This is War

I have been browsing altchans for over a decade now. Never before have I seen such a mass deplatforming campaign like I see today. There have been pizza spammers for years but it really is reaching a fever pitch lately. Almost every imageboard I browse is becoming plagued by them and it's now rare to find a small board not being actively attacked, if the board is indexed by a search engine it is attacked. The sophistication of these attacks makes me question if it's only a simple botnet or not. The attacks seem to increasingly be circumnavigating captcha efforts even when webmasters are sadly forced into implementing captchas. This implies to me that real people are making these posts and making them en mass. Why? Who is doing this? The scale implies a well funded organization. The aim seems to be to kill imageboards. Even though the law protects webmasters from user submitted content that violates the law as long as it is removed, people understandably become weary about continuing to run a site when this becomes a daily occurrence and becomes a strain on moderation for understandable mental health reasons. No one wants to deal with seeing this stuff regularly. I've seen this kill too many small sites, I highly suspect late.city was abandoned because of this around new years 2023 and it makes me wonder about the recent anon.cafe sunsetting. There's an obvious profit motive for large corporations to kill independent websites and consolidate control, perhaps a cartel is directing a third world clickfarm to do this to to force everyone onto their networks? That doesn't really add up to me though, their normal legal tactics have already consolidated much of the internet and they don't have any need for such an evil strategy simply to increase revenue. These attacks also don't seem to effect other independent websites in the same way. I don't see random neocities with guestbooks or tiny community forums hit with this spam to the same extent. If it's not a general tech cartel could it be the NSA, CIA, FBI, CCP, FSB, IDF, some other state actor or a combination of them? I find this hypothesis more likely given that all of these entities may feel threatened by free speech and independent web culture, which is strongest in altchan communities. An effective way to rid themselves of this problem and ratchet up their authoritarian control of society is to simply destroy their cultural adversaries, us. Even though not every board is a politics board, the simple act of being independent online may be enough to offend the desire for control and power that these state actors have. The most cynical explanation I have is that some large pizza marketplace is recruiting customers from our communities. Due to our propensity for mental health issues in chan culture we might have a higher proportion of people who would consume their product even if most of them are non-offending individuals just trying to live their lives. Maybe the deplatforming effect isn't even the goal, instead, being a byproduct. What do you think Lain? What can we do? Who is causing this? When will it end?

Hi, I moderate an altchan. The attacks aren't even very technically sophisticated. The posts could be filtered pretty easily with old anti-spam tech. The reason it works is a) they have a botnet b) they're taking advantage of the fact that altchans are pretty uniform in implementation (everything is fuarrrkign vichan) and most are not run by people that have the time and energy to combat them, sometimes not the technical sophistication either. Is it a spooky three-letter or a corp? Idk maybe. But it definitely doesn't have to be.

>>77332 >>77333 I thought about this and regardless of the motivation behind it's probably best to just have a low profile until it eventually becomes so bad every website will be filled with bots. At that point the best solution would probably be to fence everything (idk, IP pass given by irc chat, you have to pass some trials or be known in the chat i mean it could be anything) of course posts will drop in quantity by a lot but if it comes to that the internet would already be in a very bad state (worse than today) i often think about the real life counterpart of things and i guess postal systems do not get spammed because you have to pay to send something. so no one even bothers setting up a place of thousands of chinks to reunite and destroy the us postal system. ok i'm just brewing soykaf lol

>>77332 >Never before have I seen such a mass deplatforming campaign like I see today. They killed 8chan and want to salt the Earth to prevent any similar issues in the future. I personally believe the government wants to attack imageboards without decent moderation. Load them up with illegal images, and take them down if they take too long taking them down. >The most cynical explanation I have is that some large pizza marketplace is recruiting customers from our communities. How is it these advertised domains don't get seized? No, that's not why. >>77333 I've seen a Lynxchan board get attacked by this too, and a very obscure board at that. I'd check the front page, see it there, and know I could find it in /mega/ here. >>77334 Proof of work is the only known solution when anonymity is paramount.

>No one wants to deal with seeing this stuff regularly As a user I don't either, I'm blocking images on the front page with my adblocker and trying not to click on stuff without reading it.

Yes, feds like to plant cp on any device they don't like the owner of. They've got databases full off that stuff, possibly even some home brewed. Pizza spamming on 4chan stopped being a thing once moot had to hand over the wheel to the FBI back in the day. I wouldn't be surprised if your hypothesis turned out to be right. >a strain on moderation for understandable mental health reasons An idea. Pay pedophiles to be on the look out for any of those posts. Doesn't matter if they save any of it as long as they also remove it momentarily. Just be ready to throw them under the bus the second you need to.

I browse a lot of altchans and also run some boards on them and over the years I've seen it evolved. Always the same pattern, posted everywhere, even on not "problematic" boards. My first hypothesis, it's either honeypots or a work conducted by some organisation to demoralize the last independent places of the internet. I don't believe it's real pedos behind this but a tactical move to attack and try to destroy us. Maybe I'm wrong and it's real pedorings but I doubt about that because why would they want to advertise their soykaf on this scale ?

>>77332 >>77338 >Honeypot theory I really do think it's the only sane theory if it isn't some ad campaign. Which would also correlate with how deprave some of the pics being publicly posted on chans have gotten. Trying to catch the most depraved of people. I posted about this in another chan, but I think it would be concerning if it's the latter, instead. Bad signs of the state of the market for this kind of stuff.

>people understandably become weary about continuing to run a site when this becomes a daily occurrence and becomes a strain on moderation for understandable mental health reasons. I'm realizing that this is probably the reason dreamchan died a good while ago. It was fairly dead at that point, and so it was a breeding ground for all kinds of spam. Very unfortunate because the billboard feature the chan had was wonderful and pretty much untouched by the spam. I do want to take the time and this post to ask the mods how they are doing while dealing with the pizza spam. I've become pretty desensitized to it all, honestly, and can ignore them. I also realize not all people are built like this so I wonder how the mods on this chan are handling this mentally. You people are doing pretty great. The spam fortunately don't seem to stay up for long on here.

