clout. In comparison, 8chan was downright comfy.
jmnicolas 6y ago
Of course everybody knows the right way to convince conspiracy theorists that they're wrong is to go after them. I don't see what's wrong with having internet trash bins. At least the trash is in a know location, it doesn't spill everywhere. I'm not from the US, the only mentions of those sites I have ever encountered was journalists making a few articles about them.
- happytoexplain 6y ago
  The goal is not to convince conspiracy theorists that they are wrong, the goal is to prevent them from hurting people or society and, to that end, keep the dangerous ones from organizing anonymously online in large numbers (I honestly don't know if that's possible).
  - jmnicolas 6y ago
    If I'm not mistaken the NZ killer was on 8chan? It's the same argument with serial killer movies (at the risk of showing my age there was a strong controversy with "Natural Born Killers" at the time): you don't kill people because you chatted on the internet or watched a movie. You kill people because you had it in you. The things you were exposed before might color your act but that's it.
    - dragontamer 6y ago
      > It's the same argument with serial killer movies Hollywood is infamous for misunderstanding psychology. At best, Hollywood has outdated notions of psychology (favoring long outdated ideas like Freud, because such ideas are exciting). Hollywood sells movies, not understanding. What we're discovering today is that there's a "pathway to radicalization". People are NOT born radical, they realign themselves as radical over time.
      - formerly_proven 6y ago
        Yes, so how is giving internet trash cans like QAnon huge amounts of exposure and thus free advertisement supposed to help?
speeder 6y ago
I read 8chan and 4chan sometimes, not /b/ and not /pol/, I am more interested in the other boards that often care for or start open source projects. I am very disappointed with people that want to shut down these places, often because of false allegations (for example the attempt to shut down 8chan for child porn, that later were found out to be a false flag, the person accusing them were also the one that posted the porn in first place)
- happytoexplain 6y ago
  I also spend a lot of time on 4chan, and visit 8chan occasionally. There is a universe of difference between them, and calls to shut down 4chan are much rarer and more ignorant of the content than calls to shut down 8chan. It's important not to conflate them.
  - swebs 6y ago
    Could you go into more detail?
    - strathmeyer 6y ago
      8chan was created when 4chan disallowed child pornography and their owner bought it when all this QAnon stuff started.
      - dhimes 6y ago
        Would downvoters please explain why you're doing it? Is this statement untrue? Serious question- I have no idea.
        swebs 6y ago
        It is completely untrue. That's been disallowed on both sites since day 1. >I came up with the original concept of 8chan while on a psychedelic mushroom trip. I was past the peak and was on the tail end of the trip, and I just decided to browse 4chan because that's what I did when sober. I was still tripping pretty bad though so I kept seeing these fractal patterns and I wrote down the words "infinite chan" to remember for later. >The next day, I was able to put into words more of what the site would be like. I was inspired partly by the admin of 4chon.net, savetheinternet, who routinely refused to make requested boards for users. I wondered what it would be like if there were a Reddit-style imageboard where anyone could make a board without express admin approval, and began hacking on the imageboard engine I knew best to make it a reality: vichan. I decided to expire boards after inactivity so that it didn't get full of dead boards like Reddit does with dead subreddits, and released version 1 of 8chan two days later. https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/interviews/qa-with-fredrick-brennan-of-8chan https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/interviews/qa-with-fredr...
Pick-A-Hill2019 6y ago
Gosh, I'm conflicted. I upvoted the submission for the interesting HN comments that are likely to appear based on it but also so, so, soooo didn't want to upvote a Krebs article and give him the Ads revenue from the page views.
- gruez 6y ago
  >but also so, so, soooo didn't want to upvote a Krebs article and give him the Ads revenue from the page views. what's wrong with kerbs?
  - MivLives 6y ago
    Some people don't like that he doxes people.
    - strathmeyer 6y ago
      We're all Internet users here and reporting the news isn't what we are going to consider doxxing.
    - BLKNSLVR 6y ago
      And sometimes the doxing is of the wrong people, or people that are undeserving of being doxed.
      - criddell 6y ago
        I didn't know this. What are some examples? Did Krebs do anything to make amends for the innocent people he doxed?
        detaro 6y ago
        2 examples, there's more that are at the very least questionable if you go searching: https://itwire.com/security/infosec-researchers-slam-ex-wapo-man-krebs-over-doxxing.html https://itwire.com/security/infosec-researchers-slam-ex-wapo... https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/11/28/the-russian-metadata-in-the-shadow-brokers-dump/ https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/11/28/the-russian-metadata-i...
gruez 6y ago
Are ip address blocks registered to defunct companies a relatively common thing? Clearly ARIN isn't regularly checking whether the owners of ip address blocks are still in business, so I'd imagine there are plenty of other blocks that belong to defunct companies.
- rwmj 6y ago
  I know that the company I used to work for held on to a modest block for years after it went out of business. (IIRC it was a /20 of IPv4. It has since been recovered by RIPE.)
- Bayart 6y ago
  I understand that being articulated around old school paper administrations rather than automated APIs that stuff can easily be ignored (especially in places like the US where legislation is highly fragmented), but you'd think that the starvation for IPv4 would be a good enough incentive for people to go after those low-hanging fruits.
  - octoberfranklin 6y ago
    We started "running out of land" long before IPv4 addresses even existed, yet lots of land is listed as being owned by entities that were acquired/merged/reincorporated. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24876963 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24876963 That doesn't mean the land, or the IP addresses, are abandoned.
- cgh 6y ago
  Similarly, I wonder about internet ports assigned to dormant or defunct companies. I used to work for a company back in the '90s that had their own IANA port assignment for a proprietary database product. Of course, they don't use it anymore as the company and product are both long gone.
  - Nullabillity 6y ago
    Err, presumably the product still works for existing customers?
0xy 6y ago
The best antidote for bad ideas and conspiracy theories is transparency and public debate. This move will serve to push these movements underground to Tor or other uncensorable networks where they're even harder to monitor. It also sends a message to them that they're on to something (because if the QAnon conspiracy was real, the "deep state" would indeed try to snuff it out). I feel like this is such a bad precedent and will not end well. It will embolden the crazies. It's also not clear where this is supposed to end? Flat earthers? 9/11 truthers? Who's next?
- dragontamer 6y ago
  > The best antidote for bad ideas and conspiracy theories is transparency and public debate. I've been on the internet for decades. I fully disagree with this. EDIT: Mass bannings, aka an "Exodus Event", was the solution to almost all major conspiracies I've witnessed. 1. When GameFAQs LUEsers gained conspiracy theories against the website and other reckless behavior, to the point of harming the website, the solution was to cut off LUE and prevent the public from viewing that message board. 2. I never visited SomethingAwful, but clearly the toxic subset of that community was banned and eventually moved to 4chan. 3. 4Chan's prominence in the late 00s / early 10s was clearly toxic and always was. 4chan was just focused on hitting "safe" targets, such as harassing Scientology / Scientologists. As soon as 4chan's toxic behavior was unleashed to more mainstream ideas, it was clear that the toxicity had to be stopped, and 4chan moderators stepped up their game. 4. 8Chan was created in response to the Gamergate conspiracies, as was some legitimate sites like Resetera (though they took the less conspiracy-minded side). ---------- For the most part, the bannings on 4Chan worked. We don't see Gamergaters pushing their silly conspiracy theories today, or other vile attacks on people. Furthermore, the doxing / swatting mostly stopped on that subject. > This move will serve to push these movements underground to Tor or other uncensorable networks where they're even harder to monitor. Yes, that's called an exodus. But as various websites gain prominence, they discover again-and-again that with prominence comes responsibility. When you have a group of doxers and swatters visiting your website, you start to punish that subgroup. That's just what must happen. Yeah, its a temporary fix (doxers / swatters will move elsewhere), but at a minimum, it sends the message that such behavior won't be tolerated. > It also sends a message to them that they're on to something (because if the QAnon conspiracy was real, the "deep state" would indeed try to snuff it out). Tell me: when a child is misbehaving and thinks "Adults are out to get me", do you go more lenient on them? EDIT: Adults are just like children: you have to punish bad behavior and reward good behavior. That's just the basis of building a modern society.
