A Flawed Facade, or, the bots currently spamming Freenode about Freenode.
Firstly, don’t expect details because nobody except the people doing this have them. My proof is primarily in the form of the fact archive.org hasn’t indexed certain pages which you would think would be linked to by the people who supposedly wrote them.
Secondly, here’s what’s going on. Two Freenode staff members are currently being falsely accused of various illegal activities. They are being accused via a set of IRC adbots that firstly advertise their ad services and then send along the various links to accusatory content.
The most dangerous part of this content is the two blogs that are certain to be fake. Let’s say (EDIT: klori. Previously said mst, but the example shown uses the klori page timeline.), one of the victims, did in fact have a website. Wouldn’t they link it, thus ensuring archive.org would have archived it before this time? (Do note that it does get archived now, after it has been linked from one of the only places that do link to it — the “hub” page Freenodegate.)
So these blogs are clearly fabrications based on this alone. But if additional proof is needed, WHOISing the advertising site used, which happens to be owned by an activist for the rights of the exact kind of activity the targets are being accused of, along with the fake blogs, shows the same registrar and hidden information. Even ignoring why someone from Denmark would use that registrar, the fact they are coincidentally the same registrar is still “interesting”, and combined with the faked dates I believe it’s safe to say this entire blog — along with the other one — is fake.
As for the page itself, the history of it shows it was originally created by Encyclopedia Dramatica user “Meepsheep” on the 21st of July, and all the critical links were already in place at that time. It shows a lot of edits by “FuckYouIRCbot”, which is apparently trying to destroy the page — good on them for trying, but the page was later protected. (Encyclopedia Dramatica: Protecting pages filled with lies since whenever.)
So here’s my guess as to what’s going on here: Everything’s being puppeteered by a few people, with the 3 sites: the fake mst blog, the fake kloeri blog, and possibly the fake IRC ad service site (it links to the other blogs, distinctly seems to fall in line with the others…) all being run by one person. Whoever wrote the article was either tricked by them into thinking the blogs were real, or was in on it. ED is the kind of site that’d protect it either way because as one can tell from any good look at the content, it’s basically what would happen if /b/ became a wiki.
Given the implicit categorization of IRC users as entrepreneurs and drug addicts that you may have noticed in the spambot messages, they probably don’t like either Freenode or IRC in general.
The “entrepreneurs” part is interesting — perhaps they’ve been bitten by a cryptocurrency?
Anyway, good luck to those weathering the storm, and not so good luck to those who’ll try to twig who I am because y’all will probably succeed.
