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Audacity fork creator steps down. Claims his life is in danger

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Re: Audacity fork creator steps down. Claims his life is in danger

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any anonymous website, including 4chan, is extremely easy to "game" in the way you describe, but "the site is full of propaganda from government and entities with enough capital to pay astroturfers" and saying it's safe to assume a government, bank, or large company is secretly weaponizing 4chan to raid this repository owner sounds very similar to one of the standard paranoid conspiracy theories that circulate on the…

Sorry, I am not defending 4chan posters at all. I am just saying that “anon” isn’t just some random 4chan posters all the time anymore. Looking further into the sequence of events, it might as well have been just 4chan being 4chan, but like someone else said, it seems that they played themselves here. There are posters on /g/ who legitimate wanted this tool to remain usable without tracking analytics.

>There are posters on /g/ who legitimate wanted this tool to remain usable without tracking analytics.

Indeed. It's perplexing why they targeted this person for doing a public service. (Not that they should harass the original project or anything, of course. But it especially makes no sense that they don't like the person who's actually on their side in the matter.)

Re: Audacity fork creator steps down. Claims his life is in danger

#72
post #57

Am I the only one who would just … walk outside and talk to the 4channers who showed up? Probably offer them a cig and a meme. I’ve been thinking of tweeting my home address, so this is a relevant concern. What do you even do when someone comes to your house, other than listen to them? It could also be true that they did something a lot less friendly, like “bang on the windows and run away laughing.” That would be un…

> I’ve been thinking of tweeting my home address, so this is a relevant concern. Giving out their home address didn't work out well for Tony Stark in "Iron Man 3" or for this guy in New Jersey [1], but they both had done things to get some people really annoyed with them. So at the very least make sure that you don't have anyone out there who is really annoyed with you and has only been prevented from forcefully expr…

The news article makes me wonder if you could do the same thing except give someone else's address. Mob justice isn't known for calm and logical analysis.

Re: Audacity fork creator steps down. Claims his life is in danger

#73

OK, so who knows of any completely anonymous alternatives to Github? Something blockchain based perhaps?

what? Just use a different username and change the email you use in the commits to the github email (@users.noreply.github.com)... (should be "git config --global user.email 12345+foobar@users.noreply.github.com")

Re: Audacity fork creator steps down. Claims his life is in danger

#74
post #7

Does anyone have a tl;dr as to wtf is going on? How does something like this escalate to this level?

Name for a fork of audacity was polled, 4chan trolls/raiders voted for sneedacity[0][1] won, maintainer chose to use a different name instead, 4chan trolls were unhappy and escalated their efforts. [0] https://github.com/tenacityteam/tenacity/issues/33 (now deleted) [1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sneeds-feed-and-seed

now this makes sense. (I'm not saying it's good or right, just that it 's now understandable how this bizarre situation happened)

4Chan is the devil you think you know but don't really.

Re: Audacity fork creator steps down. Claims his life is in danger

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or more they may send pizza deliveries and subscribe you too every mailing list known to man. Don’t post your address. Use a PO BOX if you must.

Yeah, that's a good point. But I mean, on the other hand, free pizza. Actually, this is a good example. There have been ~two high profile swatting incidents resulting in death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting#Injuries_or_deaths_du... Dying in a car crash is a lot higher probability for most of us, but the question is whether publishing one's address would raise the probability significantly. I'm not sure it wo…

The wikipedia article you linked to only has one death, and it was an uninvolved person. In the 2015 Oklahoma swatting incident, the swatting victim shot the police chief, then surrendered. The cop survived and the swatting victim was not charged.[1] My guess is that the police really screwed up and didn't announce themselves before busting down his door.

1. https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/no-charges-man-who-shot-police-c...

Re: Audacity fork creator steps down. Claims his life is in danger

#76
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4chan is still a bit of a black box to me. I mean, I guess that's the point? I am pretty curious who these people are, mostly how old they are. I occasionally go rummage through it to see if it's still 4chan, and it always is. 4chan is one of the few places/things on the internet that makes me genuinely uncomfortable.

4chan mostly is an interesting place because of how extremely toxic everyone is to each other but how little their insults mean to you because everyone is anon. The problem is when they start targeting real individuals and posting their personal info. It goes from jokes to real harm very quickly. But I'm not sure its really any worse than mainstream social media. Witch hunts start on all of the large platforms. Whats…

That's a good perspective, and a light I hadn't considered it in. The discomfort I have with 4chan is pretty similar to my discomfort with twitter, facebook, et autres. I guess with 4chan there is perceivably less accountability in the event of the harmful situations similar to your description, but I have zero real basis for that belief.

Re: Audacity fork creator steps down. Claims his life is in danger

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right. I wish we did though. IVF is so expensive in America that it's cheaper to fly to South Korea and get the procedure done there, by $10's of thousands. Even still, would 4chan really dare mess with someone's kid? Generally they try to avoid going to prison, or vigilante retribution. I guess you're right though. Thanks for pointing that out. I can think of a few ways 4chan could troll someone's child witho…

Here in Germany there is a YouTuber (only 100k subs) who gets daily visits from many trolls. Police already locked up his very small town for outsiders but his young visitors don't seem to care and regularly get fined. It all started when he posted his address online.

Thank you for this datapoint. I didn't realize that.

I live in a small town myself, relatively speaking (St. Louis isn't exactly a tech hub), so I was thinking that might guard me somewhat. But, my follower count keeps growing for some reason, and stuff like this has been more and more on my mind.

I appreciate it. If you have any links to further info, I'd be curious to read. Otherwise, no worries.

Re: Audacity fork creator steps down. Claims his life is in danger

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're telling me that a bank is going on 4chan to start raids? Please, no CEO knows what a 4chan is.

What I am saying is that I have seen a lot of evidence for organized/professional sentiment manipulation in 4chan, and there are tons of collected threads that describe how the organizations that are paid to post in 4chan work. I assume it is a professional service being sold. For example, every time I tried to make threads around this YouTube video exposing the lobbying practices of Exxon Mobile against climate chan…

Trust me, nobody needs to pay people to deny climate change and make racist shitposts on 4chan.

Re: Audacity fork creator steps down. Claims his life is in danger

#79

The absurdity is that these trolls clearly found Audacity useful. But because of them not knowing when to stop, they're going to end up with a much shittier product, possibly having just killed the future of Audacity, without the support of real devs like this one. After all, what serious developer would continue working on this knowing this project is going to endanger their life? "Congratulations, you played yourse…

I'm pretty sure most of them pirate Ableton Live.

Re: Audacity fork creator steps down. Claims his life is in danger

#80

Not posting this under my main account for reasons, but 4chan harassed me for developing software too. They're a bunch of anonymous assholes that have nothing better to do. Their commentary was degrading and demoralizing. They thankfully didn't find me in real life, but I pulled down all social media to avoid them. Edit: I want to say one more thing. Sometimes people defend 4chan and say stuff like "that's just how t…

Is there the wall of shame/hall of fame pages for 4chan-related doxxing incidents? Are those greentexts the only content they share?

In 2000s there used to be external wikis for ops done in a local BBS in my country, and those used to summarize timelines and key informations that led to development. They were probably doing for their own fun but were also useful for defending side.

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