Vivisector
Public Discourse => Non Topics => Topic started by: Jim Demintia on April 11, 2011, 04:55:58 pm
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Looks like Encyclopedia Dramatica is finally dead.
Hey everyone,
We have some things that we need to take care of, but we will be back soon. While you are waiting, please check out our new blog and join our mail list.
Thank you for your fealty,
ED
I really doubt they'll be back. I believe the only reason the site was kept online as long as it was was because it probably had pretty good Google rankings which allowed for some advertising revenue to be extracted from it. If the owner(s) can't extract that revenue stream anymore, there'll be little motivation to bring it back.
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I dunno. If they weren't going to come back, I assume they would come out and say so.
OTOH they haven't been funny, useful, or relevant for the greater part of the past 4 years. Maybe it's time, y'know?
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Well, their Twitter says it's just new servers being deployed "over the next 12 hours" but weirdly almost this exact same thing happened back in January. ED went down, Gawker reported on it citing rumours that it was going to be shut down, then it came back up. Very odd that this should happen again. It's been twelve hours since that Twitter post (account ED_Official, sorry on the phone right now) and all the messages since then are trying to promote a site called "Oh Internet" which is also linked to from the ED message.
I dunno; it's gotta be hideously burdensome to run a site like ED. We all laugh off "internet lawsuits" but ED pissed off so many different people at the very least the threat of litigation or complaints to the ISP must have been a headache. The ad revenue probably made it worth it for a while; but I gather earlier this year several prominent pages were wiped to make the site more hospitable to advertisers. May have been the math just didn't work anymore.
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I gather earlier this year several prominent pages were wiped to make the site more hospitable to advertisers.
I know for a fact that the article on noted nutjob Betawolf was deleted; I believe Jessica Elwood's was, too.
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I don't really want to veer into speculation territory but I believe that a lot of furry articles were deleted as a part of a "clean up" drive. What I'm talking about is stuff like the pages on Jews and, well, black people...stuff that's mainstream offensive and likely to drive away advertisers. Also, there was that human rights complaint in Australia that got some Internet news coverage. Stuff that was sort of borderline unfunny and probably written by actual, non-ironic racists but was kept under the banner of "nothing is holy".
I began noticing they had a bot doing find/replaces on certain words...a certain offensive word for black person, and others around the beginning of the year. I started digging around and lots of people were complaining about it...but there seemed to be certain admins who were aware of what was going on but had little to say about it other than "this is the way it is, deal with it". It really screwed up the flow of some articles too, and sometimes people who cared about the article fixed it, other times, no. It was at that point I began to wonder if ED may not be on it's way out.
I really think it's probably too much of a burden on whoever owns it, for too little reward. I'm not saying they're not planning to come back, they may be. I'd honestly not be surprised if this was the end of ED, is all.
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If you're a clever person you can find the ED forums are still up (http://208.99.87.140/) however they seem to have been spammed with this "Oh Internet" thing prior to the subdomain being redirected.
Interestingly enough, their images.encyclopediadramatica.net subdomain is still active and still serving content. It's also hosted on a completely separate server.
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While you could never quite trust the content of any ED article on furries - except where screenshots were involved - if someone ended up with an article there, it was usually a damn good indicator of specific people in the fandom to stay away from. I'll miss that - but not anything else.
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Well, there's this (http://twitter.com/ED_Official/status/58248909654470656):
Update on downtime. Move and new installs done by Friday morning. Hang in there. Check the blog blog.ohinternet... & follow @O_Internet
I suppose it's still possible that they're going to come back...all of this "odd" stuff could be just stuff...who knows. It's just an exceedingly odd way to handle a server move and upgrade.
Guess we'll have a better idea Friday.
While you could never quite trust the content of any ED article on furries - except where screenshots were involved - if someone ended up with an article there, it was usually a damn good indicator of specific people in the fandom to stay away from. I'll miss that - but not anything else.
While it is true that people you should stay away from often had ED articles, it was not always true that people with ED articles were worthy of staying away from. There were/are a lot of furs, and just people too, who end up with ED articles simply because they got involved in drama somewhere where there were people with too much time and an ED account.
