I am back.

submitted by magnora7[A] from self.SaidIt

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[–]Zapped 7 insightful - 3 fun7 insightful - 2 fun8 insightful - 3 fun -  (42 children)

Good to see you back and active.

Do you have the time to look at the timing of the attacks, like every 3 months or after a newsworthy event? Have you tried to put together a pattern of when the posts or comments are made, like between the hours of 10am and 2am EST? Do the same accounts interact with each other in the comment sections more often than other accounts? Do some of the accounts that interact but have different "personalities" use the similar language or phrases?

I'm sure you're way ahead of this, but I'm curious to what you find out, when and if you feel its ok to disclose what you find. I would like to reaffirm what you said about not interacting with those accounts. It only feeds them what they are hungry for.

[–]magnora7[S] 18 insightful - 6 fun18 insightful - 5 fun19 insightful - 6 fun -  (41 children)

Glad to see you too. The pattern of when they are around seems to be pretty random. I do notice they spend about a few hours on saidit, and then will go away for that day and come back the next day at some random time. I see this over and over, for literally 20-30 days in a row, each day burning through about 5-20 accounts, some months old, depending on how much traction they got that day. There will be a few months of this, then a month or two off. Then back on again. For 3 years now.

I have lots of various patterns to recognize them by, but I don't want to say too much about that or else they'll hide those patterns and then my job will become even more difficult. But I will say they also post garbage spam from many accounts like "Samsung router drivers" links while they do these cultural attacks. And the "Americans" comment bot will suddenly spring to life at the same time as well, sometimes itself making 3 accounts a day, like today. So it's a multi-faceted approach, using many accounts, diluting the quality in many ways simultaneously. I used to think it was just ad bots (which it is sometimes) but I've noticed lately that the volume of ad posts flares up dramatically always at the exact same days as we get cultural attacks too, so I've begun to realize they're related. Someone just wants to turn this site to a trash heap by filling it with various types of garbage and seems to be being paid to do it given their tenacity. And that troll farm probably has a list of 10-20 forums they hit and cycle through, which is why they'll hit this one heavy for a few hours, go away to another site, and then come back the next day.

I mean if you think about it, if reddit can destroy all its competition by paying a couple people $12/hr, why wouldn't they? Or if China can destroy places of free discussion by paying some random college students to poison the well of discussion and never get caught, why wouldn't they? There's lots of groups out there who could be doing this, but whoever it is, it's become pretty clear it's a very purposeful campaign. One with focus, tenacity over literally years, and a lot of developed complex strategies they cycle through like a playbook. This also implies money is involved to me.

As much as I hate it, it seems to be the most reasonable explanation given what I've seen across the last 3 years. And this exact thing is affecting a lot of forums. It's destroying and souring the culture of the internet and everyone can see it, which has non-internet cultural repercussions too. I hope those people feel ashamed about what they're doing, but I'm not sure they're capable of shame. Which is why they're such a great fit for the job of destroying human culture. If he were alive, I wonder what Aaron Swartz would say about this type of cultural attack, because it certainly is the attack style of the new decade.

Basically it seems DDOS attacks to take down websites are old hat, cultural attacks are the new way. If the culture is destroyed, and no one will go there because it's so hostile and alienating, then what use is the forum? This is so much harder to defend against than a DDOS attack. In fact I would say weakness to this style of attack may be the main reason why so many reddit alternatives have failed.

Anyway, it's true that the best strategy is still not to feed the trolls. Just report the comment or post, and PM me if you think you've spotted one. Thanks!

[–]deleted 6 insightful - 3 fun6 insightful - 2 fun7 insightful - 3 fun -  (4 children)

Aaron

Yes! I'm sure many of us would! Do you think that spreading copyrighted media and growing piracy is part of their plan as well? You mentioned it as a poison and I could definitely see it as such a tool.

