Whistle Orga

Or only exist locally.

And I am not saying this is necessarily negative, but should we consider local fallout?

I think that was discussed in the initial TGR chat. Iirc, the consensus was that they deserved to be outed

My biggest concern with fallout is that any of us who really push the thing hard might get targeted on an infoSec basis. cracker-based digging.

Pfft. Let them dig for me. They have before.

Globally? I'm sure.

Any enl tool leak will be treated in the harshest terms by much of our own faction, even if exposing scraping.

Yep. It's the sort of action that permanently labels a person.

You mean just hunting? How else? I am genuinely asking.

I'm just kind of finally catching up here. What is it that we want to do with Reddit? I have a couple of alts but not any that have posted on /r/ingress

Being the whistleblower, I think

Leaking tools is a sacred cow to a lot of influential people. If any of us publicly exposed an ENL scraping tool and named names, the whistle blower would be crucified.

And it's too late to anonymize.

I bet things could be arranged so that a drunk Quarkgent blows his own whistle

Yes. I don't mind jumping on that grenade. I'm carrying a big sloshy bucket of stigma around with me already. It's fine.

TBH, we don't have anyone in here with enough access to anything they are willing to give up to be damning enough to be worth the leak at this point.

So it's probably a moot point.

Don't doubt Charlie's ability to find grenades to jump on

lol

He'd probably just start playing EVE anyways

I hear it's got some good spreadsheets.

Unrelated maybe, but we have a couple flip floppers who were running off at the mouth recently after flipping BACK to ENL... They named names of which res locally have access to "the tool". Which matches up with one of the supposed scrapers running his mouth in xfaction... Something to the effect of "we let Europe do our scraping for us"

Europe is great at tools, haven't you noticed?

It may all just be a bunch of hot air...

They are

Supposedly

SOP, V, Rocks

on our side

Whistle is moving slow, but she's moving.

Trying to check the api thing.

While we're waiting, this is an important thing to consider. If we do this job well, we are reasonably likely to have to put our money where our mouths are with regarding to exposing things on the ENL side as well.

That would be even more divisive than the original guardian discussion.

We're pretty smart, resourceful people. If we wanted to dig out a distributed ENL scraper engine, I think we could.

But I don't know if I would. As much as I despise scraping, I don't know that it would be worth the trust I would have to gain and break to do that.

People have already floated a couple of ideas in DMs, and they're workable. They involve outside actors I don't want to expose just yet but... yeah. They're workable avenues.

So, I suppose something would be gained if we tried to unite ENL and RES who hate scraping against ENL and RES who scrape. But it sure wouldn't be ENL factional unity or focus.

This would be the cross you die on

And it's not that great a cross

It would be powerfully divisive. We'd have to decide whether to post anonymously (weak, and probably not fooling anyone), whether to serve up a sacrificial lamb (probably me) or whether to present a united front.

What would be gained?

Like I'd rather keep the parts of the enlightened that I like than blow up the whole game over this one shitty part.

Tend to agree

I guess it would pre-empt the RES accusation that we do it too.

More leverage with Niantic.
A very different kind of global conversation on the topic.

(I have limited availability today -- yell if you need me)

think about that. Instead of it being 'you guys are bad too!' the source of conflict would be between ...who?

Us and each other.

We'd end up in a conversation like 'well, if everyone is doing it..so what?'

The Amish and the non Amish

Would an actual pro-cheating faction coalesce and talk about things?

yeah there'd be a lot of that. And a renewed call for an official Niantic API

It would change the nature of the guardian refactoring conversation

If you could get the global conversation there.


It could also go:


you out a bunch of high level RES but cant stop their tool
you out a bunch of high level ENL but cant stop their tool


They say "fuck you, you're cheating too." We say "fuck you, you leaked our tool and cant be trusted." Everyone who didnt have access to scrape data before has access now by contacting someone who does. Some trusted ENL and some RES lose status with Niantic. Niantic posts something ambivalent about scraping violating the terms of the game, but makes no changes.

It might scare some people into being less awful, on both sides.

or they could decide that everyone is awful so I will be too.

It'll definitely be press for the scrapers though

And I don't think Niantic can realistically block the scraping

it will be a level playing field of awfulness

This would not surprise me in the end that both sides are run by one asshole lol

Niantic cannot stop scraping, but they can marginalize the value of it. Scraping happens because guardians, period.

Generally agreed.

People might scrape for alerts

but the motivation is lessened without guardian

Yeah, instant notifications about anything that sniffs like BAF is also bad, agreed.

This would continue without guardian.

yeah it's there to stay. There's really no help for it.

and it's fine. We get fields up anyway.

This is an interesting ethical question.

[[GIF, size 23'714 bytes]]

ok. No joy on the API token. They have one but it's locked down. She'd have to request.

ok.

so, we're on to the next thing...member lists and in-situ screenshots

Then userlist?

yea.

Could they explore if the IRC gateway is turned on? If it is, they should be able to connect using their user credentials and suck out the history using an IRC client.

might go down that road after screenshots. This user doesn't seem very technically savvy and I don't want to overload her.

It seems fairly unlikely -- the slack admins would have to have explicitly turned it on

Yes, they would, but it's another option since the API key is not.

[[Photo]]

do not visit that site please

Registered April 2016.

600 users in the #bot channel

she's compiling

Hmm hopefully she knows leaving the channel today would be a bad idea?

Registered through Google with privacy on.

I think she's pretty on top of protecting her anonymity

you offered our labor to sort out the list?

Do we have an idea what is motivating her?

anything we can do to help. I can tell you basically any agent within 100km of me

yeah. wasn't pushy. She seems committed to doing the work.

I'm hoping some people just want to watch the world burn.

I wonder if the person who created the channel, landspeed, is the same as the Utah RES agent with that name. Park City area.

No. Haven't gone there yet. Potentially dangerous conversation. Want to get the data in hand first.

think about the scope of this thing for a second, it's nuts. 600 users in that bot channel

there are only about 1100 north american users on V