Gregory's ServerLearning that today's massive Mastodon spam attack was carried out by conspiracy-addled Japanese middle-schoolers whose previous spam run was shut down when admins got in touch with their parents who confiscated their devices is definitely straight of the Shitty Timeline Little Brother.
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  @pluralistic I do think that fedi handled this one pretty well. Doesn't seem like there was a lot of disruption. Some fedizens (myself included) had to deal with a bunch of spam, but reporting worked, moderators did a fantastic job, and by and large most people don't seem to have even noticed?  @benfrog @rysiek @pluralistic There's been sooooo much :amaze: Suspended hundreds of accs today @stux @rysiek @pluralistic You''ve been doing a heck of a job. As a user I've seen zero disruption!   @rysiek  @dancingtreefrog @rysiek @pluralistic Neither did I. I wonderif a centralized system would handle it any better. @Szescstopni  I didn't see any of the spam specific to this situation. I've only seen people (mostly admins I'd guess) talking about it. However I see more and more spam every day from mastodon.social accounts. Most of the time it's scams and NSFW stuff. @rysiek @pluralistic On our server it seems to be a pattern that if a user got spammed they got a billion messages. But if they weren't a target they got nothing. @Ooze I got hit by a lot of spam, personally. I am guessing that's because I had a few relatively popular toots recently, so my handle was easy to come across on whatever instances the spammers used. @rysiek @pluralistic I'm only hearing about this now. My instance is small. I imported a huge block list of bad or questionable actors to avoid future headaches. So that one might have already been preemptively blocked.  @misty I imagine. I submitted a couple dozen spam reports myself. It's somewhat intense for me, I cannot imagine what moderation teams are dealing with.   @oblomov True for a while, but not for long. Once you have simple filters the spammers find a way to get around them. And so it goes. In this case my tech admin has a small script that dealt with it all. So, yeah, it's whack-a-mole. @ColinTheMathmo of course, spam filters only raise the bar and can be circumvented, but at the moment that bar is basically underground, so even just a little bit would help ;-) I'm honestly thinking about a small script myself as a user, but I don't know if it's possible to automate the reporting.  @rysiek @pluralistic I didn’t notice anything. Was too busy having an existential crisis. @pluralistic@mamot.fr a detail maybe, but is it really an attack if creating an account is open to anyone without any reviewing process?   @pluralistic well shit. Now I feel kinda bad for posting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_4adkAymrg in response a few times. But also, that explains why I could almost read it without much effort (kids use fewer kanji, which are like letters, words, or phonemes — parts of words with meaning when combined? Idk, I’m not a linguist, just a long covid addled dweeboid with insomnia) @pluralistic wow I had no idea there was even an attack. Somehow, your explanation leaves me with more questions than if I knew nothing at all @pluralistic Icing on the cake: these attacks are carried through Discord scripting. Because Discord is so self-absorbed they don't even check if their scripts are bothering the world at large. What. I don't know anything about that. I can run scripts on Discord, and they will happily do HTTP requests to other servers?  @shadowwwind @flberger Admittedly, understanding the passage in full is made complicated by the terminology overlap between script and bot and (most importantly) between a "server" as a stand-alone computer on the network and "server" as in an instance of Discord itself. Ok. It still sounds like a failure of moderation to me. Especially after they have been told about it. That's an interesting form of Whataboutism you got there 😄  I'm not saying that it isn't happening but I find it incredible that Beamship apparently is to small to bother with. We have less than 50 user. Very manageable and personal with such a small system. Of course, I'm the only one that gets reported 😂   @pluralistic They will not get off scott-free. They have brought embarrassment and shame to their families, and now have a significant misdeed on their permanent school records which, in highly competitive high school admission (and even more competitive university admission) may well tank their future lives.  @pluralistic@mamot.fr Conspiracy? iirc they're a massive cyberbullying gang that doxxes people? @pluralistic hold up the same scriptkiddies that did the last big spam wave, whenever that was a while ago, did this one? At what point does it become criminal lol  @pluralistic oh goodness. And I have this picture of my head about how these teenagers are going to respond when their mothers have a little chitchat with them. It's Japanese culture. Take maternal umbrage to fear factor 10000x. She need say hardly anything at all. @pluralistic why are we talking about this past tense? My last spam message was 43 minutes ago, still rolling in regularly  @pluralistic Aha. That explains all the kanji I'm seeing in the most popular tags for the day. @pluralistic Police might be considering charges, regardless of what parents and school say. After Kadokawa hacking incident, they are not dinking around with cybersecurity anymore. @pluralistic now I'm curious and want to see some of this spam. Is there any left anywhere? @ghouston If you're serious, I have some in the reports that included posts. CC: @pluralistic @pluralistic https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/18/business/4chan-hiroyuki-nishimura.html @pluralistic wow, that's actually kind of reassuring. Kids at least have a chance to grow out of it.   @pluralistic The issue isn't the Japanese middle-schoolers. The issue lies yet again with shitty instance admins allowing for open registration while not having the capacity nor the interest in maintaining their instance.   @pluralistic “Parents take away the devices of Internet pests” is a model that could substantially improve the Internet and should be more widely applied. Sadly, some of the worst offenders are not subject to parental discipline for one reason or another. @pluralistic @cstross I loved Little Brother so much, I bought 5 copies to give out to friends in appreciation of letting me read it for free. A book I'm now hoping my 13 year old will love it  @pluralistic very reassuring today to see that "midokuri" hashtag graph, that had been going sharply up, now going symmetrically down to nothing.  |
@pluralistic wow