Audacity fork maintainer quits after alleged harassment by 4chan losers who took issue with 'Tenacity' name Efforts to wrest control of the open-source Audacity audio editing project from corporate owner Muse Group have hit a stumbling block after the maintainer of one of the more popular forks stepped down over alleged physical harassment. The trouble began when the two-decade-old Audacity project was acquired by Muse Group in May …
These are anonymous posters on 4chan. The only way they could collaborate is if they communicate ON 4chan. Therefore people harassed them of their own accord.
Also, and most importantly, sneedacity won the poll fair and square.
The community decided sneedacity was the best name and cookiengineer refused to accept that.
Voting on a poll is not harassment and that is nearly all that was organized on 4chan.
part of what you said is true: These are anonymous posters on 4chan.
Other than that... no.
It would be very very easy to set up clandestine communication channels via various means on a board like 4chan, anonymous or otherwise. Threads are often deleted so that there is no history (to the best of my knowledge) and are not archived. And, a thread that dox's or points to a video that dox's or calls for harassment would probably be deleted (I suspect they don't keep good logs, deliberately). So any posted IRC channels or messaging info or even a graphic with steganography embedded within it might easily have disappeared without a trace.
When anyone can post anything anonymously, this potential for using the platform to do something illegal or abusive is always there.
When anyone can post anything anonymously, this potential for using the platform to do something illegal or abusive is always there.
The Chinese dictatorship approves you.
Anonymity is a shield against the Tyranny of the majority. If 'cookiengineer' could have stayed anonymous, he wouldn't have been harassed IRL.
Which is just as well.
If someones nutty enough to turn up with a knife over this, they'd likely just as happily turn up with a firearm if one were available.
Firearms _might_ be a deterrent for rational criminals (even that's debatable) but they do nothing for nutjobs other than to add a tool to their belt.
And a sign that reads: No warning shots will be fired, AMMO is not cheap!
I hadn't seen that one.
As for applicable warning signs, I just thought another one up:
"WARNING: i am extremely talented and can easily build a proper flamethrower in a very short time with available household materials. Do NOT tempt me!"
or something like that. Kinda like that FPS Russia video with the flamethrowers. "For home defense"
(apparently legal to own in most of the USA, but probably not Germany)
This post has been deleted by its author
Someone does not like a name for a project so physically goes round to your home and threatens you?
That person (persons?) needs to be in a mental institution, and the quicker the better.
Agreed on that, and...
Downvoters on that post = 4chan members
(also anon for obvious reasons)
Also, predict that this thread will be full of anonymous cowards.
RE: "Someone does not like a name for a project so physically goes round to your home and threatens you?"
My reading of the article is that the 4chan choice - Sneedacity, which is almost as stupid as Boaty McBoatface - won in a poll of users for a new name, then the poll was rejected (rightly IMHO, YMMV) and Tenacity used instead. So the babies at 4chan had a tantrum. You involve the general internet denizens in your affairs at your peril. The internet is as unpredictable as a crocodile floating in the river; Or as predictable in it's unpredictability. You know you're going to get bitten, you just don't know where or when. Roll the dice and say something on the internet - Perhaps you'll be the lucky loser today! Good luck!
Substitute "The Internet" for "Usenet" in the following:
"Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea. Massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it." —Gene Spafford, 1992
Hey! Don't you be dissing my beloved Usenet! You'll be maligning IRC next. Scandalous!
There is one huge difference between Usenet and the Internet; Usenet, and IRC, are comprised of a relatively small subset of humanity drawn from a tech aware set of elites...mostly... The WWW, represented by Facebook et all, are drawn from pretty much all of humanity, and there are vastly more unstable and idiotic individuals there who can be relied on to be unstable and idiotic in public.
Like the quote, though some of the imagery is a bit...iffy... :-)
You're thinking of the olden days when BIFF was the exception. On the web, he is TEH ROOOLAR!
BIFF!
But as regards the rise of the idiot on the net, contrast the above link still roughly how I wrote it, vs its current incarnation. (l33tspk is now "typography"??)
Hey ho, at least that magnificent (and real) .sig still remains.
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>That person (persons?) needs to be in a mental institution, and the quicker the better.
Further clarification in the aforementioned Github issue states that there was a knife attack and the victim perceived it as the intent to kill. A lone psycho or a criminal gang, this seems to be serious and worthy of police investigation.
unless more than one person is involved, lone psycho is probably right.