[–]JasonCarswell 7 insightful - 3 fun7 insightful - 2 fun8 insightful - 3 fun -  (0 children)

First you need to consider what "copyright" and "piracy" really mean within their full spectrum dominance. NO ONE ever gets on to MSM without being "acceptable" and conformist. No matter how talented you are you'll never be a star without close Jewish, military, or intelligence connections, usually family. They only promote themselves and their manufactured consumer and authoritarian propaganda content. We are forced to consume their culture yet not allowed to embrace it as our own, nor to make our own independent culture without it being stomped on.

[–][deleted] 4 insightful - 2 fun4 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 2 fun -  (2 children)

DMCA is a huge attack vector. Also, freer sites attract "illegal" steaming providers/links, for like sports events, which seems to be a hugely contentious issue.

[–]deleted 4 insightful - 2 fun4 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

hugely contentious issue

This right here. It is kinda crazy how these services can continue to exist. Do you think that laws need to be rewritten or that the public is in the wrong and should change? I know that it's kind of a charged question, but I feel that everyone needs to be asking themselves this.

[–][deleted] 4 insightful - 2 fun4 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

The official DMCA process is basically guilty until proven innocent, so it rubs me wrong. The larger questions are over my pay grade. No victim, no crime, and fuck the Feds.

[–]Seahorse 6 insightful - 3 fun6 insightful - 2 fun7 insightful - 3 fun -  (1 child)

This is very interesting.

I wonder who's at the heart of this!

[–]magnora7[S] 7 insightful - 4 fun7 insightful - 3 fun8 insightful - 4 fun -  (0 children)

It is interesting, but I think it's going to become increasingly widespread. I believe soon almost every government and major corporation will soon have hired internet shill groups. They call it "native advertising", and it's becoming the norm because of how well it works compared to traditional advertising and propaganda. I know this is something Monsanto has done for at least a decade. It's also known both Democrats and Republicans do this too with ShareBlue and Cambridge Analytica.

Soon it will be every organization, and the internet will be a complete mess because of it. Especially with GPT-3 commenting AI getting so good, it's becoming easier to automate human-like responses on platforms like saidit and reddit. One person can act as 100 low-IQ people simultaneously by using these bots. They can create an intelligent crowd of people that all have the same bias. It's enough to overwhelm a forum, and when it becomes very close to human-like responses it can be hard to administrate because you can't differentiate the bots from the real people, and this is taken advantage of by the attackers.

[–][deleted] 6 insightful - 3 fun6 insightful - 2 fun7 insightful - 3 fun -  (6 children)

Very interesting. Something that's kept me at Saidit is that I think most of us agree that Big Corp and special interest groups of the 1% (internationally) are actively damaging any small group or business that can impact their market share. Many on Saidit disagree with me about the specific approaches of the 1% to glean everything from the 99%, but there seems to be a general agreement that this is endemic in US political culture (and in India, Brasil, Russia, Turkey, the Philippines, the UK, etc., etc.). You note the other forums that were attacked, and I would argue that some of the attacks can be from some of the small/developing forums, which receive funding from politically motivated donors.

One interesting development with the cultural attacks is how familiar they are with Saidit, and how they tried use our interests against us. This I see in the broader context online, whereby strategies are to divide people by having them argue over misinformation, disinformation, facts, science &c.

On another note, the attackers actively went after /u/TheAmeliaMay, and this person handled it very well (under the circumstances), but one very disturbing issue here is that Amelia did not deserve the personal attacks from the Saidit community, and some of these people were also foolled by the attackers. I know from personal experience that one has to have a thick skin to remain at Saidit. I hope /u/TheAmeliaMay will engage with us again soon, and will know that there are those of us here who are very grateful for Amelia's support and engagement.

[–]magnora7[S] 7 insightful - 4 fun7 insightful - 3 fun8 insightful - 4 fun -  (3 children)

One interesting development with the cultural attacks is how familiar they are with Saidit, and how they tried use our interests against us.

For instance, when we set up saidit, within the first week someone had used an automated script to register over 1000 usernames. They already had the API script set up because we're built the same way as reddit. They just pointed the script toward our site and stole a lot of people's usernames from reddit, so they couldn't register the same names on saidit.

These people know what they're doing.