>>77337 >They've got databases full off that stuff >Pay pedophiles to be on the look out for any of those posts FBI already has that covered, kek. Something to be noticed is the dragnet is particularly geared towards actual pedophilia I.E. under 13. Surely, and while still completely illegal to the exact same extent, more arrests/sales could be made targeting the broader demographic of people interested in 14-17 year olds, but instances of that being advertised or even existing to be consumed are practically unheard of - Too old. To me, it suggests a larger psyop at play, much like the well understood racebaiting techniques that have been being used for hundreds of years and occur as well-coordinated raids on popular chans. "Inferior little dick genes" etc. But the pedophilia, specifically in this vein, indicates dragnet espionage - No man can be controlled by honeypotting him with pictures of a 17 year old. He'll lose his job, sure, and some of his reputation, but he'll never be internally compromised, something blackmail at this level necessitates. And since we've established the technique isn't for sales/arrests, lest it targeted that larger demographic of interest, it can only make sense that it's for blackmail.

>>77340 >I wonder how the mods on this chan are handling this mentally To reassure myself, I just tell myself that it's a clandestine job on the part of some bad actors, who aren't real pedophiles, but it's pretty annoying even if I try to remain fairly insensitive to it.

>>77340 >I do want to take the time and this post to ask the mods how they are doing while dealing with the pizza spam. I just deleted more a few minutes ago. I've been doing this for years; it doesn't bother me anymore. My usual moderation had to take a backseat, so most of what I've been doing for the past few months when I login is cleaning up this soykaf and nothing else. >I also realize not all people are built like this so I wonder how the mods on this chan are handling this mentally. I'm an apathetic person, but I'm not going to let the government win. >You people are doing pretty great. I appreciate it.

>>77335 >How is it these advertised domains don't get seized? They almost always have different domains. I've never clicked one but I'm certain there are several layers of redirects as well. >>77340 >I do want to take the time and this post to ask the mods how they are doing while dealing with the pizza spam. It's honestly not hard to deal with. Just delete, maybe report if I have the energy to do something pointless, and move on. It's infrequent enough to be manageable. Is it actually advertisement for a real product or service? Idk, probably not. My guess it's either a honeypot or just someone that wants to lower the quality of boards. But a lot of spam seems like nobody would ever fall for it, it's best not to think too deeply about the motivations of spammers.

Hello. I am the administrator of two imageboards, one of them 15 years old. I have been dealing with this problem for a long time. In the past, whenever there was a spike in CP spam, I would pull more volunteer janitors from the community, and after a while the spam would subside for months or years before returning, often in a different form. Sometimes multiple strategies were even used simultaneously by the spammer(s), but a show of force and solidarity from the board staff was often enough. This time though, it has been clearly ramping up, and adding a large number of janitors on both of my sites has not dissuaded the entities responsible. We are getting one or more spam posts daily, which is very problematic for our users, and I'm sure many of them have left. Even now with us deleting posts within a few minutes most of the time, it is inevitable that users will still see them. I can also confirm that reCAPTCHA was completely ineffective. So, this is either a person or a group of people, or a bot with CAPTCHA solving capabilities built in, which is not such a longshot these days. I disagree however with OP's assessment that it must be a well funded organization; a few people or even a single highly motivated person with access to a large number of rented disposable botnet IPs would be able to keep this campaign going. Spamming us is just too easy, because of how imageboards work. I also wondered if it could be a honeypot for a long time, but the violent nature of some of the more recent images has me doubting that. I think that it is either a person or group that wants to destroy imageboard culture, or an actual sales ring. Whatever the reason, it is very effective at decreasing user counts and user morale, and is unfortunately an effective deplatforming strategy. Without resorting to user registrations which tramples on the unique spirit of imageboards, I am grasping for any other workable solutions. Comparing images against publicly available CSAM hash tables seems workable at first, but spammers in the past have used techniques such as embedding a random string into the image itself, which would easily defeat such an effort. All free expression on the internet is being steadily absorbed into corporate spaces. I don't want imageboards and forums and small websites on the far corners of the web to die out as a mode of community. Is there anything workable we can come up with to fight back against this attack on all imageboards? Maybe if we can get several imageboard admins together in a sort of working group, we can try to figure something out.

>>77345 What about adapting something like https://github.com/db0/fedi-safety, uses image classification AI instead of hash checking

>>77341 I understand your post mostly and agree, but I've never heard the term "dragnet" before, what does it mean?

>>77345 >tried catpcha premade like google or custom? From what i've seen any mainstream captcha has a premade solution you can acquire. Would be interesting to try custom because it would show if its automated bots you could filter with custom captcha or actually someone targeting your specific place and willing to break your custom captcha.

>>77347 It's a fishing term, where you drag a gigantic net. It's associated with catching as much as possible by using obscenely large nets, and is also specifically associated with catching plenty of things you don't want. In surveillance, since Snowden, someone coined the term "dragnet surveillance" where everything is downloaded for later analysis, normalizing it in the political/infosec lexicon. I used it as a way of describing indiscriminate honeypotting, or otherwise posting this particular honeypot to as many places as possible, as often as possible, to create a "dragnet" of sorts, where you might trick 1,000 idiots, you're only really looking for one particular kind of idiot: Someone you want to blackmail. That usually doesn't include regular people, and much like fishing you can just throw them back. Further, to be certain, the term is not intended to represent a functional network of any kind.

>>77346 This seems like a good idea at first but it requires a powerful local GPU to analyze the images. Not something I have I'm afraid. >>77348 I'm using reCAPTCHA. If I can set up a custom CAPTCHA that would be a good thing to test.

>>77351 It looks like it can also be set up as a separate server with an API, but yeah, GPU needed

>>77350 Thanks for the explanation, hopefully we find a solution soon. This all makes me incredibly angry, I just want to soykafpost and effortpost in peace. I've seen a touhou themed captcha before, maybe we could have something like specific to each altchan's niche?

