4Chan was hacked and has been down for 4 days
pcworld.com>According to BleepingComputer, the attack was made possible by 4chan’s extremely outdated version of PHP from 2016
Interesting, you would think the 4chan people would know better. My guess they are gone for good, not that is a huge loss.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43698267 Says it was a validation bug that let poscript files be processed by Ghostscript assuming they were PDFs.
> you would think the 4chan people would know better
I would, in fact, not.
no shortage of other *chans to take its place. from what i've heard it was mostly spam and porn at this point anyways. as the replicant said at the end of the movie "time to die"
Uncensored speech scares you like that, huh?
Uncensored speech didn't scare me 25 years ago. It does now. Maybe it's old age that changed my mind; maybe it's living in a dystopia.
I was on your level 10 years ago. It has become obvious recently that humanity cannot handle it.
Now, I need very good evidence that it's a good idea before I support the kind of free speech that destroys civilized society from within.
Perhaps it's supremely ironic that americans will have actual need for anonymity in online spaces now. And not for posting dumb memes, but for doing the things to tyrants that their Founding Fathers kept talking about.
What a mature response that invites further discussion.
> Be me
> Run Image Board
> Never update dependencies
> Get pwned by a 12yo exploit
> Jannies use real name gmail adresses
> Board down for days
Oh the lack of humanity
Aside from 4Chan offshoots, I wonder if the "green text" format of posting messages is used anywhere else.
Afaik only in reference to green texts, i.e. /r/greentexts
That's strange to me. It's a pretty unique and interesting way of posting messages. You would think it would have been adopted by one of the many other platforms out there.
Maybe 4chan's just got too much bad juju. I've also always seen pushback for ">greenposting when the text isn't even green..."
I admit, it is a unique posting style which invites linguistic inquiry, but there is something awkward about seeing it used outside of its home.
I assume they're rewriting the site from scratch since their source was leaked. A common entry level /g/wdg/ exercise is to write your own 4chan clone, so perhaps they could just find an open source option available
They said it depended on whether or not the janitors stuck around.
They're incapable of moderating the site because they're afraid they'll recruit moderators who abuse their power? This is true of literally any community and you can audit mod logs or remove the ability to delete entire threads (just posts). It seems like their technical issues are turning into community management issues
They have a legal obligation to moderate content that is against US law and probably against their own rules if they want to keep Section 230 protections. And everyone knows they have a problem with very frequent rule-breaking posts and large bots posting such content.
If there's not enough trustworthy janitors right from the start, it's increasingly likely they could get in trouble too quickly. I think that's what they're worried about.
"Comprehensive legal action", sure. They need to find the offenders first.
If I was a janitor I would seek legal action, but against the site owners. Not updating their website (that every script kiddie this century would love to hack) for 13 years is clearly a gross negligence.
> clearly a gross negligence
If we can't prove this for billion dollar corporations that leak nationwide user data, I don't see how a judge will find 4chan grossly negligent.
Typically you need to show a "conscious and deliberate disregard" for the rights or safety of others, for it to be considered gross negligence. We could argue six ways to Sunday whether or not that's the case, but the only opinion that matters legally is a judge's.
I don’t understand why they can’t just put up a simple landing page. It makes me wonder how bad it was - like the server was completely nuked.
But as long as there is money to be made it will come back.
Because the goal of 4ch is to keep people out to preserve quality. That worked pretty well.
The new beta site is also already up and running
Previous discussion (971 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43691334
How could you tell?