• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Arrest made on man accused of causing Kurt Eichenwald's seizure via Twitter

Status
Not open for further replies.
I'm always surprised people are still defending 4chan. I get it, even back in my day (what, more than 15 years ago?) 4chan was popular among high schoolers. To them, it felt like this cool underground thing where you could go for some 'edgy' comedy, a real insider internet nerd thing. A boy's club. That kind of thing can be attractive when you're young and still developing your personality, just like how you can get into obscure cult movies or bands to form a unique personality. Everyone needs to identify with some community outside of the mainstream.

But, even if you were part of that crowd when you were younger, you need to be able to look back on it and admit it was always full of shit. It's a bunch of kids misbehaving from behind the safety of a screen in their own little nerdy corner of the internet. Some people, even after all these years, still identify way too much with that shit. At its best, 4chan is full of people repeating the same old lame jokes at each other. At its worst, it's sexist, racist and people mistakenly feeling good about being a part of the 'cool crowd' on the internet.

It's never been cool, it's never been funny. It's a cesspool. There's nothing good about it, it's a bunch of people acting like idiots in their insular little anonymous community, and acting like they're somehow the John Wayne's of the internet instead of a bunch of deluded neckbeards.

The fact that they're actually comparing themselves to someone like George Carlin is hilarious to me. You're not nearly at his level, kids.


I dont even know where that era of posters are anymore, same with somethingawful, I guess they all just got older. I feel it is a different generation posting now. Although I think somethingawful had bad mods or something and that site just declined.
 
Dude there's nothing general about this...

Like for god sakes this was a targeted attack. The they have documented proof of intent to injure/kill.

The internet is real life and the sooner we treat like that, the better off we'll all be.

I'm glad people are beginning to realize this. These clowns always want to be able to fall back on "It was just jokes" or "I made a mistake"

Get this through your heads younger people, You don't always get a second chance, shit counts for real.
 
Dude, reddit is more of a racist shit stain than 4chan. I don't condone any actual racism (Honestly, I think it's a rather weird concept to get upset over skin color), but if you truly dislike 4chan for saying racial slurs and other meaningless insults, you really need to just get off the internet in general because it's everywhere. Do people actually mean when they call another poster on 4chan a "faggot" or a "nigger"? No, they do it as a joke. It is part of their culture, and yeah it's odd, but that's how it is. It's just words, and it depends on the way the person is saying them. /pol/ is an absolute racist shit stain on 4chan, it is by far the worst board (though they produced some funny stuff once in a while). Don't group them up with everyone else. It's just tiring to see 4chan still be a "boogeyman" on the internet.

For the record, I only go to /v/ and /ic/.

Don't bring George Carlin into this shit. And stay away from Rodney Dangerfield too.
 

sazzy

Member
this should be a potent warning to people who think they can do this shit. this is no different than surreptitiously giving peanuts to someone you know has a peanut allergy.

I remember seeing threads with high fiving on r/donald about this... hope they all get caught.
 
I follow Kurt out of sheer curiosity and saw the post in question. It was surreal. Kurt is then gone for several days, comes back, says "hey this thing happen and I'm going to seek justice" and then his Twitter is subsequently blasted with more strobe gifs. It was a mind fuck to see the perpetrators defend it then "lol do you really believe he had a seizure lol".

My understanding is that more arrests will be made and, yeah, fuck these people and let them for in jail. I hope this story gets Nationwide attention so we can scare these assholes from even thinking of getting out of bed.
 

rjinaz

Member
These defences of the guy.

This is why I'm nearly done with the net.

People that bully online or that did it regularly in the past, wanting to believe it's no big deal and everybody does it. The only way to explain away them being horrible people.
 
Dude there's nothing general about this...

Like for god sakes this was a targeted attack. The they have documented proof of intent to injure/kill.

The internet is real life and the sooner we treat like that, the better off we'll all be.

Online crime is now slowly being treated as equally as offline crime in certain countries like mine, so it's about time. Get those 40 other people arrested, too.
 

Cyan

Banned
I don't think its a good legal precedent to apply psychical assault standards to internet harassment. Which is not to defend internet harassment at all.

Imagine that the scifi concept of "basilisk" images--fractal visual patterns that interact with flaws in the structure of the human brain and can cause it to crash like a computer, killing the viewer--were something that actually existed in reality. You could show someone a specific type of image and it would cause them to slump over and die on seeing it.

Now imagine that someone emails a basilisk image to someone they don't like. Knowing full well what it is and what it does. That person opens the email, sees the image, and dies.

Do we charge that person with murder? They intended to kill the victim. They had a murder weapon. They used that weapon successfully. The victim ended up dead. Does it make any difference that the medium of the murder weapon was electronic? I'm sure you agree that this person should be charged with the murder they successfully committed.

Okay, now let's pull it back a little. Instead of murder, the person wants to cause the victim to have an epileptic seizure. Every other step is the same. They know full well what they're doing and the effect it will have. They want that effect to happen. They use their weapon successfully and the victim experiences an epileptic seizure. As above, this seems quite straightforward. They intended to do this, they had a weapon that allowed them to do it, they succeeded. Why would it not be assault just because the medium of their assault weapon was electronic?
 

jstripes

Banned
People that bully online or that did it regularly in the past, wanting to believe it's no big deal and everybody does it. The only way to explain away them being horrible people.

Now, if he'd tweeted a Zelda score of 7.8, it would be a different story.
 

DrForester

Kills Photobucket
This is not in any way meant to victim blame, or excuse what this asshole did, but are there not add-ons for browsers to disable .gifs and video from autoplaying to help people like him from seeing these things (maliciously sent, or while browsing themselves)?
 

dallow_bg

nods at old men
This is not in any way meant to victim blame, or excuse what this asshole did, but are there not add-ons for browsers to disable .gifs and video from autoplaying to help people like him from seeing these things (maliciously sent, or while browsing themselves)?

There's definitely an option to not autoplay gifs and videos on the official phone app.
I sure as heck use it but it's not on by default.
 

Dan

No longer boycotting the Wolfenstein franchise
This is not in any way meant to victim blame, or excuse what this asshole did, but are there not add-ons for browsers to disable .gifs and video from autoplaying to help people like him from seeing these things (maliciously sent, or while browsing themselves)?
Now, even with these options enabled, how does one figure out whether a video is dangerous prior to playing it? Still seems easy for a person to maliciously disguise a video as something benign if they wanted to.
 

Einchy

semen stains the mountaintops
Good.

Anyone purposely trying to harm another person, even if it's via Twitter, is no different than trying to harm them in person.
 

Kaiterra

Banned
Good this guy got caught. Make an example of him.

Re: 4chan discussion: If you fuck a goat ironically, you're still a goat fucker.
 

pigeon

Banned
Seems like the right charge. Wonder if a jury will be able to see a flashing picture as a weapon.

I assume they'll have expert testimony to that effect, but, I mean, the fact that the guy said "I am sending you this image in the hopes that you will have a seizure" and then said to others "I sent him that image in the hopes that it would cause him a seizure" probably isn't going to help him either.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom