mid0nz: mid0nz: Not a Man at All, or Target Practice on the Sherlock Fandom I don’t inten
mid0nz:mid0nz:Not a Man at All, or Target Practice on the Sherlock FandomI don’t intend to be alarmist but I am serious— taking childish behavior seriously. I’m going to write here in the uncomfortable and ungrammatical plural on purpose.Somebodies have their sights on Beeblockians and they’re clever, oh so clever. Moriarty clever. Not the campy adorable it’s-really-Andrew-Scott-we’re-giffing kind of clever. I’m talking about I’ll-burn-the-heart-out-of-you clever. I’m talking C.A. Milverton Carles Augustus Magnussen kind of clever.These somebodies (who knows who they really are?) established a tumblr presence, a blog they used to shame fan artists. At first they just seemed sophomoric, simply trying to get a rise out of us via shaming and insults, like has-been insult comedians going for cheap laughs. It’s predictable. Both the “humor” and how relatively powerless fans would respond to such embarrassment. Now I’ll put this out there for you to think about. What a brilliant way to learn the emotional ins-and-outs of the (insular) fandom! What an expedient way to learn how we protect what we hold dear! They learned (if they didn’t know) who the BNFs are. They learned what fans were able and willing to do to support the aggrieved artists who are to us, beloved community members, but who are, to the malevolent bloggers, insignificant pawns. And they learned what they already knew or at least suspected— there is nothing we can do to stop them. Tumblr shuts them down for harassment and they pop up again with another handle. It takes months and years to get positive attention and grow an audience on tumblr. But attack, and you have massive attention over night. At best we can ignore them. But as they proved recently, they have to be named— their name has to be circulated so we can block them. Their infamy must spread among the very people who ought to be ignoring them. They fucking GET how tumblr savior, etc. works. We use blockers to save us from tedious information and porn when we oughtn’t be looking at it. Blocking tools are meant to protect us from ourselves not from people who wish us ill. They work pretty well because of basic community etiquette (i.e. the first rule of good tumblr citizenship: “Tag your porn.) That’s precisely what these somebodies are trying to subvert.Next step— the kill. It’s obvious (even, as Sherlock would say, to the likes of Anderson) that the most lethal weapon against the lot of Sherlockians is information. And here’s the sinister twist and why I think we need to take these anonymous individuals somewhat seriously. They infiltrated the BFI screening. Either they were well-organized enough to get one of the 200 tickets (in which case we must be VERY wary) or they convinced an attendee to give up the goods— how Sherlock did it, the big scenes, etc. I can’t think of another instance (I’m sure I’m missing something obvious) of a targeted attack on thousand and thousands of people with information— not, as it is in the usual sense, by hiding it or by whistle-blowing on people who want to protect it but by forcing information on people who don’t want to know it. They knew how in-bed Google and tumblr are. All they had to do was package the unwanted information as images and use highly generalized tags like #Sherlock, tags we all use, tags that newbies track. That way the images end up in Google image search (as well as other search engines) and you’re not only getting spammed on tumblr, you’re getting hit on Google and it spreads— the information. To Facebook and twitter where you can’t reliably “protect” yourself from seeing it. This is not the work of trolls or tricksters. (That’s what they want you to think they are.) They’re more like black hat hackers.A “black hat” hacker is a hacker who “violates computer security for little reason beyond maliciousness or for personal gain” Black hat hackers form the stereotypical, illegal hacking groups often portrayed in popular culture, and are “the epitome of all that the public fears in a computer criminal”. Black hat hackers break into secure networks to destroy data or make the network unusable for those who are authorized to use the network. Black hat hackers also are referred to as the “crackers” within the security industry and by modern programmers. Crackers keep the awareness of the vulnerabilities to themselves and does not notify the general public or manufacturer for patches to be applied. Individual freedom and accessibility is promoted over privacy and security. Once they have gained control over a system, they may apply patches or fixes to the system only to keep their reigning control. (x)This is the work of somebodies who have hacked into secure social network— i.e. the Sherlock fandom. They’re testing the waters and have launched and incredibly successful assault. This shit is a proof-of-concept for something that matters much more than a tv show.As a community the fandom doing good work but we need to do more. We need to OBSERVE, WARN, and most of all RECORD. We need to track their methods. Even if we don’t try to fight fire with fire (I wouldn’t advise it— this behavior is sociopathic) we need to know their logic so we can see it coming, forestall it when the stakes are high. We need to know their methods and to make those methods known. And most importantly, as a community we need to develop better security.EDIT —> Passeriform makes a great point. They may simply be repeating spoilers that the mass media has printed. I don’t know if that’s the case because I’ve avoided those, too. So far.They’re not. They’re posting very detailed stuff from people who went to the screening. In some cases, they’ve exploited the good will of people promising they’d keep it to themselves, and then are posting it and spoiler-bombing people in their ask-boxes with it. Thanks for this analysis; I think you’re right about how frightening it is, and that it’s a lot more than troll-dom. -- source link
#bbcsherlock