Hello world,
as many of you may already be aware, there is an ongoing spam attack by a person claiming to be Nicole.
It is very likely that these images are part of a larger scale harassment campaign against the person depicted in the images shared as part of this spam.
Although the spammer claims to be the person in the picture, we strongly believe that this is not the case and that they’re only trying to frame them.
Starting immediately, we will remove any images depicting “Nicole” and information that may lead to identifying the real person depicted in those images to prevent any possible harassment.
This includes older posts and comments once identified.
We also expect moderators to take action if such content is reported.
While we do not intend to punish people posting this once, not being aware of the context, we may take additional actions if they continue to post this content, as we consider this to be supporting the harassment campaign.
Discussion that does not include the images themselves or references that may lead to identifying the real person behind the image will continue to be allowed.
If you receive spam PMs please continue reporting them and we’ll continue working on our spam detections to attempt to identify them early before they reach many users.
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So Nicole is false and we’ve all been lied to? 😱
Couldn’t be. You can’t lie on the internet.
So you have all the limitless time and energy to address this stupid spam post but you can’t prevent the rise of authoritarian bots and powermods on lemmy.world?
What is an authoritarian bot?
I guess limitless time and energy would be needed to identify authoritarian bots because it’s much harder compared to identifying a person in an image. Should nothing be done because the larger problem can’t be solved at the current time?
Harder for you people maybe, to me they stick out like a tooth ache
Username checks out.
If I had a nickle for every time someone thought that was a clever reply, I’d be able to afford a house
You might even be able to afford therapy.
First: you people? Who are “we”, are unable to identify such contents / opinions? Second: I’m not talking about people identifying content and filtering it, I am talking about automated systems. Do you think that they are filtering Nicole’s by looking at each and every picture?
‘You’ are everyone in existence not me who apparently have a hard time distinguishing authoritarian jargon.
I’m not sure where opinions come into this, are you a bot?
If I can do it, an automated system can do it. Twitter already had it but they didn’t roll it out because it ‘false flagged’ a bunch of repugnican politicians as fascist back in 2015 GUESS WHAT THEY WERE FUCKING ON THE MONEY!
I get it, you’re a terminally online shitstirrer that isn’t getting enough attention. Well I can guarantee this is the last post you’ll be getting any of that from me.
You are absolutely incapable of judging the complexity of the tasks at hand. a) Calculating a hash of every uploaded image, comparing it against a blocklist, and extending the blocklist as needed b) validating each each post to distinguish truth from lie, facts from imagination and on top of that judging whether the presentation opinion fits in a moral/ethical framework of which a computer has no concept of.
A computer is a machine that calculates stuff. It “emulates a brain” to appear smart. A brain is a biological machine that is good in pattern detection and expression, which emulates a computer to do math to appear smart.
If you think an automated system can do it because you can do it, please spend your apparent infinit resources and time in implementing it rather than wasting your valuable time online insulting others who actually do something.
you’re a terminally online shitstirrer that isn’t getting enough attention
I’m seriously impressed you are accusing the other person of doing this. Reread your comments and take a hard look at the vibe you are giving off.
Wait, there are people who genuinely believe she’s the one behind it?
I thought it was pretty obvious that she’s the target of harassment. Some people must be new to the Internet
I’ve seen internet harassment campaigns, none have looked like this. She doesn’t feel like the target here. If you wanted to use the internet to harass a girl, is this how you would implement it?
Yeah. This is older than the internet. It’s like writing “For a good time call Nicole” and writing someone you don’t like’s number in a truck stop bathroom.
…actually…
Yeah, I’ve been targeted by enough romance spam that I just assume any photo of a woman I don’t know was probably stolen from some random Tumblr or Instagram.
Speaking of new to the internet, it’s clearly not a harassment campaign against her. This is waaaay too much effort. There’s only 3 things that would engender this level of effort. Money, government spying, or mental illness.
