Lazarus

Miscellaneous => Other => Topic started by: Joanna on February 12, 2023, 02:15:00 am

Title: Informative article I want to share
Post by: Joanna on February 12, 2023, 02:15:00 am
This post is sort of inspired by a recent harassment thread

I came across this article about how online communities are attacked.
The article is not specific for any particular community but it claims that even small communities are not immune from being attacked if there is a potential of them becoming large.
I hope it can provide some useful insights to People who need them.

https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm
Title: Re: Informative article I want to share
Post by: Martin_fr on February 12, 2023, 09:43:21 am
I am really tempted to try some of those methods on this very topic itself. ;) ;)



To be clear: me as a user, not in my function as admin/mod.
Title: Re: Informative article I want to share
Post by: AlexTP on February 12, 2023, 10:01:49 am
Joanna, keep the good work going, please. Trolls are corporate-sponsored fools, ban them all.
Title: Re: Informative article I want to share
Post by: Joanna on February 12, 2023, 02:51:54 pm
Joanna, keep the good work going, please. Trolls are corporate-sponsored fools, ban them all.

To be honest I’m really tired of them. I was thinking recently about how much of my life has been squandered dealing with the wrong people I would much rather have good chats about pascal and other interesting topics.
Title: Re: Informative article I want to share
Post by: AlexTP on February 12, 2023, 02:54:10 pm
You can make moderation in the chat more cruel, don't you?
Title: Re: Informative article I want to share
Post by: Joanna on February 12, 2023, 03:10:14 pm
You can make moderation in the chat more cruel, don't you?

These people seem to have a never ending supply of accounts and IP addresses. But even so, I want to emphasize that Moderation is the easy part. Getting good people to come and be active is the hard part. As a rule of thumb people are hard to get and easy to lose especially now that pascal is not as popular as it once was.

I consider an irc channel or forum to be a success when there are enough people to Have good on topic  conversations without any effort on my part.
Title: Re: Informative article I want to share
Post by: 440bx on February 12, 2023, 04:14:27 pm
I am really tempted to try some of those methods on this very topic itself. ;) ;)
That would be a genuinely positive use of a set of actions that are generally negative. 



@Joanna

Fortunately and likely because of the well balanced efforts from the moderators, the problems enumerated in the article you linked to don't apply to this forum.  Because of that, it is a bit peculiar for you to mention it here.  That said, thank you for exposing a long list of problems we _don't_ have. 

Also, as the moderator of that channel it is incumbent upon you to solve whatever problems exist there.  There is no reason to "export" the problems that channel may or may not have to this forum.

Title: Re: Informative article I want to share
Post by: Joanna on February 12, 2023, 04:36:24 pm
Quote
Fortunately and likely because of the well balanced efforts from the moderators, the problems enumerated in the article you linked to don't apply to this forum.  Because of that, it is a bit peculiar for you to mention it here.  That said, thank you for exposing a long list of problems we _don't_ have. 
I think you have misunderstood my intentions. I was by no means criticizing how this forum is managed. My objective is to educate people about techniques That have been successfully used to wreck all sorts of communities. Hopefully people will understand what is happening should they encounter them at some future date anywhere including but not limited to forums.

Title: Re: Informative article I want to share
Post by: Blaazen on February 12, 2023, 05:02:33 pm
Apparently, aside of "The Art of Computer Programming" from D. Knuth must exist "The Art of Computer Trolling" written by unkown hero.
Title: Re: Informative article I want to share
Post by: Martin_fr on February 12, 2023, 05:51:48 pm

EDITED: Changed previous moderation note.

Please stick to the topic of the external article.

Please to not accuse random members of the forum. If you feel something was missed by the moderation team => report it to moderators.

All non compliant posts will be removed.
Title: Re: Informative article I want to share
Post by: Joanna on February 12, 2023, 07:46:02 pm
Apparently, aside of "The Art of Computer Programming" from D. Knuth must exist "The Art of Computer Trolling" written by unkown hero.

A lot of these techniques are present in many forms and are by no means limited to computing. It is a form of psychological warfare really.
Title: Re: Informative article I want to share
Post by: Martin_fr on February 12, 2023, 07:56:09 pm
Locked, as this is simply picking up another locked thread.

Title: Re: Informative article I want to share
Post by: Martin_fr on February 13, 2023, 03:18:26 pm
Cleaned the topic up (Several posts were edited by me). Reopened.

Stick to the before mentioned rules.

Title: Re: Informative article I want to share
Post by: PierceNg on February 13, 2023, 04:16:04 pm
This thread should have the #1 technique - forum sliding - applied to it. Let all the other useful (and even not so useful) posts slide this thread out of view and flush it away.
Title: Re: Informative article I want to share
Post by: Bogen85 on February 13, 2023, 05:46:27 pm
This thread should have the #1 technique - forum sliding - applied to it. Let all the other useful (and even not so useful) posts slide this thread out of view and flush it away.