I agree, Amelia handled it well given the circumstances. I think Amelia is taking a break but will probably be back, they just need to take a breather after all the craziness from the attack, which I totally understand! It's upsetting to see some people on saidit fall for the attack tricks, but that's why those tricks are used, because people do still fall for it. That's why education and discussion about these topics is so important. In theory, if we understand how the tricks work completely, the tricks no longer work on us. So all of us have to learn all of the tricks. It's a lot to ask, but the whole global internet culture has to mature in this way for things to move forward, I believe. We have to see the tricks for what they are, and learn not to react emotionally to those intentionally trying to provoke us.

[–][deleted] 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

Holy Mackerel. I remember Redditors bragging about their scripts for vote, account and post management years ago, when Aaron Swartz was also briefly engaged, and thereafter. But I've not seen these discussions for many years. (As you probably know, everything changed at Reddit during Digg's first major blackout, and their kiddos created Reddit accounts. I can't remember when that was.)

[–]magnora7[S] 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

The Digg exodus to reddit was in 2010. The technology has gotten better and better for infiltrating forums, I have no idea how Aaron would deal with this. Also there weren't really long-term large-scale paid shill groups when Aaron was around, imo they've become a prominent thing in just the last 10 years or so

[–][deleted]  (1 child)

[removed]

    [–][deleted] 3 insightful - 3 fun3 insightful - 2 fun4 insightful - 3 fun -  (0 children)

    Am I going to have repeating issues from 4-hour-old accounts? What is it with these brand-new users who want to lecture Saiditors. This is indeed an issue.

    Regarding Amelia, I think it's obvious this person was trying to help deal with the many problems during a massive attack with fake accounts. Amelia tried to develop fair and equitable processes. In one case, Amelia reversed a ban. It was not Stalinist. During the process, Amelia was attacked by everyone - real and fake - sometimes with very personal insults. Regardless of that, Amelia was nonetheless rather polite to everyone, offered transparency in /s/Saidit and /s/gov, and would only delete or ban statements and people who were in obvious violation of Saidit rules, and as far as I can tell, there wasn't much in the way of deletions and bans because many of us could see all of the crazy posts.

    [–][deleted] 5 insightful - 5 fun5 insightful - 4 fun6 insightful - 5 fun -  (0 children)

    The pattern of when they are around seems to be pretty random

    I live on the east coast... I’ve noticed they hit every morning, between 5-7 am EST and upvote with socks, it (or they) are the first posts of the day everyone sees. They post when SaidIt activity is at its lowest it seems.

    For the past week, every morning when I wake and check SaidIt, a fresh thread is there with no comments yet (or just a couple).

    But I will say they also post garbage spam from many accounts like "Samsung router drivers" links

    & Cher! Can’t 4get about Cher!

    [–]zyxzevn 5 insightful - 2 fun5 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 2 fun -  (24 children)

    This all gives me new ideas to improve saidit as a forum.

    I notice that these posters are mainly focussed on the main subs.

    Would it help to have new accounts automatically placed into "quarantine"?
    Or accounts that are "suspicious".
    The moderators and admin could approve their posts and replies. Or approve them to the sub.
    In the case of suspected manipulators, we could even mark them as "sus".
    The idea is that they can see themselves. And sus people can see each other as well, that way groups of manipulators (or different accounts), do not know that they are hidden.
    The moderators are still able to make them visible in their subs, though.
    The system is not meant as censorship, but as a way to make attacks on saidit more difficult and time consuming.

    I also noticed that some subs were taken out of /all, while they often have good information.
    Many now leak through to /news or /politics
    Like: /s/Coronavirus /s/VaccineSkepticism /s/ClimateSkeptics
    The censored information is often what needs to be seen and/or discussed.
    And the wrong information that is now mainstream is even causing victims and destructive politics.

    Examples:

    1. From /r/ClimateSkeptics we can see that some scientists were already warning about weather changes.
      Due to the solar cycles, the solar forcing /solar particle forcing can change the weather and climate completely.
      Snow in Mexico and in Spain were already some warnings.

    2. From /s/CoronaVirus and /s/NoNewNormal we can see that masks and lockdowns do not work. But the major problem is not the virus, it is the PCR tests that give 95% or more false positives. And the totalitarian politics that does not listen to science.

