- I've asked whistle to not propagate the information any further, or respond to any open pings she might already have out.

- no response on that yet

- collaborative drive:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B-ERhFknO7kMS3RHNUZ1c2dMb0U

you'll have to request. I'm not about to do all that email address gathering

- all screenshots to date are in there. I'll batch approve periodically.

- newp

- [[Webpage]]Anticipated WB data Release is 1 PM EDT on Thurs, 10/19/2017

Website
Initial release vector is this website: https://brokersguild.wordpress.com/roster/
DM your email address to @theprevaricator for preview access

Last minute edits document
Erich needs to read this and do the needful
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QgHVpOFGEs03PMpUffST0vFQdrc1dylnNTyFL4XcxjA/edit?usp=sharing

TGR has an issue to address regarding some leaked info on a blue team cheaternet. See screenshots here:
https://goo.gl/BCFyeh (you'll have to request access)

We're on lockdown with this. Internal discussion is fine, but do not disclose anything externally. I'm wrangling, but this is a TGR community-owned issue.

We're going to come up with a strategy and work in lockstep. No external facing actions until we're in agreement on how to proceed.

WB releases
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B-ERhFknO7kMUGZwZ01vMUZfVGc

Spreadsheet of Broker's Guild bots channel members with commentary
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LTPhGVZNfUSQyaPz8eq9EO-S1RebKBz6vKIGsIk-g1o/edit#gid=0

Proposed release website format
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fERELXXix5B1QIgqc0QeTgPvQ5j-7_62nykRaTQ7vSg/edit

If you want to yammer or vent spleen or otherwise oscillate, click this thing
https://t.me/joinchat/B5mbsEOHfigcFSUKxcdAbg

If you would like to interact with WB
https://t.me/joinchat/C2DEIELQwk3MLDzAG10Dbg
Consider your anonymity and make decisions that are right for you.
.....17.10.2017 13:23:02, James P. Violentwaves142 IN E16: >>unsupported service message type: messageActionChatJoinedByLink<<

- ok, whistle has agreed not to contact anyone else or to follow up on any open pings.

- Next order of business: Based on what we've received so far, do we feel absolutely confident that this is real?

- Does anyone have doubts about the validity, or fears of being set up?

- no. I'm minimizing conversation until we have had time to really think this through and have consensus on the whole of the things that need to be done in the next step. Not going to let this thing spiral or become fractured.

- We've done as much work as we can to lock the source to us, and to clamp down our release. I think we're good on infoSec for a day or two at least.

- Yes. I'm only interested in our internal observations for now. We have to agree that it's valid as a gateway to the next step.

- they've offered to collaborate.

- yes, I feel this as well.

The full kimono ask would be to request access to their login credentials for the slack.

- But I'm hesitant to do that. It would damage the relationship if the whistle felt she had to say no.

- If I were in her shoes, I would have come to someone like me, too. Instead of Krug.

We're more likely to do more damage than Niantic would.

- We can maybe permanently move the needle one tick with regard to the gamewide conversation on these kinds of issues. That's valuable.

We can put a lot of high profile RES in deeply indefensible positions for a week or so.

We can nuke RES orga during anomaly week.

- We will not get anyone banned, and we will not stop the malfeasance.

- I mean, that'd be lovely and we can maybe angle for it, but it's not a realistic expectation.

- We could invite the whistle to come talk to us.

- multi-vector, simultaneous release.

- one message, many voices. I'm not worried about that part. We know how to do this.

- ok, let's focus on the immediate for a bit. By my notes, we're asking for three things:

1) As many in-situ screenshots as the whistle can possibly grab, showing agents requesting and receiving scraped data requests.

2) API key

3) member list of the slack

- That's fine. "Probably so, and if we find evidence of that we'll expose it too. Next question?"

- ok. I'm going to go ahead and lead with the API key. It's a long shot anyway

- Erich, can you cobble together a dead simple step by step on how to pull the API key if it's available?

- ok thanks. DM it to me and I'll proceed.

- yes, good.

- lol checking Aurora slack

- ok, request submitted to whistle.

I'm gonna grab a quick shower, bbs

- same thought.

- and also maybe...maybe build XFAC support prior to release.

- We know it happens on our side.

Two years ago Quarkgent gave me a tour of a web-based tool with a very slick GUI

- Yes, I think I could live with that. OG people mostly hate me already anyway.

- I was a baby at the time and didn't really know what I was looking at.

- it's a steam whistle!

- Yes. It would be a useful thing to do.

- It would be a useful datapoint in ongoing conversations on topics like, say 'hey, stop making game dynamics that are hypervulnerable to this well-documented instituational cheating problem you have'

- We can achieve three things here:

1) We can disrupt a bunch of influential RES on an individual basis. They'll either have to own it or deny it, and both will be sort of fun to watch.

2) We can change the gamewide conversation on issues that involve scraping. Like the individual bad actors, Niantic will either have to own it or ignore it, and both would be amusing to watch.

3) We can disrupt RES nationally for a brief period, and since we control the timing we can use that strategically.

- Yes, that seems valid. Once we get data, we'll have to think about how long we can hold it.

- It's not, really. This is very likely the same codebase as was exposed in PNW in April. Russell.

- Just on a larger platform. The PNW evidence was from a localized hangout. What we're hearing about sounds global.

- 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.

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

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

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

- 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.
.....17.10.2017 14:42:22, Cate [Intoku, WA, <span class="emoji emoji-spritesheet-3" style="background-position: -486px -36px;" title="us">:us:</span>]: >>unsupported service message type: messageActionChatJoinedByLink<<

- 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.

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

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

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

- 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

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

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

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

- 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.

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

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

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

- [[Photo]]

- do not visit that site please

- 600 users in the #bot channel

- she's compiling

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

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

- 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

- No, I think BRRN would have a different label than the Brokers Guild

- Whistle has described the documentation work she's going to do. It's comprehensive and well thought out.

- Please don't lose sight of the fact that we may end up exposing this on both sides. I think the more rational and objective and emotionally distanced we can be in our approach, the better.

- I know there are going to be a lot of gotcha! moments as the list comes out, but let's stay professional.

- sorry, didn't mean to insult you.