It wouldn't be the first (alleged) lone psycho that posted regularly to the 4chan board to go off the rails and hurt/kill people. I recall some idiot in either AU or NZ that went on a killing spree a couple of years ago, was called "an accelerationist" and had regularly posted a bunch of wacko stuff on 4chan, even had a manifesto, etc.. 1 out of millions of regular people who just want to vent or discuss their favorite anime, THAT guy was apparently a TRUE psychopath. His Darwin award was 'Death by Cop' as I recall, or maybe he did himself...
(And what we do not want is for IRL harassment to accelerate into something far worse, and criminals usually leave evidence, and so I hope the cops in DE catch the perp(s))
black helicopter icon for the fun
Of course they wouldn't do that it stand your ground states. In such states, they'd have turned up with a gun and shot him whilst he slept.
Stand Your Ground laws give people a license to kill, allowing those who shoot others to obtain immunity, even if they started the confrontation and even when they can safely de-escalate the situation by walking away. Stand Your Ground laws are inherently dangerous because they change the nature of gun violence in a state by encouraging escalations of violence and, according to research, do nothing to deter overall crime - https://everytownresearch.org/report/stand-your-ground-laws-are-a-license-to-kill/
although your initial point was good, I have to disagree with the quoted part. I personally believe that a "peace through strength" strategy works, not only for personal defense, but for nations as well. Not debating it, just saying. In short: a criminal sees ME, very unlikely to attack. And two female relatives of mine carry pepper spray in their purses (which I initlally gave them). (Another female relative is a cop, she carries a pistol).
But if you want proof, try going to a big city in "certain areas" and act like you're a tourist, vs acting like you at least have some "street smarts". Criminals look for the easy targets and avoid the ones who look like they're capable of defending themselves (and are more than willing to do so).
(so a half an upvote because I liked the first part)
Is there a reason the 4chan guys are defending Muse Group?
Is this kind of like a form of stockholme syndrome or if a company treats you mean you revere them higher on a pedestal? I do see that a little with Valve and their fairly stringent Steam DRM platform.
Or are they projecting their own inadequacy? They can't hope to ever break free of corporate / consumer control measures and so simply do not understand that others who are more technologically capable can manage and thus get jealous? Again, you see this a little bit in the Linux communities when someone tries to get away from proprietary blobs like Nvidia's.
Possibly there is enough weird human behaviour here to undertake a psychology doctorate on ;)
Politics aside, and sadly at the same time, this might make the Tenacity fork popular enough to become the main fork. Or at least make other forks visible or even to some simply the visibility of free audio software. Audacity really is spinning down the drain quickly and it's clear that any bad news is not good news.
After Trump, anything's possible. Trump was part of Putin's neofascist alliance, and some of his strongest supporters came from 4chan ("The Donald"), 8chan, and 8kun. Incel white boys are likely to behave like that, taking stupid things like a fork name seriously, or attacking a fork of a program now owned by Russians. The whole QAnon thing, which has become a religion worshiping Trump, was created there by 8kun's owner Jim Watkins, who pretends to be the secret agent Q. And Muse Group is actually Russian, hence the Yandex link, and thus possible telemetry into FSB.
Hello, 4chan user here.
This article does a great job of summarizing cookiengineer (the maintainer's) claims, but there are two sides to every story. I will not make any assertions, but simply offer my own perspective:
Cookie opened a poll to vote for the name of his audacity fork, and himself added the option "sneedacity". This name is a 4chan meme so naturally the presence of this option resulted in the poll being raided by 4chan members to vote it to the top.
As far as I am aware, this is as far as 4chan went in terms of "harassment". We spammed a poll and left some funny comments. Anything further than this is, from my own observations, a complete fabrication. I was reading through all of threads and not once did I see anyone posting cookie's personal information or calling for him to be harassed. Everything that he is claiming to happen to him is crazy and has no reflection on what was actually being discussed in the threads.
He has yet to provide any proof for any of these claims of harassment he has made, but yet every 4chan thread is fully archived and easily accessible if anyone wishes to view them.
He has also made multiple claims that contradict each other and then deleted them when called out. A few have been summarised by someone on reddit:
https://www.reddit (dot) com/r/programming/comments/of7sdz/4chan_harassment_prompts_maintainer_of_most/h4bkk71/
Again I am only my view of what I have personally witnessed, I will let the reader make up his or her own mind.