    3. From /s/VaccineSkepticism we see that the mRNA treatment (vaccine?) against the corona virus is based on the same PCR tests, and could be a complete lie. The British Medical Journal shows that the mRNA-treatment at best, only gives 19% improvement.
      In the mean time, the adverse reactions to the treatment cause strong fevers (50%), and many other problems. And could be blamed for many deaths in the elderly-care. International lawyer Feullmich calls this "playing Russian Roulette", which could be punished as homicide.

    For me the website is great for discussing these controversial and important topics.
    And I would like to see more of these type of discussions being active on the website.

    It would also be handy to move posts to the subs that are best suited.
    Like move the recent post about vaccine-deaths to /r/VaccineSkepticism
    If it is too hard, make it like a crosspost.

    Many other ideas to improve the forum:
    1. Redesigning the forum with Keywords, where the top-keyword determines where it gets posted.
    2. Besides NSFW, we have more flags to signal NSFL, violence, hate, prank, stupidity.
    3. And maybe also the opposite: Love, friendship, fun, happy.
    4. Posts can be linked with each other via link-replies (replies only contains a linked text) to add related videos/mirrors or discussions.
    5. Some more icons to upvote a post or comment, one choice, and each is only plus one point.
    The list only has to show the best voted icon(s).
    So you have "bulb of insight", "smile of fun","tears of laughter","heart of love","sad face of bad news","kiss of encouragement", "flame of controversial" or "cloud of confusion". With some extra programming a sub can have some special icons (meant as fun).
    Here is an example of such icons on NewTube.

    I also see that JasonCarswell has some ideas about improving the forum

    [–]magnora7[S] 8 insightful - 4 fun8 insightful - 3 fun9 insightful - 4 fun -  (22 children)

    Would it help to have new accounts automatically placed into "quarantine"?

    Or accounts that are "suspicious".

    No, because limiting user engagement from the start will inhibit growth of the site. And more importantly, the attackers often use aged accounts. They registered literally thousands of accounts many months ago. That cat is out of the bag, as far as saidit goes. So account age is not a reliable indicator for anything most of the time unfortunately.

    In the case of suspected manipulators, we could even mark them as "sus".

    Any manipulation marking system like this will be hijacked by the manipulators. They literally have hundreds of accounts. So they will mark people they don't like as 'sus' and the whole system will be immediately broken and maliciously hijacked.

    Voat had a similar failure. They had a "protectvoat" group that was to maintain the quality of the site. That group got hijacked by attackers. They then used the power of that group to silence any normal conversation, and silence new users. This is what caused voat to become the mess it was.

    I like some of your other ideas, I like that you are thinking about these problems, because they are very tough problems indeed. The voting buttons thing might be cool, but at some point there is too many buttons. I think 4-5 is the max number of buttons. And from a software perspective, adding another button would be a huge huge deal, because the whole database is written around there being exactly 2 voting options. To add a 3rd button to the saidit/reddit code, it would probably be a 100-200 hour project. And I wish that was an exaggeration.

    Anyway, keep thinking... I personally think the core problem is that it's too easy to register usernames. A lot of the core issues come down to the fact one person can easily use a bot to make 1000s of accounts, and with a VPN and fake IP addresses, there is basically no way to connect those accounts as being owned by the same person. So there needs to be a way to keep it closer to 1 account per human. Most sites accomplish this now with phone numbers, or connecting through facebook, or something like that. I have thought perhaps we could do it in a way where the person has to write a 5-sentence essay on 1 of 100 topics, like "Why does war exist?" or "What's the purpose of language?" and then we see how intelligent and grammatical their responses are. This would be much harder to automate, but with GPT-3 bots getting good now even that might not be enough. And of course this would all have to be on a new site, because like I said the cat is out of the bag with saidit username registrations

    [–]zyxzevn 5 insightful - 3 fun5 insightful - 2 fun6 insightful - 3 fun -  (20 children)

    Thanks for this insight. And already people were fearing that some admins were hijacking reddit.