- play drivers, decision influencers. Anomaly orga, superagents, operators, BAF designers

- Specifically, because multiple options for pulling this same kind of information on ENL networks exists, and I'm having a hard time justifying releasing the RES stuff if I'm not willing to do that work and release the ENL stuff too.

- It's a question of proactivity. We know it exists, and I think I could go get it. Do I have an obligation to do so? Maybe. Is there a qualitative difference between not ignoring it because it's being handed to you, and not ignoring it because it would take work to ferret out?

- yeah, it's an entirely different dynamic. We've talked about it some.

- There's an awful lot of sorting to do before we have an action plan.

- hm

- Even though Niantic is working on Guardian changes, I worry that they're just going to implement something different but equally vulnerable to spoofing and scraping.

If we could comprehensively prove institutional-level scraping on both sides of the factional fence, it'd be powerful leverage for getting shitty game dynamics permanently removed.

- Yeah. I'm going to have that conversation with her as soon as the data is in hand.

- I'd also like to create an environment where we can all talk, I think.

- need to chew that over some more

- I think that would be fine. Taking it out of the badgeosphere neuters the shit out of it.

- GH is the primary gameplay motivation for a whole slew of asshats. It would be satisfying to simply take that away from them, all at once.

- sorry, that came off pretty harsh. I know some of y'all like legit guardian hunting. I don't mean to be insulting. I've just always hated the mechanic and don't understand why it's such a powerful motivation for some people. It's like pulling the wings off of flies.

- that seems ok

- Elf needs food, badly.

- bbiab

- I think we have to lead with just the res data.

- It won't stay secret long, no matter how responsible we are with it. There won't be time to dig up the enl stuff before we would need to go. I think.

- How long can we safely sit on this, once we have it?

- @ollietronic what was the length of the news cycle on Russell? How long did it burn hot?

- 30 people cannot keep a secret

- Maybe my fault for releasing to widely at once, but I like the wisdom of crowds.

- No but based on delivery so far I think we will have what we need soon.

- Whistle is consistently following through

- That seems correct. And gives us plenty of time to plan.

- Our release should be neutral. No sermonizing

- That I'm less sure about. Info war is a valid tactic

- Weaponizing thr information is a way of engineering consequences for the behavior.

We know thst the behavior will not change and that the bad actors will not be banned. But we can send a message that institutionalized cheating backfires dramatically.

- Not if we do it right

- To be clear, I think infowar is valid and my intention was to use the data in order to disrupt res orga and reduce their anomaly effectiveness

I'm happy considering other viewpoints. I mean, this is why I asked for feedback and help.

- WB has already mentioned the presence of KC and Nashville POCs and a res trusted reporter.

- Maybe Chris, but it's worth being ready, and WB has given us enough to establish trust

- We do not know yet. I have avoided those kinds of questions and will continue to do so until the data is in hand.

- No worries. It's interesting and difficult content to process.

- There is a cycle to this stuff. Releasing it a time designed to maximize the volume and awkwardness of internal RES conversations at anomaly time would be strategically useful.

- I do this stuff for work all the time.

"We released as soon as we had completely vetted the data and the source and felt confident that we were delivering a responsible and accurate message."

- Anytime you're considering my ethical character, recall that I am a professional extortionist.

- We are a team on this. I am not advocating any particular approach very strongly, and I'm listening hard.

- The useful takeaway for now is that the WB data is decoupled for now from any digging that might be done on equivalent ENL tools.

- oh, gosh did you look at this one closely?

- [[Photo]]

- The prior request to the example was in France

- Yes. Evolution of a thing

- As others have brought up, I'm amazed nobody has blown this thing up before. 600 people?

- We can reasonably speculate that they only kept this thing a secret for so long by having a very careful vetting process.

- It took them a long time to fuck up, so they probably had a pretty good system for weeding out unreliable contributors.

- That's going to speak to a certain amount of seniority among the user base. Might not necessarily all be play drivers, but they're going to be people that have been around long enough to become known and trusted.

- true. The waiting is the hardest part.

- the room #bot has one purpose and one purpose only, and there are six hundred people in it

- there will be lot sof captures of specific people making requessts and being served scraped information.

- we could test that with the one proof of concept shot she sent us.

- the one example isn't a great candidate. the oldest port was 46 days

- It's hard to recruit 600 bodies without getting at least one crusader.

- This is not great. This is the opposite of great.

- Junior Mints or gtfo

- ok so reading back on the conversation with WB, I now better understand something she said earlier

- The actual database they're using is called RIOT (dunno what it means).

- [[Photo]]

- what she's saying, I think, is that there is another interface to the riot database that provides more comprehensive information, if you're approved for it.

- Any files WB shares, I will create hard copies locally, then reload to our shared resource.

- yeah, gotcha

- WB is using a throwaway google account

- yeah :(

- that's pretty gross

- Sure, it's just a pretty ballsy thing to introduce

- nice

- oh in the other shot, the one where the agent is requesting the location of brokers near a specific portal, this is the portal specified:

- [[Webpage]]https://www.ingress.com/intel?ll=34.048991,-118.533484&pll=34.048991,-118.533484

- just basic comms scraping and parsing

- This is very similar functionality to an ENL tool I was shown a couple of years ago. This stuff has been around forever.

Database work is easy.

- WB, unsolicited:

"
Should have the bot folder done tonight, working on it little by little as time allows."

- so an idea for release:

In addition to other vectors...in the day leading up to release we could expand this channel to maximum possible size by inviting everyone trustworthy we can think of. Create a g+ template for publishing the data in an easy to consume format, and have everybody release it simultaneously. same message

- shoot for 100+ simultaneous releases

- that would keep it from being a lightning rod for any one person.

- and would very interestingly distribute the conversation.

- [[GIF, size 198'924 bytes]]

- that'd be a good separate vector

- anything on reddit should be anonymous. Nobody needs to be on the receiving end of that bilebomb

- Looking back on Russell, Sarah New was the main release outlet on G+. A single point of release like that doesn't feel like the best strategy on this, especially when so many of us have been conspicuously noisy lately about other things

- "A group of people are planning a simultaneous release of information on a RES scraper platform. Would you like to review and possibly participate?"

