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

- I've watched this rodeo before. Been told we're whining to ask for an agreement about fair play standards. That my local teammates clearly also cheat because someone took out a guardian candidate once. Or because we use IITC.

People rationalize this kind of cheating to an extent that you will not believe. Be prepared for this.

- I did in fact catch that

- Spooky

- Yeah?

- ๐Ÿ’š

- Yeah, Imgur was the main point of that release

- Because it was on our coast

- Oh damn, stego

- Hugs, everyone

- You've all known this to be true, but seeing your worst suspicions confirmed and having names put to them is painful. Feelings will result. Hugs for everyone

- It seems to say he's a dev

- Europe is on this list

- Proof makes it different

- It seems so. Lots of awkward i's instead of l's among my local smurfs, reflecting actual igns

- Sorry, Erich

- How so?

- I'm sorry, Erich. Folks will get defensive when this goes down

- Yeah. The hardest-to-fathom part will be the folks who don't get defensive. Because they believe they did nothing wrong

- Yes. We need to be able to clearly define scraping and explain why it's cheating

- Probably

- The existence of cheating tools is not a factional issue

- The extent of use varies by faction by region

- Intel scraping can do all the things we've seen

- ๐Ÿ’š

- Gamifying a video game

- Thank you, whoever spotted this

- Has someone instructed Semi?

- Ty

- Yes, and yes

- This is a powder keg

- You can short url anything

- [[Webpage]]See tinyurl.com/MimosaSmiles

- Yeah, RES owns that one

- This. If you ever want anything but the most acrimonious of relationships with Niantic, you have to give them the basic courtesy that suits this circumstance

- I like this thought. Scope without locating players

- ๐Ÿ‘

- People will talk plenty about their own smurfs as soon as this gets released

- Yes

- (There is a mile of backscroll and I'm at work again today. Ping if you need me for something)

- There's a public list

- They pulled Q3 off it already, boo

- I would, yes

- I would not prewarn any additional ENL without a compelling reason

- This isn't an anomaly-specific issue

- Yes

- ๐Ÿ’š

- Dreadpiratecat is a local

- Keeping the website more data-focused feels right

- Yes

- There are good people on this list, who honestly believe this is ok

- Yes

- Lying to the other faction is something we all do

- That doesn't make this violation okay in my book. But recognize that it's a matter of degrees

- I agree. They may not. Be prepared for a lack of shame

- Everyone - I missed a bunch of good work while out this evening. But, perspective from one who's seen some of this before:

- Please take a break, tonight if you're still awake or in the morning if you're not

- Think about something that isn't Ingress. Hug your cat, share a joke, send a good vibe to your best friend

- Tomorrow is going to be tough, I won't lie. This will help

- Can we skip the murder fest?

- Night!

- Wait

- That's nuts

- Yup

- TY, Erich

- Also: breathe, shower, cup of tea, lunch, whatever kind of self-care moment is appropriate for you. Please. The boulder is rolling

- Lol @ etherbunnies

- "Keeping it from me"

- These are public channels on that slack

- Once you're in the slack, this stuff isn't hidden from you

- The subreddit is heavily moderated

- It's just a thing we have to live with

- I went with #IngressCheats
I'm in a pissy mood

- Dammit, NIA

- Nope

- It needs to be enough for Niantic to make an unambiguous statement of whether this kind of thing is acceptable

- This

- [[Webpage]]https://plus.google.com/+CateGoodfriend/posts/U8Z34tDQJTB

- Can we add this to the pin, please, @Semiotiq?

- Their identity is pretty irrelevant to me

- Publish the takedown attempts

- Hugs, VAIN

- You know I would love it if you did

- Done

- The public facing website, the slack, and the scraper are three different things

- The first of those went down before we went live

- Assume the scraper is still up

- Calling someone a cheater in comm is a TOS violation

- Whether that particular move qualifies, /shrug. But please help agents in your home communities keep that in mind

- https://myaccount.google.com/security-checkup

- Even less often than I join a slack and don't look at the public channel list

- Good job on that, people

- I'd be pretty pissed

- This was an expected response

- This is a problem I would love to see fixed as a result of this week. If we can get Niantic to make a clear statement of what is and isnโ€™t okay...