ufmace 6y ago
Man, I never cared much for QAnon, but the way so many mainstream institutions are joining together, using the exact same misleading talking points, to censor something off the internet makes me wonder if they're onto something after all.
- logicchains 6y ago
  It's amazing how skeptical people are of the idea of a paedophile ring among the elites when only recently Jeffrey Epstein was arrested for running one (and mysteriously died in custody).
  - ibejoeb 6y ago
    This is what I don't understand about qanon, which I assume is because what I know of qanon is only this surface-level premise. Where does it go off the rails? Because--if we're being real with ourselves--we have to contend with the fact there is a pedophile island, and heads of state, royals, and other elite are credibly implicated the sex trafficking that sustains it.
    - ufmace 6y ago
      AIUI, the key part of QAnon is "the storm", the idea that some secretive group in the Trump administration is preparing some kind of mass indictments, possibly involving military tribunals, to bust all of the secret pedophiles. This is "the plan" that QAnon people implore us to "trust". No matter how bizarre and disconnected the happenings in various Government agencies seem, it's all supposedly part of "the plan" that we're supposed to just trust. Pedophile rings in the highest levels of Government and high society seem disturbingly plausible. I have no idea who's connected to it or how it all works, but I bet we'd all be pretty disturbed if it ever really came to light. But I'm not about to buy that there's a secret plan that's going to make it all work out, and everything is actually happening according to that plan.
      - hajile 6y ago
        I was doing some reading on Qanon. The weirdest part to me was how FEW correlations they have to offer. If I give a large group 4,000+ pieces of random information and a multi-year block of history, I'd expect the number of interesting and surprising coincidences to be staggering. Instead, the "deltas" and obsession with 17 is weak at best. One could say that it is more interesting that so many Q posts somehow have so very little in common with anything at all.
norwegianwhale 6y ago
Some people believe that poverty is caused by other people becoming rich. So there's conspiracy theories that aren't treated as such, and other theories falsely labelled as such.
motohagiography 6y ago
It's an interesting find. The difference between these sites and spam sites is that they are mostly self-contained comment boards. You have to actually go do them to interact with them, where spammers were breaking the internet. What clicked for me in this article is asking why I ever thought the internet was about ideas, what it might have meant pre-internet for people to be free of a "mainstream" in the old music and style subcultures, and what the consequences of "eternal september," really were. When we say mainstream, I think we mean aligned to the dominant power, and the culture that comes with a mainstream is based on litigating rules for incremental advantage. Internet trolls use the higher bar for entry of tech focused platforms to harass people who are competing in the desperate political struggle for approval that is mainstream social media. Conversely, this mainstream culture is also the source of the visceral disgust some people have for lawyers, journalists, activists, and other people who affect being underdogs so they aren't held to the standards of honest people, and then antagonize others using those dominant rules as a cover. The same can be said for trolls. What it comes down to is this calculus of self permission to act like a piece of shit because you identify as the underdog. It's not the platforms, it's the single idea that identifying as an outsider, resister, pariah, defender, or challenger, justifies cruelty because being "good," is defined by your chosen bugbear. The reality is the mainstream is not "good," the public sphere is an open sewer, and the only things that float in it are turds. It's not a right/left thing, it's a conflict between people competing for mainstream power and people trying to find freedom from that mainstream's domain, with some of each self-identifying as beneath decency. The conspiracy-sphere of alternative internet platforms isn't the problem. I would defend the necessity of their existence because trying and failing and building new things requires real privacy away from the mindless predation of both the mainstream and the pariah net. Sure, take them down as a forcing function to make the new private sphere stronger with a higher bar to entry that is cryptographically enabled, but it's not solving the problem they think.
- leftyted 6y ago
  > Internet trolls use the higher bar for entry of tech focused platforms to harass people who are competing in the desperate political struggle for approval that is mainstream social media. Conversely, this mainstream culture is also the source of the visceral disgust some people have for lawyers, journalists, activists, and other people who affect being underdogs so they aren't held to the standards of honest people, and then antagonize others using those dominant rules as a cover. The same can be said for trolls. What it comes down to is this calculus of self permission to act like a piece of shit because you identify as the underdog. > It's not the platforms, it's the single idea that identifying as an outsider, resister, pariah, defender, or challenger, justifies cruelty because being "good," is defined by your chosen bugbear. The reality is the mainstream is not "good," the public sphere is an open sewer, and the only things that float in it are turds. It's not a right/left thing, it's a conflict between people competing for mainstream power and people trying to find freedom from that mainstream's domain, with some of each self-identifying as beneath decency. What a great insight. My opinion is that this comes down to the fact that we cannot be good in public. The more "in public" we are, the more dishonest we are. The private sphere -- family, close friends, personal intimacy, etc -- is where people are at their best. We can be honest there. We can show weakness, we can apologize, we can compromise and we can forgive. The internet has made lots of things public that used to be private. It is also taking things that were public and making them more public. This is making the world worse. Since I know you've read Hannah Arendt, this matches up well with her assertion that "in politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy" and "hatred and love belong together, and they are both destructive; you can afford them only in the private". She insisted on glory -- not goodness or justice or love -- as the sole criterion for political action.
fallingfrog 6y ago
I’m pretty sure that anyone who is willing to swallow massively implausible theories like qanon is not the kind of person who will be amenable to logical arguments and fact checking. You can’t just argue those people out if their positions because it’s not about truth for them, it’s about feeling like one is a member of the elect. Denying reality is not a bug, it’s a feature of every millenarian belief system. Facts are ineffective, you just have to shut them down.
- fallingfrog 6y ago
  Downvoted! Look: we here on hacker news are used to thinking about the world in a logical way. We test our ideas against reality and reject what doesn’t fit. We have rational enlightenment ideals about democracy and reason. Well some people don’t! They really don’t. They have a prescientific, premodern understanding of the world. I know this is hard to accept but it’s clearly true. And every time they turn on the tv and see gay people and atheists, they get furious and they want all those people to shut up and be silent, so the world can go back to being the comfortable, familiar place that they think it is without all the complexity and uncertainty that the real world contains. So if you don’t understand the world, and it’s scary, you’re going to latch on to some belief system that says that some cabal of devil worshippers is responsible for everything you don’t like. Logic has nothing to do with it.