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Well, there's this (http://twitter.com/ED_Official/status/58248909654470656):
Update on downtime. Move and new installs done by Friday morning. Hang in there. Check the blog blog.ohinternet... & follow @O_Internet
I suppose it's still possible that they're going to come back...all of this "odd" stuff could be just stuff...who knows. It's just an exceedingly odd way to handle a server move and upgrade.
After seeing the ongoing trainwreck known as "Fur Affinity", nothing about this ED thing looks odd at all.
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The redirect has changed...and now any encyclopediadramatica.com link redirects to "ohinternet.com", which appears to be a wiki...in fact one quite a bit like ED, but one that is "SFW" according to the "Oh Internet 101" page.
The redirect appears semi-intelligent—type in a URL to an ED article and in some cases it tries to bring up an Ohinternet.com article with the same name.
No it only does that for history pages (i.e. "title=foo&action=history" MediaWiki URLs)
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Well it was supposed to be back by "Friday morning", and that's come and gone.
Anonymous is planning a DDoS (http://anonnews.org/?p=press&a=item&i=820).
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The way this was handled only serves to re-inforce my idea that this is about money, or specifically, ad revenue. That redirect probably aims to preserve the encyclopediadramatica.com domain's PageRank while serving content from a far more advertiser-friendly site. If the content of the old ED were hosted anywhere, slowly this new site would lose it's popularity to the "new ED", thus thwarting such a scheme.
People are greedy S.O.B's, and while this was a shitty move, you have to remember that you weren't exactly dealing with honest and forthright folks at ED. I really doubt there's any significant archival out there--in fact, now that I think about it--the excuse of downtime could have been a way to allow the Google cache to expire without anyone suspecting something was up--so this is probably, in fact, the end of ED.
The lawsuit threat is laughable, though, and I'd almost have to think made in bad faith. Suing someone for copyright violation on the content of ED is almost inherently a joke. That site's stock in trade was copyright violation, and all any lawyer has to do is point out that the owners don't actually have clear copyright ownership of the majority of the site's content--then the options become give up or pay lots of lawyers lots of money to sift through various Goatse photoshops and screen captures of /b/ to determine ownership of all of it.
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Wait, Anon is planning to DDOS them? Granted, ED was at its most useful as an archive of chan memes and Anon goings-on but that seems like a bit much.
Haha just kidding that's hilarious.
Also ED at least had better quality control than Urbandictionary or its ilk. Which, I realize, isn't saying much, but still.
Also thanks to this thread we're getting absolute shit tons of referral hits from The Goog. Apparently there are an awful lot of people who really want to know what's going on over there.
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Wait, Anon is planning to DDOS them? Granted, ED was at its most useful as an archive of chan memes and Anon goings-on but that seems like a bit much.
Haha just kidding that's hilarious.
Also ED at least had better quality control than Urbandictionary or its ilk. Which, I realize, isn't saying much, but still.
Also thanks to this thread we're getting absolute shit tons of referral hits from The Goog. Apparently there are an awful lot of people who really want to know what's going on over there.
There was a DDoS going on for a while, but then it was announced that a group of researchers had scraped ED back in February (http://www.webecologyproject.org/2011/04/archiving-internet-subculture-encyclopedia-dramatica/) and had an archive of 9401 pages complete with wiki markup.
Which means it's back (for now) (http://encyclopediadramatica.ch).
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Wait, Anon is planning to DDOS them? Granted, ED was at its most useful as an archive of chan memes and Anon goings-on but that seems like a bit much.
Haha just kidding that's hilarious.
Also ED at least had better quality control than Urbandictionary or its ilk. Which, I realize, isn't saying much, but still.
Also thanks to this thread we're getting absolute shit tons of referral hits from The Goog. Apparently there are an awful lot of people who really want to know what's going on over there.
There was a DDoS going on for a while, but then it was announced that a group of researchers had scraped ED back in February (http://www.webecologyproject.org/2011/04/archiving-internet-subculture-encyclopedia-dramatica/) and had an archive of 9401 pages complete with wiki markup.