- yes, def new channel. Sorry I should have thought that through.

- Yeah I'm thinking 6 hours

- yeah not join the new channel I think

- this is just an idea. Not sure if it's good or not.

- I feel the same way on this one as I did on Recharge.

"Of course we're talking to each other."

- hmm

- I worry about driving too much traffic to Reddit. That thing is going to be such a grief-fest

- but maybe if the reddit post links a gdrive

- and then we all pick up the drive

- oh. yes

- and a website would enable perfect content layout

- and a fun FQDN

- niantic.fixyour.game

- oh and we know a pretty good web designer I think

- oh, funny analog to clusterbomb fielding

- the recharge campaign was about getting smart passionate people to write some really well-considered commentary

- staged release seems ok too. Not the same hammer blow, and it concentrates the g+ commentary in just a few places, but it's true that we could keep the story alive longer.

- if we release on a Thursday and use AMA as a mid-cycle bridge, that's an extension and easy signal boost

- hey. Pongo knows about websites and stuff.

- Basically the same thing we're looking at now, but in the Pacific Northwest and based on stuff happening in hangouts rather than Slack

- I'm adamantly opposed to warning RES about this ahead of time.

- The Sarah New g+ post drew 479 comments.

That's a shitlot of comments.

- 'main' is where the people are.

- ooh interesting there are references to RIOT in that thread

- "ENL OrGTFO
+6
WTF is all the butthurt for? Maybe a RIOT would help? Oh well, I'll go SOP up a date on RESWUE.
"

- hm

- The attention span on Reddit is measured in mayfly lives

- I want a bunch of RES having really awkward, difficult conversations with one another.

- Institutionalized malfeasance has a way of doing that.

I make my living catching engineers stealing $80k software packages without even being aware that it's a problem.

- I'm starting to rethink the goals here into broader categories

1) name and shame
2) short term res orga disruption
3) culture change

- I know we've had a lot of back and forth on number 2, and I'm content to let that one go. Or at least marginalize it

- WB says:

"Whistle Blower
I will share folders as I complete them but ideally I would not want information released until everything is done. As once it's out it will get closed quickly. As of now there is a 48 hour erase on some sensitive channels already."

- So let's respect that please.

- 900

- ok, here we go. You guys get what I get.

Remember, NO RELEASE until we are all in lockstep.

- https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B-ERhFknO7kMUGZwZ01vMUZfVGc

- first reaction: they code guardian hunter stats directly into the riot database

- IE: you get a kill you get a point or whatever. It's tracked in the root datastore

- yeah it's a subfolder of the main share. request is fine

- props to WB for really good documentation

- oh geez.

- Stego is in my damn guardian 2.0 working group

- reading, taking notes

- pittsburgh RES community leader ivanrussell

- ok let's stop spamming

- we'll roundtable it in a little while. Just read and make notes for now

- link added to pin

- So, just going to reiterate one more time - a lot of us are going to have some emotional reactions to this stuff....and that's fine. But thou shalt not do anything stupid.

- Thanks. I'll get this into the pin

- from wb:

"Bot is one channel that self deletes every 48 hours as you can imagine why. Any data pulls that are done via the bot channel I will add to the screen shot doc. The other 2 remote bot applications I can not see the pulls for.
Just know that each member in the spanr, and omnivore room have at least 1 bot. Meaning they have at least 1 chat that allows others outside of the guild to pull data. So roughly 360 more chats with who know how many agents with access to scraper data."

- These poor dummies. If only they had kept it to just a distributed network, without the centralization.

- @Aneristic relocated 'bot members list' spreadsheet one level up to live on the whistle root. I want to keep the WB docs strictly limited to raw data

- WB:

"Those are just the bot data pulls. There are another 300 + like myself who do not use the bot because we have riot access."
.....17.10.2017 20:47:25, Ginger: >>unsupported service message type: messageActionChatJoinedByLink<<

- and spanr is a farmfinder

- some duplicated screenshots, I think

- which makes him the third member of the guardian 2.0 working group to be identified in this thing.

- that's great.

- WB says:

"Riot is where the magic happens. Web based. You have to have 2 guild members vouch to get in the guild and another 8 wiling to put access deletion attached to your name to get riot access. Anyone you vouch for screws up the chain gets deleted.
I have a folder started on it. But every action, look up, even profile view is recorded so I won't have as detailed screenshots. I will have some things blacked out so it doesn't get traced back"

- I will compile all this later

- read: WB is pretty deep in this thing

- yes let's just keep doing work and thinking for the moment.

- once we've finished populating and annotating the member list, we can talk more comprehensively about the seniority and impact of the people identified

- um

- @VAIN_vurxof please make a note of that on the spreadsheet

- I think we have things this sophisticated, just not this widely distributed.

- sorry! doing thing!

- yes, good. Let's limit sorting, filtering, deleting and adding to Erich and Jillian

- to avoid collisions

- Let's stay cognizant of possible username/slackname mismatches

- If you see an entry on the sheet, you can modify AO and notes

- just don't add or delete rows, or filter or sort the data

- Three Pittsburgh RES.

- when it does, the correct response is:

//screenshot
"you were in this channel when this person requested this information. What did you think was happening?"

- we have a shitload of thinking to do.

- This is a different order of magnitude than Russell.

That was one of the spinoff bots. This is the core.

- lol no.

- make sure to note that please

- I'm guessing we have a week, tops.

- This is what I was thinking about earlier when I said we should release simultaneously. This is not a one-person-in-the-line-of-fire deal.

- Three new documents added with the label 'radar'

- to WB Docs

- I'm doing multiple backups of each of these releases on both local media and in the cloud. I'd appreciate it if others were to do the same please.

- An AMA on whether scraping is cheating would be nice.

- good lord

- we have things like this. Cactus, poptart

- blue team is just a lot better at distributing them

- I dunno. I bailed out of both of those things pretty early on.

- I just realized today that I was still in the poptart slack. thank god it's dormant

- I mean we, factionally. Cactus is the latest and greatest offender. It's EU developed. It got put through the wringer recently and is now probably underground. For a while, it was on the way to becoming as normalized and distributed as this RIOT garbo

- Let's try to stay on target here. The scope of this information is broad and unexpected. We have some refactoring to do on goals.

