Crash Course: What Is 4Chan?

In light of the recent story of the two Florida teens than set a threatened gopher tortoise on fire, 4Chan’s /b/ finds itself again in the headlines. In the extremely graphic video the girls can be seen attempting to set the tortoise on fire multiple times before smashing it on the ground and ultimately killed the tortoise by stomping on it. /b/ users took matters into their own hands and doxed(released private information) about the two teenagers.

This is far from the first time that /b/ has come to the aid of an abused animal but before you think of joining the community due to what you perceive to be a common interest in the well being of animals, I will try to clear up some common misconceptions about 4Chan.

All of 4chan is /b/: 4Chan itself is a user submitted imageboard whereas /b/ is 4Chan’s random board, other popular boards are the fitness based board /fit/ and the gif/webm based board /gif/ among others.

/b/ is evil: Just like most online communities you are going to find good and bad about people on /b/, one of the best things you can do is per their own advice “lurk moar(more)”. Currently on the /b/ catalog are a variety of “rate me” threads, “YLYL(you laugh you lose)” threads, race bait and general opinion threads, also included is a thread that states “4Chan will automatically XXXX your credit card number if you input it with you expiration date” and as far as I can tell nobody actually fell for it. Take the old saying “if you don’t have anything nice to say then don’t say anything at all” and abridge it for /b/ as “don’t say anything at all.

/b/ is the hacker group Anonymous: No, just…no. 4Chan users post under the name Anonymous with varying ID’s and may have a history with the group, but few users of 4Chan are members of Anonymous and if somebody tells you that they are, they are full of shit.

Tits or GTFO: One of the most widely accepted rules, if you are asking the community for help then you should be prepared to offer tits. Most of the time offering tits will go a long way towards getting help from the community but there have been a handful of times that it has backfired, if you are going to offer your own tits then you should make sure that you remove identifying information from the picture. When you take a cell phone picture, information such as the location in which the photo was taken is stored, the information is easy to find and even easier to remove, try making a copy of the photo with removed information or just upload the photo to Imgur.

I could keep going on about 4Chan but maybe you should just check it out for yourself, you will not need any additional software nor will you need a new antivirus. Be forewarned that even more so than on Reddit, Facebook and Twitter I have wasted hours of time checking the different boards, also if you see a thread that looks too good to be true then you may want to save from it early before it 404’s.

What is ARM Architecture?

ARM was first developed by British computer manufacturer ACORN Computers in the 1980s and is a family of instruction set architectures for computer processors based on reduced instruction set computing(RISC). A RISC based computer design approach means that ARM processors require significantly fewer transistors than typical complex instruction set computing(CISC). which is found in most personal computers. RISC reduces costs, heat and power use which are desirable traits for personal devices such as smartphones, laptops, tablets and netbook computers. A simpler design facilitates more efficient multi-core CPUs and higher core counts at lower cost, providing improved energy efficiency for servers. Globally, ARM is the most widely used instruction set architecture in terms of quantity produced with over 50 billion ARM processors having been produced as of 2014. According to ARM Holdings, in 2010 alone, producers of chips based on ARM architectures reported shipments of 6.1 billion, representing 95% of smartphones, 35% of digital televisions and set-top boxes and 10% of mobile computers.

Taken from its wiki, The ARM architecture is supported by a large number of embedded and real-time operating systems, including Linux, Windows CE, Symbian, ChibiOS/RT, FreeRTOS, eCos, Integrity, Nucleus PLUS, MicroC/OS-II, PikeOS, QNX, RTEMS, RTXC Quadros, ThreadX, VxWorks, DRYOS, MQX, T-Kernel, OSE, SCIOPTA, OS-9, and RISC OS. It is also the primary hardware environment for most mobile device operating systems such as iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Windows RT, Bada, Blackberry OS/Blackberry 10, MeeGo, Firefox OS, Tizen, Ubuntu Touch, Sailfish and webOS.

What is Hacking?

Despite what teenage girls or mothers on Facebook would have you believe, hacking is not accessing a computer after someone neglected to log out from it. A true hacker would never need you to forget to log out of your account nor would they need to even be at your location. They would get your account information remotely without any assistance from you at all. A hacker would also not need to phish for your information, phishing is a type of scam where a person pretends to be someone they are not to get your information, here is a good example.

The term hack is getting dangerously close to generic use as of late, there are “lifehacks”, “kitchenhacks”…typically anything that makes an existing tasks even remotely faster is now considered a hack. The new generalization of hack and hacking takes away from the true hackers, and these are people that know far more about computers than you ever could. Commonly accepted uses of the term hacker taken from Wiki are:

•  People committed to computer security, primarily concerns those who work debugging or fixing security problems (White hats), differentiate from the morally ambiguous Grey hats and the illegal computer criminals, who perform unauthorized remote computer break-ins via a communication networks such as the Internet (Black hats).
• A community of enthusiast computer programmers and systems designers, originated in the 1960s around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT’s) Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) and MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. This community is notable for launching the free software movement. The World Wide Web and the Internet itself are also hacker artifacts.The Request for Comments RFC 1392 amplifies this meaning as “[a] person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular.”
• The hobbyist home computing community, focusing on hardware in the late 1970s (e.g. the Homebrew Computer Club) and on software (video games, software cracking, the demoscene) in the 1980s/1990s. The community included Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates and Paul Allen and created the personal computing industry.