Which means it's back (for now) (http://encyclopediadramatica.ch).
Let's see if ED's original founders do go through with that lawsuit threat when they see this.
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On the OH Internet talk pages, they are claiming that: a) they did this because they couldn't control the quality of ED articles the way they wanted to, and b) that it isn't a clone of Know Your Meme, as many people are saying.
I can buy (a), even though it really doesn't refute anything anyone is saying (it can be true along with any and all of the other stuff), but (b) is bullshit. They tried this a while ago with a site called WhatPort80, which was spammed onto ED pages as a "SFW" and "you can show your friends" version of ED articles. That obviously went nowhere, but the founders clearly see the profit potential in such a thing, so they decided to take away ED, since that was getting in the way of people caring about their new site.
It's obviously intended to reach a far wider, and more advertiser-appealing, audience. Whatever else it may be is probably not relevant.
Anyway, the Internet news sites are starting to pick up on this here and there. Particularly delicious is this (http://www.geekosystem.com/encyclopedia-dramatica-ohinternet/) quote from Sherrod DeGrippo, who owns Oh Internet and owned ED:
"OhInternet considers the entire internet worthy of documenting, which includes mobile apps, startup execs, programmers, subcultures, events and yes, memes too. The users make the decisions on that, not shareholders or a board of directors. OhInternet is something I take very personally. We don’t have paid staff or writers or any employees, we DIY everything and I’m in there every single day, creating content myself and am available on our IRC network.”
I'm willing to bet they were not counting on those researchers, though. That may very well throw a serious kink into their attempts to remove ED as a competitor in terms of Google PageRank.
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OhInternet is offline after being hacked. All of Sherrod's passwords were posted to her personal website and the entire user table from the ED forums has been leaked.
Another "you shouldn't mess with Anonymous" moment, I guess.
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The new ED is "meh". I looked at it today, or the parts that would have changed anyway (such as the ED article itself), and to the extent anyone had a valid complaint about the quality of articles beforehand it seems to be just as much if not more of a problem now.
I think it's pretty clear from any cursory research...especially now that everyone's gone and dug up info on Sherrod DeGrippo (info that was out there but not real visible), that DeGrippo is a shitty businessperson and one of those "serial LLC" types. OHi will not last long. That the stunt with ED was required to make anyone even notice it kind of gives you an idea of how bereft they are of ideas in an already-crowded genre.
We don't really know all that much about the owners of the new ED. So what will become of that is an open question, especially since as far as I can tell they are running no ads whatsoever, nor are they asking for donations beyond helping to rebuild the wiki. I believe I saw somewhere that they'd been served with a DMCA, but if their hosting is foreign, it's likely they have an ISP who will ignore such things. It was still up this afternoon.
I think if anything, the observant person should have learned something from this, if they didn't know it already. That "Anonymous" is as human as anything else, and as such there are people looking to take advantage, profiteer, scam, and screw over just about anyone they can for personal gain. The characters involved with ED were actual criminals, in some cases. Seems like people have this idea that on the Internet, people have a different set of motivations for stuff than they do offline. They don't. Remember that.
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And on that note I'd like to inform our audience that Vivisector is switching to a subscription-based service for all users effective immedia...oh wait no that's a fucking stupid idea. Welp, chalk up yet another popular website that we're 'better than' :3
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I believe I saw somewhere that they'd been served with a DMCA, but if their hosting is foreign, it's likely they have an ISP who will ignore such things. It was still up this afternoon.
http://encyclopediadramatica.ch/Encyclopedia_Dramatica:Hall_of_Lawfags
Apparently Sherrod has sent multiple DMCAs to remove photographs of her along with some of the information on her page.
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I believe I saw somewhere that they'd been served with a DMCA, but if their hosting is foreign, it's likely they have an ISP who will ignore such things. It was still up this afternoon.
http://encyclopediadramatica.ch/Encyclopedia_Dramatica:Hall_of_Lawfags
Apparently Sherrod has sent multiple DMCAs to remove photographs of her along with some of the information on her page.