- Our job here is not to watch the world burn, or get people fired. We know nobody is going to get banned, and we know the malfeasance isn't going to stop.

- We simply need to reconsider what we want to achieve, based on the information at hand, then come up with a plan for release that dovetails with those goals.

OK?

- My goals are roughly the same as they were initially:

1) Marginalize some RES bad actors
2) Disrupt RES orga on a short term basis
3) Effect a big nudge on culture change

- That's cool. You are a great representative for the radical end of the spectrum.

- Ultimately, we know we're going to release the data. Once we do, it's a paper airpline. We can throw it however we want, but it's going to slew around some.

- My sense is that the decisions that remain to us involve when and how to release the information.

- I'm nobody :)

- WB is going to keep documenting as new entries pop up. There are about a dozen requests (ballparking, didn't count) in the dataset now, which is only over the last 48 hours. Presumably we'll get roughly that same volume again.

- sorry, done

- hey, we're all just kids sorting through a challenging set of problems here. Please stay civil. Thanks.

- welp.

I have to go run a BAF meeting for something I should have been preparing a few hours ago. This seems fine.

Be back in a little while

- 200 posts deep on a 45 minute hiatus. This seems fine.

Anonymous feminine

- noted

- soon.

- I made a mistake with the copying of docs. For about 70 minutes, three of the documents on which WB is the owner were shared to everyone. That's been rectified.

- My apologies to everyone for exposing your information that way. It was a fingerfail. I'll be more careful.

- I realized this morning that I was still in the slack for it, and left.

- I was briefly in Cactus too, before I realized how problematic it was.

- I was added to zone-specific telegram channels that yielded alerts relevant to fielding.

- and I was briefly in the developer chat

- that should be a fairly trivial scripting task for anyone who has any brain left

- that would be a nice resource. The return on investment isn't good if it looks like it will take more than 30 mins

- In terms of process, this is where we are:

- We're populating the spreadsheet as well as we're able
- We're getting all the freaking the fuck out of our systems
- We're waiting for WB to finish pooping intel
- We're thinking about the how, what, where and when of the release.

- some

- Thank you for doing the work.

- What specific thing is pushing your buttons the most?

- I'm mostly just absorbing and thinking.

- Within 48 hours, we're going to have to act. Our cone and trajectory options are pretty narrow, but they'll make a difference.

- @VAIN_vurxof is right, I think. The most valuable thing we can do is try to use this to effect permanent cultural change. However minute.

- I'd be gobsmacked if everyone on that slack is paying.

- How do we release this information in a way slanted to maximize the likelihood of

1) Niantic publicly paying attention
2) Ingress prosumers+ actually changing the way they behave

- I feel bad for Stego

- sort of

- [[Webpage]]YeahYeahYeahsVEVO: Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Heads Will Roll

- and when they get the packet they check the portal against last known status

- it's a grep, nothing to it

- It's interesting though, in a way. Niantic's failure to be a good game company, and the extent to which it is a sandbox and the playerbase has willingly promulgated player ownership.... there's an opportunity there.

- I'm trying to figure out if we can force Krug to be an ally

- thank you thank you

- really good work

- yeah, that was some quality action swarm work between you and aneristic and the team at large there

- How important is it to identify the people who are not yet tagged? I think it might be pretty important

- those could be international POCs and community leaders for all we know

- erwin.van.rijsewijk

- wait, this guy

- [[Webpage]]plus.google.com/+WaltervanRijswijk

- ok, spelling mismatch

- probably not the same guy

- oh that would be hilarious :)

- it would just be a really funny way to release the information

- so far, I'm still liking a carefully formatted, easily consumable information package published on a one-page website coupled with an anonymous Reddit initial release, followed by staged g+ releases

- but I'm listening for better ideas

- website needs to be completely non-interactive. It's just informational

- feedback on blanks will be crowdsourced across reddit and the g+ posts. People reporting back. Website will periodically update.

- general rule yes: if you're sure you're right about something, lock it down. If you're not perfectly sure, ask.

- we are going to have to do some value-added content. Minimal, but enough to explain the real implications of Omnivore and Radar

- I would really rather see us all push this. I have heard the concerns about artificial concert and phased release, but...

Anonymous g+ release feels cowardly and easily attacked. Single-user release feels like putting someone on the cross.

- actual person

- classic question :)

- it has to be completely absent of vitriol

- Everyone else is going to do the work of being angry for us.

- if you want to start working on it, go for it. We're probably 48 hours out from a relese, but being ahead of the curve on prep is much to be desired.

- sorry, phone rang. catching up

- Coximus is the only one I can ID

- I want to talk and think about this more.

- If we talk to him, we don't give him much.

- So we give him the NIA employees, anomaly POCs and Vanguard

- and the gist

- hm

- I think we're on as soon as both WB is ready and we're ready.

- 50 people can't keep a secret

- so, we're on the clock.

- My fault, maybe. I'm ok with it.

- that conversation happens Soon.

- yes. It's just the next thing.

- well I did invite a website developer

- Advantages of website:

- fun FQDN
- easy persistence
- easy to consume if well designed

Disadvantages:

- pain in the ass to set up and develop

- Rapid development = we put one person in charge of each major job and then trust them to do it and don't second guess them.

- roles for website:

- framework implementation
- information architecture
- writing words

- I don't like anonymous g+ because it opens a new avenue for attack

- website doesn't feel as vulnerable to that

- website has persistence

- need to refer back to that time that RES got pantsed over institutional cheating? "cheating.willbe.blue"

- I'm just goofing with the name. could be anything catching. I think willbe.blue is already claimed.

- ok good point

- we could tinyurl the g+ post

- or the reddit. but the reddit is going to be open to comment, and I don't want to drive traffic to that

- this should stand on its own, I think.

- and it has to be dead simple. A little exposition, a spreadsheet, a lot of corroborating images.

- some corroborating stories, if we can get them

- that's relevant

- I don't know squarespace, I guess is my reservation.

- What about tumblr?

- yeah google offers pretty easy hosting too

- I think the right thing to do is define loose parameters for each job, assign jobs to people we trust to do them, and then have everyone with related jobs talk to each other.

