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For those without showdead on, there's an insightful comment from beedogs: My guess (and he intimates this in his comment about backdoors in Chinese products)
by kintamanimatt 13y ago
For those without showdead on, there's an insightful comment from beedogs:
My guess (and he intimates this in his comment about backdoors in Chinese products) is that the US government asked him to basically break his entire system so they could do MitM attacks.
The conversation probably went something like this:
USG: Install this machine in your datacenter. Route all traffic through it.
Accept installation of this new fiber demarc and allow us access to
configure this new router. You do not need to know where this
traffic is going. If you refuse, we'll slap you with a contempt order
and throw you in federal prison. If you tell anyone about this, we will
slap you with a contempt order and throw you in federal prison.
LL: Get fucked. I'll shut everything down instead.
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Why beedogs is shadowbanned is beyond me. A quick glance through his comment history doesn't indicate he's done anything to deserve it.
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Hey beedogs: I can't reply to you directly because you're hellbanned. Send an email to PG. I'm not usually a fan of posting people's contact information, but in this case it's everywhere anyway - pg [at] ycombinator.com
- beedogs 13y agoYeah, I'd like to know why I'm shadowbanned, too. This is the first I'd heard of it. Can someone at least let me know what the hell I did?
- kintamanimatt 13y agoWelcome back!
- beedogs 13y agothanks -- and to whoever sorted this out: thank you as well.
- phpnode 13y agoreplying to beedogs because I can't directly: You made this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6183189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6183189 and one of the admins arbitrarily decided that you needed silent punishment. nice eh?
- kintamanimatt 13y agoWhat? That's not even something worthy of a hellban!
- RexRollman 13y agoOut of curiousity, does anyone know who has the ability to hellban and, if so, are they themselves evaluated?
- kintamanimatt 13y agoMods. Could be PG, could be someone PG has elected to be a mod. The mods don't make themselves known, as far as I've seen. From the FAQ: [0] > Who are the editors? > About 30 YC alumni. They can kill stories and edit the titles, and in extreme cases (e.g. spamming or deliberate trolling) ban users. Are the bans evaluated? Well, no, apparently not automatically. But they can be manually reviewed by sending a nice email to PG. [0] http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- alan_cx 13y agoFor that alone? Cant be. Really? Surely there must be something more than that alone. Granted, its not the most useful post, probably meant to amuse, but a hellban?
- phpnode 13y agoturn on showdead and you'll find dozens of other cases where people have been banned for similarly egregious reasons. In some cases people go on posting for years without knowing their posts are dead. it's the most horrible aspect of HN.
- 13y ago
- sp332 13y agoThe official way to appeal is to ask info@ycombinator.com about it. I did that once and they said I got banned by accident. [Edit: ignore this part, it's wrong] If anyone gets shadowbanned (which can happen for automated reasons), use this link with your IP. https://news.ycombinator.com/unban?ip=ipaddress https://news.ycombinator.com/unban?ip=ipaddress PG made this link as an automated appeal, he says it only works once.
- kintamanimatt 13y agoEmailing is definitely the way to go. I've emailed PG about a post that got flagged to death and he was fairly quick about unbanning it. I don't think that link is for un-hellbanning an account. I think that's if you have a bot that messes up, or doesn't respect the rate limiting expressed in the site's robots.txt, and the IP of the bot gets blocked. If it were for un-shadowbanning, the username would be asked for rather than the IP address. Having said that, I forgot about that unban link -- thanks!
- tjoff 13y agoJust to confirm, you are spot on - the link has nothing to do with hellbanning. But I guess the most common cause is if you restore a browser session with lots of HN pages.
- kintamanimatt 13y agoAnd I suppose a busy shared connection with lots of people reading HN all at once!
- phillijw 13y agoI once emailed PG and asked if I could be unbanned. HIs response: > You're not banned in sense of having been banned by a mod or a spam filter. Your karma just got too low.
- sgustard 13y agoIf the government said "comply with this order or go to prison" and he said "I'll shut down instead", doesn't that still count as failure to comply? Is that like me burning down my house in response to a search warrant?
- kintamanimatt 13y agoMy bet is the government told him to modify his codebase to capture passwords at the point where they're in cleartext and gave him x days to do it. He didn't refuse to do it, but closed up shop instead so he didn't have to. I doubt the government can compel him to continue running a business he wants to close down. It'd be like having a broken taillight and being given 15 days to fix it. If the person took the car off the road, they'd not be compelled to make the repair. Perhaps they can demand he continue to do business (although it seems like a pretty tenuous request), or perhaps they can blackmail him with threats of criminal prosecution lest he keep his show on the road. Who knows?
- cdjk 13y agoHe could shut down external access, deploy changes to capture plain text passwords, then turn everything off. Technically he's complied...
- tootie 13y agoIf they asked him to produce customer data and he deletes instead, then he is in violation. If they asked him to install some middleware for all his traffic, he can just say "Sure, but I don't have any traffic anymore".
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- beedogs 13y agoFYI someone sorted this out (not sure who, but thanks!) Thanks for the heads-up!