There are a couple of blogs you will come across as links in some of the "dox drops" that are out there. Their sources for their posts tend to be webcitation.org links. She has also DMCA'd those. In fact, when you start digging, you will see that Ms. DeGrippo quite likes to DMCA stuff.
I would say that this behavior is exactly the kind that ED would always ridicule, but everyone knows that irony is dead on the Internet.
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R.I.P Encyclopedia Dramatica.
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I'll use that as an excuse to provide a few more updates that have come up since the last post.
There are, or were, a few blogs that were dedicated to "intelligence" (to use the term loosely) about ED and its activities. The difference between these and the usual machinations of those targeted by ED was that they provided what seemed to be reliable, sourced facts about ED and it's users, or more accurately, DeGrippo and her admins. One blog, "Criminal Intelligence (http://crimint.wordpress.com/)", is written by a fellow named Nicholas Castor who seems to have his own fun little basket of issues, but nonetheless had substantive posts about DeGrippo and ED. When this whole thing hit he took down all the posts and in their stead posted some potshots at people looking for "dox" on ED and seemed to do a little victory dance.
More interesting at this point is a blogspot (http://josephevers.blogspot.com/) under the moniker "josephevers", which is (was) the name of the fictitious owner of ED. It's most recent post (http://josephevers.blogspot.com/2011/04/contact-information-for.html) said that the "new" ED is hosted by a Dutch teenager (based on whois info). That post has since been updated to include the address of a separate individual in the UK who claims to own the site. The Dutch teenager is now said to own only the domain. The "new" ED is working off of the wiki markup provided by the Web Ecology Project (see below). The domain is Swiss (.ch) but I gather the hosting is still U.S. They are collecting DMCAs and posting them, Pirate Bay style, but so far it seems that they have been able to stay in business without any noticeable downtime. Not sure how long that will last though.
A Google search for the kid's name reveals him to be a "web developer" who has a few abandoned/failed projects behind him, notably a "non profit" social network (?). ED.ch is asking for donations via Google Checkout, or more sketchily, an outfit called BitCoin that bills itself as a "P2P currency".
So we have these sort of dealings plus the PSN hacking as the activities of the new "Anonymous". Say what you will about Anonymous, but it's pretty clear from recent events that they're now far shadier than teenage anime fans with too much time and an Internet connection.
Update: So instead of wondering about the Web Ecology project as I posted originally, I looked at their Contact Page (http://www.webecologyproject.org/contact/). "Web Ecology Project" seems to suggest a university research initiative of some kind, however if they are associated with any kind of institution of higher learning, they are not advertising it. Rather, visitors to the page above are given an e-mail address for press inquiries as well as "business/consulting [inquiries]". Additionally, a contact phone number for their CEO is given. So whatever the story is behind this, and it's surely tangential to the whole ED saga, it's fairly clear that their use of term "researchers" is a bit loose here and there seems to be an attempt at, shall we say, perception management here.
Update 2: This just keeps getting better. Looking through their people page (http://www.webecologyproject.org/people/) is interesting. I note they go out of their way to mention academic credentials of the people involved, but no one in the group has an actual CS degree. Several B.As in English and History, and this guy:
Tim Hwang is the Director of the Web Ecology Project and an analyst with The Barbarian Group — where he works on issues of group dynamics and web influence. He is interested in building a science around measuring the system-wide flows of content and patterns of community formation online. He is also the founder of ROFLCon, a series of conferences celebrating and examining internet culture and celebrity. He currently Twitters @timhwang, blogs at BrosephStalin, and is in the process of watching every homemade flamethrower video on YouTube.
I also recognize at this point this post is waaaay out of our usual, uh, scope of coverage so I think I'll stop now.
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This afternoon ED.ch is returning what looks like a bad gateway error from Cloudflare, meaning their servers are offline.
But enough on this already. To close this thread out, since it is not on topic for this forum- if you are interested in what is going on with and the people connected to ED.ch, check out the Joseph Evers blogspot (http://josephevers.blogspot.com/). This person is doing a far better job of tracking the movements of this skeevy band of characters than I care to do.