- G+ is a personal space. You pay attention to the identity of the person who is talking to you. If that person is obviously, intentionally anonymous, it feels suspicious. It's about feel.

Websites are expected to be anonymous. You read a website, you consume data, you don't think about who is talking to you.

- job 1: Establish platform. Must be anonymous, persistent and collaborative
job 2: Information architecture. Determine what needs to be on the page
job 3: write words that go in the word boxes

- jobs 2 and 3 could combine. All 3 jobs could combine. But we're on a clock and we have a lot of smart people who are good at things and we should get mileage out of them.

- I'm going to benevolently dictate that we have to release no later than Friday morning, regardless of WB's wishes.

- which means that if we're going to alert Krug, that happens Thursday morning

- so, by noon eastern tomorrow we need publisher roles (set up space, architect information, write content) assigned. If that hasn't happened, then we fall back to something easier than one person can do.

- I trust everyone here to do anything they say they're going to do, so if you want any of those jobs, go ahead and claim

- if multiple people want things, we'll just collaborate. website will be a spinoff, informed by the peanut gallery

- we need a working prototype by Thursday night

- clock is clock

- I don't think we can be ready by then

- maybe thursday night, if we work very hard

- I'd rather release in the morning than the evening.

- Maybe. I'm not sure. Whatever we produce has to be at least as compelling as the gdocs WB gave us, but more concise

- Like, I know how I would write it, but I'm not a good writer. I'm maybe not a good judge of writing. I think I'd need to see a whole thing to know if it's right.

- noon eastern Thursday seems ok

- maybe

- if there's a lot of investment

- well, if we know for fucking sure that we'll be releasing at noon on Thursday, I'll tell him noon tomorrow

- sure. That's an Ingress lifetime. But it means we need some folks to buy in hard on development of the information source

- I'm ok telling WB that we're going to release noon on Thursday and need to get everything she can before that. My sense is that she'll understand.

- I'd feel better with Friday morning

- but *shrug*

- "RIOT is a database that aggregates scraped comms data.

Using it, Resistance agents can query:

- all the portals belonging to a specified agent, including the dates on which those portals were captured
- upcoming Guardian portal candidates for a given region
- an agent's home portal and start date

Additional applications exist that enable authorized RES agents to:

- launch their own distributed scraping engines
- receive real time alerts on data not available via intel review, such as VRLA and hack mod deployment
- identify clusters of L7 and L8 portals (farms)

The functionality that drives these features and their use are violations of the Niantic Terms of Service.

A minimum of 680 RES agents are currently making use of these features. They include Niantic employees, Vanguards, and anomaly POCs.

Here are some examples:

//screenshot
//screenshot
//screenshot

Here is a list of all RES agents currently using these features

//spreadsheet

Here is complete screenshot evidence documenting these claims:

//all the screenshots

- yeah. I'm not a good writer.

- I'm just trying to suggest a framework

- maybe! it sounds like we're leaning toward using tinyurl instead of a FQDN though. This is probably a requirement for the timeline we're talking about, because registration and domain propagation takes time.

- the proposed writeup is a good evolution of what I started. There's a problematic bullet point in there, and I worry that the 'spirit of the game' stuff is a little preachy, but I'm a robot and everyone knows that.

- adding proposed language to pin

- My thing was an evolution of Lena's thing. Your thing is an evolution of my thing. This is how we do.

- welp

- there's your g+ post

- any recommendations?

- ok thanks

- I think I understand you.

- Of course, there is the matter of the screenshots being comprehensive and damning, and there being no chance in hell that WB is going to talk to Niantic about it.

- but we'll make do with whatever presents

- I could introduce that into the conversation with Krug tomorrow

- I think it's an unreasonably high bar. The screenshots don't leave anything at all to the imagination.

- but sure, I can try

- won't hurt

- if I'm WB, my response is going to be 'Um, there are Niantic employees on this list, but I'm supposed to think I'll be anonymous? Yeah....'

- not to mention the RES vanguard

- yeah.

- see backlog

- Yes, and it's a very noisy backlog

- But it's the price of admission :)

- Everything has been here for about the last .... 13 hours

- you're going to need it.

- It's been a long day.

- the pin has the highlights, probably

- but you're not going to have a real understanding without doing the reading.

- lol you've got a LONG way to go :)

- bedtime for moi. goodnight, monsters. Nice work today.

- I'm still up, it turns out.
Notes are us.

- the comments are a fun read

- I'm going to get to have the most wonderfully awkward conversation in my Guardian 2.0 group in a few days.

- I'm going to add another column called 'notes notes'

- ask anything you like there

- added 'metanotes' and 'metametanotes'

- y'all have fun

- There's a question of how much you want to question every little thing.

The comments on sc33n are from @strandit

The comments on slackfarmer are from @vain_vurxof

- they both know what they're talking about. This is a trust community. /shrug

- what do you need, a W-2?

- sworn testimony?

- Ok, well on behalf of whatever entity you're advocating

- I'm not being flip

- what constitutes proof?

- VAIN got slackfarmer drunk in Navarro and picked his brain about the easter eggs implemented on the redacted portal. Is that proof? probably not.

- does that mean slackfarmer isn't a Niantic dev? uh...no.

- If only we had someone on the Niantic payroll to dig up that kind of evidence :)

- https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopher-collins-09626a4

- [[Webpage]]https://twitter.com/slackfarmer

- that took like...45 seconds

- sure. Might be useful to provide some documentation.

- not sure how far down that path we want to go.

- "I mean, can we PROVE that these people actually used the tools to break TOS?"

- etc.

- it will certainly be interesting to see what happens

- thanks for the good notes on the euros

- Just found another RES Vanguard :( Katvinci

- argentina

- I...don't think so. You pretty much have to flip back and forth, I think.

- I have a list of Vanguards thanks to @deafone , so I just crossed that against the name list

- didn't expect to get another hit

- poor Andrew

- oh I'm sure

- they just don't have the bad luck to be on a massively well-documented list

- or at least not one that's been released yet.

- [[Webpage]]https://spairo.org/comms/
surely someone can have some fun with this

- g+ post

- not yet :)

- the picture is starting to come together

- it's going to be lovely

- I've started doing the googling on the undocumented agents.