> He has yet to provide any proof for any of these claims of harassment he has made
I know this is the internet and we all like to see proof, but he's under no duty to prove any of his claims to you, me or 4chan.
If people *are* turning up at his house, then the only people he needs to show proof to are the cops. If anyone is turning up at his house (let alone armed), then they entirely deserve what they get.
It's possible he's making it up, but 4chan's history and reputation really works against it here, the claims are entirely believable.
Of course, this could also be a false flag - 4chan generating fake news about 4chan...
>4chan's history and reputation
4chan users do not have a reputation of killing people or committing terrorism. Meanwhile multiple mass shootings have been streamed on facebook, and twitter was used as a recruiting tool for ISIS.
Why do you group all 4chan users under what a handful of bad apples do but would never do the same for any other social media site?
> 4chan users do not have a reputation of killing people or committing terrorism.
They do, however, have a reputation for brigading and causing a general nuisance of themselves.
4chan also has it's fair share of
- out and out incels
- nutjob level right wingers
- edgelords
- general twats
The first two have previously been linked to acts/plans of domestic terrorism, whilst the latter two just contribute to the rep
> Why do you group all 4chan users under what a handful of bad apples do but would never do the same for any other social media site?
Because the perception is that 4chan is primarily comprised of shitheads, a perception earned in no small part by previous behaviour.
You know what a handful of bad apples do in that saying? They spoil the barrel.
Actually, in 4chan's case the neighbouring barrels have probably help contaminate it's reputation. Most people don't know (or care about) the difference in ethos between 4chan and 8kun, for example. In fact, if they have heard of it, the bit they'll probably remember is a bunch of 4chan users wanted to post child porn.
Twitter and Facebook are no utopia, but the userbase and usage isn't primarily shit posts.
Context is also quite important here. User base (allegedly) harassed someone for being muslim? Could be a FB group, sub-reddit etc.
Userbase (allegedly) harassed a dev for not going with the userbase's preferred name? C'mon, that's pure 4chan. Turning up with a knife might not be, but if you've enough users at least one of them is going to be a mental dickhead.
4chan is what it is (and some of it has been great), can hardly complain that they're - at best - associated with sometimes being a bit of a nuisance.
That comparison makes about as much sense as Rudy Giuliani saying he doesn't use hair dye. You should look up the fallacy of false equivalence.
If you want to see beautiful women in beautiful places, with perfect lives, doing yoga and eating salad, you got to instagram.
If you wanna hang with resentful, angry, immature, spiteful, sad cases - who project their self-loathing and sexual frustration on others - you hang out on 4chan.
The fact that so far there hasn't been a police press release about the assault and that he spent the day posting on github, reddit and twitter after he was he was supposedly cut with a knife in his own home make his claims seem a bit dubious. Heidelberg isn't Lagos or Chicago, three people breaking into someone's home in order to attack them with a knife in front of their family would be a big deal there.
"The fact that so far there hasn't been a police press release about the assault"
Says that he isn't in the USA. In most civilised countries the police seldom post about such things unless it happened in a public space - until well AFTER the court case
German police have privacy laws to respect. Big deal or not, they don't post about aggaravated tresspass/assault incidents, Look it up in the court reports instead
Even in the USA, if the people involved don't want it publicised, it doesn't get publicised. I know of a number of pre-4chan incidents relating to IRC which never made media releases, including one psychopath skiddie who's managed to spend considerable time in federal accomodation for attempting to murder the FBI agent investigating death threats he'd been making (afaik he's still there and keeps managing to do things to extend his stay)
"As far as I am aware, this is as far as 4chan went in terms of "harassment"."
That sounds more believable. After a while you get a sort of 'feel' who for how 4channers operate, and this story seems slightly bullshit.
It sounds like how my grandpa would describe "surfing the web" in the 90s, imagining a photorealistic avatar of me with mirrorshades on a hover board, surfing my way to AltaVista. Like, in the sense of "it's 4chan! That's how those psychos work! Go ahead, look it up! I understand 4chan!" In reality, you have to really screw up to provoke random channers to come and TRY TO STAB YOU.
