The Confessions of Slashdot Asshats

Published: June 20, 2017 2017

Several weeks ago I wrote about using the DMCA takedown notices to remove my picture from image websites that Slashdot asshats kept posting for shakes and giggles. What I didn’t mention then was that three users accounts — “criemer,” “creinner” and “cremier,” variations of my Slashdot username — got deleted by management, and I subsequently created new accounts with disposable email addresses to prevent the usernames from being reused. End of story, right? Not quite. An extraordinary set of events shortly thereafter caused another user account to get deleted by management that immediately ended three months of unrelenting harassment towards me.

Confession

After I announced in a comment that I’ve successfully taken down all my pictures from various image websites, two users, an Anonymous Coward (or asshat) and “FakeFuck39” (seriously), commented that they “found” more of my pictures in a search result that I failed to notice and provided a new set of image links. What was curious was the very first link had a posted timestamp of 15 minutes earlier. All the links were recently posted. While I copy and pasted a new round of DMCA takedown notices to email, “FakeFuck39” posted a confession about the three deleted user accounts.

those were buddies of mine. one from France, one from Israel, and one of them was from across the table from me. I don’t know who cdreimer was. We had fun for a week or two creating accounts and laughing at you, but posting bullshit on slashdot all day is not what we do, so unlike you we had our fun and stopped creating new accounts. That’s like asking where the basketball players are after the game is over on the playground. They’re at home with their wives in their big house moron.

An asshat confessed to being “cdreimer,” the user account that started this series of events at the beginning of the Memorial Day holiday weekend.

cdreimer was me… I don’t know who struck first, cdreimer or criemer, but I know you guys were a lot funnier than me!

I sent an email to my contact at Slashdot the next morning, pointing out the links to newly uploaded pictures and nostalgic confessions.

Escalation

Later that evening I got a comment posted by an asshat written in the same style as “FakeFuck39”:

your image is all over the internet now, under the filename fatloser.jpg, and a lot of it appears to be coming up on russian hosting sites. have fun “protecting it” -most people would want to hide if they looked like that, from shame of how low they sank. as far as whether it’s legal or not to create accounts making fun of you or spread an image you made available – yes, it is – and no, your opinion is wrong, nor does it count.

have you noticed no one fights your takedown notices? the game we had you playing was issuing notices after you did the first one for cdreimer. you’re Still playing champ.. Once you get the links posted down, we’ll send you the new ones. I gotta warn you though, the next batch had a little photoshop work done. you’ll love it

I sent an email to my contact at Slashdot and went to bed.

“FakeFuck39” commented the next morning with newly uploaded picture links. This was where everything tied together. An asshat promised Photoshoped pictures and “FakeFuck39” delivered the links to the Photoshoped pictures. Could we say that the two were the same person?

Deletion

I sent off another email to my contact at Slashdot the next morning. After lunch I got an email from management that “FakeFuck39” would join the other deleted user accounts. I periodically checked throughout the day to see if the account got deleted. When the “FakeFuck39” username became available again, I created a new account to the prevent from the username from being reclaimed by its former user. Unlike the other fake user accounts that got deleted, “FakeFuck39” had two years of comment history and the last three months focused on replying to my comments. The harassment that got started when someone falsely accused me of threatening to shoot them finally came to an abrupt end.

The asshats, of course, never went away on Slashdot. A dedicated group of Beavis and Butthead types are still replying to my comments for the last two weeks. They’re easy to ignore.

The Slashdot Asshat(s) Who Stole My Pictures

Published: June 6, 2017 2017

Last week I took back a Slashdot user account under my pen name with a DMCA takedown notice. The quick response by management scared the asshats into silence for 48 hours. A different group of asshats started harassing me towards the weekend. One of them posted a link to my 350-pound picture from my author website. When I clicked on the link and noticed that the picture was from May 2016, I replaced the image with a picture taken last month by saving to the same filename.  That provoked an angry response for not using different filenames. The response puzzled me until I realized that my jowls were puffier in the 2016 picture, the “ten-pound tire” around my neck that the asshats love to moan about. I then implemented a 403 (forbidden) rule in the .htaccess file to prevent the external linking of my images and created a Slashdot page with the 2017 picture on my author website. Those actions provoked even more anger. The retaliation was my 2016 picture appearing on image websites. Out came the DMCA takedown notices to protect my pen name and copyrights.

The first image website was Hosting Pics, a French-based picture website that U.S. law like the DMCA doesn’t apply to. I initially tried the contact form that appears dodgy (i.e., “Unable to find MySQL database.”), tried again successfully, and found a contact email address to send the DMCA takedown notice (just in case the contact form was dodgy after all). The email I got the next morning indicated that the source was the contact form, informing me that my picture got removed. Less than 24 hours later, an asshat uploaded the picture and left me a note in French: “I think that’s it. Good morning, Heavy Barbara.” Another request got the picture removed the following morning.

Other locations included 4chan and Imgur. Both had email addresses for sending DMCA takedown notices. I got an email from 4chan the next morning that my picture got removed. Imgur didn’t send out an email notification but they did remove my picture the following afternoon.

An asshat pointed out that Google has cached copies of my pictures that will live forever on the Internet and there was nothing I could do about it. That comment made me laugh.

Google has a help page for removing images from the search results, especially deleted images that are no longer accessible to the web crawlers. By placing a 403 rule to prevent external linking to all my images, the search engine regards those images as deleted. A removal request gets those links out of the search results sooner rather than later. After 4chan removed my picture from their site, I put in a request to remove those links. With a half-dozen open requests, I should have the search results cleaned up in a few days.

I’m once again enjoying the calmness that comes from scaring off the asshats with my awesome powers as a content creator. The few asshats who are still around are sharing a link to my picture, but this time it’s the Slashdot link to my author website. The more exposure that link gets, the more web traffic and ad revenues I get. Since the brouhaha with the asshats got started three months ago, I made $80 in ad revenues as curious readers left Slashdot to visit my websites. As Warren Buffett once said, “When it’s raining gold, reach for a bucket, not a thimble.”