I guess I'm a bit slow today.
Took me a little bit to figure out what you were getting at.

Good one.  :)
Title: Re: Informative article I want to share
Post by: Joanna on February 13, 2023, 06:01:00 pm
While reading this article it said that some websites such as slash dot will not allow it to be posted at all because because once people are aware of these techniques they are not so effective.
 I hope that there are some friendlier people to participate in this discussion.
Title: Re: Informative article I want to share
Post by: Bogen85 on February 13, 2023, 07:39:10 pm
While reading this article it said that some websites such as slash dot will not allow it to be posted at all because because once people are aware of these techniques they are not so effective.
Slashdot is not a site where people typically go to for technical answers to technical questions. It is typically a news/story/other commentary site.
If one puts incorrect technical information by mistake into a question or answer on a technical subject, it needs to be able to be edited.

As such, sites like Stack Overflow and this Forum allow posts to be edited so that correct technical information is conveyed when searching (either on said site or from an external web search) for technical solutions to problems.
Title: Re: Informative article I want to share
Post by: Joanna on February 14, 2023, 12:15:21 am
I don’t use slasdot but the implication I was trying to get across is that sometimes there are people who want to deliberately keep knowledge from others that could be useful. Yes we are a not too large pascal using community here but that doesn’t make us immune from being at receiving end of these techniques.

What I want to accomplish by sharing this article is for people to be aware that these things happen and be able to Recognize them when they are used against us. Yes they have been used against us before.

Bogen85 I believe when we first met there was someone who was using the techniques mentioned in this article to disrupt all On topic discussions in the irc channel on freenode. Although you got annoyed with the channel  and quickly went somewhere else , I cared enough to come to these forums in search of someone who could help. Fortunately someone who could help was sent to rescue channel and for that I’m grateful.

Even though our community is small I think it’s important for everyone to know how easy it is to get any group of people who would have otherwise been friends to have infighting. People are emotional and emotions are both our strength and weakness. As it says in the article people’s emotions can be used to manipulate them to do things not in their best interest.

Being that fpc is the only programming platform that I use or care about, my concern that the community could be destroyed is a little bit above average. I have nothing to fallback on. I don’t enjoy getting into fights with other pascal programmers over things that have nothing to even do with pascal.

I hope this article will be both interesting and useful to others as it was to me. O:-)
Title: Re: Informative article I want to share
Post by: Handoko on February 14, 2023, 03:08:32 am
What I want to accomplish by sharing this article is for people to be aware that these things happen and be able to Recognize them when they are used against us.

I think differently.

Yes I agree, the attack is real. I have a blog and I build websites. No matter how small a website is, it's visited regularly by hackers, spammers, etc.

But it is not wise to publicize the knowledge how they can or how can we minimize the threat. Because that only will educate them. Now the newbies can level up become more skilled attackers.
Title: Re: Informative article I want to share
Post by: Joanna on February 14, 2023, 07:53:16 am
Quote
Yes I agree, the attack is real. I have a blog and I build websites. No matter how small a website is, it's visited regularly by hackers, spammers, etc.

That is a valid point. I know someone who has a home server that is constantly attacked by bots trying to do a brute force login on his machine.
Although the article posted is somewhat out of date only references humans that are up to no good. Some of the disruptive behavior probably has been outsourced to chat bots that don’t have to be paid. I’ve encountered some chat bots in irc that seemed to scan the words and respond with something related to the conversation. The result was incoherent babbling when I engaged them.

As for all the hacking and spamming and denial of service attacks those are a natural progression of a desire to disrupt things. That delves into the realm of cyber security which is also an interesting topic.
One of objectives of these things attacking your website could very well be a less free locked down internet. {look at all these cyber criminals running amok let’s require facial recognition to access internet!}

I often think about how things could be better designed to stop malicious people on internet. Some people just resort to banning large ranges of ip addresses but there has to be a better solution. The internet of things with all sorts of unsecured devices that shouldn’t have been connected to internet is only making things worse.

Quote
But it is not wise to publicize the knowledge how they can or how can we minimize the threat. Because that only will educate them. Now the newbies can level up become more skilled attackers.

That would be a valid sentiment if we were dealing with bored teenage pranksters. However I believe the people doing this to be paid professionals who have already mastered these techniques and probably more. We are playing catch-up at best. I learned a few things myself from that article.

There is a whole new profession of social influencer on the Internet. They go to every platform they can get to including irc. They use multiple accounts and vpns. Libera is full of all sorts of strange accounts created at server launch which I doubt are people who have anything to do with the opensource community. They try to promote all the latest Offensive strange ideas of politics and reality. I’ll let you fill in the blanks..

As I’ve said before there are powerful interests that want to get people off irc and onto more profitable platforms with ad revenue and surveillance capitalism.

We have to come to terms with the fact that people exist who for whatever reason do not want there to be this open source project and keep trying to be disruptive.
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