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4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak

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Re: 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak

#431

Post by busterarm »

jmyeet wrote: post #147
properpopper wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For users who aren't familiar with 4chan - this post describes only one board - /pol/, where you can find hateful posts about every race and religion. 4chan have 30+ boards in total

This is /pol/ focused, yes, but the other boards aren't separate worlds. It's all part of what many call the "alt-right pipeline" and it's subtle and insidious. For example, many (particularly women) have consumed Candace Owens's content about the Blake Lively / Justin Baldoni saga, just like many followed certain creators with the Amber Heard trial. Both of thse fall squarely on the alt-right pipeline. So you may st…

Sorry, but you don't find any of that shit in /k/ or /m/ or a dozen of the other most popular boards on the site.

You literally are making shit up.

Re: 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak

#432

Post by control_del »

robotnikman wrote: post #397

I did some digging and the hacker posted which exploit he used. Apparently some boards allowed uploading PDF files, but the site never checked if the PDF file was an actual PDF file. Once a PDF file was uploaded it was passed to a version of Ghostscript from 2012 which would generate a thumbnail. So the attacker found an exploit where uploading a PDF with the right PostScript commands could give the attacker shell ac…

[dead]

Re: 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak

#433

Post by foolfoolz »

shipscode wrote: post #126

The take on 4chan on here is super intriguing. I always felt that the current social media/doomscroll/memesharing landscape which has become so common worldwide is indiscernable and in some ways worse than 4chan. It feels like 4chan left it's homepage and went worldwide sometime in the early 2010s when iPhone-style phone use became more commonplace. I remember that 4chan users had more honor than users on the interne…

modern 4chan has a certain authentic charm to it. this is missing from most other places. you have to sift past loads of junk to get it, but you have to do that on any app to get the content you want.

with no names, likes, virality, accounts, etc there’s less focus on writing the basic filler comments. less companies trying to sell me stuff. less focus groups trying to tell me what to think. and with less censorship you end up seeing more creativity

Re: 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak

#434

Post by dmonitor »

geriatric-janny wrote: post #59
delusional wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of official association could one have with 4chan? 4chan was formative for my early connection to the internet, and I'm really curious what the organization behind it looked like. Was it professionally driven, or just some random guy mailing checks? stuff like that.

I lied about my age and was given janitor access in the mid 2000s. There was a special /j/ board to coordinate on, but it broke relatively early, and you mostly had to hang out in the #janiteam channel on Rizon. I think almost everybody else was underage as well. There was a minimal web overlay that let you delete/escalate posts. You couldn't see people's IPs, but you could see how many outstanding ban requests they…

> These numbers helped me deduce that many boards' most infamous personalities were all the same guy.

Simultaneously one of the best and worst parts about the website was how much a single person could create influence. Some guy spamposting "30-year old boomer" memes eventually turned boomer and zoomer into mainstream terminology.

I remember a long time ago, a general that I would frequent attracted the attention of a lunatic who would frequently try to ruin threads by spam posting corrupted unloadable images until the bumpcap was reached. It made a successful thread with no incidents feel like a moment of success.

Re: 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak

#435

Post by h2zizzle »

happytoexplain wrote: post #191
CamelCaseName wrote: post #2

If you lamented the disappearance of the "old internet", well, this was a part of it, and now it may be gone too. The title is also a fair bit understated. They're leaking the moderators home addresses and work contact info (for admins, who are(were?) paid moderators)

Was part of it. As somebody who has been trapped there since 2004, I'd say it evolved into a part of the normal internet between 2010 and 2016 (i.e. it had already fully transformed before Trump's first term), where "normal internet" means being infested with uncle-on-Facebook-tier political posts, "jokes" where the punchline is "I hate my political enemies", etc. Creative irreverence was replaced with regular childi…

Considering that the people posting this "creative irreverence" were the same guys calling you a "stupid f*gg*t n*gger piece of sh*t" on Halo 2/3 and CS when they got noscoped from across the map or whatever, "It's just a joke" has always been somewhat suspect. It would be wrong to say that there was no element of tongue-in-cheek-iness and hyperbole, of course. It just wasn't completely innocent, broadly speaking.

Of course, in a post-Bioshock Infinite world, there's really no excuse for not grokking how time and distance from the origins of a cultural behavior pattern can warp even well-meaning notions that aren't regularly re-examined and tuned to align the intention with the zeitgeist. If the Sarah Silverman-esque posters ever looked up and realized, "Oh, they don't know it's a joke, they're ACTUALLY Nazis," it was too late to shift things back. (Unless you were in a Boondocks thread on /co/, in which case correction was freely forthcoming.)

Probably didn't help that at least one mod wanted 4chan to become more racist, on purpose.

