Author Topic: ED = finally dead?  (Read 5997 times)

Jim Demintia

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Re: ED = finally dead?
« Reply #20 on: April 19, 2011, 05:48:52 pm »
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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Re: ED = finally dead?
« Reply #21 on: April 27, 2011, 04:16:07 pm »
R.I.P Encyclopedia Dramatica.
Nothing personal, just bussiness.

Jim Demintia

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Re: ED = finally dead?
« Reply #22 on: April 27, 2011, 05:37:21 pm »
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", 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 under the moniker "josephevers", which is (was) the name of the fictitious owner of ED. It's most recent post 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. "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 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:

Quote
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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Jim Demintia

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Re: ED = finally dead?
« Reply #23 on: May 07, 2011, 01:05:37 pm »
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. 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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Re: ED = finally dead?
« Reply #24 on: July 20, 2011, 11:15:52 pm »
Doesn't look like they're quite through yet..

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Re: ED = finally dead?
« Reply #25 on: July 21, 2011, 12:05:25 am »
Donating to ED is like taking a shit on the internet.

Conan

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Re: ED = finally dead?
« Reply #26 on: July 21, 2011, 02:13:04 am »
Doesn't look like they're quite through yet..

http://encyclopediadramatica.ch

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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
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Wonder what "hardware" they bought...

Jim Demintia

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Re: ED = finally dead?
« Reply #27 on: July 21, 2011, 03:30:00 pm »
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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GreenReaper

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Re: ED = finally dead?
« Reply #28 on: July 21, 2011, 05:03:39 pm »
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 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 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 when you're delegating DNS records to them (can you say "functionally dependent"? Or "willful blindness", for that matter.)

Jim Demintia

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Re: ED = finally dead?
« Reply #29 on: July 21, 2011, 05:39:29 pm »
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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Re: ED = finally dead?
« Reply #30 on: July 21, 2011, 07:46:08 pm »
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 (historical view). I suspect growth will be limited from this point on, though. Worldwide traffic is increasing slowly enough 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. ;-)

Quote
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 greatly over time. Throw 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 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.

Jim Demintia

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Re: ED = finally dead?
« Reply #31 on: July 23, 2011, 08:51:50 am »
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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Re: ED = finally dead?
« Reply #32 on: July 23, 2011, 10:39:53 pm »
Quote from: Jim Demintia on April 18, 2011, 04:39:18 pm

Quote
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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Jim Demintia

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Re: ED = finally dead?
« Reply #33 on: July 24, 2011, 02:59:33 pm »
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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Re: ED = finally dead?
« Reply #34 on: July 24, 2011, 09:25:19 pm »
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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Re: ED = finally dead?
« Reply #35 on: November 03, 2013, 10:59:49 pm »
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.

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Re: ED = finally dead?
« Reply #36 on: November 04, 2013, 12:03:43 am »
From where I'm standing, ED died sometime between the Dennis Fetcho voicemails and 2004. /b/ took over and I quit caring.
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