- Link?

- Ha

- Watching that party line spread is interesting

- Or cheaters playing as green

- Iโ€™m good. Hope youโ€™re ok โ€” I know this is a hard day

- ๐Ÿ’š

- ๐Ÿ’š

- ๐Ÿ˜‚

- It's getting late for a bunch of people in here, so, as you are headed to bed: I'm super super proud of the work that was done leading up to today, and infinitely more proud of how everyone handled today. This is not the end, but the beginning of another campaign. Please treat my friends well by getting some rest tonight. ๐Ÿ’š

- Watched that today and thought of TGR when she said that

- Oh, man. Did you see Big Matty's comment about that?

- Uhhh, in response to some PNW post? Looking

- I think it was a comment on that post Joe S deleted?

- [[Webpage]]Matt Stevenson (BigMatty)
+3
Do you think this is what they meant when they said it would be #NotMyVanguards first task to "solve the Guardian problem"?
In the comments to: https://plus.google.com/+ollietronic/posts/3NbWknbtTGk

- Good night, Steph!

- NO PANTS

- Guys, guys. Gazebo date scene in PP2

- 5-star portal candidate. Also, I'm a free-range pony that can't be tamed

- With a kayak

- Probably not. I can't picture those characters in a canoe. But kayaks are important tonight

- Duh

- Yup

- Yup

- Catch?

- We need to have this not turn into a thing about the technicalities of whether specific individual accounts on that spreadsheet are bannable

- We have to steer away from this, I think

- Every time something similar has come up, it gets bogged down in the minutiae of particular ban cases

- I'd be okay with no bans if we get a substantial change

- Yeah, what Semi just said

- Too hopeful. Tech always finds a way

- We change the motivation

- Amen

- That'd be crazy cool

- ๐Ÿ˜‚

- +1

- I anti-care. I'm a horrible example of the ingress population, since I was raised by Pongo and Ollie. I would in fact be genuinely upset to get onyx Guardian

- I have a cursed Sojourner

- That would be amazing

- But if you were to fantasize, what would the rules be?

- Starting with jemstar's account and having someone else repost could work again

- Can we do a website post next week specifically asking for evidence of more cases and offering to publish those, too?

- So we're still reaching new eyeballs. 9K new today

- And while you're gone

- It's not whether Outgress exists. It's the fact that NIA hasn't even made a statement about it

- Or just take the agent's name out of the attack emails

- There's no need to know who the attacker is

- Yeah, Outgress is a super clear case. Just not high on my priority list. And I think we should finish this takedown before we start another

- No one is allowed to forget AnAmerican

- Relique made me giggle today

- [[Photo]]

- [[Webpage]]In the comments on https://plus.google.com/+HRichardLoeb/posts/XidN2NNGYEz

- Despite what it does to *the game*

- I could work on this, but I don't have the audience

- I'm starting a draft. I have to get my daily reports out, so it'll take 20 minutes to get started, and then I'm not the fastest writer. I will be pulling some of you to help. If Ana can do it better or faster, get her

- Oh, yeah, one of my friends is a reporter who recently left Forbes. If someone wants an intro to the guy who writes their Pokรฉmon go stuff, I could try to make that happen

- Agreed

- Thinking about possible futures is fine

- I have been deeply disturbed by so many of the revelations that have come out of the Brokers Guild leak. The sheer number of agents involved, including many that I considered colleagues. The fundamental disconnect between how my player community and other player communities I have worked closely with view this game we love and how the community leaders in the Brokers Guild view it.

But there is nothing more sickening than the argument Iโ€™ve heard in a few places that the Brokers Guild was fundamentally on the side of the Right, rooting out cheating that endangers the soul of Ingress.

*The Guild is not an anti-spoofing league, nor are the tools it built tools for catching cheats.*

A bot that spits out lists of the oldest portals owned by a specific agent, or the oldest portals in a geographic area is not for catching spoofers.

A mod scraper to spot VRLA being deployed is not for catching spoofers.

A counter that tallies your guardian hits in terms of how many of your opponentsโ€™ days you have wasted is not for catching spoofers.

