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An Influential Economics Forum Has a Troubling Surplus of Trolls

4 points by aragonite 3y ago

aragonite 3y ago
https://archive.is/NMzsh https://archive.is/NMzsh
- aragonite 3y ago
  > An experienced software developer, Jensen dove into EJMR’s inner workings. “He got a bit hooked,” Ederer says. It didn’t take Jensen long to figure out the forum’s scheme for assigning usernames: Each four-character-long code was generated based on the thread’s topic ID and the user’s IP address. (An IP address is a unique label assigned to a device on the internet.) First, those strings of digits were combined. Say your IP address was 131.111.5.175 and you were posting in a thread with the topic ID 227259. Those numbers would be joined to form 227259131.111.5.175. That string would then be run through a scrambling algorithm called a hash, which would spit out a new string in encoded form that reads e8b5eae32c2b197a0ac4cb889a9bbb8f417f3bff. Your username would be the characters in positions 10-13 in the hash, or in this case “c2b1.” > But, as Jensen discovered, the forum’s creator had made an elementary mistake. Usually the administrator will “salt” the hash, or introduce an element of randomness into the algorithm that spits out the new string of digits. In this case, the developer had forgotten to do that. ... > But how could anyone go after EJMR without knowing who was behind it? A year earlier, a web developer named Jesse Nickles had decided to investigate the site. Nickles runs a website called Hucksters.net, where he seeks to expose “bad actors” online—spammers, scammers or anyone else causing or enabling harm via a computer. “I wanted to bring more transparency to some of the shady corners of the internet,” he says. > It wasn’t EJMR’s “misogyny” and “racism” that motivated him to look into it, Nickles says. (Scare quotes his.) He leans toward free speech absolutism. Rather, it was the hypocrisy of the site’s administrator that galled him.

4 points by aragonite 3y ago

aragonite 3y ago

https://archive.is/NMzsh https://archive.is/NMzsh

aragonite 3y ago
> An experienced software developer, Jensen dove into EJMR’s inner workings. “He got a bit hooked,” Ederer says. It didn’t take Jensen long to figure out the forum’s scheme for assigning usernames: Each four-character-long code was generated based on the thread’s topic ID and the user’s IP address. (An IP address is a unique label assigned to a device on the internet.) First, those strings of digits were combined. Say your IP address was 131.111.5.175 and you were posting in a thread with the topic ID 227259. Those numbers would be joined to form 227259131.111.5.175. That string would then be run through a scrambling algorithm called a hash, which would spit out a new string in encoded form that reads e8b5eae32c2b197a0ac4cb889a9bbb8f417f3bff. Your username would be the characters in positions 10-13 in the hash, or in this case “c2b1.” > But, as Jensen discovered, the forum’s creator had made an elementary mistake. Usually the administrator will “salt” the hash, or introduce an element of randomness into the algorithm that spits out the new string of digits. In this case, the developer had forgotten to do that. ... > But how could anyone go after EJMR without knowing who was behind it? A year earlier, a web developer named Jesse Nickles had decided to investigate the site. Nickles runs a website called Hucksters.net, where he seeks to expose “bad actors” online—spammers, scammers or anyone else causing or enabling harm via a computer. “I wanted to bring more transparency to some of the shady corners of the internet,” he says. > It wasn’t EJMR’s “misogyny” and “racism” that motivated him to look into it, Nickles says. (Scare quotes his.) He leans toward free speech absolutism. Rather, it was the hypocrisy of the site’s administrator that galled him.