This is waaaay too much effort.
If you are willing and able to do a bit of scripting, it’s not that hard to generate and send a bunch of messages on the Threadiverse.
And there are people who will go to pretty extreme lengths to harass people who they are really upset with. An ugly breakup or something and…
mentally ill people can have plenty of time on their hands to invest this much effort in harassing others. people claiming that this can’t be harassment are effectively supporting the harassment, as that tries to further blame the likely victim of this. obviously this is just speculation, as we don’t know the full truth.
people claiming that this can’t be harassment are effectively supporting the harassment, as that tries to further blame the likely victim of this
I don’t think anyone seriously thinks the woman in the pictures is behind this.
I’m sorry, sometimes it’s hard to tell whether people actually mean it. I can totally see people commenting that and being serious.
things can be multiple things and once
True.
It’s a crypto scam. That’s all it ever was
Everyone is 1 of the 10000. Even the people who have to look up what being 1 of the 10000 means
I had to look it up, and after reading a lengthily Wikipedia page on Greek mercenaries, I tried the second result: an XKCD comic I’ve seen before but had forgotten. So today, I’m one of the lucky 10,000 again.
Streisand effect dude. 🤦♂️
Is this Nicole thing really still a thing? That’s so like back when I still had a 401k.
My government salutes you!
Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos.
Ouch
So was it last week or the day before yesterday? It all happens so fast, I can’t - and frankly - refuse to catch up.
It’s been ongoing for a few weeks at least. Maybe months.
It’s been at least half a year
i received another message yesterday, after my instance’s admin claimed they fixed the issue (i assume my blocking the spammer’s ip address from making new accounts)
the problem with this spam and generally federated platforms is that you can only really try detecting it based on the content. the accounts tend to get created on another instance and then the messages federate over to you, which means you won’t see a lot of the identifying information you’d see for a local user, such as their IP address.
I just chalked it up to “a necessary evil” in order to take advantage of federated platforms. I found it funny at first, and then just ignored it. I never thought that it could’ve been some smear campaign, but rather scammers looking for easy targets.
I’m glad mods are doing something about it, even if it’s not a perfect fix.
IP bans aren’t great either. A decent spammer will just use a vpn. Then you’re just banning IPs from a service that other users might also use. An even more sophisticated bad actor would just use a bot net.
Understandable.
I looked up the Discord out of curiosity. Link is expired or channel does not exist
I’ve heard that if you actually add her on friendica, the mayor of Toronto shows up at your house and gives you an old fashioned.
I’ll give it a go
Weird, I’d assumed it was just AI generated? What makes people think it’s harassment?
Anyone that is monolithic in a space without broad scope comments and presence is fake or potentially dangerous. No one would be posting in Lemmy, in this context of supposed community building without having a presence here. There are several people that come to mind that could legitimately post that they are “the fediverse Squid Legend” but all of these have a major footprint on Lemmy.
There is also a sketchy tracker link attached to the images, but I don’t think any of us are really able to say what exactly is happening with this. Like I finally got one of the messages a few days ago and my whitelist firewall logged the sketchy link. Someone else scanned that link in a security context which flagged it as suspicious. As far as I know, that is all that is known about what is underpinning the messages from the network side. Admins likely know more.
Someone floated the idea, others liked the idea, started sharing the idea and once it made full circle, everyone was sure it’s harassment.
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills that everyone is saying it’s obviously harassment. Doesn’t make much sense to me. I think it’s obvious she’s a victim but this would be way too niche of a form of harassment for it to be obvious
That said, the course of action should be the same regardless
All the images look like screenshots taken during video calls. Also some people did some research and found the potential identity of the spammer (based on one of the accounts used) and maybe even the woman herself (coworker of the guy).
Yeahhhh and see that’s when we need to stop and chill. Give this woman her privacy for the love of God
It’s what confirmed she’s likely the target of harassment and not a spammer herself.