Krakow, Bombay, the Netherlands, Japan

- these guys put together a hell of a tool and network

- gotta hand it to them

- Lot of coder hours, for sure. And some careful consideration on the social engineering / infosec side of things

- found a Hawaiian

- It would be graceless not to acknowledge the depth and complexity of the technical achievement here, even if it is built on sand.

- and the internationalization of it is breathtaking.

- Placeholder

- Not done with backlog.

We are not in a court of law. We are not staring down the barrel of burden of proof.

Of course there will be arguments that this all might be perfectly valid. The world is full of people who believe and argue for insane things. This should not prevent one from making reasonable observations targeting rational audiences.

- Not caught up yet but have to take care of real life for a bit. Will be back in a few hours.

- Thank you.

- I do not think that we do. I think the evidence at hand is adequate. We simply indicate that the system purges data more than 48 hours old and show thr powerful examples available.

Still catching up.

We are getting way too deep in the weeds. This is a big, gnarly bomb. Put a bow on it and drop it.

- Yes.

I am planning to provide 24 hours notice to Krug at around 1 pm. It will be very short and sweet with nothing evidentiary included.

- The public facing spreadsheet should not include AO or our notes.

- This thing right here

- Yes. I'm on team no map

- Yes. She anticipates data completion today.

- Yes. With you. Will do.

- Yes. I am STILL catching up :) give me a bit.

- One hour warning on Krug notification. Derail that now if you feel that you should.

- Either you or me, I think, based on discussion so far.

- I will recruit some help to ensure that his attention gets got.

- I am not ignoring your objections. I feel your argument strongly. Ultimately though, I feel that one of the most valuable long term things we can do with this project is effect culture change, including within Niantic. That is easier if we show them basic regard.

- Multiple people with names he will recognize sending the same very simple message.

Not word for word..but like..


We recently received information documenting a large RES scraper network. Niantic employees, investors and Vanguards are identified. We will release it sometime after noon on Thursday the 19th. The team agreed that we should provide you a chance to prepare.

- Open to suggestions

- I think that if I give him names, WB access to ongoing data will be prematurely compromised.

- Oh I should probably add anomaly pocs to that laundry list too

- #notice

- I think we are just telling him to clear his calendar

- The win is showing him some regard.

- Yeah. I only wanted to do this if we were going to go with simultaneous distributed g+ release

- Done. Target Thursday at 1 pm eastern for earliest possible goLive

- @ollietronic would you care to do the anonymous Reddit splash?

- I think there's just a misunderstanding of words.

I was saying I should add anomaly pocs to the list of implicated actors in the message to Krug

- Ok. I understand.

- New WB data:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B-ERhFknO7kMdF9fVWR6anlJNzg

- ok, I've compiled and reorganized the most recent RIOT dump, here's the link:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B-ERhFknO7kMZG1OYXItWHVwTGM

- Yes ma'am.

- Ok gang, I've run the notification past WB and WB is on board. It's time to ping @redSoloCup

- If you wish to do so, please send this message or some close variant to @redSoloCup now:

We recently received information documenting a large RES scraper network. Niantic employees, Niantic investors, Vanguards, and anomaly POCs are identified among those agents involved.

We will release the information sometime after noon on Thursday the 19th. The team agreed that we should provide you a chance to prepare.

We know you're backlogged, so we're going to send this message from several people simultaneously to ensure that you receive it. Apologies for the spam.

- if you do, please ding the bell so we know who all has sent

- one sec

- Scr33n

- heh. really do need a few more people to send that message. If he's 500 messages in the hole, it's going to take a bunch of pings

- yeah

- 2

- From WB, in response to "What was your motivation":

"We had an agent in the guild that had 74 spoof bot accounts banned in one day. I have never spoofed or any desire to but after that it made me realize that using this isn't that much better. And who knows how many other spoofers are members, or feeding information to spoofers.
I can't change the things I have done by using this all I can do is move forward and play a straight up game from here forward."

- oh yes that is good. I missed that edit suggestion from Scott, I would have used it too

- I hit the ground running on 3 hours of sleep this morning

- our relationship is pretty dry :)

- @slykens can you repost? I'm out of brain. Or @TheMedellia

- yes please. I'd like to see 10+

It's metadata, in addition to utility

- Confirmation from WB that all the data she can harvest has now been pushed.

- I am working with WB on a method for her to interface the group. Might take the form of a new TG spinup

- [[GIF, size 252'100 bytes]]

- I figure lots of people won't, and that's fine. No obligations, just a chance

- alea iacta est

- ok. If anybody is waiting for a response from me on something, or think it's weird that I haven't reacted to something, please let me know. I feel caught up, and that's probably not a way I should be feeling.

- ok WB is ready for a TG chat. In order to create the new group, I need at lease one person to add on an initial basis. Is anyone definitely willing to join a group chat with WB?

- oh, wait I'm being an idiot

- ok thx

- ok thx

- ignore that last, bad paste

- If you would like to chat with WB

https://t.me/joinchat/C2DEIELQwk3MLDzAG10Dbg

Consider your anonymity and make decisions that are right for you.

- join link added to pin

- she's clear about this. She knows she self-implicated.

- no. The join link is not to be shared outside of this room. Provided we maintain that integrity, the only people able to join the chat are those of us here.

Joining would simply mean that WB knows you're in this working group.

- Everyone, I don't want to sound like an alarmist, but just in case anyone hasn't thought about this already - information gets out. It's safest to assume that the RES who are about to be vilified will get a partial picture of who we are and the work that we did on this.

It's time to change all of your passwords and perform a general personal infosec hygiene pass.

This is something that we should all do more often anyway. So do it.

- indication from WB was that she wasn't on TG previously. not sure if true.

- yes check the root folder for 'riot docs'

- good note james thanks. I've passed this along.

- whoa you too

- thanks

- and also...ohboy

- [[GIF, size 97'529 bytes]]

- {{FWD: Charlie Arnold, 18.10.2017 13:22:21}}
alea iacta est

- It would certainly be an interesting response.

- So, status.