  - theplague42 6y ago
    HackerNews is just as vulnerable to confirmation bias and reactionary behavior as any other group of people. Being an engineer does not make one magically immune to cognitive bias.
    - aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 6y ago
      As the recently-departed James Randi pointed out repeatedly, scientists are among the easiest people to fool with magic tricks for this very reason.
    - reducesuffering 6y ago
arminiusreturns 6y ago
I'm a conspiracy theorist, I'll admit it. Not the kind who spouts nonsense (at least I try not to), but who has spent a long time understanding the real big picture at a geopolitical and geostrategic level to the best of my limited ability. More on this later. These calls for censorship are dangerous in so many ways not being addressed. There are two primary issues at hand in my eyes though. One, that the censorship engine that many think will only apply to those "crazy crackpot conspiracy theorists" will eventually be turned on them at some point in the future. Two, is that instead of actually filtering out "crazy conspiracy theorists" it will only filter out the "individual crazy conspiracy theorists", while the other entities at play will have (more) free reign to run amok than they already do and have. I'm trying keep this meta, and not get into particulars for obvious reasons, but as a singular example to make a point; I particpated in one of the largest conspiracies in the last two decades, but it was a state and mainstream media sponsored one; the Global War on Terror (GWOT). If the deep state (in the original Peter Dale Scott sense of the term) wanted another Iraq equivalent today, how do you think this would be applied to people who fought against it? To ask the question is to answer it. As a matter of fact, this has happened more recently in a few cases, but most Americans just are completely unaware of the massive amounts of death and destruction being carried out in their name... because the media doesn't talk about it, and those that do are labelled... you guessed it... So for those who constantly clamor to use the "but these conspiracy theories are dangerous because of real life consequences!" angle are focusing on outliers (that should still be addressed) while ignoring the thousands of deaths of people of a different color half the world away, either at our hands, at the hands of those we finance, or at the hands of those we supply weapons to. The bottom line is everyone is a conspiracy theorist, it's just that some people don't like certain ones, and clamour to silence those voices, not just for them, but for everyone. The term itself was brought into the perjorative by the CIA in an attempt to discredit anybody who questioned the Warren commission. The entire history of the world is a history of conspiracy! I tend to lean towards Michael Parenti's disdain heaped on what he calls "coincidence theorists", because thats what so many rebuttals and "debunkings" end up being. By taking this ridicule and censor approach, instead of addressing things like half-truths and limited hangout psyops (of which Qanon certainly is), what happens is those who question things of this nature are forced further into isolated, filter bubbled communities that then become extremely defensive. This is not the way to address these things... but to be honest I think the pendulum may have swung too far already. It's too popular (even if much of it is manufactured popularity, a nice play on words of Chomsky's manufactured consent) a position. It's just another in the long line of boogeymen the state and other actors love utilize for other purposes. Communism! Terrorism! Protect the children! ... Conspiracy Theory! I suggest you don't fall for it. I also try not to blame too harshly those who do... after all, I fell for the GWOT in my younger and dumber days, as many of us did in the months and years after 9/11, and didn't get my brain back till I got out of the military. A few quotes from old comments of mine: "One issue is that people seem to have completely forgotten what inductive logic is, and how powerful it can be. Of course evidence (deductive logic) is preferred wherever possible, but in the arena of intelligence agencies and billionares who spend a lot of time covering up their tracks (especially by degrees of seperations), you aren't going to get that evidence except in the most rare cases. Even in the cases where the evidence does show up, it is often covered up, destroyed, lost, inadmissable, gag ordered, blackbagged, etc." "my anecdotal experience has been from starting with only one maxim. That I would rather know the truth than the lie, in particular the ugly truth over the beautiful lie. What started out for me just as the meager attempts of a USMC Iraq combat vet to understand his own place in what could truly be called a vast conspiracy (the war), became a lifelong journey of transformation in understanding the bigger picture of the realities of this world. Let me tell you, it is so much more conspiratorial than most would ever want to know (and I base this upon good, strong evidence, and where that is lacking, good inductive logic). I think most people honestly would prefer the beautiful lie. My problem always has been and probably always will be when those who prefer the lie try to tell me the lie is truth, and then attack when incredulity inevitably rises as a reaction." I keep thinking about doing an hn "I am a conspiracy theorist, ama." right before I burn this account. Is now the time? I think I would need to discuss how to approach that delicately with mods first.
ed25519FUUU 6y ago
> The public face of 8chan is Jim Watkins, a pig farmer in the Philippines who many experts believe is also the person behind the shadowy persona of “Q” at the center of the conspiracy theory movement. It’s funny to me that people think Jim is capable of leading a worldwide movement and has enough opsec not to get caught. Have you seen the guy on YouTube? Give it a watch and decide for yourself. I followed Q (not qanon) in relation to spygate, and let’s just say I was surprised. It’s not some basement mouth breather, it’s state level. Have the people who followed Q also considered it could be some Russian or other country’s psyop against us? Again think for yourself folks. Anyway, I’m convinced Q at this point is out of the bag. Even if you banned it on the clear web it would spill out from the dark web into every public space. The only way to attack it effectively now is to get transparent about some of the central claims Q says control the levers of power: 1. What was happening on Epstein’s island? 2. What evidence does Assange have regarding the source of hacked emails? 3. What were the deleted emails on HRC server and how did the Clinton foundation amass so much money? Interesting enough just now after two years of Q, we’re getting some more information about these, so it really is going to be do or die for “qanon”. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/10/09/politics/pompeo-clinton-emails/index.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/10/09/poli... https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/17318376/united-states-v-maxwell/?filed_after=&filed_before=&entry_gte=&entry_lte=&order_by=desc https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/17318376/united-states-...
- theplague42 6y ago
  What about it makes it "state level"? Dozens of failed predictions. Vague, open-ended insinuations that can be interpreted by anyone in totally different ways. No legitimate information that can't be found with a search engine. Whoever made up Q is similar to Trump in that they identified a group of people with real problems (loss of faith in institutions, fear of losing social power) to whom they could spread propaganda, but have no real solutions to any of the identified problems. I find it ironic that you say "think for yourself" while repeating nonsense propaganda that has little to no impact outside of made-up scandals targeting the Clintons.
  - Covzire 6y ago
daveevad 6y ago
> The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. Using legal tactics to stop text on the Internet seems folly to me.
- varjag 6y ago
  Derouting obsolete IPV4 blocks is as technical as it gets.
kordlessagain 6y ago
Someone should grow some balls and advertise their routes on BGP.
holidayacct 6y ago