It's all a bit suspect it's what I'm saying. Assuming he's not lying is the correct course of action until proven otherwise, obviously. It very well could have all happened, telcos don't ask for a psych evaluation before you sign a service contract. However, I am not going to be surprised if we find out this is a shitpost gone too far in a week or so.
When commenting, I like to be constructive or at least offer a relatively intelligent response. But all I can offer here, is that if you are an adult and spend time on 4chan, you would benefit hugely by ceasing your use of the site, growing up and getting a life. That unsolicited advice is offered with true sincerity. Seriously, it will do you and those around you the world of good.
So here's a recap of what actually happened:
Telemetry was added to Audacity. Some webdev named cookiengineer on GitHub forks Audacity. He makes a poll for how the fork should be named as a GitHub issue where you vote with reactions.
Someone posts "Sneedacity" on the poll issue and then makes a thread on /g/ telling people to vote for Sneedacity.
So people vote for it, a couple idiots spam "sneed".
Then cookiengineer turns out to be mentally ill, claims that 4chan is harassing him, makes it sound like all 200,000+ active 4chan users are after his life, posts on Twitter and HackerNews, claims that 4chan found his phone number and address
Literally none of that happened in any of the threads on /g/.
He claimed that he was mass-called and got spammed SMS on his Pinephone: first says on Twitter that he's glad his Pinephone didn't crash, then, when a well-disguised /g/ troll asks him on his HackerNews thread the list of phone numbers that spammed him (pretended that he wanted to block them on his phone), he said that his Pinephone couldn't handle all the calls and SMS and kept crashing so he "had to reflash the device". Caught red-handed contradicting himself.
He deleted his tweets when people shown that he's contradicting them.
Then he actively asked people to mass-report the Sneeds-Feed-and-Seed/sneedacity GitHub repo (/g/ ended up making its own Audacity fork) and its contributors, which is a violation of the GitHub Community Guidelines.
Also claims that 4chan stabbed him with a butterfly knife (no joke).
All ready downloaded V.2 and 3 blobs and stuffed them in deep storage.
I will name them anything I want, I was thinking "Classicdacity". Just for my personal use you know!.
/sarcasm
If someone wants to show up at my door over this, please do. I live on the Palouse, literally thousands of square miles of future burial ground.
/end sarcasm
This whole thing over a name is pretty stupid.
You don't seem to know how the German system of "Massregelvollzug" works. I'd hardly call a system "lenient" that will basically put you away for undisclosed time - which is often enough forever. You don't just have to do the time you got sentenced to there but they'll keep you until some shrink diagnoses you as no longer "dangerous". It is an open secret that these institutions have a selected hand full of "experts" that will diagnose whatever the instutions' medical lead says.
It's probably a waste of time to say this, but why don't we all step back and wait for further information? This is a weird story that is apparently being investigated by the police. It may be true in full, in part, or not at all. The original article simply states what has been alleged with no corroborating evidence at the moment. Sit back, keep an eye on the headlines, and wait for more to come.
There's only speculation, but it might be that with the license change and the addition of telemetry, there was the possibility of violating GDPR rules (acquiring data, no matter how anonymized, from a minor).
But: I haven't seen a real lawyer chime in; Muse Group hasn't demonstrated a competent understanding of US or EU laws so far; they keep playing keep-away with the licensing agreements (so who knows what's going to apply next week); and honestly it just may be plain stupidity on their part.
Maybe international compliance is today's excuse, but I'm pretty sure it's just primer for "micro-transactions".
Sony and Microsoft (even Sega) started their online gaming services back in 1999/2000 without age restriction, but once micro-transactions came into birth, Sony and Microsoft changed to "13+ with parental supervision" (or something similar you've read before).
it's in regard to their supposedly coming online platform, and related to the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act or (COPPA)
As COPPA doesn't allow storing details of under 13s without "verifiable consent from a parent or guardian," so they are pre-empting this, its the same reasons under 13s make up their date of birth to get on facebook
I there: (I de-lurker just for this news)
I don't want to defend any 4chan but sheesh, everybody knows that 4chan are not the guys that act in persona (and some of them I doubt that they will go out).
But let's show the evidence.
* The forker said that he was attacked.
* But, there is no evidence, no arrest, no photos (why? 2021 and nobody even has a phone camera?).
* Not a record talking with the cops or a lawyer.
And truly, nobody really cares about a fork on Github, nobody (but companies and lawyers).
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