Aside from whatever new activity from the bot trickles in via screenshots to the WB TG over the next 24 hours, we've gotten all the data we're going to get.

Erich is handling the implementation of the website, and I'm on standby to assist him with any gruntwork in that regard.

Jemstar is going to take care of the Reddit splash.

Everyone seems ok with the website framework and language.

We will all pick up the Reddit post and signal boost on g+ at an organic pace.

What's left?

- one thing we could do is better populate our bad actor spreadsheet with AO and notes

- still at least 50% blank entries there

- ok, I'll work on that

- The RIOT stuff is maybe the most damning of it all.

- if you haven't reviewed the contents of that folder yet, do so

- "Monday is going to be.... interesting" - RedSoloCup

- I'm going through it. It's a slow roll

- Posting action items as I think of them:

All hands on deck edit pass on the website before it goes live. This will be a short and intense activity tomorrow around noon eastern. Please be available if you can.

We'll focus on fail conditions, not minutiae.

- Probably.

- no, they're just picking up every scanner ping worldwide.

When a mod happens, it pings the scanner. Scanner alerts the server that a change has happened. Server scans the portal affected and performs a delta on last known state of that portal. Changes reported.

- virtualized scanners

- This is almost certainly also how cactus works

- yeah. If you did a packet analysis on the Ingress process you'd see it

- or reso upgrade

- "Dear Niantic:

Resistance have an API to the portal network backend. Please hire one of them to make this a resource instead of a disgrace."

- I truly admire what they've accomplished from a technical perspective. Set aside the ethics and politics of it, and it's just... really fucking impressive.

- yeah. this website is going to be...

- oy

- I don't even know

- I'm terribly proud of this team.

- website is designed to be anonymous for a reason. Minimize pushback vectors.

I feel you, but trust me, they're going to get the personal end of things too.

- Shift from "resistance scraping network" to "Ingress scraping network"

- You will do your damage on G+. we all will

- Look, this is important:

This landed in my lap, and it took me about 90 seconds to share it with all of you.

In the same vein, it's on all of us to give it to everyone else.

We don't own this, we're just taking care of it for a little while.

- good job!

- the less factional we come across, the better. The data tells the story.

- Thoughts:

Should we get international in the next 18 hours before release?

- We might be well served to have a few additional viewpoints on this.

- I'd like to get perspectives from Canda, Europe, Australia.

I don't know anyone in Asia.

- or South America. But having one representative from each of those seems...useful

- if we had good candidates.

- it would meaningfully impact signal boost.

- there is risk, but familiarity mitigates that. We'd need to feel very good about the candidates.

- I'd be ok with Appletalk and Rhainedrop.

- Thursday 10/19 1 PM EDT earliest

- Yeah. I'm doing the risk-reward math.

- One thing we did poorly on recharge was failure to engage the international audience on the front end.

- This would be a matter of specifically targeting a small handful of trusted minds to provide international perspective

- we could get their attention in time for them to review and comment

- not necessarily before sleepytimes but definitely upon waking. The kinds of people we'd be asking are as glued to their feeds as we are.

- ok. I'm willing to accept that as unacceptable risk

- let's put gmail addresses in DM to @theprevaricator for nospam purposes

- It's cool. Just floating ideas, not wedded to them.

- Thinking about how this thing looks over the next 19 hours

- By noon eastern, we need to be doing final pass review on the website

- ok, so let's limit channel chatter to website review and critical new content only for a while

- lol Brett beat me to it. thanks

- adding to pin

- ok so if you have website feedback, @theprevaricator with it here and maybe #tag appropriately. There's going to be a lot of this, probably, and we need to keep it organized, and we need to not spin off another channel.

Between now and release, there's not anything currently more important than getting this right.

- @theprevaricator "The inner workings of a Ingress scraping network" an

- I'm still working on the RIOT entries

- got sidetracked doing pullquotes from the WB convo

- oh shit I didn't understand that this is what you had done. YOu are the best person.

- yeah I'll do a quick grep to get the dupes out

- but it's farting me into space

- let's do content first, maybe

- once the words and data are right, style will follow

- you've been working very hard all day and we love you :)

- "Mod deployment, such as VR hack mods and VRLA"

- "Mod deployment. Ain't nobody paying attention to the common shields"

- We'll get this right. The thing has to be Readable as Fuck

- like a Family Circus one-panel

- [[Photo]]

- There is no way to know how many others interact with the bots they administer, but

- This whole thing should be punctuated with pullquotes

- "Insane statement"
hyperlink: would you like to know more?

- there are just so many bombs.

I like leading with the RAID interface

- before we go any further on this, I wanna establish a ground rule:

Erich, you volunteered to do the work, you get to make the decisions. YOu've been in this since the beginning and we trust you to do a good job. You get to reject any feedback you want without spending a lot of time feeling bad about it. We know you mostly won't do this, and it's fine. We know if you burn out or can't hit deadline, you'll hand off.

- um, that's all.

- You're going to get pummeled with maybes.

- anyway, gary on

- you have a way with words, son.

I TOTALLY SET YOU UP FOR THAT

- doing

- Use the fewest words possible. Don't reference the agent. Don't acknowledge that maybe you should have referenced the agent.

- My general sense is that this website should have a clinical, sterile feel. Minimum exposition and framing. The data tells the story.

- no factionalism, nothing to attack

- the website is PART of a narrative, not the whole thing. We humanize it in our g+ follow-ups

- everyone takes a different piece of the data and injects life into it

- "First, he makes a query to find any guardians this agent has." /s/he/EpsilonPrime

- addition of 'riot' column

- Whistle gave us permission to use her pullquotes, and I think we should. They're powerful AF

- https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B-ERhFknO7kMaEp2SHQ3aDRoQ2s?usp=sharing

- I mean I wouldn't say beautiful so much as 'smouldering'

- @TheMedellia photo now pl0x

- you know the one

- It doesn't fit with the vibe of the rest of the site content, but there's room for a narrative section describing the interview with WB, punctuated by pull quotes

- thaaat's the one

- this is not to be underestimated. Every single ENL agent who reads this thing is going to have that same visceral reaction to a different antagonist. Those feels will drive the real narrative.

- we made a promise to RSC. I'm powerfully disinclined to break it.