Pay close attention to social media companies and privately run social networks and forums. I used to work for a major social media network that was growing and eventually stalled. If you run a social network and it gets popular you're going to run into major problems that no one talks about. 1.) Multiple governments, private organization and luddites send people to your company to compromise the source code. 2.) People eventually find out they can use the social network as a covert advertising platform. They end up trying to make side money using the platform to slip ad campaigns as normal human interactions. 3.) Eventually someone figures out they can control the behavior of people on the social media platform in strange ways. One guy figured out he could create sock puppet accounts and automate the process of bringing women he liked everywhere he went. Don't do this!!! If you start slipping covert advertising in the platform and you get caught you're eventually going to run into organized crime, the govt or both. 4.) And my favorite, people start offering your best employees obscsene amounts of money to try and stop you from starting another social network.
- novok 6y ago
  > automate the process of bringing women he liked everywhere he went So what is that exactly? Somehow these women would show up to meetups or something? Or were the sockpuppet accounts 'women'?
  - holidayacct 6y ago
    Surprisingly, they were real women that fell for sock puppet accounts.
    - novok 6y ago
      So whenever they arrived somewhere, would they be very confused and then leave because mr.sockpuppet wasn't around? You got to give more details, otherwise this story is pretty confusing.
      - holidayacct 6y ago
rudolfwinestock 6y ago
“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” —John Gilmore “The Internet interprets the absence of censorship as wickedness or weakness and attacks it.” —me Please note that the above two statements do not contradict each other.
grawprog 6y ago
I'll admit, I spent some time on 8chan both before and after jim Watkins took control. The story behind it all is actually pretty fascinating. One big thing I did notice though after a hiatus browsing there and going back. Watkins did something to that site. It was always pretty bad, a lot of the people there were pretty awful, but there wasn't an organized right wing presence pushing Nazi ideals and anti-Holocaust propaganda. Most of the people there just tended to be misfits who didn't even fit in on 4chan. A lot of people I remember talking to in those early days were pretty normal people who just liked the idea of a censorship free anonymous community. Don't get me wrong, there were definitely some pretty deplorable people and posts back then, I mean they were the people that got banned from 4chan after all, but it wasn't the same. I even remember a few threads where hotwheels came on and joked around and stuff. Overall it had a more harmless, if a bit sociopathic and hateful, vibe to it. Fast forward a few years to just a few months before it got shut down, I remembered it existed and went and checked it out again. It was fairly different. Every board got constant spam from white supremacists and Nazis, the content was 99% race baiting type stuff, there was a huge MGTOW presence on there. The hate towards women had sky rocketed. Everyone on there was just angry and totally hateful towards society. Jim and his son would pop on and off spouting nonsense, the nazis would regularly go unbanned and were allowed free reign. I'm fairly convinced Jim and Ron purposely led the site that way. Whether by their own decision or maybe even government persuasion. The fbi had an active presence on there by that point https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20201868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20201868 And were even caught out instigating what ended up being and active shooter. The whole community there and all this saga around it has always kind of fascinated me. The people there came from all places and walks of life with more beliefs and ideals you could shake a stick at. And it's surprising the kind of actual heartfelt stuff you could find on there filtered between all the shit if you looked.
- sarcastix 6y ago
  Every place on the Internet that has free speech becomes nazi. Make of that what you want.
mineirobr 6y ago
Yes lets shutdown everything we dont agree with.
arexxbifs 6y ago
99 goofball sites on the net. Take one down, pass it around. 101 goofball sites on the net...
octoberfranklin 6y ago
Regarding ARIN listing a defunct entity as owner: keep in mind that TONS of telecom infrastructure is listed as being owned by defunct companies that were acquired/merged into other companies, or simply reincorporated in a new jurisdiction. For example, the concrete blockhouse where my neighborhood's DSL modems live sites on land owned by an entity that hasn't existed for a decade. This is according to the county auditor, who is the highest non-judicial authority when it comes to real estate ownership. When CenturyLink bought the old telco they never bothered to update the deed. That doesn't mean I can go squat on that land. It just means the records weren't updated when the acquisition happened.
- otterlicious 6y ago
  Acquired isn't defunct. The archaically named entity that owns your local telco cabinet almost certainly still exists: http://www.centurylink.com/static/PDF/AboutUs/DoingBusiness/Affiliates_List_061514.pdf http://www.centurylink.com/static/PDF/AboutUs/DoingBusiness/...
  - octoberfranklin 6y ago
    It really is defunct. The corporation "US West" is no longer registered. Acquirors don't keep their acquisitions' corpses registered forever.
    - otterley 6y ago
      All of US West’s assets were acquired as part of the merger transaction. In this case, there’s no evidence of a similar acquisition.
      - octoberfranklin 6y ago
        No evidence that you're aware of. Because they're not a publicly-traded company like US West. This is unsurprising.
        6y ago
ivanhoe 6y ago
I have to say that I find the amount of effort that's put into silencing these particular weirdos scary - and it's also deeply hypocritical because conspiracy theorists are being shushed down for believing in imaginary and impossible to prove things, while say religious and supernatural folks are free to promote their ideas freely, although they share many of the same elements, and historically have caused much more hate and violence and terrorism.
- TheBobinator 6y ago
  For things to be said here. First, Ben Bagdikian's media monopoly highlights how we now have very concentrated media companies and almost every company that calls itself "the mainstream media" is actually part of 4 or 5 companies that are I think are best deemed an oligopoly of influence brokers in the US. Much of the reason those companies have been targeting the current incumbent president for the past 4 years with a ferver that the Bushes, Clinton, or Obama never were attacked with is largely because when a rich person is threatened with losing their money, they'll simply spend it all to stop it from being taken away. Great example of how that works is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGIYU2Xznb4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGIYU2Xznb4 (This is older, we're down to 5 now). https://producertales.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/mediamoguls.jpg https://producertales.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/mediamogul... Second, you make more money as a "news" org if you foster an unquestioning, guillable audience that doesn't question what you're putting forward much. Hence, the use of naming and shaming, guilt tripping, heckling and otherwise berating their own audience through innuendo and sleight of hand. The MSM has repeatedly crossed the line in the last year of attempting to incite their audience to violence. A great majority of americans at this point, by polls, consider those orgs to be trash news and tabloids; what these large news orgs are attempting to do is to stop competition from taking root. Some of that is supported by the US Government; psyops are a real thing and having media control is an effective means to stopping them. Much of that is revenue assurance. The problem today is, people are turning off the TV and Cable news broadcasts and are going to 3rd parties because they've gotten wise to big media pissing in the soup. Finally, 8chan has been, for a long long time, targeted by social engineering groups including spooks from the US government. The internet has this funny issue where unregulated, anonymous boards tend to get targeted by social engineering threat groups in foreign governments and that has been pretty well documented. Even HN gets targeted. The problem with psychological warfare is, much like any WMD, it doesn't differentiate between target or target audiences, and as a spook org, you have no idea who really uses 4chan or 8chan. So you end up with these platforms being used to attract and radicalize certain broad audiences, then SHTF such as e.g. Anders Behring Breivik, the courts and governments are left to pick up the pieces and save face. Pretty much at this point there's no more face to save, and the burden of proof is now a hell of a lot higher for audiences going forward. The game of building trust in an org then using people is prooving less and less effective. Krebs did an excellent job at following the money down on what looks like a fairly sophisticated psyop. Interesting to me he'd do that.

