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Security professionals and hackers attending the Hack In The Box Security Conference (HITBSecConf 2014) learned that online communities like Reddit, Twitter, Slashdot (and very likely SN) are being actively manipulated by teams of sockpuppets. At the HITB event, Haroon Meer and his team from South African-based Thinkst, an applied research company that focuses on information security, spoke about how certain parties – whether individuals with mischief in mind, organisations with vested interests, or certain nation-states – have been using false identities to control online conversations. More importantly, they also collected forensic evidence that such tampering has been going on.
“It’s the concept of rent-a-crowd, brought to the Internet age using sock puppets – essentially accounts that are created online that don’t really represent real people, and are used to sway people’s opinions in forums and other online get-togethers,” Meer said.
The full text of the talk is available at Weapons of Mass Distraction: Sock Puppetry for Fun and Profit , and you can read more at: http://www.digitalnewsasia.com/digital-economy/censorship-shadowy-forces-controlling-online-conversations/
(Score: 2) by pnkwarhall on Tuesday December 16 2014, @04:19AM
....and that theory has been put forward in the threads themselves several times, with several different "villains". My favorite was the BSD crowd looking for converts. (Sounds feasible to me, too)
Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 16 2014, @04:37AM
My favorite was the BSD crowd looking for converts. (Sounds feasible to me, too)
But, but, that is exactly what they want you to think!
(Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday December 16 2014, @02:39PM
I'd go with the pro-BSD crowd. Most threads seem multi-step:
1) Get people fired up about systemd.
2) Linux == systemd.
3) The only alternative is openBSD, switch now!
Step 2 is where they lose me. My distro (Gentoo) has several init options. Systemd != Linux.
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