>>77354 That works only if you are okay with excluding casual posters who don't know the niche lore. That said it could force motivated posters to learn lore, slightly raising quality. But you may end up dissappointed by how many posters get frustrated and leave. On the other hand, the CP spam is itself pretty frustrating and probably worse. There are also some chans which serve more than one niche, and others with a vague niche that can't be expressed that way. In those cases this idea may not work at all.

There is always the integrated CSAM detection service for Cloudflare users.

while different waves of spam must be carried out by different individuals/groups with different aims, some attacks are certainly carried out by antisocial eccentrics. by nature, chan boards attract unique individuals. some of these offbeat people are prone to obsessive behaviors that can last years, such as x86x2 spamming 4chan. all it could take is a ban or misunderstanding for these things to go on for a decade or more. maybe even to target rival boards. but for the majority? it could depend on the structure. are they leaving links to secure chats or other contact information? that might be more in line with advertisements for a seller or honeypot. the risk of seeing these floods is a decent deterrent against using smaller chan boards, so i have never seen it happen, myself.

>>77345 >Is there anything workable we can come up with to fight back against this attack on all imageboards? At least in theory, letting users filter content themselves should already work pretty well in lieu of "instant moderation". Make it easy to share filters and it might be sufficient even. I think the biggest issue is that law enforcement will eventually knock on your door and force you to shut down a website. I haven't been able to figure out a foolproof solution to this yet as even "privacy networks" such as Tor, I2P... can be compromised with global traffic analysis (which is very much in the capabilities of even regular corporations). I've been thinking of a bittorrent-esque forum, where users host their own or "liked" posts along with some public servers where users can publish references to (new) posts. Anonymity could be an issue, though I think that's a solved problem given torrent+proxy combinations are already common. Even then though it just delays the inevitable. Without real pushback it'll simply become forbidden to even think anything out of line.

>>77365 There are always links in the posts, when they happen they seem to hit every board on whatever list is being used simultaneously. The posts are beyond the realm of ability for a single antisocial person to be posting manually. I understand what you're saying though, there are certainly autists who go on rage quests but this is beyond the pale. That the domains don't get seized by the feds is also telling in suggesting it's a three letter agency of some kind.

>>77370 thanks for clarifying. that's very interesting. so these domains are available on the clearnet? whether or not they host illegal content, it would seem almost impossible for persistent use of these domains on the clearnet without acknowledgement by multiple, specialized international law enforcement offices. that sounds like it could be telling. cheers for your time.

>>77372 I tried to visit those domains on Tor and it's not reachable (gives some Nginx error) so I guess they disable visiting through Tor on purpose. So it may be a honeypot ?

>>77372 >so these domains are available on the clearnet? Yes. Which raises red flags from the get go. You can do a whois to look them up (if you catch the domain posted again) and you really want to look it up. Of course, I do not recommend it. I personally tried it because I was just curious to what kind of info was available publicly and I'm not actually touching the actual illegal content. (Took precautions as if I am, anyway.) Just wanted to see what these people were fronting has. And I'm an idiot with free time There wasn't much, but the domain of the links posted on boards (that i had at the time) had info locating their domain provider somewhere in India iirc. The links we're redirects to some shady file hosting service. Think old Megaupload. I didn't actually check it on a live machine by clicking the link. I used services that can try to path to where the link will try to send you. From there I took the link to the site without the paths and just took a look through browserling. I think it was hosted in France? I really can't recall now. The currency they used when advertising their "premium" download services were in euros so it is likely. That or browserling's VMs are in EU. >>77373 >So it may be a honeypot ? Very likely in my opinion. Maybe this time it is different? I don't really want to bother checking again and I doubt it is any different to begin with.

>The most cynical explanation I have is that some large pizza marketplace is recruiting customers from our communities. I think this explanation is true. I've almost never seen cp posted in a forum site without a link to buy more. it's not just that we're all mentally ill, like it or not chan sites have been associated with pedophilia for a long time. if you're selling pizza chan sites are your best bet for advertisement. 4chan is one of the only places you can easily find loli anymore. I hate that anonymous forums are associated with that kind of stuff but they just are.

>>77374 most smaller domains are shielded by opt-in whois privacy guards from the registrar, making it unlikely to yield useful information. still, it's good to check. thank you for doing so. contacting the registrar may be useful unless they are negligent or in an agreement with law enforcement. depending where the company is located, the difference is likely difficult to determine. some individuals/groups acquire domains in bulk for personal and business reasons, like speculative parking. it could be intriguing to compare whois lookups for shared registrars, countries of origin, and available information. sometimes fields are blanked, while other times, the information is declared as protected by privacy services. one could also try finding out where or by whom the sites are hosted through their ip addresses and associated information. if lookup returns metadata linked to a vps, one could contact the provider. if not, that's more interesting. the subject matter is too radioactive for me to try. these aren't suggestions so much as brainstorming analysis options. (i apologize that my last post was a little redundant and dumb. thanks for taking your time to reply.)

It's off-topic but each time I read the OP's subject I got the Burzum's "War" song intro that pop up in my head and I lugh alone behind my computer.

It does not have to be a conspiracy though. It could be someone just trying to make money. Possibly they live in a country they wouldn't be charged with anything so no risk to them to post clearnett domains or they went through various means of hiding their identity when setting up a domain somehow and may want it clearnet to get higher traffic. Also consider the possibility of someone wanting to spread malware but is attempting to be selective which is questionable since most people spreading malware are just trying to make money and dont really care who the victim is. Probably a good time to mention to everyone many browsers default setting is to preload linked URLs. So chances are if you havent turned this off your IP will show up as having visited all sorts of sites you didnt even go to. >>77356 As far as im aware all the various "CSAM hash detection" things automatically report users to the FBI (even if not from the US) though and are full of content that isnt even illegal to begin with nor should be so the databases are corrupted, plus there is issue of false positives. It is a good way to get your site shut down and get a lot of people including yourself on government watch lists for no reason. You just need good anti bot tech mainly since a lot of this seems to come from bots.

I've noticed that there are a lot more Anons trying to turn every conversation to National Socialism, too. There's a Nazi music thread up here, MYFAROG keeps getting brought up on tabletop boards elsewhere even though no-one actually plays it. Fashion boards keep getting Hugo Boss brought up as a segue into Nazi uniforms and Hitler Youth hairstyles, and the neo-nazis keep trying to appropriate cyberpunk and synthwave. "fashwave" my arse. All these meme videos using Little Dark Age, you have to wonder what MGMT think about nazis using their song. Well, I suppose it's nothing new, the real nazis appropriated Odinism, Nietzsche, and even the swastika.

>>77344 I for one clicked a few of the URLs they posted see where they lead, so I guess I can be blackmailed now years in the future once they start dragging the depths of the UDC for dirt on people. The URLs the spammer posted to the site would change over time, they used/use some kind of URL shortener and redirector. It'd lead to this landing page, I think the beginning of it's domain name was "t.me", bareboned page with some URLs that supposedly lead you to cp. If you'd click one it'd lead to a file hosting website that I hadn't ever heard of before which appeared to be a honeypot. I have no idea if the website was a legitimate file hosting site, I don't think that I tried to use the search function on the site to look for other stuff. The website was heavily javascript dependent, pretty much nothing on the site worked without it (I never enabled javascript). Also, I think the domain name of the file hosting site changed a few times, but the UI was the same. The domain was not Cloudflared. I'm going off of months old memories here so I could get some details wrong, but anything I remember to be definitive is not a misrecollection. The spammer's page on the file hosting site would display a list of collections of material, I think the collections' names were pedophilic in nature, but the individual filenames were random. I think there were also tags displaying the file size of the individual files. All of the "collections" were paywalled, so you would have to pay money to the website in order to access them, I don't know if the uploader would get a cut of it. From what I recall, they only accepted trackable transaction methods e.g credit card, visa, maybe bitcoin -but that's trackable. I definitely didn't see monero. I figured it was (or is considering this is ongoing) probably some sort of honeypot, there might not even be any cp on the file hosting site, I wouldn't know though, can't know without committing a crime by paying money to attempt to view it, as a pedophile would. Just considering the shadiness of the website, the javascript dependency, and their lack of support for currencies like monero tells me it's likely a honeypot, pedophiles would have to be smarter than that. The payment function doesn't work without javascript. I remember being brought to some payment landing page that I think had a few bubbles for the trackable methods like credit card, visa, and maybe bitcoin. But that is all. I really do wonder how these people aren't getting caught, because the way they run their operation -if it is indeed a criminal operation that is in no way associated with governmental agencies- is terrible, they should of been discovered by the authorities by now, or the authorities should be getting close to uncovering them considering the levels of passive surveillance that are created by the internet of things we are living inside of. It wasn't some hidden service, just a clearnet file hosting site. Anyway people should report the fuarrrking thing, I haven't because I can't. Not a single website for reporting pedophilia to the authorities works without javascript, I was thinking of making a front-end to access such reporting websites because of it.

>>77384 Well just after I made my post I saw another post from the glitterboy(s). So I figured why not just refresh my memory. Now they use li-nk.net to shorten and redirect URLs, I don't remember it from before. They uploaded "video previews" on anonymfile.com, never heard of it before. I didn't see anything there, no video, just a blank page, video file was a random string of numbers.mp4. Maybe the video will display with javascript enabled, I don't need to know nor do you. anonymfile's policy does say that 'files with illegal or malicious content are forbidden to upload', but what service wouldn't state that, be it legitimate or ostensibly legitimate. Another shortened url lead to telegra.ph, the telegra.ph page had a list of URLs to world-files.com, I remember this site. Files on the website can only be viewed by "premium users". They say the site is "webmoney" certified, and show megastock.ru as well, never heard of either. The site appears to function without javascript, I must've been too afraid to try anything before. You cannot view their accepted payment methods without making an account. I was able to make an account, it was very easy I just typed in bullshit for account information and the captcha was basic, just 4 numbers to type in. For payment they accept paypal, visa, mastercard, and bitcoin among other random methods I've never heard of. I don't see monero anywhere. Payment via mastercard lead to pay.r-global-inc.com. Bitcoin had 3 different wallets: 3G285Psq5eb6XZxDsCYUVJBGg53rEgxVH7. 3Q4SB3ipk4DhyYE4LT28VRBbN2a7amEAt1 33VWNLsYYYH3QoXBoXrQun6GXqSPsMTaFg Another method, www.oneclickreseller.com lead to some weird ass site. They had some random chinese payment services too among these premiumkeys.com premiumkeystore.com Again, weird shady sites. Anyway I think this is as far I can and am willing to go.

>>77386 semper fi, lain. this sounds like a definite scam or honeypot designed for idiots; possibly one of those bottomless link pits. hopefully the url shorteners were not configured to skim information from a user's personal network.

>>77377 THIS IS WAR... HUH... WOW

I wonder if we could use some kind of proof-of-fuarrrks system. Like there's a word hidden in the rules for example that you have to enter in a field once to activate posting from your browser. Then we can ramp up the challenge until we find a level where the spammers can't be assed anymore.

>>77404 That's essentially just a CAPTCHA. Some forums use it, usually by asking a question on a related topic (e.g. "A reboot happens when a <answer> fault occurs"). It has some success though even then there are many spammers who work around it. The small stuff appears to be gone but some are really insistent on flooding forums with garbage (with multiple accounts) to the point it's clearly not about advertising some product but making it unusable for everyone.

>>77383 /p0l/ culture is being propped up glowniggers. there have been cops that have catfished each other over 4chan in retarded entrapment schemes and that one academic who was flooding the place with AI generated spam. its the reichstag fire all over again. create and fund an fanatic movement, pretend to be the savior who'll protect society from this evil menace, get the good folk to give you dictatorial emergency powers. second, 4chan is associated with the evil anonymous cyberterrorist group in the eyes of the feds. what a better way to discredit the place than flood it with nazis, unironic racists, tranny fetishists, tranny bashers, trumptards, pedophiles and ISIS fanboys?

