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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

#61

All I'll say is that Cookie also provoked the trolls by changing his Github bio to some of their comments [0]. There's no right side here, but if you're ever put in a position where the majority of your users disagree with the way you're handling a project, it's probably best to step down rather than confronting them. That kind of democracy is what keeps open source development viable. [0] https://archive.is/ZqK2T

What makes you think they would have stopped the ongoing harassment if the maintainer just hadn't quoted them?

Yielding to 4chan trolls could be prudent. It isn't democracy.

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

#62

There need to be harsh, harsh penalties for showing up uninvited to someone's house based on something that's happened or been said on the Internet. This is little kid shit and they either need to learn or have their toys taken away so they can't keep doing it.

>There need to be harsh, harsh penalties for showing up uninvited to someone's house based on something that's happened or been said on the Internet. This is little kid shit and they either need to learn or have their toys taken away so they can't keep doing it.

Interestingly, this happened on a much larger scale yesterday too,

https://twitter.com/DannyEFreeman/status/1412193024734601216

Same rules? Lock them up?

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

#63

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…

I have to say I usually find the /g/ antics to be funny but they certainly cross the line from jokes to genuinely harassing someone to what the OP post is describing which is horrific.

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

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could very likely not be 4channers who show up at your house, but a SWAT team looking to take you out for holding someone hostage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Wichita_swatting

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.

History trivia: you might think that sending a bunch of deliveries is a modern thing, made possible by the telephone. But no, if you were sufficiently dedicated you could do it back when you had to send letters to order stuff.

In 1809 this [1] happened in London:

> On 27 November, at five o'clock in the morning, a sweep arrived to sweep the chimneys of Mrs Tottenham's house. The maid who answered the door informed him that no sweep had been requested, and that his services were not required. A few moments later another sweep presented himself, then another, and another; twelve in all. After the last of the sweeps had been sent away, a fleet of carts carrying large deliveries of coal began to arrive, followed by a series of cakemakers delivering large wedding cakes, then doctors, lawyers, vicars and priests summoned to minister to someone in the house they had been told was dying. Fishmongers, shoemakers and over a dozen pianos were among the next to appear, along with "six stout men bearing an organ". Dignitaries, including the Governor of the Bank of England, the Duke of York, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Mayor of London, also arrived. The narrow streets soon became severely congested with tradesmen and onlookers. Deliveries and visits continued until the early evening, bringing a large part of London to a standstill.

The person behind that wrote thousands of letters to set that up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berners_Street_hoax

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

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing you don't have kids

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.

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

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Step 1 is catching them, and it's the nature of this sort of attack that doing so is deceptively hard. This kind of harassment is basically a flash-mob.

Pretty easy if they’re dumb enough to bring their phone with them.

I don't believe that phone based tracking is nearly as easy as people make it out to be. Just because the data exists, doesn't mean it is easy to process. Someone would have to spend tens of hours at least digging through data and unless its a serious crime, its just not worth it.

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

#67
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that they don’t trust the maintainer. However 4chan raids like this are often run by third parties that can benefit from attributing this type of behavior to “anonymous” individuals. I wouldn’t be surprised if the people who bullied this individual had the goal of getting the original independent fork abandoned while also getting the new fork cancelled on the grounds of hate speech all along. I visit 4chan an…

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.

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

#69
post #39
post #15

The kind of people who hang around 4chan is fucked up; I've always said that.

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. WhatsApp and Facebook are responsible for countless literal witch hunts where the accused were killed or brutally beaten. 4chan seems tame in comparison.

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

#70

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

You can use github anon. Like everything, its a pain in the ass and you have to carefully analyze everything you do online to avoid linking personalities.
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