    Connecting via phone-numbers can be hijacked via click-farms. But can block some activists.

    Reddit uses DRM to identify browsers, which could be helpful to ID the user at registration.
    You can also run a system-analysis (network-test, speed-test, mem-test, screen-size, browser-version) to see if registrations are very similar.

    As a fun note, I thought of more controversial questions at the registration:
    "Who really started WW1?" "What department was destroyed at the Pentagon at 9/11?"
    "How fast flies a swallow?"
    "What makes frog change their sex?"
    "How bad is sugar for your health?"
    "What makes facebook addictive?"
    "What states reported voting fraud, and how much?"
    "Who pays fact-checkers?"
    "Why does laughing gas make a person fall asleep?"
    It would be fun to have an extreme long list of questions.
    And researching some of the answers would make people realize that there is more going on.
    Why not use the questions to help convince attackers to stop?

    [–]magnora7[S] 6 insightful - 3 fun6 insightful - 2 fun7 insightful - 3 fun -  (18 children)

    You can also run a system-analysis (network-test, speed-test, mem-test, screen-size, browser-version) to see if registrations are very similar

    Yes I have done this. They spoof their IP, spoof their browser and even spoof the version number of the browser. It's constantly changing for all of them with every comment and post it's a new browser, new IP, new everything, basically randomized. They've really got it down to a science. Although perhaps the randomness itself is a giveaway...

    Thanks for your questions, good ideas. We just need something that is easy to do once, but very hard to do 100 times. Another option would be to have them pay $1 in some cryptocurrency to register an account. This would mean they'd have to pay me to attack the site, which upsets their whole method that is based on being able to register unlimited accounts. But it would obviously deter some real users too. But that might be a cost worth paying.

    Why not use the questions to help convince attackers to stop?

    Lol you might as well try telling wet paint not to dry. Not worth the effort, trust me. Plus if one does wake up and quit, they just replace that person, so this doesn't actually mitigate the attack.

    [–]zyxzevn 5 insightful - 3 fun5 insightful - 2 fun6 insightful - 3 fun -  (17 children)

    it's a new browser, new IP, new everything, basically randomized. They've really got it down to a science. Although perhaps the randomness itself is a giveaway...

    Sounds like very organized. Maybe even military.
    Certainly a well worked out procedure.
    Maybe they also have 1000s of facebook /google accounts.

    Speed of a calculation also randomized? (javascript/wasm) Might be harder. Also some data may be cached if they did not clear it (like site icon).

    [–]magnora7[S] 9 insightful - 5 fun9 insightful - 4 fun10 insightful - 5 fun -  (16 children)

    Yeah I agree it's very organized. It's known JIDF has done this sort of thing for a while, could be them. I've had run-ins with them before. They stole one of my subreddits long ago fraudulently through the redditrequest system and literally put up a JIDF flag on the sidebar after they stole it. That was like 6 years ago. Then when I started calling those people out, the reddit admins immediately banned my account for something I did 3 months prior...

    This is the subreddit (which was intended to be a backup/alternate sub for /r/undelete): https://www.reddit.com/r/undeleteundelete/

    They also have a wiki article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Internet_Defense_Force

    So this has been a problem for a while. Usually it was just an edge case thing though, or trolls playing around, but now it's a serious problem that affects almost all sizable forums. Our current attacks could be JIDF, could be Chinese, could be US, could be Russian, could be all 4, could be something else. Who knows. I would say JIDF and China both probably do not like some of the things posted on saidit, so they would have motive. But I really have no idea. Could just be a crazy guy in his basement who works for hire off craigslist paid by some random person that just doesn't like saidit for some reason. But it seems pretty well coordinated, especially if you include the DDOS attacks (which are STILL ongoing, like every 3rd day for literally years) so I'd guess it's at least a 3-4 person organization.

    Also the DDOS attacks still occur even though they're obviously not successful, which indicates to me someone just has an automated DDOS attack botnet on a rotating schedule.

    Speed of a calculation also randomized?

    Cool idea but each page is always completely custom so there's no baseline metric to judge against because the filesize is always different

    Also some data may be cached if they did not clear it (like site icon).

