Not even that, really. It's that they DIDN'T previously ask this, and now are trying to RETROACTIVELY CHANGE THE RULES on people who previously had agreed to different rules!

Yes. It is my belief the database could have leaked to the public by now, given that Google has already turned up evidence that at least one party is willing to solicit offers.

That is rather interesting, yes. Not ALL of the attacks have done so, though. And the collection of images isn't too meaningful, because Tubgirl and Goatse are stock, popular images.

Absolutely nothing, but everyone needs a hobby, and mine happens to be paranoia.

Your assumption is that these attacks are being carried out by a clever hacker, rather than a hamfisted idiot with convenient access to inside information. If the Atwa connection is at work here, there is absolutely no evidence to suggest Atwa is capable of subtlety or even long-term thinking. As many hosting providers and backup systems are effective against mitigating the damage from such annoyance attacks, it is not surprising that these can be repaired easily.

I don't find this a plausible theory on the grounds that it is too tinfoil hat, and there are too many attacks on disparate groups, some of which have no connection to either side. However, I'm coming to the belief that TSR is no longer really directly responsible for any of this, and that the real problem is that the genie is out of the bottle. At least one party, although not proven to be related to the attacks at all, has proven they are willing to solicit outside help to execute these attacks. While an attack requiring wizardry is still very unlikely in such a scenario (wizards don't really care to be someone else's personal army), it is quite possible that the DB has fallen into the hands of public script kiddies that are now carrying out some or all of these attacks independently, without any oversight from anyone still associated with TSR. Pandora's Box was opened, and there's no way back even if TSR wanted it to stop.

This is why I like to webbug my own critical accounts. I put, in them, a hotlinked object that is never linked from anywhere else, so when someone starts snooping through my inbox, their IP is immediately captured when they see the object and an alarm is sounded on my computer. I also preemptively hack my own computer.

The Gray Fatness is postulating that these attacks never actually occurred and are just things made up for attention by a conspiracy of sockpuppets. I do not find this theory very plausible, however.

Well, it does mean she can get it BACK. But yeah, the information is probably unretrievable. While Google never deletes anything, they're not gonna help you retrieve it, either.

From what I can tell, the FA circle operates much like a cult, so yeah.

That does seem rather interesting, but how can he be related to all these people?

Pretty much. So the crapidshare thing indicates that the attacker is clearly learning from the conversations on MATY. IF this isn't simply a random incident. I mean, we're talking crapidshare and gmail. Not even a Sims site.

Well, SOME Of these certainly seem unrelated. I don't see any Sugah-TSR connection at all, given that this Sugah is largely an unknown on this side of the fence and has no affiliations of any kind with the pirate movement, and the attacks are closer to a conventional script-kiddy MO of vandalize-and-run. Of course, a possible explanation is that the dox list may have leaked out onto the public Internets by now, and therefore this string of attacks is now being carried out by people unconnected to the community, even if its root origin remains TSR. But that is speculation and nowhere close to the reasonable doubt level.

Petitions don't have passwords and compromising the petition would not have gained access to anything other than dox. I'm not seeing a link. If a hack was attempted on a Paypal, this could constitute an actual crime and evidence may have been collected. However, the apparent profit motive may suggest an outside agent rather than one connected to the community.

Well, for starters, everything coming from TSR is automatically more threatening simply because they're prepared to throw thousands of dollars into a legal attack. Secondly, the descriptions may not necessarily jive because Johan is not involved in any of this, and therefore, he hears one story, while the people receiving the nastygrams hear something else. Did you know that the tone of an email message is misunderstood by some significant proportion of over half the time? So you have one level of misunderstanding when the orders to send the nastygrams are sent out, another level when the nastygram is sent by the outsourced agent, and again when the story returns.

That's Tubgirl. The google cache image of the site suggests the site itself was not tampered with, and that the Botophucket images linked were simply altered. This is the true peril of hotlinking. Forget that crap about bandwidth theft. Hotlinking my files gives ME the power to control YOUR site's content by splattering crap like THAT on it. Faced with THAT, I guarantee that the person doing the hotlinking will pull it down REAL fast and probably be banned from the site they did it on.

However, it does not tell us anything about a hacking, or even prove that one took place. I mean, it's Botophucket. Botophuckets are hacked all the time. The familiarity of those images is meaningless. As a veteran of the Internets, I can tell you that those are stock images of sufficient infamy that they have PROPER NAMES recognizeable to ANY veteran. Tell them it was Tubgirl, and they ALL know what you mean.

Yeah, I'm having a sense of deja vu here, with this same conversation on MATY as well. So...same as there: Goatse is not very unique or original.