217 points by headalgorithm 6y ago

s9w 6y ago

> hate-filled anonymous message board 8chan not as hate-filled as Twitter. I don't think people like him have actually been on these sites.

mathgorges 6y ago
As someone who spent a decent amount of time on 8chan and boards like it in high school, this comment legitimately confuses me. Can you expand please?
- s9w 6y ago
  It depends on who you are on what you define as hate. The sites both have a very clear political preference. And both are harsh towards the other. But the chans due to the way the work have less of a vendetta style activism and mostly ignore or ridicule outsiders. There's some rough language - I would say on average the chans are certainly more direct and less signaling, but the lows are pretty equal for both sites. Death wishes are very common on both. And of course what you interpret as hateful is massively defined by your beliefs. If you define using wrong pronouns as such, then you're gonna have a bad time on the chans. But so would you on Twitter for having a photo with a MAGA hat. The chans can be surprisingly humane and supportive. Truly so and not just for social points. Their usual dismissive description is not matched by the actual content. Which is understandable since honestly at the moment, a very good chunk of the content is by bots and organized groups. Related: I recently posted a long article on all sorts of c++ stuff on a technical Reddit. It also contained criticism of Git. People got their god damn pitchforks! They told me to give up my job, told me I'm a bad coder, they went through reddit and git histories, looked up accounts on other sites and sent me things to my private E-mail that carry a prison sentence in my country. And the mods didn't even remove any of it. Because I criticized Git. But they do insta-ban people for using the wrong pronouns. Things are not like they seem if you're not in the 'in'-group. Deviate just a little and people come for you - on Twitter like on Reddit. There's no such thing on the chans.
  - theplague42 6y ago
    One regularly talks about killing Jews and one doesn't.
    - charlchi 6y ago
      In South Africa, twitter users make regular calls for the killing of white people, about as regularly as 4chan/pol has calls for killing jews. The other day twitter refused to remove of an extremely hateful image of 2 white people's decapited heads being held up by 2 black women. So no, they are about the same. One platform will ban hate speech from some groups but not from others.
    - swebs 6y ago
      Twitter does all the time, just with a different target. Someone even set up a satirical subreddit to take all the hateful messages posted on Twitter and replacing "white/men/etc" with "jews" just to prove the point. https://old.reddit.com/r/menkampf https://old.reddit.com/r/menkampf
    - s9w 6y ago
      Twitter talks about killing men, white people, Trump or conservatives. It's honest to god not much different.
happytoexplain 6y ago
I have, a lot. Your comparison is nowhere near realistic.
- olah_1 6y ago
  The difference is that people on Twitter are chasing a real commodity called clout. Never underestimate what people are willing to do for clout. In comparison, 8chan was downright comfy.

jmnicolas 6y ago

Of course everybody knows the right way to convince conspiracy theorists that they're wrong is to go after them. I don't see what's wrong with having internet trash bins. At least the trash is in a know location, it doesn't spill everywhere. I'm not from the US, the only mentions of those sites I have ever encountered was journalists making a few articles about them.

happytoexplain 6y ago
The goal is not to convince conspiracy theorists that they are wrong, the goal is to prevent them from hurting people or society and, to that end, keep the dangerous ones from organizing anonymously online in large numbers (I honestly don't know if that's possible).
- jmnicolas 6y ago
  If I'm not mistaken the NZ killer was on 8chan? It's the same argument with serial killer movies (at the risk of showing my age there was a strong controversy with "Natural Born Killers" at the time): you don't kill people because you chatted on the internet or watched a movie. You kill people because you had it in you. The things you were exposed before might color your act but that's it.
  - dragontamer 6y ago
    > It's the same argument with serial killer movies Hollywood is infamous for misunderstanding psychology. At best, Hollywood has outdated notions of psychology (favoring long outdated ideas like Freud, because such ideas are exciting). Hollywood sells movies, not understanding. What we're discovering today is that there's a "pathway to radicalization". People are NOT born radical, they realign themselves as radical over time.
    - formerly_proven 6y ago
      Yes, so how is giving internet trash cans like QAnon huge amounts of exposure and thus free advertisement supposed to help?

speeder 6y ago

I read 8chan and 4chan sometimes, not /b/ and not /pol/, I am more interested in the other boards that often care for or start open source projects. I am very disappointed with people that want to shut down these places, often because of false allegations (for example the attempt to shut down 8chan for child porn, that later were found out to be a false flag, the person accusing them were also the one that posted the porn in first place)

happytoexplain 6y ago
I also spend a lot of time on 4chan, and visit 8chan occasionally. There is a universe of difference between them, and calls to shut down 4chan are much rarer and more ignorant of the content than calls to shut down 8chan. It's important not to conflate them.
- swebs 6y ago
  Could you go into more detail?
  - strathmeyer 6y ago
    8chan was created when 4chan disallowed child pornography and their owner bought it when all this QAnon stuff started.
    - dhimes 6y ago
      Would downvoters please explain why you're doing it? Is this statement untrue? Serious question- I have no idea.
      - swebs 6y ago
        It is completely untrue. That's been disallowed on both sites since day 1. >I came up with the original concept of 8chan while on a psychedelic mushroom trip. I was past the peak and was on the tail end of the trip, and I just decided to browse 4chan because that's what I did when sober. I was still tripping pretty bad though so I kept seeing these fractal patterns and I wrote down the words "infinite chan" to remember for later. >The next day, I was able to put into words more of what the site would be like. I was inspired partly by the admin of 4chon.net, savetheinternet, who routinely refused to make requested boards for users. I wondered what it would be like if there were a Reddit-style imageboard where anyone could make a board without express admin approval, and began hacking on the imageboard engine I knew best to make it a reality: vichan. I decided to expire boards after inactivity so that it didn't get full of dead boards like Reddit does with dead subreddits, and released version 1 of 8chan two days later. https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/interviews/qa-with-fredrick-brennan-of-8chan https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/interviews/qa-with-fredr...

Pick-A-Hill2019 6y ago

Gosh, I'm conflicted. I upvoted the submission for the interesting HN comments that are likely to appear based on it but also so, so, soooo didn't want to upvote a Krebs article and give him the Ads revenue from the page views.

gruez 6y ago
>but also so, so, soooo didn't want to upvote a Krebs article and give him the Ads revenue from the page views. what's wrong with kerbs?
- MivLives 6y ago
  Some people don't like that he doxes people.
  - strathmeyer 6y ago
    We're all Internet users here and reporting the news isn't what we are going to consider doxxing.
  - BLKNSLVR 6y ago
    And sometimes the doxing is of the wrong people, or people that are undeserving of being doxed.
    - criddell 6y ago
      I didn't know this. What are some examples? Did Krebs do anything to make amends for the innocent people he doxed?
      - detaro 6y ago
        2 examples, there's more that are at the very least questionable if you go searching: https://itwire.com/security/infosec-researchers-slam-ex-wapo-man-krebs-over-doxxing.html https://itwire.com/security/infosec-researchers-slam-ex-wapo... https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/11/28/the-russian-metadata-in-the-shadow-brokers-dump/ https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/11/28/the-russian-metadata-i...

gruez 6y ago

Are ip address blocks registered to defunct companies a relatively common thing? Clearly ARIN isn't regularly checking whether the owners of ip address blocks are still in business, so I'd imagine there are plenty of other blocks that belong to defunct companies.

rwmj 6y ago
I know that the company I used to work for held on to a modest block for years after it went out of business. (IIRC it was a /20 of IPv4. It has since been recovered by RIPE.)
Bayart 6y ago
I understand that being articulated around old school paper administrations rather than automated APIs that stuff can easily be ignored (especially in places like the US where legislation is highly fragmented), but you'd think that the starvation for IPv4 would be a good enough incentive for people to go after those low-hanging fruits.
- octoberfranklin 6y ago
  We started "running out of land" long before IPv4 addresses even existed, yet lots of land is listed as being owned by entities that were acquired/merged/reincorporated. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24876963 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24876963 That doesn't mean the land, or the IP addresses, are abandoned.
cgh 6y ago
Similarly, I wonder about internet ports assigned to dormant or defunct companies. I used to work for a company back in the '90s that had their own IANA port assignment for a proprietary database product. Of course, they don't use it anymore as the company and product are both long gone.
- Nullabillity 6y ago
  Err, presumably the product still works for existing customers?

