Have you ever wondered where widespread internet jokes come from? All of us have probably seen, and enjoyed, many internet based jokes. Whether you laughed at the youtube video Chocolate Rain, viewed "lolcatz", or you were a victim of a rickroll prank, you are familiar with how fast and widespread these jokes can be.
For the most part, these jokes were started, or at least popularized by the website 4chan.org. WARNING: THIS SITE IS HIGHLY OFFENSIVE, AS BOTH EXPLICIT CONTENT ON THEIR MESSAGE BOARDS AND ADVERTISEMENTS ARE WIDESPREAD. This site has a large subculture following.Though mostly immature humor, sometimes the users of this site come together to take part in mischievous behavior.
The users are known for widespread attacks known as raids. Typically, many users will take part in a raid at the same time to cause widespread problems. In one instants, users "raided" a white supremacist website through a DoS Attack, causing the website to go offline. In another instance, a user of 4chan posted the Google HTML numeric character reference for the swastika symbol. A multitude of users than searched the code and pushed the symbol to the top of Google's hot trends chart. Later, Google removed the symbol. 4chan users have also caused problems for the Religious movement, Scientology, by taking parts in raids on the official website.
For the most part, the 4chan raids are harmless mischievous pranks. On the other hand, they tend to be offensive and cause harm to the sites they target. 4chan does show the potential of mass attacks taken out by an enormous amount of users, through techniques as simple as Google search.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan#Media_attention
Friday, December 4, 2009
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4chan started Chocolate Rain huh? Didn't know they had that good a singing voice. ;)
ReplyDeleteThey pull some wild stuff, but I'm not sure you can credit them with everything. You forgot to credit them with starting the rumor of Kanye's death :)
Look into Anonymous also when you get a minute.
Praetorian
My first question is to whether or not 4chan started the rick rolling fad or the chuck norris one, those things are hilarious!
ReplyDeleteI wonder if 4chan has pulled any pranks not involving the internet, ie doing something mischievous to a Scientologist building or disrupting a meeting? I wonder if someone will take that to the next step eventually.
Well what typically happens is that they find a strange internet clip or picture then turn into a joke. I guess they weren't creating this material, as much as popularizing the clips and pictures. I'm not sure about the Chuck Norris facts. With regards to Rick rolling, apparently it morphed from a joke they had when they would promise a picture of one thing, then a duck on wheels would pop up when the URL was entered. Thus, the user was "duck rolled". Then, one user placed youtube clip of Rick Astley's songs "never gonna give you up", instead of the picture of the typical duck. Thus, Rick Rolling was born, or so the story goes.
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