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4Chan launches embarrassing attack on devout Christians on Facebook
- spooneybarger 17y agothis is simultaneously awful and hilarious.
- jrockway 17y agoBut mostly hilarious.
- unalone 17y agoMy biggest problem with 4chan is that despite knowing they're doing awful things and inflicting pain on people who don't deserve it, they still manage to be really funny and so I lose the will to strongly condemn them.
- noodle 17y agoevery once in a while they do get someone in their crosshairs that does deserve it, though.
- emilis_info 17y agoAnd the christians deserve it because...?
- noodle 17y agonever said they did, and didn't mean to imply it if i did. just saying, they do target some people that deserve it, sometimes.
- angstrom 17y agoThey're like a real world parody of South Park with fewer taboos.
- astine 17y agoI don't know, South Park doesn't annoy me the way this shit does.
- jacoblyles 17y agoI don't understand how it is hilarious, though I've been told my sense of humor is a bit odd. Inflicting pain and embarrassment on complete strangers by stealing their log in information and violating their privacy - is that your idea of a good time? Empathy pro-tip: ignore who the target was, and pretend the attack happened to someone close to you. How does that make you feel?
- jrockway 17y agoHow does that make you feel? If my friend had a fake message posted under his or her account, I would probably not feel all that bad. The issue of password reuse aside, it is really not a big deal. "Haha, my account got hacked, I didn't actually have sex with him!" and that's the end of it. Some people try to add wayyy too much meaning to their lives...
- thenextweb 17y agoWell, imagine going to your fathers profile page and seeing a photo of him with shit on his dick. After YOU persuaded him that being on Facebook would be fun. Maybe not so funny after all...
- encoderer 17y agoBut it's also not some tragedy, either. It's a practical joke. A prank. That is all.
- thenextweb 17y agoHey, that might be clear to you but for 99% of the people checking out those profiles it might take a while for that to sink in.
- jacoblyles 17y agoYeah, I doubt it would cause too much trouble in my peer group either. But I know people outside my peer group, my friends' parents for example, who don't take everything as lightly as our nihilistic generation.
- dlytle 17y agoInitially I got a laugh of out of some of the edits, because they were so ridiculous they almost couldn't be believed. It stopped being funny once I saw the faked suicide note in one of the posted screenshots. Not like I'm surprised by anonymous internet pranksters crossing the line, of course.
- eli 17y agoMostly awful, though. Nobody deserves that, even if you don't like them or don't agree with what they believe.
- mrcharles 17y agoAnother solid reason why you should never use the same password for multiple sites. To do so, you are effectively trusting every single site in the chain. I read enough HN and Codinghorror to know that many sites have no clue how to handle passwords in a secure fashion.
- nailer 17y agoI stupidly got caught out a few years ago when Reddit left all their passwords in plain text, and then got hacked. I was dumb enough to have been using the same password on Paypal at the time, not quite understanding how Paypal was linked to my bank account.
- TheElder 17y agoYes, that's the lesson everyone should take from these kinds of incidents. We all know not to do it, yet it's so easy to use the same password on multiple sites. Use this as a lesson to learn from.
- nimaj 17y agoThis is why I like SuperGenPass (http://supergenpass.com/ http://supergenpass.com/).
- tvon 17y ago4Chan, you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. (to borrow from Obi-Wan)
- scythe 17y ago12chan?
- barrkel 17y agoAs far as I am aware, 12chan just trades dodgy photos. 4chan seems more "hands-on".
- ltbarcly3 17y agoYes, mocking people on the internet and making dirty jokes is certainly the pinnacle of human depravity. The KKK? Neo Nazi's? No, the most wretched people are giggling undergrads, sitting in dorms, trying to gross each other out. And quoting Star Wars? - Go outside. - Walk to the library. - Read a book. Repeat until you stop day dreaming about owning a light saber or riding shotgun with Han Solo.
- gloob 17y agoI might be off base here, but I suspect the poster you replied to was attempting to be humorous, rather than expressing a philosophical truth about how 4chan users are actually the most evil thing in human history. Provided I'm correct, your response strikes me as a little like walking up to a six year old playing with a Rubik's cube and telling him how it was produced by slave labour in China. You might well be correct, but the context switch is rather jarring. (edit: typo)
- tvon 17y agoAs gloob figured out, it was primarily a joke, though I find your vehement disgust with my use of a Star Wars quote to be a bit disturbing. Besides, sci-fi nerds generally read a lot so the library bit doesn't even make sense... and who wouldn't want to own a light saber (though I can't say it's something I actively daydream about)? However, in defense of my statement, 4chan is the only place I've ever seen photos of a nude, decapitated woman posed in sexually suggestive positions, and it would probably take you 5 minutes of browsing /b/ to find drawings of girls under the age of 10 having sex. (edit: typo)
- benreesman 17y agoGod bless those little /b/tards.
- DanielBMarkham 17y agoOne of those jokes that's really funny -- as long as you're not the one getting trashed in public.
- billswift 17y agoIf you wouldn't laugh at getting hacked like this yourself, then you really need to get a life.
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- ctbarna 17y agoThe evidence of 4chan's involvement here is kind of shaky.
- DanHulton 17y agoChrist NO, are you kidding? I was browsing 4chan when threads about this shit started going up. They are pretty clearly behind it. I was just wondering when it would hit the MSM and then HN. Not very long, it turns out.