0xy 6y ago

The best antidote for bad ideas and conspiracy theories is transparency and public debate. This move will serve to push these movements underground to Tor or other uncensorable networks where they're even harder to monitor. It also sends a message to them that they're on to something (because if the QAnon conspiracy was real, the "deep state" would indeed try to snuff it out). I feel like this is such a bad precedent and will not end well. It will embolden the crazies. It's also not clear where this is supposed to end? Flat earthers? 9/11 truthers? Who's next?

dragontamer 6y ago
> The best antidote for bad ideas and conspiracy theories is transparency and public debate. I've been on the internet for decades. I fully disagree with this. EDIT: Mass bannings, aka an "Exodus Event", was the solution to almost all major conspiracies I've witnessed. 1. When GameFAQs LUEsers gained conspiracy theories against the website and other reckless behavior, to the point of harming the website, the solution was to cut off LUE and prevent the public from viewing that message board. 2. I never visited SomethingAwful, but clearly the toxic subset of that community was banned and eventually moved to 4chan. 3. 4Chan's prominence in the late 00s / early 10s was clearly toxic and always was. 4chan was just focused on hitting "safe" targets, such as harassing Scientology / Scientologists. As soon as 4chan's toxic behavior was unleashed to more mainstream ideas, it was clear that the toxicity had to be stopped, and 4chan moderators stepped up their game. 4. 8Chan was created in response to the Gamergate conspiracies, as was some legitimate sites like Resetera (though they took the less conspiracy-minded side). ---------- For the most part, the bannings on 4Chan worked. We don't see Gamergaters pushing their silly conspiracy theories today, or other vile attacks on people. Furthermore, the doxing / swatting mostly stopped on that subject. > This move will serve to push these movements underground to Tor or other uncensorable networks where they're even harder to monitor. Yes, that's called an exodus. But as various websites gain prominence, they discover again-and-again that with prominence comes responsibility. When you have a group of doxers and swatters visiting your website, you start to punish that subgroup. That's just what must happen. Yeah, its a temporary fix (doxers / swatters will move elsewhere), but at a minimum, it sends the message that such behavior won't be tolerated. > It also sends a message to them that they're on to something (because if the QAnon conspiracy was real, the "deep state" would indeed try to snuff it out). Tell me: when a child is misbehaving and thinks "Adults are out to get me", do you go more lenient on them? EDIT: Adults are just like children: you have to punish bad behavior and reward good behavior. That's just the basis of building a modern society.

ufmace 6y ago

Man, I never cared much for QAnon, but the way so many mainstream institutions are joining together, using the exact same misleading talking points, to censor something off the internet makes me wonder if they're onto something after all.

logicchains 6y ago
It's amazing how skeptical people are of the idea of a paedophile ring among the elites when only recently Jeffrey Epstein was arrested for running one (and mysteriously died in custody).
- ibejoeb 6y ago
  This is what I don't understand about qanon, which I assume is because what I know of qanon is only this surface-level premise. Where does it go off the rails? Because--if we're being real with ourselves--we have to contend with the fact there is a pedophile island, and heads of state, royals, and other elite are credibly implicated the sex trafficking that sustains it.
  - ufmace 6y ago
    AIUI, the key part of QAnon is "the storm", the idea that some secretive group in the Trump administration is preparing some kind of mass indictments, possibly involving military tribunals, to bust all of the secret pedophiles. This is "the plan" that QAnon people implore us to "trust". No matter how bizarre and disconnected the happenings in various Government agencies seem, it's all supposedly part of "the plan" that we're supposed to just trust. Pedophile rings in the highest levels of Government and high society seem disturbingly plausible. I have no idea who's connected to it or how it all works, but I bet we'd all be pretty disturbed if it ever really came to light. But I'm not about to buy that there's a secret plan that's going to make it all work out, and everything is actually happening according to that plan.
    - hajile 6y ago
      I was doing some reading on Qanon. The weirdest part to me was how FEW correlations they have to offer. If I give a large group 4,000+ pieces of random information and a multi-year block of history, I'd expect the number of interesting and surprising coincidences to be staggering. Instead, the "deltas" and obsession with 17 is weak at best. One could say that it is more interesting that so many Q posts somehow have so very little in common with anything at all.

norwegianwhale 6y ago

Some people believe that poverty is caused by other people becoming rich. So there's conspiracy theories that aren't treated as such, and other theories falsely labelled as such.

motohagiography 6y ago

It's an interesting find. The difference between these sites and spam sites is that they are mostly self-contained comment boards. You have to actually go do them to interact with them, where spammers were breaking the internet. What clicked for me in this article is asking why I ever thought the internet was about ideas, what it might have meant pre-internet for people to be free of a "mainstream" in the old music and style subcultures, and what the consequences of "eternal september," really were. When we say mainstream, I think we mean aligned to the dominant power, and the culture that comes with a mainstream is based on litigating rules for incremental advantage. Internet trolls use the higher bar for entry of tech focused platforms to harass people who are competing in the desperate political struggle for approval that is mainstream social media. Conversely, this mainstream culture is also the source of the visceral disgust some people have for lawyers, journalists, activists, and other people who affect being underdogs so they aren't held to the standards of honest people, and then antagonize others using those dominant rules as a cover. The same can be said for trolls. What it comes down to is this calculus of self permission to act like a piece of shit because you identify as the underdog. It's not the platforms, it's the single idea that identifying as an outsider, resister, pariah, defender, or challenger, justifies cruelty because being "good," is defined by your chosen bugbear. The reality is the mainstream is not "good," the public sphere is an open sewer, and the only things that float in it are turds. It's not a right/left thing, it's a conflict between people competing for mainstream power and people trying to find freedom from that mainstream's domain, with some of each self-identifying as beneath decency. The conspiracy-sphere of alternative internet platforms isn't the problem. I would defend the necessity of their existence because trying and failing and building new things requires real privacy away from the mindless predation of both the mainstream and the pariah net. Sure, take them down as a forcing function to make the new private sphere stronger with a higher bar to entry that is cryptographically enabled, but it's not solving the problem they think.

leftyted 6y ago
> Internet trolls use the higher bar for entry of tech focused platforms to harass people who are competing in the desperate political struggle for approval that is mainstream social media. Conversely, this mainstream culture is also the source of the visceral disgust some people have for lawyers, journalists, activists, and other people who affect being underdogs so they aren't held to the standards of honest people, and then antagonize others using those dominant rules as a cover. The same can be said for trolls. What it comes down to is this calculus of self permission to act like a piece of shit because you identify as the underdog. > It's not the platforms, it's the single idea that identifying as an outsider, resister, pariah, defender, or challenger, justifies cruelty because being "good," is defined by your chosen bugbear. The reality is the mainstream is not "good," the public sphere is an open sewer, and the only things that float in it are turds. It's not a right/left thing, it's a conflict between people competing for mainstream power and people trying to find freedom from that mainstream's domain, with some of each self-identifying as beneath decency. What a great insight. My opinion is that this comes down to the fact that we cannot be good in public. The more "in public" we are, the more dishonest we are. The private sphere -- family, close friends, personal intimacy, etc -- is where people are at their best. We can be honest there. We can show weakness, we can apologize, we can compromise and we can forgive. The internet has made lots of things public that used to be private. It is also taking things that were public and making them more public. This is making the world worse. Since I know you've read Hannah Arendt, this matches up well with her assertion that "in politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy" and "hatred and love belong together, and they are both destructive; you can afford them only in the private". She insisted on glory -- not goodness or justice or love -- as the sole criterion for political action.