    Perhaps, I'm not sure how to detect this in a way that would be useful though

    [–]zyxzevn 5 insightful - 3 fun5 insightful - 2 fun6 insightful - 3 fun -  (14 children)

    It sounds like JI DF to me.

    With calculation I mean something like a complicated physics calculation.
    In both JS and WASM.
    You can also render something to the screen with JS to test the speed of their graphics.
    You can combine the speed-check with a word-check (captcha). You render a noisy image of a moving&rotating word, while spheres and other objects move in the image. Easy for humans. Very hard even for AI trained for exactly this.

    [–]JasonCarswell 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (4 children)

    Perhaps a new idea: Make our own captcha with a 3x3 or 5x5 grid or whatever. Those 9 or 25 squares each have an image with one optical illusion or visual puzzle that has to be selected by a human.

    [–][deleted] 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (8 children)

    fancy shit. does anyone have these moving captchas in use today?

    [–]JasonCarswell 2 insightful - 3 fun2 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 3 fun -  (0 children)

    I'm surprised to hear you thinking tribaly like that. Sure Zionist are at the top, but really it's about speaking truth to all power, regardless of national origin or their minions.

    [–]JasonCarswell 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

    Who watches the watchers?

    [–]JasonCarswell 1 insightful - 2 fun1 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

    Don't mark the suspected. That's baseline for everyone. The bottom. Start at the top...

    Mark the well known to be trusted, starting from the center, with M7. Have the trusted and known mark others. When someone trusted falters, remove their "trust" and all their "trustees". What remains is trust.

    Use /s/friends, another vote, an invite only sub with a whitelist, or some new thing.

    Too few buttons is dumbing down the world! Meanwhile the techno-corporatocracy is hoarding all the info. We need our own qualitative data. I have a new simple idea that can change it all but it needs coding - a lot of it. But first I'll need to illustrate and maybe animate it to convince anyone. Animated ideas and 2D pixels are easier to refine than complex architectural engineering.

    The critical problem with Reddit and SaidIt is that VERY limiting 2-vote database. That's why we need to start fresh, from what I can observe.

    At the very minimum, mine needs 25. Preferably 25x9 or better 25x9x9 (more than this and it's no longer simple) and then the same again on the right side for metatags. Add some scrolling and then it's almost infinite. I bet it could be used for many other purposes too. I may have shared too much and spoiled the surprise. It's not a riddle or rocket science, but IMO it's simple and elegant - yet requires a seriously flexible powerful database array behind it along with settings interfaces.

    I've been pondering vote improvements since I arrived. I haven't considered the security or signup much beyond my recent friend-2-friend post. (Cloudflare bounced me right after that. First time since months ago when you adjusted it.)

    I LOVE your essay idea.

    [–]JasonCarswell 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

    Good stuff. Like minds. I updated my "Fairness And Justice" with a little hierarchy table listing the admins > advisors (high trust) > citizenry (regulars) > fray (new & rare) > unruly (banned). I didn't mention it there, but had to d3rr and others that a colour coding system (ie. red yellow green) could easily indicate a user's status. Status gets no special privileges other than recognizing they're not unknown. (All of my ideas would go much better with illustrations.) Just as I look for red names from my /s/friends list, I could also avoid reading the fray. I was also thinking about being able to turn them on and off, and have some new ideas for the block function, but that's another story.

    All of this is fascinating. If I were into woo I'd say the Universe is lining up for me. As my foggy ideas about Next-Gen Forums condense to crystallize it's good to be exposed to the problems of today to also imagine defensive strategies of tomorrow.

    Why would /s/Coronavirus /s/VaccineSkepticism /s/ClimateSkeptics not be in /s/all?! How did you notice this?

    I agree, moving posts would be nice. I think you typoed a couple times with /r/ instead of /s/.

    Keywords = metatags. I've been asking for that since I arrived. My MetaVote system would replace the need for votes, metatags, NSFW, etc etc etc. ALL of it could be simplified while also deepened - and sooooo much more. Potentially very flexible and customizable, including icons. Also important but not centrally critical: word clouds.