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The Internet, Trolling, and Cyber Security
Posts
What was wrong with the chain you described earlier? user->ip->identity etc.?
Also: what if there is no evidence to connect the person who physically posted the fliers to what happened online?
Seriously, there is zero knowledge involved, assuming there is no conscious effort made by the party to hide their online activity, it's trivial, if there is such an effort, it would require more time and it is possible it gets complicated to a point where it's one can't assert the identity of the user, but the number of people who actually chain proxies & VPN's across borders is probably even less than the number of Tor users.
I really wasn't talking about criminal activity done IRL here. The guy that posted "Here is the info of that dumb chick....go do that!" can be named in a suit and he's the one that I'm arguing the police have all that's necessary to find.
I'll ask it again, is there an actual suggestion as to how to make police work easier with regard of such "anonymous" internet crimes?
edit:
If the problem is manpower, I'd rather have specific task force created & police officers getting educated on technical aspects than have a whole organization.
Edit2: Azio, I'm in agreement with that, but "not posting incriminating photos of yourself online" is not paranoid. It's about as close to common sense as it gets. Did anybody catch the story about that guy with the DUI kill that was caught partying after being found guilty and before the sentence was pronounced and got hammered by the judge for not showing remorse? Yeah, he was caught because of a facebook photo.
Linky link:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080718/ap_on_hi_te/facebook_evidence
I'll see if I can find the screencap of the guy who said he committed a rape/homicide, then gave the longitude/latitude of the missing person, when I get home. It was spot on target, and he gave the info a couple hours before the police found the body.
Other than stuff like that though, the vast majority of 4chan is just harmless fun.
Edit: Seriously, I was just using that an example. I didn't know someone posted something along those lines. Christ.
The chance that someone's going to hack your photobucket to look at your private photos is vanishingly small. This guy just happened to attract the attention of a bunch of technically skilled bad people, which he really had no way of anticipating.
I mean, they do 'good' things too like exposing pedos and animal molesters and giving Hal Turner a hard time.
I saw that picture, and holy shit that was fucking creepy. However, I'm not 100% convinced that it wasn't, as they say over there, "shooped".
Anyway, basically what we have here is a practical demonstration of the extreme end of John Gabriel's famous theory, really. There's not a whole lot to do about it aside from taking some basic precautions.
Do you disagree with my assessment of the likelihood of anything happening?
This. There's a lot of fucked up shit that comes out of that group, beyond a doubt, but it's not an organization of people by any means.
The picture in question. Unfortunately the picture is like a meg large, and any resizing makes the text virtually unreadable. It brings up a few questions though.
The rape/murder was the terrible thing that happened. Why is it any worse if somebody posts about it online? It isn't like it's any less bad to murder somebody as long as you don't tell people about it. So, why blame 4chan for what one sociopath did?
Personally, I believe that it happened. But how on earth are the police supposed to check up on anything like this though? The only thing linking to the murder is a picture that by it's very nature HAD to be edited in the first place to get everything on there. There is no way to know if it is real or false, and the only people who you can ask about it were the people in 4chan when the original thread went down. And they're just as likely to lie to you as they aren't about even seeing the original thread, let alone anything that went down in it.
Honestly, any sort of "fix" to this problem would end up even worse. If there are crimes committed and posted on the internet, then fight the crime, not the internet.
My apartment is in a neighborhood where it's not too likely to get robbed. Nonetheless, I lock the door when I leave.
Although it isn't likely that your photobucket album will get hacked or you will be a target when a myspace exploit gets widely circulated, the "don't be a dumbass" rule still applies. If there are pictures you'd never want anyone to see, don't put them online.
So don't worry too much, but leave the camera at home next time you go a-murdering.
If you ever need to talk to someone, feel free to message me. Yes, that includes you.
I hear that photobucket has passwords for the accounts.
Well, if we'd like to get into increasingly tenuous analogies, I don't leave naked pictures of my girlfriend in other peoples' places of business, even if they promise me they totally won't look at them or show them to anyone or keep them in the store window visible to anyone or anything like that.
Well, my actual point was that you apparently think that locking your door secures your apartment from break-ins. I'm sure many of the people who put things on photobucket feel the same way about the password on their photobucket account. (This is, of course, ignoring any pertinent laws)
I was simply making the point that taking a few really basic precautions is not the same thing as paranoia. I think you're reading too far into my analogy.
If you set up an account on a website, even if the account is free, I think the use of a password implies a reasonable expectation of privacy and control. There is plenty of content on hosted services that I don't think I would want distributed to everybody I know. I wouldn't want my hosted e-mail account hacked and my emails sent to my mom, for instance. Your argument only works because we think of photobucket as a "public" service used for picture sharing with the whole wide world, and uploading nude pictures of your girlfriend is an unusual activity. It's applicable only because of the connotations of the act, not because of any material property of it.
If we made the example slightly less extreme - say, the naked pictures were taken by his girlfriend while she was on vacation and e-mailed to his gmail account, and the pranksters hacked his gmail account and got access to them that way, would you still be saying, "Well, it was dumb to put them online?"
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
There's also a breakdown in paradigms or concepts or something here as well. A whole lot of younger people don't think about security when they use the internet. They think "how can I share X with someone?" And then maybe they think about a password or some other security.
If you're wondering if the naked pictures were just saved in the main Photobucket account and the "attackers" just guessed the correct URL for them from a non-incriminating picture from the same user, I was wondering the same thing.
Place of business that promises to keep my objects safe and private? Hm... sounds a lot like a bank's security boxes. And frankly, if that bank were to get robbed, it wouldn't matter what the hell I had in my box, no one would be saying "aw well that's what you get for thinking a bank is safe..."
Please tell me I misread that and you're not in fact comparing a bank security box to a free online hosting service.
If you trust fucking Photobucket to the same extent you trust a bank, man, I don't even have any words.
Of course, if you start viewing it as a community of chaos worshippers instead of a fast moving image repository, you've basically said that all 4chan is /b/ - /b/ is the problem, not 4chan itself.
Wanna know how I got these scars?
Honestly, 4chan isn't just /b/. Some areas are far more moderated and in control. It'd be like describing all of the PA forums as SE++.
That's like saying just because one guy on a baseball team is an asshole that everyone in that team are assholes.
Mostly because 4chan isn't a company with hiring practices...you just sign up and post.
That's not a very good analogy either though, because moot accommodates those people to be assholes, gives them their own little area to be assholes as much as they want, and even goes so far as to cover for their antics as was seen in the "dirty bomb threats against super bowl" episode.
I do agree that it's really unfair to judge all of 4chan by /b/'s actions though, since a lot of the boards are really civil and on topic such as the animals and nature board or the cooking board. People should be focusing their dissent on the shitty people in /b/ and some of the administrators actions.
Steam: Drokmir
Well there have been cullings before.
But it's like trying to keep ants off the pile of sugar you like putting on the ground, they just keep coming back.