fallingfrog 6y ago

I’m pretty sure that anyone who is willing to swallow massively implausible theories like qanon is not the kind of person who will be amenable to logical arguments and fact checking. You can’t just argue those people out if their positions because it’s not about truth for them, it’s about feeling like one is a member of the elect. Denying reality is not a bug, it’s a feature of every millenarian belief system. Facts are ineffective, you just have to shut them down.

fallingfrog 6y ago
Downvoted! Look: we here on hacker news are used to thinking about the world in a logical way. We test our ideas against reality and reject what doesn’t fit. We have rational enlightenment ideals about democracy and reason. Well some people don’t! They really don’t. They have a prescientific, premodern understanding of the world. I know this is hard to accept but it’s clearly true. And every time they turn on the tv and see gay people and atheists, they get furious and they want all those people to shut up and be silent, so the world can go back to being the comfortable, familiar place that they think it is without all the complexity and uncertainty that the real world contains. So if you don’t understand the world, and it’s scary, you’re going to latch on to some belief system that says that some cabal of devil worshippers is responsible for everything you don’t like. Logic has nothing to do with it.
- theplague42 6y ago
  HackerNews is just as vulnerable to confirmation bias and reactionary behavior as any other group of people. Being an engineer does not make one magically immune to cognitive bias.
  - aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 6y ago
    As the recently-departed James Randi pointed out repeatedly, scientists are among the easiest people to fool with magic tricks for this very reason.
  - reducesuffering 6y ago

arminiusreturns 6y ago

I'm a conspiracy theorist, I'll admit it. Not the kind who spouts nonsense (at least I try not to), but who has spent a long time understanding the real big picture at a geopolitical and geostrategic level to the best of my limited ability. More on this later. These calls for censorship are dangerous in so many ways not being addressed. There are two primary issues at hand in my eyes though. One, that the censorship engine that many think will only apply to those "crazy crackpot conspiracy theorists" will eventually be turned on them at some point in the future. Two, is that instead of actually filtering out "crazy conspiracy theorists" it will only filter out the "individual crazy conspiracy theorists", while the other entities at play will have (more) free reign to run amok than they already do and have. I'm trying keep this meta, and not get into particulars for obvious reasons, but as a singular example to make a point; I particpated in one of the largest conspiracies in the last two decades, but it was a state and mainstream media sponsored one; the Global War on Terror (GWOT). If the deep state (in the original Peter Dale Scott sense of the term) wanted another Iraq equivalent today, how do you think this would be applied to people who fought against it? To ask the question is to answer it. As a matter of fact, this has happened more recently in a few cases, but most Americans just are completely unaware of the massive amounts of death and destruction being carried out in their name... because the media doesn't talk about it, and those that do are labelled... you guessed it... So for those who constantly clamor to use the "but these conspiracy theories are dangerous because of real life consequences!" angle are focusing on outliers (that should still be addressed) while ignoring the thousands of deaths of people of a different color half the world away, either at our hands, at the hands of those we finance, or at the hands of those we supply weapons to. The bottom line is everyone is a conspiracy theorist, it's just that some people don't like certain ones, and clamour to silence those voices, not just for them, but for everyone. The term itself was brought into the perjorative by the CIA in an attempt to discredit anybody who questioned the Warren commission. The entire history of the world is a history of conspiracy! I tend to lean towards Michael Parenti's disdain heaped on what he calls "coincidence theorists", because thats what so many rebuttals and "debunkings" end up being. By taking this ridicule and censor approach, instead of addressing things like half-truths and limited hangout psyops (of which Qanon certainly is), what happens is those who question things of this nature are forced further into isolated, filter bubbled communities that then become extremely defensive. This is not the way to address these things... but to be honest I think the pendulum may have swung too far already. It's too popular (even if much of it is manufactured popularity, a nice play on words of Chomsky's manufactured consent) a position. It's just another in the long line of boogeymen the state and other actors love utilize for other purposes. Communism! Terrorism! Protect the children! ... Conspiracy Theory! I suggest you don't fall for it. I also try not to blame too harshly those who do... after all, I fell for the GWOT in my younger and dumber days, as many of us did in the months and years after 9/11, and didn't get my brain back till I got out of the military. A few quotes from old comments of mine: "One issue is that people seem to have completely forgotten what inductive logic is, and how powerful it can be. Of course evidence (deductive logic) is preferred wherever possible, but in the arena of intelligence agencies and billionares who spend a lot of time covering up their tracks (especially by degrees of seperations), you aren't going to get that evidence except in the most rare cases. Even in the cases where the evidence does show up, it is often covered up, destroyed, lost, inadmissable, gag ordered, blackbagged, etc." "my anecdotal experience has been from starting with only one maxim. That I would rather know the truth than the lie, in particular the ugly truth over the beautiful lie. What started out for me just as the meager attempts of a USMC Iraq combat vet to understand his own place in what could truly be called a vast conspiracy (the war), became a lifelong journey of transformation in understanding the bigger picture of the realities of this world. Let me tell you, it is so much more conspiratorial than most would ever want to know (and I base this upon good, strong evidence, and where that is lacking, good inductive logic). I think most people honestly would prefer the beautiful lie. My problem always has been and probably always will be when those who prefer the lie try to tell me the lie is truth, and then attack when incredulity inevitably rises as a reaction." I keep thinking about doing an hn "I am a conspiracy theorist, ama." right before I burn this account. Is now the time? I think I would need to discuss how to approach that delicately with mods first.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago

> The public face of 8chan is Jim Watkins, a pig farmer in the Philippines who many experts believe is also the person behind the shadowy persona of “Q” at the center of the conspiracy theory movement. It’s funny to me that people think Jim is capable of leading a worldwide movement and has enough opsec not to get caught. Have you seen the guy on YouTube? Give it a watch and decide for yourself. I followed Q (not qanon) in relation to spygate, and let’s just say I was surprised. It’s not some basement mouth breather, it’s state level. Have the people who followed Q also considered it could be some Russian or other country’s psyop against us? Again think for yourself folks. Anyway, I’m convinced Q at this point is out of the bag. Even if you banned it on the clear web it would spill out from the dark web into every public space. The only way to attack it effectively now is to get transparent about some of the central claims Q says control the levers of power: 1. What was happening on Epstein’s island? 2. What evidence does Assange have regarding the source of hacked emails? 3. What were the deleted emails on HRC server and how did the Clinton foundation amass so much money? Interesting enough just now after two years of Q, we’re getting some more information about these, so it really is going to be do or die for “qanon”. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/10/09/politics/pompeo-clinton-emails/index.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/10/09/poli... https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/17318376/united-states-v-maxwell/?filed_after=&filed_before=&entry_gte=&entry_lte=&order_by=desc https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/17318376/united-states-...

theplague42 6y ago
What about it makes it "state level"? Dozens of failed predictions. Vague, open-ended insinuations that can be interpreted by anyone in totally different ways. No legitimate information that can't be found with a search engine. Whoever made up Q is similar to Trump in that they identified a group of people with real problems (loss of faith in institutions, fear of losing social power) to whom they could spread propaganda, but have no real solutions to any of the identified problems. I find it ironic that you say "think for yourself" while repeating nonsense propaganda that has little to no impact outside of made-up scandals targeting the Clintons.
- Covzire 6y ago

daveevad 6y ago

> The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. Using legal tactics to stop text on the Internet seems folly to me.

varjag 6y ago
Derouting obsolete IPV4 blocks is as technical as it gets.

kordlessagain 6y ago

Someone should grow some balls and advertise their routes on BGP.