We will focus on the computer security defined hacker here. These hackers will examine and exploit weaknesses in a computer system or network, typically motivated by profit, protest, challenge or personal enjoyment. Hackers are essentially experts in computer or network security. Recent examples of websites actually being hacked are:

• State of Montana notifies 1.3 million patients of breach to Department of Public Health and Human Services server.
• Popular messaging app Yo gets breached.

PC World also recently released an informative map that shows in real time what it looks like when the web is hacked. Despite the bastardization of the term hacker, it is best that you do know what you are dealing with when encountering actually being hacked.

Crash Course: What Is Reddit?

Reddit is a user submitted social news site which calls itself “The front page of the internet”. Anyone can view the material on Reddit but you would have to register an account if you would like to vote on the submitted material or if you would like to customize your experience, the point of submitting content is for ‘karma’, or simply imaginary internet points. Material is grouped into subsets(subreddits) so if you would like to view only political news or gifs of cats, there is a subreddit for that. Recently Reddit underwent a change in their default subreddits(what an unregistered user would see) where they removed one of the most popular subreddits, /r/AdviceAnimals which specializes in memes, better explained as internet inside jokes.

The Good: Reddit is a great place for certain communities, I always refer to /r/dogecoin as one of the best communities that I have ever been a part of, I list some of their fundraising ventures in my feature about Dogecoin. /r/IAma is also a great place to be able to interact with celebrities or most anyone else you may admire, some noteworthy AMA(Ask Me Anything)’s include President Barack Obama, Bill Gates and very recently Julian Assange. Beyond its communities and celebrities Reddit does what it is supposed to do very well, it compiles links from news sites in one place so you don’t have to mess with your browser’s RSS feeds, just go to the subreddit of choice and there you should have it. I have also found Reddit to be useful in learning, when I first signed up almost two years ago I knew next to nothing about CSS or programming, through individual community assistance I have people to consult when I am lost. 

The Bad: Redditors like to think of themselves as part of some indie/underground culture when the reality is that Reddit is one of the most popular websites on the internet. Taking a look at the front page right now while not logged in, I would say not even half of the top 25 posts are worthwhile, currently the top 3 are a Flintstones gif; a picture of someones game inspired cappuccino and a meme. I may have praised certain communities in ‘The Good’ but as a whole the individual subreddit communities are terrible, in most popular threads’ comment sections you will be met with ongoing puns and re-referenced inside Reddit jokes. To put the inside joke mentality into perspective, let’s say you have one friend whose idea of being funny is to recite lines from movies/television or just keeps talking about the same thing from a year ago over and over again. There is also an oft-referenced hivemind mentality that comes with Reddit, if you are unfortunate enough to declare your position on a topic and it happens to not be the popular decision, you can expect to hate when you see your new message indicator. 

The Ugly: Reddit has not been without its controversies, taken from its own wiki: 

• Anderson Cooper of CNN devoted a segment of his program to condemning /r/jailbait and criticized Reddit for hosting it. Initially this caused a spike in Internet traffic to the subreddit, causing the page to peak at 1.73 million views on the day of the report. In the wake of these news reports, a Reddit user posted an image of an underage girl to /r/jailbait, subsequently claiming to have naked images of her as well. Dozens of Reddit users then posted requests for these nude photos to be shared to them by private message. Other Reddit users drew attention to this discussion and the /r/jailbait forum was subsequently closed by Reddit administrators on October 10, 2011. Critics such as /r/jailbait’s creator /u/violentacrez disputed claims that this thread was the basis of the decision, instead claiming it was an excuse to close down a controversial subreddit due to recent negative media coverage. 
• A year after the closure of the jailbait subreddit, a Reddit community called “/r/Creepshots” drew controversy in the press for hosting sexualized images of women without their knowledge. In the wake of this media attention, /u/violentacrez was added to /r/Creepshots as a moderator,and reports emerged that Gawker reporter Adrian Chen was planning an exposé that would reveal the real-life identity of this user, who moderated dozens of controversial subreddits as well as a few hundred general-interest communities. Several major subreddits banned links to Gawker in response to the impending exposé and the violentacrez account was deleted. Moderators defended their decisions to block the site from these sections of Reddit on the basis that the impending report was “doxxing” (a term for exposing the identity of a pseudonymous person), and that such exposure threatened the site’s structural integrity. Chen published the piece on October 12, 2012, revealing that the operator of /u/violentacrez was a middle-aged programmer from Texas named Michael Brutsch. Within a day of the article being published, Brutsch’s position was terminated by his employer and the link to the exposé was briefly banned from Reddit. He stated on Reddit after the article was published that he has received numerous death threats.

Reddit can be the best or the worst of the internet, it is effectively what you make of it. If you wanted to have an account just for NSFW content then you could register and subscribe to all NSFW subreddits that interest you. I have personally used Reddit to meet people in the technology world that I in turn have interviewed for this blog and I also use it for research when I am looking for a group of people that specialize in the certain field that I want to learn more about. One thing that I could list under ‘The Good’ and ‘The Bad’ is Reddit’s addicting nature, more than once have I gotten bored with Reddit so I went to type in my go-to-when-bored site into my browser…Reddit.