>>77409 This but it was also being co-opted by texan oil magnates and big ag in parallel.

>>77409 >/p0l/ culture is being propped up by glowniggers Fact. I saw it firsthand ~2017 when Trump came into play. It was so obvious that it completely dissuaded me from further participation and disillusioned me from popular rhetoric. Now I see it everywhere. I dubbed it "Paradoxical government," where the instigation of a counter-culture is in fact the culture desired by the media conglomerate at large. "Don't smoke weed" made everyone a culture subservient drug addict, for example. It's absolutely maddening. It's the "pendulum swinging back" as gets quoted so often these days, but the pendulum as held by a hypnotist, not the grandfather clock we all so memetically envision.

>>77404 There is a method called honeypot forms. They usually don't work great but they filter out a lot of bots if implemented intelligently enough. Basically it's hidden fields and checkboxes etc. You also can block headless browsers that bots use, they can avoid detection but many don't bother. >>77409 Something like that happened with the whole Black Lives Matter thing too. https://theintercept.com/2023/02/07/fbi-denver-racial-justice-protests-informant/ >>77412 Reverse psychology is just pop psychology bullshit. The average person will just follow what they think is acceptable to their peers. What really is going on is the profit motive of the news becoming even bigger than it was in the past. 2016 was Donald Trump vs Hillary Clinton because it was literally Reality TV Star vs "First Woman President". Before Trump there was Ronald Reagan the famous actor. Then also Bill Clinton with his saxophone playing. Barak Obama the "first black president". Anything that grabs attention of people that dont even bother paying attention easily.

The bot only ever spams /zzz/? On sushichan its always on /lounge/ and Heyuri's /b/ and 4-ch's /img/. It also spams identical links on 4-ch's textboards and post office. Maybe textboards are the solution? They won't keep out the spam but at least there won't be images and any links can just be deleted.

>>77332 IMO it's a mix of everything. Notice how places that allow Tor and freedom of speech get drowned quickly. Meanwhile halfchan still stands, simply because it doesn't allow Tor which makes it a great place for having weirdos under surveillance. Another ironic thing is how they let extremism thrive, but other "innocent" topics got censored. One example of this was the thread that encouraged people to buy precious metals in order to ruin banks. It was repeatedly being cleaned up in spite of having seemingly less extremist message. But I guess soykafholes like this one get targeted by bots by accident rather than with aim to destroy us specifically.

>>77417 >One example of this was the thread that encouraged people to buy precious metals in order to ruin banks. It was repeatedly being cleaned up in spite of having seemingly less extremist message. Or perhaps because it's blatantly being sh1lled by profiteers? lmao Who's selling this so precious silver for these worthless dollars/Monero? >inb4 "don't care keep stacking" I wonder who could benefit from convincing others to keep silver out of the market. Hm >soykafholes like this one Did one of your sh1ll threads get deleted here?

>>77418 >Or perhaps because it's blatantly being sh1lled by profiteers? lmao You're brewing soykaf, but I'll bite. Somehow worse stuff was untouched, but that one specific thing was kept being removed which appeared strange to me. >Who's selling this so precious silver for these worthless dollars/Monero? Fiat currencies are a tool that gives power to those who print it. Fiat currencies also fuel debt based economy that impoverishes people and leads to environmental degradation. Monero is cool though, but it has the disadvantage of being electronic. A good summary can be found here: https://workableeconomics.com/ >I wonder who could benefit from convincing others to keep silver out of the market. Hm Companies that mine and sell precious metals obviously, but still better than paper printed out of thin air. You honestly must be delusional to defend the current system. >Did one of your sh1ll threads get deleted here? Cool assumptions about me there. Your emotional response is really amusing, I guess defending status quo is your daily bread. Yep, it's all just made up. Keep your bank account and don't worry if your savings evaporate over night! https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/jpmorgan-pay-60-mln-settle-precious-metals-spoofing-lawsuit-2021-11-19/

>>77419 I digress again, but I'd rather invest in industry, i.e. Russia or China, to get actual tools instead of hunks of metal.

>>77413 >The average person will just follow what they think is acceptable to their peers. And it's cool to be a rebel. Do you honestly believe this is a virgin facet of human nature that isn't being exploited to make money?

Altchans have freedom of speech. The powers that be don't like freedom of speech because people can share the idea that the powers that be are evil, so they are making every effort to censor the entire Internet just to protect their power. That's why they false-flag flood boards which are a bastion for freedom of speech with illegal content, so they can have an excuse to shut down the website. I don't know if cp was involved with Voat, but I remember that website getting shut down for basically being alt-right. Somehow the guy couldn't afford to keep it up or something idk. I don't know if there's a good alternative to voat anymore besides poal and scored.co which are ok.

>>77409 I think a lot of people are just tired of minorities chimping out and biting the hand that feeds them.

>>77416 Here: https://lainchan.org/q/res/12273.html

>>77379 What browsers don't preload? Presumably you can turn this off in firefox I'm genuinely spooked now because if my system has been preloading links that's got to be dozens of false positives over the years I've tripped by now with this; all because I want to watch anons bs about thinkpads.

>>77379 >>77430 Do you have more info on browser preload? Tried to search now and i found only 2 things: 1. links get preloaded if marked with rel="preload" attribute so regular links should be excluded from such behavior. 2. Whenever you type something into url bar firefox will preload dns resolve & tls handshake but it wont preload html. This means whatever you type in wrong can lead to getting logged but at least you wont load any malware. You can turn this off with urlbar.speculativeConnect I would expect that nobody tries to preload every link since it would suicide the browser on collections of links like "post your best software " threads.

Sharty is behind it obviously.