holidayacct 6y ago

Pay close attention to social media companies and privately run social networks and forums. I used to work for a major social media network that was growing and eventually stalled. If you run a social network and it gets popular you're going to run into major problems that no one talks about. 1.) Multiple governments, private organization and luddites send people to your company to compromise the source code. 2.) People eventually find out they can use the social network as a covert advertising platform. They end up trying to make side money using the platform to slip ad campaigns as normal human interactions. 3.) Eventually someone figures out they can control the behavior of people on the social media platform in strange ways. One guy figured out he could create sock puppet accounts and automate the process of bringing women he liked everywhere he went. Don't do this!!! If you start slipping covert advertising in the platform and you get caught you're eventually going to run into organized crime, the govt or both. 4.) And my favorite, people start offering your best employees obscsene amounts of money to try and stop you from starting another social network.

novok 6y ago
> automate the process of bringing women he liked everywhere he went So what is that exactly? Somehow these women would show up to meetups or something? Or were the sockpuppet accounts 'women'?
- holidayacct 6y ago
  Surprisingly, they were real women that fell for sock puppet accounts.
  - novok 6y ago
    So whenever they arrived somewhere, would they be very confused and then leave because mr.sockpuppet wasn't around? You got to give more details, otherwise this story is pretty confusing.
    - holidayacct 6y ago

rudolfwinestock 6y ago

“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” —John Gilmore “The Internet interprets the absence of censorship as wickedness or weakness and attacks it.” —me Please note that the above two statements do not contradict each other.

grawprog 6y ago

I'll admit, I spent some time on 8chan both before and after jim Watkins took control. The story behind it all is actually pretty fascinating. One big thing I did notice though after a hiatus browsing there and going back. Watkins did something to that site. It was always pretty bad, a lot of the people there were pretty awful, but there wasn't an organized right wing presence pushing Nazi ideals and anti-Holocaust propaganda. Most of the people there just tended to be misfits who didn't even fit in on 4chan. A lot of people I remember talking to in those early days were pretty normal people who just liked the idea of a censorship free anonymous community. Don't get me wrong, there were definitely some pretty deplorable people and posts back then, I mean they were the people that got banned from 4chan after all, but it wasn't the same. I even remember a few threads where hotwheels came on and joked around and stuff. Overall it had a more harmless, if a bit sociopathic and hateful, vibe to it. Fast forward a few years to just a few months before it got shut down, I remembered it existed and went and checked it out again. It was fairly different. Every board got constant spam from white supremacists and Nazis, the content was 99% race baiting type stuff, there was a huge MGTOW presence on there. The hate towards women had sky rocketed. Everyone on there was just angry and totally hateful towards society. Jim and his son would pop on and off spouting nonsense, the nazis would regularly go unbanned and were allowed free reign. I'm fairly convinced Jim and Ron purposely led the site that way. Whether by their own decision or maybe even government persuasion. The fbi had an active presence on there by that point https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20201868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20201868 And were even caught out instigating what ended up being and active shooter. The whole community there and all this saga around it has always kind of fascinated me. The people there came from all places and walks of life with more beliefs and ideals you could shake a stick at. And it's surprising the kind of actual heartfelt stuff you could find on there filtered between all the shit if you looked.

sarcastix 6y ago
Every place on the Internet that has free speech becomes nazi. Make of that what you want.

mineirobr 6y ago

Yes lets shutdown everything we dont agree with.

arexxbifs 6y ago

99 goofball sites on the net. Take one down, pass it around. 101 goofball sites on the net...

octoberfranklin 6y ago

Regarding ARIN listing a defunct entity as owner: keep in mind that TONS of telecom infrastructure is listed as being owned by defunct companies that were acquired/merged into other companies, or simply reincorporated in a new jurisdiction. For example, the concrete blockhouse where my neighborhood's DSL modems live sites on land owned by an entity that hasn't existed for a decade. This is according to the county auditor, who is the highest non-judicial authority when it comes to real estate ownership. When CenturyLink bought the old telco they never bothered to update the deed. That doesn't mean I can go squat on that land. It just means the records weren't updated when the acquisition happened.

otterlicious 6y ago
Acquired isn't defunct. The archaically named entity that owns your local telco cabinet almost certainly still exists: http://www.centurylink.com/static/PDF/AboutUs/DoingBusiness/Affiliates_List_061514.pdf http://www.centurylink.com/static/PDF/AboutUs/DoingBusiness/...
- octoberfranklin 6y ago
  It really is defunct. The corporation "US West" is no longer registered. Acquirors don't keep their acquisitions' corpses registered forever.
  - otterley 6y ago
    All of US West’s assets were acquired as part of the merger transaction. In this case, there’s no evidence of a similar acquisition.
    - octoberfranklin 6y ago
      No evidence that you're aware of. Because they're not a publicly-traded company like US West. This is unsurprising.
      - 6y ago

ivanhoe 6y ago

I have to say that I find the amount of effort that's put into silencing these particular weirdos scary - and it's also deeply hypocritical because conspiracy theorists are being shushed down for believing in imaginary and impossible to prove things, while say religious and supernatural folks are free to promote their ideas freely, although they share many of the same elements, and historically have caused much more hate and violence and terrorism.

TheBobinator 6y ago
For things to be said here. First, Ben Bagdikian's media monopoly highlights how we now have very concentrated media companies and almost every company that calls itself "the mainstream media" is actually part of 4 or 5 companies that are I think are best deemed an oligopoly of influence brokers in the US. Much of the reason those companies have been targeting the current incumbent president for the past 4 years with a ferver that the Bushes, Clinton, or Obama never were attacked with is largely because when a rich person is threatened with losing their money, they'll simply spend it all to stop it from being taken away. Great example of how that works is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGIYU2Xznb4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGIYU2Xznb4 (This is older, we're down to 5 now). https://producertales.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/mediamoguls.jpg https://producertales.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/mediamogul... Second, you make more money as a "news" org if you foster an unquestioning, guillable audience that doesn't question what you're putting forward much. Hence, the use of naming and shaming, guilt tripping, heckling and otherwise berating their own audience through innuendo and sleight of hand. The MSM has repeatedly crossed the line in the last year of attempting to incite their audience to violence. A great majority of americans at this point, by polls, consider those orgs to be trash news and tabloids; what these large news orgs are attempting to do is to stop competition from taking root. Some of that is supported by the US Government; psyops are a real thing and having media control is an effective means to stopping them. Much of that is revenue assurance. The problem today is, people are turning off the TV and Cable news broadcasts and are going to 3rd parties because they've gotten wise to big media pissing in the soup. Finally, 8chan has been, for a long long time, targeted by social engineering groups including spooks from the US government. The internet has this funny issue where unregulated, anonymous boards tend to get targeted by social engineering threat groups in foreign governments and that has been pretty well documented. Even HN gets targeted. The problem with psychological warfare is, much like any WMD, it doesn't differentiate between target or target audiences, and as a spook org, you have no idea who really uses 4chan or 8chan. So you end up with these platforms being used to attract and radicalize certain broad audiences, then SHTF such as e.g. Anders Behring Breivik, the courts and governments are left to pick up the pieces and save face. Pretty much at this point there's no more face to save, and the burden of proof is now a hell of a lot higher for audiences going forward. The game of building trust in an org then using people is prooving less and less effective. Krebs did an excellent job at following the money down on what looks like a fairly sophisticated psyop. Interesting to me he'd do that.