Automated alerts that push to every RESWUE client in your community when your local opponents are throwing a flash farm are not for catching spoofers.

A heat map of an individual playerโ€™s commonly-visited locations, complete with times of day, is not for catching spoofers.

Augmented reality gameplay is new and exciting territory. Yes, we all put our privacy on the line a bit every day that we play Ingress. But we also get to help define the cultural norms on using one another's location information. There has been some back-and-forth this week about whether x specific feature of #RIOT is technically within bounds of the Ingress TOS. Or whether Niantic is aware of some features that are clear TOS violations but tolerates them because theyโ€™ve been used to catch spoofers. Fine, if some of this is happening with Nianticโ€™s blessing, they just have to say so.

But so much of what is revealed in these screen shots is so far outside of the bounds of moral behavior. No one ends up in a Slack by mistake โ€” you have to explicitly accept an invitation, and it is clear that one of the requirements for membership in this Slack was registration with your real agent name, spelling quirks and all. Joining the Brokers Guild was a conscious choice.

And once in, well, we can all see from these screenshots what the members saw, in public channels inside that Slack. Guardian hit requests, complete with automated lists of which Brokers live nearby. (The deals being brokered were guardian hits, not spoofer stings.) People helping each other set up bot access in other chat platforms to propagate scraped data to their local communities. Agents building portfolios of players whose every move they wanted to stalk.

Somehow, the hundreds of people in that Slack, even if they werenโ€™t all participating, stayed silent about what they saw there. That is destroying the soul of Ingress.

- I can post any time in the next two hours

- Yup

- Thanks for the help, Erich. I promise Iโ€™m looking at it

- Who has a thought on timing?

- Oh, good point, I can pull back one hair

- Deal

- Grabbing lunch, then Iโ€™ll make another pass at this

- [[Webpage]]https://plus.google.com/+CateGoodfriend/posts/dVbiwAk9Ngy

- FedEx deadline made!

- Anyone need anything?

- Yes?

- He is NIA, and ENL

- This. People make mistakes

- I'm not going to give her the keys to my house or something without getting to know her first. No skin off my nose if she's just someone playing Ingress somewhere

- Yup. I'll take gullible over conspiracy theorist any day. It's a social video game, not the nuclear launch codes. Can't make friends if you don't take chances

- Yeah, no worries, weโ€™ll hold it in confidence

- I meant weโ€™ll keep her confession in this room. Sorry that you had to put her name out on the internet

- This. So much this

- I can forgive someone without giving them the chance to stomp all over me again, too. Itโ€™s not bosom buddies or nothing

- But the offending channels that we know about were public. If you were in that Slack, you knew this was going on. Iโ€™m going to find it very hard to accept that excuse from anyone

- Everyone breathe

- He's had a hell of a day x 3 days

- I haven't seen any reason to think someone in here is actively leaking. I'm sure some things are being talked about. I'm sure other people in other places are having reactions. But EWBF
.....21.10.2017 00:59:31, Michael Noda [GreatNorthern, PHL <span class="emoji emoji-spritesheet-3" style="background-position: -486px -36px;" title="us">:us:</span>]: >>left group<<

- And I'm fine with being in here even though I'm not Semi

- My definition of cheating does not include the tools we use to fly megafields, or the tools I use to win anomalies. There's no need to drive a wedge between those of us who operate anomalies and those who haven't

- We and a lot of other people have had a long, hard week. Some people are having a hard moment, late at night on a Friday. If you have the space in your heart to breathe and let it be for a little while, I think things will settle down

- Well said, sir

- Aww, thanks, Charlie

- A lot of people were bound to be made uncomfortable this week. Just because someone said that they have inside information from some room doesn't mean they do, or that it's from this room. People are going to say a lot of things. A lot of those things will be unwise, and some will be unkind or feel like attacks

- Applause

- Don't stop talking, Ana

- Thank you for this. As much as I sometimes take "burn it all" as a motto, I'm not here to burn other people here as witches. I continue to think that our focus for the beginning of next week should be on getting a sensible statement out of Niantic.

- I'm sad. We had work to do

- Lori is so right. Love you awesome nerds

- Huh, that actually is vaguely interesting. Never heard of it before today