>>77421 It isnt reliable like that. You're confusing this with how oppositions get turned into a commodity product which you see happen most in fashion. >>77430 Firefox and Chrome both do it probably all of them do. It is supposed to be only load certain things marked by the site to preload. So a website would have to be improperly set up to be preloading something users posted or allow functional html in posts for someone to insert the needed tags if that is even possible. I just turn it off as an extra precaution. >>77433 >urlbar.speculativeconnect Did the name change? Before in Firefox it was user_pref("network.prefetch-next"

>>77445 >network.prefetch-next thats still the right setting to ignore prefetch instructions on a website made with rel="preload" urlbar.speculativeconnect is a different option to disable prefetch while you'e typing urls into the top bar where you always see the address of the page you visit.

>>77335 >I personally believe the government wants to attack imageboards without decent moderation. The gov does not care. It's the investment funds that push ESG, not govs. What the elected presidents do is to go to the WEF where investment funds tell them what they have to do if they want to see investments being done in their countries and what to not do if they don't want to see a massive uninvestment. It is extremely unlikely that three letters are spamming pizzas, but the corpos who went postal when their grip on Twitter went from total to mostly under control? They could. Or it could be one single bored neet. CP spams are old. The good old /b/ always had a thread going on until the feds caught Moot and told him he would either be rapped in jail for 20 years or give a parallel server to the feds. Since then the party van have done its job. >>77375 This is my opinion as well. It's advertisement for either paid porn or a honeypot. Probably both.

>>77543 >It's the investment funds that push ESG, not govs back when wikileaks was hype there was one leak how cia was using embassies to push diversity in foreign countries school systems to get to the kids. Jap prime minister also said "his nato friends repeatedly advised him to promote diversity" as he announced the recent changes.

I run solarchan and we still regularly get the exact same posts described here, despite otherwise being basically dead. The url-shortener links change each time and the IPs come from all over south-east asia, but the format stays consistent. I get the impression it's a real person posting, not a bot. I used to think it was either for profit or a honeypot, until my hosting provider told me they'd had a complaint. The complaint was lodged around one minute after the post and at that time we were getting a couple of posts a week, so it's unlikely anyone had even seen the post yet except the spammer themselves. I think this makes it clear that the intention is to shut down alt-chans. I have my own theories about who and why but that's only speculation; I think we can infer their motivation though.

Would it be reasonable to apply a link whitelist instead? It wouldn't be hard to compile a list of popular sites, and anything else would display as (link hidden) and visible only to staff until the domain gets approved. If the users understood the system in place it shouldn't be an issue, especially as image boards like this move relatively slow enough to not cause major interruption in discourse (imo).

It's possible that the poster is someone that only wants to make money of it, as was discovered by these lains ( >>77374 >>77384 >>77386) who did some investigating. It lead to India and France, and those are countries where this kind of stuff is not as frowned upon as it is in more civilized areas of the world. Perhaps the spammer knew this and uses these countries for this exact reason. The moneymaking-angle is still possible, however seeing as the materials are of a certain mark and, from what I can tell, relatively rare, it's just unlikely for me that it is: these kinds of markets are shrouded in secrecy, untraceablity and of the clearnet for a reason and the reason is to not get arrested. It's possible that the spammer is compromised and just posts it for honeypot reasons and that anyone dumb enough to purchase this stuff gets vanned. Or perhaps the spammer is just very stupid by using these marketing tactics and will get arrested soon (but that seems unlikely because of the 'quality' of the material). The last of the options you put forward is the most probable reason for me: to kill alt-chans. It's a campaign that's been going one for some years now. I was there when 8chan was was killed after the faked shooting by Tarrant. Before the whole Tarrant mess, it was noticeable how the glowies tried to get a foothold. They couldn't because they stood out because of their glowiness, and anyone who was anyone was unphased by the glowies and simply kept continuing posting their great posts. That's the last thing glowies want and so the Tarrant thing happened and 8chan got nuked. Glowies won that battle, because the alternative to 4chan (exodues and all that) was dead. Now they're just moving their operations to all other alt-chans. Although the posted material is deplorable (to say the least), I find myself unmoved by it. There's only frustration over having to clean up this mess from the computer. It does make navigating this chan more venturous as it was before. So the plus-point here is that chans are becoming dangerous again, attracting all sorts of dangerous posters with ideas to thwart a tyrannical government. Other ideas for why we are seeing this: Maybe society is just more depraved as it was 20 years ago, and this spammer is just the retarded consequence of this. Perhaps it's a lower associate of 'The Club" using a handful of the millions of IP addresses that suddenly got released at the beginning of Biden's presidency. This for reason #3: to kill alt-chans. Another reason could be to make the many millions of deranged teenagers interested in this stuff, which makes them viable candidates for 'The Club'. Remember: these kids grew up with 'smartphones' and during the COVID-masking tyranny: some of them are hallmarks of humanity, while others are very weak and prone to be picked up by this. Another conceived idea is that it's a way to van autists in preparation for the 2024 US presidential elections. 'Weaponized autism' is a thing eagerly exploited by the powerbrokers. It's something that was used during the 2016 elections, so perhaps the party that's so very interested in keeping this stuff online is trying to use to gather autists for this goal.

>>77570 I heard for an owner on an altchan are looking into making some sort of URL unshortener. From there one could blacklist the URL it leads to and delete the post. I imagine it is much harder to change file host than url shortner service. If it is succesful they will post the code publicly. Don't wait for his solution, though. He works full time and may take time. It would be better if more people with experience take a jab at it.

>>77595 Social views dont matter even if that were true. It would make more sense if they chose a country that has no relevant laws which there are various but France isnt one of them. Im not sure on India and dont feel like looking it up. >>77570 Bots often posts on same board due to being triggered by certain words and this is what has been observed. So in case it is a bot searching for key words maybe all that is needed is a robots.txt because who runs it might not be skilled enough to make it ignore do not crawl requests or it might not even use it's own crawler. I mean if this isnt already the case. >>77569 Your hosting provider or some other service you use very likely uses a hash checker for any files and runs periodically. Many companies do this these days. These often report directly to the FBI and other agencies even false positives. They are very shady systems that no one gets to check what these things are actually looking for but in many cases they report things not even illegal and can be set up to prevent spread of whistle blower information for example.

