Live data from Hacker News

4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak

knowyourmeme.com

501–510 of 1001 posts

Re: 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak

#501
post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think I'd argue the issue here is a lack of diversity of views because exposure to radical views is the only thing that protects me from them. Although I might not be normal in that regard.

I would accept this is a problem though. I just question whether the solution is censoring views. I guess I'll give an example...

In the UK there's a lot of people questioning why young boys today seem to often hold such radical views about women. Of course, there's the surface level explanation we're given that boys are watching people like Andrew Tate online and are becoming radicalised, but then you have to ask why boys are watching people like Andrew Tate in the first place when they could also be listening to male feminists and have gone in the opposite direction.

It seems to me the most likely explanation for this content selection bias is that boys are told lies about gender from a very early age and then on hearing become easily radicalised partial truths from people like Tate. The uncomfortable reality is that Tate is telling half-truths about the biological differences and that many of these half-truths are just denied outright by others in positions of authority. It's really no wonder they find his content interesting. It's probably the same reason someone like Jordan Peterson seemed to fill a large cultural hole a few years back. Somehow just being positive about the unique contributions and strengths of men was a radical and shocking position that people found interesting.

Re: 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak

#503
post #475

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…

Reminds me of how people were crashing the PSP's XMB with BMP and TIFF files twenty years ago. I was just a kid, and began "pirating" every one of my classmates' consoles (some in exchange for a small amount of money). Good times.

The `Memory Pit` exploit for the Nintendo DSi works in a similar way - it exploits a buffer overflow in the reading of image meta data by the Nintendo DSi Camera application in order to achieve arbitrary code execution.

https://dsibrew.org/wiki/Memory_Pit

Re: 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak

#505

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…

The more popular blue boards were pretty bad too, let's be honest. It wasn't hard at all to find things on those boards that wouldn't be tolerated on any mainstream social media, for good reason.

I'm not looking for corporate sanitized social media site #102032. Imageboards if nothing else allow people to be people and you know what? Sure sometimes people suck, but I don't want some overvalued social media companies in America deciding what I can and can't see.

Sure I've encountered awful people on imageboards, but I've also encountered very nice, helpful people, some of which I've stayed in contact with long term.

Re: 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak

#506

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…

This is an old well known exploit. Don't run versions of ghostscript from 2012?

I would also say don't run ghostscript with the same permissions as the web server, especially not if you can just hand it your PDF through stdin and take a PNG through stdout. Sandbox it as much as possible. PDF is a really complex format which means lots of opportunities for buffer overruns and the like. (Edit: Actually, reading through Arch-TK's post above, it sounds like it was much dummer than something like a buffer overrun.)

Re: 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak

#507
post #430

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…

As confucius famously said, any community that gets its kicks out of pretending to be idiots will soon be filled with real idiots who think they are in good company.

A lot of it is ironic, but a lot less than it used to be.

Re: 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak

#508
post #42

4chan will be studied for years for its role in alt-right radicalization as well as being a baroemeter for young male discontent. For example, QAnon started on 4chan (I believe as a joke?) [1]. Nowadays a lot of 4chan users and traffic have since migrated to Twitter for pretty obvious reasons. Pseudo-intellectual racism has a lot of roots in 4chan (eg the popularity of Julius Evola [2]) that's deeply tied to "trad" c…

Many people will downplay this, saying that the alt-righters on 4chan were only trolls, or were only a few people sockpuppeting to make it look like there were many, or that these people were already alt-right and that 4chan didn't actually influence anyone into it (and that 4chan's userbase merely cycled out to a set of new alt-right users), but I have to say that's all wrong. I was in several different online communities 2010-2018 of people who met through 4chan, and a startling number of people did actually adopt alt-right politics over this timeframe after I had first met them. I think people who downplay how common radicalization on 4chan was didn't have as clear of a picture as this experience gave me.

Re: 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak

#509

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…

> 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…

All of this sentiment is many years out of date. "Alt-right" hasn't been a term of self-identification for almost a decade, and hasn't been used as an identifier by pretty much anyone for at least half of that. /pol/ is not the epicentre of the radical online right and has not been for years - it's a backwater in that regard now.

The most notable radicalisation happening on /pol/ nowadays, in my opinion, is a kind of hyper-masculine third-worldist ideology that is anti-semitic in its foundation and deeply misogynistic. While those two traits might sound superficially similar to the 2015 "Alt right", this new ideology has a significant pro-Islamist tendency, and has an almost comprehensive disdain for the west and its ways of life, in favour of authoritarian regimes like like Russia, Iran, and China. Also, as is being corroborated by other online circles like the Nick Fuentes "Groyper" movement, this faction of the online far-right is an increasingly post-racial one, with more traditionally white supremacist views disappearing, to be filled in by antisemitism.

Personally, I think this cultural political shift in the imageboard represents the increased representation of developing countries online, and is an important case study in how quickly cultural foundations can shift inside the borderless land of the internet.

Re: 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak

#510
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s true. The captcha is impossible without the 4chan pass. soj.ooO [1] which is similar on the other hand doesn’t have the captcha. [1] https://soj.ooO

Not sure what this random unknown website has to do with 4chan. It's similar only insofar as both things let you post. Soj requires a sign-up so no anon posting at all, and the community structure is a pretty clear rip-off of Reddit with /p/[sub] instead of /r/[sub] What is your affiliation with it?

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=rasengan shows some previous shilling, FWIW.
Post reply on HN