Right I understand that, but I’m saying we need to NOT be doxing either of these people. We really don’t need to stress this poor innocent woman out by getting involved
Holy shit fediverse lore fuckin’ slaps!
Nicole is the Boston Marathon bomber confirmed.
What makes people think it’s harassment?
It’d make a lot of sense to me.
The image quality was poor, and there are AI models that permit one to create absolutely stunningly attractive people, moreso than real photos. Hell, I’ve written scripts myself to automatically drive Stable Diffusion to produce bulk procedural images. Anyone capable of scripting up a bot to send the message in the first place is more than capable of scripting up better generation.
For catfishing, sending multiple duplicate messages to a user, which happened in this case, seems unlikely to be a goal.
I assumed that it couldn’t reasonably be a scam attempt, so was guessing at it being a deanonymization effort, but harassment would make even more sense. If you’re trying to drive lots of angry people to make the victim miserable, it doesn’t matter if the images are annoying — in fact, it only makes them more effective, since hopefully you get more irate users sending material to the victim.
I gotta give it to you guys. The foresight to prevent a disaster is 10/10. Top tier. Well done.
to be honest, this should have been done way earlier.
You know it had not even crossed my mind until this post but on hindsight it makes perfect sense.
I saw a theory a while back that the IPs which receive the various images get logged allowing the recipients accounts to be tied to an IP and possibly even a physical address based on the timeframe it was sent. Is that a real concern or just conspiracy, do you think?
That appears to be a baseless conspiracy theory.
Except for the gore pms, I believe all the images have been uploaded to Lemmy instances or Imgur, which means that the uploader has no way to track IPs accessing those images. The gore images were uploaded to another service that at least on the surface appears to be another regular image hoster that wouldn’t expose IP access logs to uploaders.
I don’t think its baseless given that anyone can set up their own Lemmy instance to host the PM’d images.
Gore wait wtf where does gore come in, is that if you play along with the ctfish?
A day or two ago, someone spammed out a picture of a murdered body with the standard Fediverse Chick copypasta. That seemed to freak people out; the nicoled community locked down, this thread happened, etc.
The gore photo seems to be a second actor/copycat. The Nicole spammer either came from their own instances or opened accounts very shortly before spamming, the gore photo, and a following anime style picture done in red-on-white saying “Do you like insanity?” seem to come from accounts that were made 2 years ago.
Oh damn. Don’t know how I missed that bit of drama. Thanks
The instance domains I’ve seen involved so far at least weren’t set up specifically for this purpose at least. Most of the URLs were pointing to established services and not different per recipient.
While I can’t rule out that individual users may have received a different URL in an attempt to extract their IP and information about their browser, this at least does not appear to have been done in a larger scale.
I find it difficult to believe there are enough fediverse users not using a VPN at all times to make that effort worthwhile.
most people don’t. the only device I have that runs a VPN 24/7 is a laptop that seeds
I use a VPN on everything else if I’m doing something sketchy thougheveryone should be more like me :3
yeah that’s fair, I probably should use it more but it’s just kinda annoying
Still glad you’re doing it now!
Foresight? This has been going on for several months.
I took the comment as sarcasm. lol
You forgot this
/sIt’s pretty obvious …
What’s scary is how many people just accepted that some woman wanted to randomly spam thousands of pictures with her smoking weed.
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Maybe they’re used to onlyfans bots.
That would make since if any of the pictures were selfies and not random screen grabs off a webcam
Oh, I think I got one of those. It’s that girl with the bong, right?
Yes, but there are a few pictures around from all of it
I got one on dullsters.net I hope it’s not some kind of vulnerability.
This is some small internet bullshit i’m here for
Damn, I never thought about it this way. Wow. I always took it as a funny thing not thinking of the person in the photo being an actual person who could very well be harassed. Thank you for bringing this to light. Whoever thought of this is a good human being. <3
I told the person sending the image to kys :/
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