>>77615 >Your hosting provider or some other service you use very likely uses a hash checker for any files and runs periodically. You'd expect most imageboards to get shut down almost instantly then, given the volume and frequency and long runtime of this spam.

>>77616 It's not difficult to alter the hash of an image, that looks the same to the human eye.

>>77620 They would use something like SSIM.

>>77620 I assume not every host is that intrusive for one reason or another but i cant be sure.

>>77615 > Your hosting provider or some other service you use very likely uses a hash checker for any files and runs periodically. It's possible, but: 1. The report was filed under a minute from the upload, so it would have to be constant not "periodically"; which IMO coul use an unprofitable level of resources 2. The email from the host said "we have been alerted" - could be an automated system but perhaps sounds more like a tipoff.

>>77705 If it only happened once it could have been coincidence of timing it happened after a minute. Could it also come from a previous report not what was last posted? Just once isnt enough to tell anything.

>>77705 Also possible if it wasnt a hash check system a user could have reported it who wasnt who posted it. Someone not familiar with imageboards. There also is a scary possibility Google's web crawler has a hash checker since I know it's web crawler indexes pages within minutes. Although if that were the case I guess more sites would run into this issue.

>>77709 >>77707 These are possible, but at that time we were getting a few posts a week total, it would have been a mighty coincidence if anyone visited at the same exact time as the pizzaposter and it took them under a minute to find and contact the hosting provider...

>>77707 The odds of someone finding the CP and directly contacting the hosting provider are exactly 0. >Just once isnt enough to tell anything. It happens again and again with many sites. It is most definitely not a coincidence. It is blatantly obvious the aim is to get those websites taken down.

>>77720 >It happens again and again with many sites It doesn't, though. Every imageboard is being spammed with CP now, but not every imageboard is getting calls from their hosting provider. This is the only example I know of.

>>77333 maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarge im confused what r yall talking about DOE

>>77730 I'm conducting this over via https://lainchan.org/q/res/12273.html Just saying that the last time cp2 spam reports happened in a single week and a day, prior to now. >>77709 Not sure about hash checkers if the robots.txt is disallowed for search engine web crawlers like us. >>77720 Get cp2 taken down, not the sites. Also, what is cp2's hosting provider or the links they send? Here's a long list of reported threads containing cp2 spam (which is the codename of the user(s) if any): https://xj9k.neocities.org/posts/cp2/ Here's Uboachan's version of events - not a lot of activity going on but the user decided to close their case: https://uboachan.net/ot/res/24758.html

I also want the 'TAKE ACTION v3' spam to be taken seriously here. They are trying to spread awareness like I am, it's not CP spam and this site rejected xj9k's report list. Get cp2 taken down, not the sites and absolutely not this person.

Jean, before they all get taken down so we have a chance to fight back, what are some of the best chans you consider?

>>77419 hold on, what does that mean? sorry for the naive question, - yes, they engaged in spoofing and a substantial part of their income is built on maintaining a framework of interest in their spoofed shares, but how exactly does market manipulation of metals play into the narrative of us destroying the banks by also investing into metals?

>>78033 It doesn't. The poster you are replying to was fallaciously arguing that anybody opposed to a scammer must not be a scammer.

Perhaps news threads could require proof of work (mkproof?) >https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/mkproof >>77409 Also, another thing. I think that the feds are too ignorant or too indoctrinated to understand that all imageboards don't have the same exact culture. They think that everyone on imagebaord is a neo-nazi. I think the reason why feds larp as nazis (especially angry accelerationists) is that they really are clueless and they think they can fit in more easily on chans that way.

>>78314 > I think that the feds are too ignorant or too indoctrinated to understand that all imageboards don't have the same exact culture Neither does a lot of the people that use them though.

>>78314 the fact they use accelerationist as a catch all for edgy right wing internet troglodytes is proof of of how dangerously brain dead they are.

>>78314 I second this, POW requirement on a new thread would both solve the spam issue and likely increase quality of posting, if you have to wait a minute before starting a new thread. Sometimes I wonder if moving on past the old BBS days where you had to insert a nickle to make a post was a mistake. There should be a small barrier to entry for all things worth doing.

If you look at the Bitcoin wallets given by world-files.com you can see there's never been any activity on them. Whatever operation they're running has achieved nothing for itself.

Election astroturfing all over again. What they did back in 2020 was intentional, they killed a bunch of alt-chans in 2019 we're talking like 5 chans in the span of months not even a year!. Then there was also those fake shootings on news which are generated with imagegen AI (it's archived but I think it got deleted after one anon pointed it out and only few listened and wakarimasen archive was framed and had its plug pulled due to the evidences of fake news astroturfing and state/rogue-sponsored engagement manipulation).

