Is it acceptable to base research on criminal activity?
> The transparency group DDoSecrets says it will make the 70GB of passwords, private posts, and more available to researchers, journalists, and social scientists.
This is just garden variety cyber theft.
The people who did this are garden variety cyber criminals who I hope the FBI will pursue for their felonious acts.
I think the research community is obligated to turn down the help of criminals like this — what they’ve done is no different than me stealing your text messages and calling it “psychology” research or have someone raid all the medicine cabinets in a neighborhood and calling it “pharmacology” research.
Disgusting and any academic who uses this data should have their career ended immediately.
Ironic that these far-left "death to amerikkka" hackers are ensuring Twitter retains its de facto monopoly in the microblogging sphere and making its US billionaires even richer.
Venn-diagram of these hacker types and intelligence informants is a full circle. Offline left mostly does well to avoid these freaks if they ever show up IRL.
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Assuming that's who did it or if they're even from the US. It could just be a red herring. Hell it could have been a pissed off Gab admin for all we know.
> Interesting to see how in the past two decades, activist hackers have swung from far-right to far-left.
Never been true.
I wish this was the Mandela Effect but it's just garden variety propaganda telling people the far-right are taking over and literally changing their memories. ie Anonymous was far bigger than GNAA and GNAA wasn't far-right.
I wonder if the SQL injection was present in Mastodon?
Super paranoid question - I wonder if one of the Mastodon coders poisoned the Mastodon source code in the hopes that Gab would pull and merge the changes?
>Super paranoid question - I wonder if one of the Mastodon coders poisoned the Mastodon source code in the hopes that Gab would pull and merge the changes?
I highly doubt that. It's a fairly large open-source software project, slipping a backdoor into the codebase via a patch wouldn't go unnoticed. The Wikipedia article you linked to states Gab uses a fork of Mastodon. I would lean towards this being a bug introduced in Gab's fork or a patched bug in Mastodon not ported to their fork, assuming that was even the attack vector. The data could just have been exfiltrated directly via their hosting infrastructure and not related to Mastodon at all.
"Instead of a very understandable, rational explanation, what about this conspiracy theory I came up with? What if you know? Think about it. Do your own research".
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[ 7.2 ms ] story [ 37.1 ms ] thread> The transparency group DDoSecrets says it will make the 70GB of passwords, private posts, and more available to researchers, journalists, and social scientists.
This is just garden variety cyber theft.
The people who did this are garden variety cyber criminals who I hope the FBI will pursue for their felonious acts.
I think the research community is obligated to turn down the help of criminals like this — what they’ve done is no different than me stealing your text messages and calling it “psychology” research or have someone raid all the medicine cabinets in a neighborhood and calling it “pharmacology” research.
Disgusting and any academic who uses this data should have their career ended immediately.
Anyone remember the GNAA, Goatse Security, weev et. al? Now it's the polar opposite.
Never been true.
I wish this was the Mandela Effect but it's just garden variety propaganda telling people the far-right are taking over and literally changing their memories. ie Anonymous was far bigger than GNAA and GNAA wasn't far-right.
I wonder if the SQL injection was present in Mastodon?
Super paranoid question - I wonder if one of the Mastodon coders poisoned the Mastodon source code in the hopes that Gab would pull and merge the changes?
I highly doubt that. It's a fairly large open-source software project, slipping a backdoor into the codebase via a patch wouldn't go unnoticed. The Wikipedia article you linked to states Gab uses a fork of Mastodon. I would lean towards this being a bug introduced in Gab's fork or a patched bug in Mastodon not ported to their fork, assuming that was even the attack vector. The data could just have been exfiltrated directly via their hosting infrastructure and not related to Mastodon at all.