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Doesn't look like they're quite through yet..
http://encyclopediadramatica.ch (http://encyclopediadramatica.ch)
WE DID IT GUYS! Donations were a HUGE success!
Thanks you your donations we are in the process of buying our own hardware to run the wiki off of! :D In the meantime, the forums are still up, feel free to register and chat around.
Hop on IRC if you want to talk to us
For updates, follow us on twitter and like us on facebook.
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Donating to ED is like taking a shit on the internet.
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Doesn't look like they're quite through yet..
http://encyclopediadramatica.ch (http://encyclopediadramatica.ch)
WE DID IT GUYS! Donations were a HUGE success!
Thanks you your donations we are in the process of buying our own hardware to run the wiki off of! :D In the meantime, the forums are still up, feel free to register and chat around.
Hop on IRC if you want to talk to us
For updates, follow us on twitter and like us on facebook.
Wonder what "hardware" they bought...
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Okay, so here's basically what's happened, mostly according to the josephevers blogspot:
As you've probably seen in the news, the person mostly responsible for the "new" ED.ch, Ryan Cleary, was arrested in the UK some time ago. He was released on bail but is required to stay away from the Internet, a pretty common condition of bail in these circumstances. So that effectively left the rest of the ED.ch crowd (mostly spurned admins who weren't offered a "job" creating free content for Girlvinyl) up shit creek without a paddle. The servers went on for a while, with some admins implausibly claiming that this wouldn't affect anything, until their hosting provider was "doxed" by the josephevers blog. Ryan Cleary originally set up ED.ch to use a service called Cloudflare, essentially a mass-scale reverse proxy. The selling point is caching, but obviously this has the nice side effect of hiding your hosting provider's IP in the DNS records. Apparently, Cloudfare stayed mum for a while but has given up trying to protect them, probably because they're not paying customers. So once the hosting provider was revealed, DMCAs were sent (on Twitter, the ED.ch guys were claiming Girlvinyl sent them, but it could have just as easily been any number of people who don't want to see them succeed.), and they were dropped quickly. This happened almost exactly in the same way once again with another hosting provider, at which point they went "down" and began accepting donations. They apparently bought hardware with these donations, which is questionable, since the idea would be to get them non-U.S. hosting that would not pay attention to DMCA notices.
It seems unlikely to me that anyone's gonna want to mess with this for the same reasons Girlvinyl dropped it- it's just too much of a pain in the ass to be involved with it. Especially since this blogspot has continued, after taking down ED.com partially with the same tactics, to "dox" ED sysops and currently they have the full legal names, residences, and DOBs of a few prominent ED.ch sysops at the top of their front page. That tends to take the fun out of running a site like Encyclopedia Dramatica real fast, and while I don't think that the "site" - any MediaWiki fed the ED.com DB dump that's out there - will be completely offline for some time, it's probably going to get passed around like a hot potato at least in the short term.
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Just about anyone could try to host ED. Whether the site would perform well once people found it is another matter. MediaWiki is not trivial to configure, nor is it "cheap" in CPU terms. Just throwing hardware at it is not a good solution. Things can be cached - even the pages - but you need to know what you're doing, and that takes time.
Even if someone else gets up and running with CloudFlare, it's not ideal for a site that changes on an hour-by-hour basis. I've taken a look - they lack per-request invalidation, so you end up with a bunch of stale pages unless you force them not to be cached (which rather defeats the purpose). More mature distributed caches impose a per-invalidation charge (http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/#pricing) for that service (which you'd have to hook up to MediaWiki), and wiki edits will eat that up quickly. I guess you'd still save on image hits and bandwidth, though.
On a tangential note, I predict CloudFlare will get their ass sued for contributory trademark and/or copyright infringement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_liability) within the next six months. Their attitude is basically "don't look at us, we're just a cache", which is sadly not how the law works (http://www.secondarytrademarkinfringement.com/?p=91) when you're delegating DNS records to them (can you say "functionally dependent"? Or "willful blindness", for that matter.)