>>77345 >I can also confirm that reCAPTCHA was completely ineffective. took you long enough. there are also stuff/tools that can bypass captcha with "goodboy points" I think this was an addon for webextension and the one out there doesn't work although I can confirm these are what glowies (ab)use. 4chan is all good since they have anti-proxy/vpn/tor blackhole list by default however there's still agents that can abuse recaptcha by hiring third-world captchafarms (aka "solver" jobs, there's a lot of that job hiring on facebook of all places - where I live, mainly used by botters, astroturfers or API bypass, paid by the cent and the dumbs think "it pays out well"), the tool that bypasses captcha (as addon) was originally meant for people with disability and even so recaptcha is mostly ready to just give you the checkmark just after clicking it so it's not effective against csaem spammers, it's just that they probably got a private API for abusing purposes, I'll say even google is probably compromised by some agent to allow this to happen since 4chan had the worst amount of botters and funny when it was practically zeroday botters when the new hcaptcha came around. >Maybe if we can get several imageboard admins together in a sort of working group, we can try to figure something out. I've been thinking of designing(tm) the unkillable meshnet imageboard but I was completely in utter disappointment after WiMax aka "WiFi but at maximum capabilities and metro-scale" was killed by some unknown force. There is WiMax2 but the future is heading towards satellite communication. Elon already is testing about 12MB throughput through satellite on some linux screenshot days ago but it's only used in conjunction with ISPs partnered but when soykaf really hits the fan it's probably just Twitter that's gonna be the final bastion of "alright" free speech and I may be proud to have memed Elon into buying Twitter somewhere in 2018-2019 (after glows went on an imageboard-killing spree) on a schizopost. Thinking about community-curated imageboards, so it's like metaverse but text form, everyone has their personal "for you" content either curated by topic/board of interest or by the curators you "follow" which can include moderator/staff and their filters (e.g, filters can now be shared to help automate content shaping and avoidance, also with the dawn of AI it's possible to just filter images but that's kinda long shot). I miss when internet was "country-neutral" now they are extending dumb politics all over the internet, stuff like posting 2d loli images with lewdity can get your twitter derezzed just because you're from a certain country but then it's still legal to watch MahoAko where I live since it came from a corporate streaming site? Why the data discrimination? We need to bring back true NetNeutrality. It's no longer a battle between "cable company censorship" it's basically just bigtech that is benefiting from all the killings of small content creators and independent platforms like imageboards, but also it helps them achieve their goals be it political manipulation or otherwise, it's in the ads. Ads are evil. Adblock is Justice. Google is killing adblockers and the spiritual internet along it (they're even putting non G-advertised websites down search results since it doesn't benefit them).>>77345

>>78314 >>78325 To be honest, it's contrary to what many people believe on spaces like these, but some of this is part of the reason why I am not concerned about glowniggers to the same extent I am about random autists on the internet. The former have shown themself as virtually incompetent in many instances. They're also a bunch of midwits. Also, I've seen random reddit/4chan autists be able to find soykaf that the feds can't They are also far more dedicated in a personal manner. See: Chris Chan. Again, because I am unconcerned with them, it does not mean that I am not cautious.

take this with a grain of salt because this happened perhaps a decade ago on a now defunct imageboard: the owner was able to fully stop automated cp spam by adding randomly generated hidden fields to the post form. when a post came in that did not have the correct hidden field values, the post request would return a successful thread message, but not post the thread. That was good enough to stop the bot spam at the time and the spammers never realized the threads weren't posted. It happened a long time ago, so it's very unlikely that the same spammers are responsible and very unlikely that their bot is the same, but the place to start would be an imageboard operator checking their logs to see how the spammers are posting. Are they actually navigating to the page through a browser automation tool? Are they sending the post request directly? If they are doing the latter, then this approach may still work. i think the fed conspiracy is just paranoia. a lot of the chans affected, including lainchan, aren't chans that feds would care about. it's most likely a person or group who wants to drive traffic to their site and sees imageboards as easy targets for spam. they probably have a bot that google dorks for vichan sites and indiscriminately spams the results >>77569 Your case is an odd one out since solarchan is not based on vichan. Either the spammers updated their bot to target solarchan, they're manually spamming, or it's a different person or group. I think the latter is most likely since nobody else has mentioned an immediate report to the host, so it sounds like your case is one where someone with a grudge against solarchan tried to take it down. Imageboards are unfortunately notorious for attracting antisocial trolls that do stuff like that. >>78314 >Perhaps news threads could require proof of work (mkproof?) it probably wouldn't make an impact since the spammers only post one thread per imageboard. there's not a lot of imageboards, so even if every imageboard had a computational intense proof of work required, it's not going to be very costly to the spammers especially if >>77333 is correct and the spammers are using a botnet

as of right now there are two cp threads on this site and one on uboa. fuarrrk me.

>>78429 Everyone considering this to be a solely for-profit endeavor must remember that the person(s) responsible have not made any money. This has been going on for months now and the people haven't made any profit from spamming cp. Notably, all of the filehosting websites they use to hold the videos have similar UIs, those are being run in some way by the people posting the cp or the people running them are in on it. They're paying money for hosting, I discovered one of their hosts, and now they use Cloudflare to try and hide them. They don't even charge much money for the videos to begin with, never more than 50 dollars. Why the fuarrrk are they still trying? Realistically as a criminal, would you spam CP en masse (a very serious crime potentially carrying the chance of years in prison atop fines which you'd be well aware of) in order to earn a couple dollars, and despite never getting any money whatsoever, continue doing so for months on end. This was going on long before the thread was made, probably almost a off and on for a year now. The risk-to-reward ratio here is all fuarrrked up, they're so deep in the danger zone right now, and haven't made a cent yet. Who would do all this for 45 usd. I'm beginning to feel more that it could be some kind of conspiracy going on, maybe not government, I don't know for sure yet. It could be some asshole in a country immune to extradition doing this, if not, it appears likely a conspiracy to me, because there's no way the guy(s) responsible can not get caught in the near future.

>>78534 >Realistically as a criminal, would you spam CP en masse It is a fact that FBI posts more CP online than any other source. Allogedly this practice is for entrapping criminals, but we all know how they compromise assets. IMO, its probably a COINTEL OP. Poisoning The Well should be a known tactic of disinformationists. See also crypome's gentleperson's guide to forum spies. I once read up on pentagon's online S|-|iII operations, deployed to astroturf for Shell Oil... There was some BS rationalle due to concern over upcomming "energy crisis". If they'll do crud like that they'll do anything. Online Activities of govs is a wild-west anything-goes cluster-fnck. If they don't spend all their budget then it gets reduced, so the targets of COINTEL have gotten silly and small fry are treated as big fish. See also FBI entrapping literally mental ill kids in terrorist plots so they can claim to be fighting the war on terror. TLDR: you are not paranoid. They are out to get/manipulate counter cultures, esp. Anti-authoritorians who can hack and use tech securely.