#digihuman

Marlon R. Nunez • "Digital Dominique"

Digital Humans | Co-Founder @ArtHeroes.co

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"As mass protests against police brutality and racial injustice continue across the country, 4chan, a notorious alt-right troll hub online, is trying to meddle in protesters’ online operations.

On Sunday night, users of 4chan made several highly trafficked posts with links to dozens of Black Lives Matter channels on Telegram, a privacy-oriented, encrypted messaging app that has been used for organizing protests across the country. Users on 4chan encouraged others to post disinformation in the groups, find “incriminating” information that they can pass to law enforcement, and trawl the channels for as much personal, identifying, and organizational information as they can about people in the groups."

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Some have already posted the phone numbers of volunteers organizing food and water for protesters, and phone numbers for jail support for arrested protesters. The 4chan posts didn’t include instructions for what to do with the numbers, but based on 4channer’s normal behavior, it’s possible that the implication is to harass the person on the other end of the line. In some cases, users in the threads are also doxxing what they believe to be “Antifa safehouses” by posting addresses of these homes.

The central focus on the 4chan posts so far, though, hasn’t been to impede the current protests, but rather to compile doxxing information on the activists behind the protests. “BE STEALTHY DONT TROLL, RIGHT NOW THE MOST VALUABLE THING WE CAN GET IS INFO,” one user posted.

“A lot of these retards have identifying info on their telegram profiles, instagram, personal website, real name, phone number, etc. get that,” another wrote, urging other 4channers to store what they found on internet archive sites like Archive.is and Pastebin (links on Pastebin aren’t accessible, suggesting that the site may have taken moderation action). Others encouraged people to share their findings with “trustworthy public sources” and “right wing journalists.”

It’s unclear to what extent 4chan posters have followed through on their plans, and if the threads have led to any offline harassment. Many of the Black Lives Matter channels don’t let anyone without authorization post. And administrators of some of the channels seem to be aware of the people trying to infiltrate. One of the larger protest Telegram channels, The BLM Revolution of 2020 with roughly 8,740 subscribers, posted an open letter to “to the fascist how are watching this channel,” on Sunday night. “I’m going to be honest with you all, the path that you have picked is only going to bring more suffering, and solidify the system that you’ve set out to fight against. Your fight is going to end up with more people in your situation. Lost, lonely, and unsure where to go,” the person behind the Telegram channel wrote, encouraging right-wingers to reach out if they wanted to anonymously talk.

One unfortunate mistake costs a Ukrainian man the chance of a lifetime, with his unraveling mind becoming a public spectacle as his erratic behaviors make it to the outside world.

"What the heck is TheSoul Publishing? I’m still honestly not sure.

Here’s what I do know: Measured in terms of views and subscribers, it had the third-largest reach of any group of entertainment channels on YouTube in November—outranked only by Disney and WarnerMedia. It is run by Russian nationals and based in and managed from Cyprus, with U.S. operations housed in a shared work space in New York. It funds itself with ad revenues from YouTube and Google worth tens of millions of dollars. And in 2018, it purchased a small suite of Facebook advertisements targeting U.S. citizens on political issues—and it made those purchases in rubles.

Asked detailed written questions about the company, a spokesman for TheSoul Publishing responded with a statement and provided background information, which is reflected throughout. The spokesman stated: “Simply because a company has roots, international offices, and/or diverse global employees outside of the U.S., one should not jump to conclusions or automatically make assumptions that there is a hidden agenda. To be clear, TheSoul Publishing creates fun, non-political oriented content that is enjoyed by an incredible amount of fans globally.”

"I caught up with Michael Murphy late on Sunday from his home in Jacksonville, Florida, but it wasn’t easy: he hadn’t been able to answer his phone for 24 hours. “I had to turn it off,” he said. “I’m also getting spearphishing emails every 30 seconds.”

The angry callers had gotten Murphy’s name from one of the dozens of domain registries that he had set up since Friday night. That day, a friend who lived in North Carolina noticed that right-wingers in that state and across the country were setting up rallies attacking business closures put in place to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

Murphy, who said he’s staunchly opposed to and frustrated by the protests because of the risks they pose in accelerating the spread of the coronavirus, and his friend realized that the organizers, which turned out to include a small group of pro-gun advocates helping coordinate the campaign, were using a simple state-based abbreviation pattern to register websites promoting the protests.

They came up with a plan. Murphy snapped up domains for every still available iteration of reopenAL.com, reopenAK.com, reopenAR.com, and so forth, that hadn’t already been purchased, along with every domain he could for variations like liberateWV.com, liberateWY.com, and liberateWI.com. The idea was to preempt any further such purchases by people genuinely seeking to organize protests.

“I realized all these fringe guys are gonna get a hold of these websites, So I went out and bought ‘em up that night,” he told me. The financial burden of thwarting fringe-right groups? “It cost me about four grand,” Murphy said. “I don’t have the money quite frankly. I was just trying to do something good. I’m in massive credit debt to do this.”

Murphy said that he recognized that his plan isn’t foolproof. While similar domains have already been obtained and still remain up for purchase, he thinks keeping fringe-right wingers from the one’s he purchased has made a difference. He said he believes such short concise domain names are important in search rankings. “Names are really powerful. That’s why people pay millions for certain domains,” he said.

After buying the URLs, things were initially quiet. But on Saturday night a Reddit post detailing information about the domain registrations went viral. While the message didn’t directly identify Murphy, it gave instructions on how to find his name alongside speculation that he must be running an anti-lockdown astroturf campaign—even though Murphy’s intentions were the exact opposite. On Twitter, people doxxed him, posting his address and home number.

“I bought these names to try to stop the insanity, basically. And it just turned to insanity,” he said. He felt forced to unplug his phone, and his inbox exploded with messages attacking him—and potentially trying to hack him..."

Corrupted Blood started with a band of high-level players who took down an end-game boss with the ability to cast a blood-draining spell. While the players made sure they were free of the spell’s effect after the battle, they allegedly forgot to treat one of the pets. That pet was then able to carry the pathogen out of the dungeon as a result of a programming oversight, culminating in a full-blown pandemic.

Corrupted Blood quickly spread from city to city. Game developer Blizzard tried to quarantine some areas of the game in response, but to no avail. After a week, Blizzard only managed to put the kibosh on the mayhem with hard resets and patches.

Epidemiologists later found players exhibited some interesting behavior during this time. Some people volunteered to help, but wound up falling sick. Others “went to work” as usual (making money by dealing weapons) and infected others. And some got themselves infected out of curiosity.

“Some people tried to uphold law and order, some tried their best to help, others maliciously disseminated the virus,” one Weibo user wrote, recalling the Corrupted Blood incident. “In a game with anonymity, good and evil appear even more real than in real life.”

Epidemiologists have also compared the Corrupted Blood incident to China’s outbreak of Sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome). Ran Balicer, Eric Lofgren and Nina Fefferman wrote several papers on the event, citing similarities to the previous coronavirus outbreak that also originated in animals.

Balicer pointed out that both the virtual and real epidemic faced failed attempts to quarantine infected people, and both cases demonstrated a high potential for rapid spread around the world. While the disease in WoW was spread by characters teleporting from city to city, Sars found its way to other countries by way of air travel.

“This plague bug in a video game really carries a lot of real-life meaning!” a Weibo influencer wrote.

One of the great things about producing Digital Human is that we get to work some really beautiful music into every show. I’ve been hanging onto some songs for a good long while waiting to find the right show for them, and this is just stunning to listen to.

The movie, Paprika, is utterly spell binding btw. Well worth a watch while we’re all in lockdown - after a digihuman binge of course, check the the link below.