- pyre 17y ago4chan is just a message board. A forum if you will. Unless you're saying that the administrators had a hand in this, then '4chan' isn't behind it. That's like saying that 'Hacker News' is behind something just because a bunch of Hacker News users used a thread to coordinate some sort of attack. 'Hacker News' isn't behind anything unless pg/ycombinator/etc somehow had a hand in it. 4chan is nothing but a medium for information shared between people. And to try and group the entire 4chan userbase under the term '4chan' is an effort in futility. There is a very wide and varied group of people that frequent 4chan. Keep in mind that many people visit 4chan without ever visiting /b/ or /r9k/.
- DanHulton 17y agoA good point, and I can't understand why you're being modded down for it. But that said, it's generally understood when someone says "4chan did it", it's shorthand for "dickhead Anons on 4chan's /b/ did it."
- pyre 17y agoThe problem is that when these stories reach the mainstream media, '4chan did it' leads to the assumption that everyone associated with 4chan had some hand in this attack. If these things reach the mainstream media enough, then it will just be a rally cry to 'take down 4chan' without anyone putting much actual thought behind it (much like the people whose only argument against government healthcare is "but it's socialism... I don't want no socialism in my guberment" while those same people will violently oppose getting rid of welfare payments/social security/medicare -- which are all 'socialist' programs). Not trying to be some sort of grammar nazi or something about this, but I don't want stories like this getting to the mainstream media just to turn people against places like 4chan based on reporting that is lacking in the specificity to tell people that only part of the 4chan userbase is responsible for these attacks.
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- gojomo 17y agoWill 4Chan someday evolve into Vinge's 'Friends of Privacy', filling the net with lies to create doubt about all the revelations available online? (Personal info chaff, of a sort.) ('Friends of Privacy' is a anonymous mass group in Vinge's Rainbow's End.)
- jff 17y agoNo, if anything they'd become the opposite of the 'Friends of Privacy'. I've browsed /b/ a bit; they like few things better than exposing the personal information on some personal vendetta or merely 'for the lulz'. I like lulz as much as the next guy, but phone harassment and impersonation are not so much lulz as simply criminal.
- rossriley 17y agoFor those who haven't heard the story the details were pulled from a Christian dating site db.singles.org which had a query parameter injection vulnerability. The vulnerability allowed you to navigate to a person's profile by entering the user id and skipping authentication. Once you got there the change password form had the passwords in plain text. Someone wrote a scraper and now the entire database is on Mediafire and contains thousands of email/password combinations.
- pbhj 17y agoNow we find out that HN is really full of the immature that think it's hilarious to break into peoples stuff and vandalise it, just to see if you can make them cry. I genuinely thought people here would have more compassion and sense of decency than 4chan.
- ekiru 17y agoWhile I think that breaking into people's stuff and vandalizing it is horrible, in the specific cases I've seen(such as the one in the article), no actual harm is done. All the victim has to do is change their password and inform people that someone else obtained their password and that they were not the ones who posted the untoward messages and photos. If the attackers have permanently taken the account by changing the password and email address, that solution is not possible, but then it's not really the scandalous posts that are the issue, is it?
- profgubler 17y agoExcept you don't actually know that no harm was done. What if this person that this happened to was married (that is not a fun conversation to have even if it didn't happen), or because of what was posted they lost their job. You have no idea. I am sorry this isn't a joke it is vandalism.
- ekiru 17y agoI never said that this was a joke, funny, not vandalism, or even not a horrible thing to do. Your example of a person losing their job over this is a good argument that harm can result from this kind of vandalism. However, I do think there is a distinction between an event causing someone to lose their job and their boss making an incorrect assumption about an event(in this case, that their employee actually posted an untoward message) and firing them. It's still horrible to break into someone's account and cause "them" to say something which will cause them to lose their job, but the vandal is not the only one at fault in that situation. No employer should fire someone for a post on facebook that appears to be written by them without first at least making sure. Realistically, they might. Regarding the case of a married person, if you don't trust your spouse enough to know that they're not having anal sex with some other man, or at least enough to consider that less likely than that their account was compromised, you shouldn't be married to them.
- aw3c2 17y agoAs painful this might be for the victims, I enjoy when online social networks "explode" into people's faces like this.
- jrockway 17y agoThere is another thread in this article asking how I would feel if this happened to a friend. The answer is "I don't care". I thought a bit about how this would make me feel if it happened to me, and the answer is "I don't care, because I don't use Facebook". I then thought about what would upset me, and I realized that I would be upset if someone edited my blog and added random technical inaccuracies. Then I realized that I digitally sign all of my blog posts, so this is mathematically infeasible. (Example post: http://blog.jrock.us/articles/App::Persistent.pod/raw http://blog.jrock.us/articles/App::Persistent.pod/raw)
- noamsml 17y agoUnless you accidentally publish your private key online (longshot, but still).
- sev 17y agoIf you read the replies on the screenshot, you notice the OP's sister posts a message (granted, we don't know if it's for sure the OP's sister, but it is implied). The interesting part is that the last name of the "sister" is not blurred, whereas the OP's is. Maybe she's married and has a different last name though.
- eob 17y agoCome on guys (and girls). 4Chan pranks on HN? Leave it for reddit.
- Steve0 17y agoThis is the typical way to 'use' 4chan. One of the few guys there with a bit of knowledge breaks into something, gets a list and then his job is done. Post the list to 4chan and have that community wreak havok with it. 4Chan is a semi-intelligent botnet.