Re: 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak

#436

Post by potato3732842 »

johnnyjeans wrote: post #282
jtvjan wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this might be conspirational thinking, but i don't think it's an accident that the site came out like this. yes, there's moderation, but the moderators are explicitly told to go easy on moderating racism[1]. it feels like once that kind of stuff isn't punished, it starts to snowball a change in the attitudes of the site as a whole. that's not to say stringent moderation doesn't make a site less welcoming, though. it'…

> it feels like once that kind of stuff isn't punished, it starts to snowball a change in the attitudes of the site as a whole. Considering the site has been around for over 20 years and people still call out and flame racism, I think this is an uncharitable and unfounded cynicism. I'm not sure declarative claims of 3rd order effects in a system so chaotic are capable of being accurate.

I think people, whether they know it or not, rightly realize that race is too simplistic of a way to mark people as good/bad or whatever so even in communities that would be fine with racism it's gonna catch a lot of shit for simply not being a good way to accomplish its goal.

Re: 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak

#437

Post by WickyNilliams »

kypro wrote: post #430
codexon wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel too many people conflate /pol/ with the whole website. Because it is the 2nd most active category, and the racist/alt-right beliefs have spread to the other boards because the head admin fires anyone that tries to moderate it. https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-man-who-helped-turn-4cha... On top of that, they actively delete and ban posts that go against alt-right. I discussed it somewhat recently here: htt…

I like /pol/ and although I'm not really interested in defending it (I 100% understand why people don't like it) I will give my opinion of it because I think most people don't get it and take the board wayy too seriously. /pol/ isn't trying to be like the millions of other politic discussion forums online. It's literally intended to be politically outrageous so when people like yourself complain that it's full of out…

The intent of the posters may be ironic subversion. But for those reading? There's no doubt some portion that mistake it for sincerity and are quietly being radicalised by it all. Poe's Law and all that

Re: 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak

#438

Post by codexon »

kypro wrote: post #430
codexon wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel too many people conflate /pol/ with the whole website. Because it is the 2nd most active category, and the racist/alt-right beliefs have spread to the other boards because the head admin fires anyone that tries to moderate it. https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-man-who-helped-turn-4cha... On top of that, they actively delete and ban posts that go against alt-right. I discussed it somewhat recently here: htt…

I like /pol/ and although I'm not really interested in defending it (I 100% understand why people don't like it) I will give my opinion of it because I think most people don't get it and take the board wayy too seriously. /pol/ isn't trying to be like the millions of other politic discussion forums online. It's literally intended to be politically outrageous so when people like yourself complain that it's full of out…

> I will give my opinion of it because I think most people don't get it and take the board wayy too seriously.

I don't take the board seriously.

The posts I made that got deleted for being "off topic" were mocking the alt-right and I just wanted to get a reaction out of people rather than trying to sway anyone. I know I'm not going to convince anyone and I'm not trying to get anyone elected.

So when I see my posts get deleted or I even get banned for being "off topic" while a post on the same topic with an alt-right bent stays up with 300 replies,it's a clear indication that 4chan has a strong political bias and is absolutely not free speech anymore as most people seem to think it is.

Re: 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak

#439

Post by wolrah »

sgarland wrote: post #139
Red_Tarsius wrote: post #88

I feel too many people conflate /pol/ with the whole website. I enjoyed browsing through sfw boards like /tg/ (tabletop media), /ck/ (cooking) and /fit/ (fitness). I had long discussions about the SW sequels on /tv/ back in 2015-19. The readership was surprisingly diverse and the anonymity lead users to provide more focused replies. With bodybuilding.com gone, the blue boards felt like the last bastion of the old int…

> bodybuilding.com Obligatory post about the dumbest argument to ever be had online [0]. It’s so good, the Wikipedia entry [1] has a section devoted to it. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240123134202/https://forum.bod... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodybuilding.com

> Obligatory post about the dumbest argument to ever be had online

Jon Bois did an amazing video about this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eECjjLNAOd4

Re: 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak

#440

Post by bigfatkitten »

loves_mangoes wrote: post #417
robotnikman wrote: post #397

I did some digging and the hacker posted which exploit he used. Apparently some boards allowed uploading PDF files, but the site never checked if the PDF file was an actual PDF file. Once a PDF file was uploaded it was passed to a version of Ghostscript from 2012 which would generate a thumbnail. So the attacker found an exploit where uploading a PDF with the right PostScript commands could give the attacker shell ac…

That checks out. Years ago I noticed a vulnerability through the photography board. You'd upload your pictures, and 4chan would display all the EXIF info next to the post. 4chan's PHP code would offload that task to a well-know, but old and not very actively maintained EXIF library. Of course the thing with EXIF is that each camera vendor has their own proprietary extensions that need to be supported to make users ha…

As far as I can tell, no real maintenance has happened since Poole sold the site a decade ago. Hiroyuki paid for it and then mostly forgot about it.
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