In case you hadn’t realized it, the last time you got flummoxed by the far end of a hyperlink may very well have been the result of a website known as 4chan. Yeah, they’re even responsible for that icanhazcheezburger website that my girlfriend finds so entertaining. (Btw: that’s me at my 30th birthday party next week.)
4chan first came to my attention with their prank on Time Magazine (h/t Last Psychiatrist). Could this have been a result of Time’s profile on it’s creator, Christopher Poole? For a guy who says there’s a ‘firewall’ between his real life and online persona, a profile that releases his real name might be looked upon with something less than good cheer. Thus, I can only imagine that when Time opened an online poll for the most-influential people in the world, Chris Poole could only cackle with glee.
And this was the result, thanks to 4chan:
What is marblecake, you might ask? Who knows. But moot is Chris Poole’s handle. He organized his army of keyboard warriors into a mobile strike-force that arranged for Time to name him the most influential person in the world.
Never mind that these were the people Time pictured with the article:
None of whom are Chris Poole.
So, what’s a world-class hacker and social engineer to do, once he’s been named the most influential person in the world? Oh, did I mention, he likes to piss off Google? And likes to use inflammatory language?
Which brings us to today: YouTube porn.
Now, I used to work at a Hollywood Video right out of college, where I heard from my District Manager about a customer who would rent kids movies, and then splice in sections of Nazi porn to the old VHS tapes. Once returned, the tapes would reenter regular circulation and traumatize little kids until one of them would speak up, sometimes months later. (Hm… I wonder if Mr Poole was a victim of the aforementioned creep?)
Funny, in that that creep’s tactics are much the same as the 4chan attack on YouTube today. It seems, much like the story from my District Manager of yore, 4chan users uploaded clips of tween-centric music videos (Hannah Montana, Jonas Bros) that would fade after a minute or two into hardcore porn.
As if we weren’t all thinking it anyway.
Google has been struggling to find and remove the clips all day yesterday and today.