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Yeah, I'll bet the WMF has a nice big hardware bill and a highly optimized installation of LAMP. Of course, most people would take that as a hint that PHP is fucking garbage (much as Twitter did with Ruby on Rails when they moved to Scala), but whatever.
If CloudFlare is just a cache they probably fall under safe harbor. But it's pretty clear they're not and they're trying to sell this service to people who don't want their ISPs harrassed for the shady shit they're doing. I'm sure lots of parties would like to sue them, and I'm sure that when that happens all kinds of fun stuff will come out in discovery that will basically force them into settlement.
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Yeah, I'll bet the WMF has a nice big hardware bill and a highly optimized installation of LAMP.
Pretty much - they essentially split by task and shard databases (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Wikimedia-servers-2010-12-28.svg) (historical view (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Server_layout_diagrams)). I suspect growth will be limited from this point on, though. Worldwide traffic is increasing slowly enough (http://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/) that software upgrades plus replacement might suffice for the foreseeable future. Heck, if they switched from Squid to Varnish they could probably junk a bunch of their font-end servers. ;-)
Of course, most people would take that as a hint that PHP is fucking garbage (much as Twitter did with Ruby on Rails when they moved to Scala), but whatever.
PHP performance has improved (http://www.flickr.com/photos/sebastian_bergmann/2247691153/) greatly (http://www.flickr.com/photos/sebastian_bergmann/2248521180/) over time. Throw APC (http://pecl.php.net/package/APC) into the mix and you're good (I understand it's going to be default for 6.x). Stuff like the MySQL native driver (http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/php-mysqlnd/) helps as well.
Can things still get slow? Sure. Especially if you get something wrong, or have script kiddies trying to DDoS the site every couple of days. I doubt rewriting MW in C++ would give you much.
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I was thinking something with a bit more of a proven track record like something based on the JVM, but whatever.
Anyway, ED.ch is back up under presumably new, non-US hosting and their "Article of the Now" is classic Wikipedia boogeyman Daniel Brandt. Perhaps not particularly interesting except for the fact that the article now claims that he is behind the doxing of both ED.com and ED.ch figures through the josephevers blog. Of course, as is par for the course with ED articles there's no real proof, and it's complete with questionable claims that the photographs are wrong- but I guess if anyone could pull shit like this off it'd be Brandt, seeing as he has both a proven capability to do this and a history of doing it- going back to doxing Wikipedia administrators he didn't like five years ago when trying to get his article deleted.
Seems like ED and the Anonymous scene at large has largely turned into small-time scam artists and crooks screwing each other over. Great time to unplug your cable modem and enjoy the real world.
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Quote from: Jim Demintia on April 18, 2011, 04:39:18 pm
Anyway, ED.ch is back up under presumably new, non-US hosting and their "Article of the Now" is classic Wikipedia boogeyman Daniel Brandt. Perhaps not particularly interesting except for the fact that the article now claims that he is behind the doxing of both ED.com and ED.ch figures through the josephevers blog. Of course, as is par for the course with ED articles there's no real proof, and it's complete with questionable claims that the photographs are wrong- but I guess if anyone could pull shit like this off it'd be Brandt, seeing as he has both a proven capability to do this and a history of doing it- going back to doxing Wikipedia administrators he didn't like five years ago when trying to get his article deleted.
It's too bad about Brandt. He'd have been better off just quitting out after creating NameBase
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And now the article has been deleted from ED.ch, and salted to prevent re-creation. This was done by one of the admins doxed at the top of the josephevers blog, which has not been updated in quite some time.
Whatever the story is with this, I'm sure something will surface somewhere soon. No matter what it is, it seems pretty clear their plan for immunity from their critics and targets isn't exactly working as they'd hoped.
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Huh, removed "due to complaint" well that was sure quick. Maybe they aren't planning on relying on CloudFlare for protection, doesn't seem like much point in using it then..
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I don't mean to necro here, but it seems ED is quite alive, at least that is what it looks like with what their Twitter is Tweeting (https://twitter.com/ED_Updates).
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From where I'm standing, ED died sometime between the Dennis Fetcho voicemails and 2004. /b/ took over and I quit caring.