- but we will be ready at 1 PM on the dot

- doesn't matter. We undermine the good faith we sacrificed to build if we don't stand by the commitment we made.

- 1 PM eastern is the time.

- that's 24 hours from notice.

- We're going to stand by our commitment unless someone provides a really, really compelling reason to do otherwise.

- not addressing
.....18.10.2017 18:44:16, John Bailey (@rekkanoryo L16 - OH/WV/PA, USA): >>unsupported service message type: messageActionChatJoinedByLink<<

- I think the impact of the WB stuff is more powerful than making them wonder. Also, I think forcing them to go on the witch hunt is good fun.

- But I'm still up in the air about how to introduce the WB quotes, because it really doesn't fit with the site

- I'm tempted to just write it up as my own g+ post, but that needs an awful lot of thinking.

- oh interesting

- last gasp in a long story. hm.

- ok. time to think about it. No WB pullquotes in website seems right.

- we got good results from the slow roll on recharge, that was a good message in the early discussion on this

- I'm leaning toward a late news cycle g+ post with the WB stuff.

- It will be less strong because I can't inline the images, but whatever

- or maybe something different. hm.

- [[Webpage]]reminded of this: https://xkcd.com/1732/

- plenty of time to think about it

- do you have an in?

- I don't have a good sense of the impact of posting outside the fishbowl.

Do we think it would scare Niantic? That could be useful.

- Yeah. or it may be one day of yammering and then a fizzle.

If Niantic ignore it and the RES ignore it, it becomes a non-story. Interesting dynamic.

I don't think RES will have that much discipline.

- I think the Vanguard thing is going to burn.

- Vanguards and niantic employee are where I'm going to fire my arrows.

- Krug is going to have to decide whether to defend or sacrifice them.

- he's invested in that project

- If he defends them, he's going to take a beating. If he sacrifices them, he's acknowledging the problem.

- If he defends them, he has to do it to the hilt. Dismissing them as Vanguards but not banning them is the worst message ever.

- [[Photo]]

- yeah. He's already signaled this.

- I intend to make that as difficult as possible

- eh, that puts it into catch-22 land. I prefer to choose my own fate.

- Then what's the right path? You're proposing a no-win situation.

Humanize it, it becomes drama.
Don't, and it quietly goes away.

- People should interface the content and tell the stories that come naturally.

- That's my decision, I think, near the end.

- the WB interview won't dictate the flow, it'll punctuate.

- Yes, it's not a lead item.

- We're not saying different things :)

- nerd

- how badly do we need this #raid column?

- the more I look at it the more I think it's unnecessary data

- a few

- it's not intrinsically damning though

- ok

- well

- eh.

- I'll follow through. A few more names is good

- no. He's careful

- it's interesting

- Based on WB, he's very active on the site, but he doesn't dip into any of the especially damning places.

- we can't really afford to go after him, I think

- sorry I mixed that message.

According to WB, he's very active on the slack.

Based on the data, he doesn't dip into any of the damning places.

- you get used to it

- Never be afraid to down arrow. Announcing that you're doing so is sometimes a courtesy. Anything really important usually finds its way into the pin

- got it. RIOT names added. Adds about 130 new faces.

- now 801 total implicated names. Please take a second to review the list again for notes and AO input

- I'm still going through by hand to fix a few mismatches, but yeah.

ArcticRebel went through the screenshots to add all the names in a new tab labeled 'riot'. I grepped that with the master list of names and added the non-redundants, marking the 'riot' column yes

- yeah this was worth doing

- contemplating post like:

"Hey, 800 RES guys: nothing you do will ever be valid again. Even when you straighten out and tell everyone you're playing clean, no one is going to believe you. How's that taste?"

- but you know, less salty and bitchy

- everyone pause, I'm about to overwrite master with copy of master

- ok done, free to resume

- if you made changes to master in the last 5ish minutes, they may have been lost. I'm very sorry.

- I fixed about six of those with the latest pass

- Yes

- fixed. I'm being cavalier

- cripes

- 25% of the RES Vanguards are using this cheater ass shit

- with the T, I think

- the APK guy

- Hey I know, how about we all just ping each one of these names on all comms

- Name one besides Travis

- touche

- worst thing

- Everyone who plays this game for pink slips knows that if you fuck up, you're going to get smeared.

- They're about to get smeared at an insitutional level. It's fine. Keep it professional.

- check pin

- Yes, incorporated into the master.

- ok time to attack this website with a monocle and a whisk

- Would like to a simple statement to head the right side column when I'm first looking at the page.

"Riot is..." etc.
Then the screenshot

- I know this is nitpicky AF but I hate mixing serif and sans serif fonts

- This is a big one

- Lead statement language change recommendation:

"
RIOT is a database application that aggregates information scraped from intel.ingress.com and agent scanner data and makes it available for agents to search."

- the differences are subtle but important. Databases don't aggregate things, applications do. The scanner implications are important.

- It reads like

"WHAM"

//screenshot

*tos in case you forgot*

- my recommendation would be:

lead statement
screenshot
TOS stuff

- I'm going to be a total pain in the ass for a while. Please forgive me. Nudgy language recommendations coming, please take them or leave them.

- Recommend changing:

"Access and maintenance of the RIOT database occurs in a Slack team called The Brokers Guild. Using this Slack, authorized Resistance agents can find in seconds:"

to

"Access to and maintenance of the RIOT database is centralized wihin a Slack team called The Brokers Guild. Using this slack and associated automation tools, authorized agents can find in seconds:"

Notes:

- 'centralized within' versus 'occurs' nods to the distributed nature of the system
- removing 'Resistance' makes the website more neutral
- And associated automation tools nods to the distribution network (there is more than one devil)

- Prelude to TOS text, in bold:

"The technique of harvesting data in this fashion is called scraping. This is a violation of the Niantic Terms of Service.

<tos text goes here>

- the search fuction is fantastic, but needs to work better

- this may be really hard to implement within wordpress

- but god the idea is so good

- all we need is simple javascript

- like super simple javascript

- I can write this.

- it would take a couple of hours. I'm out of practice

- putting that on my to do list

- can we make the font size on the roster table about... oh, 65% of what it is currently?

- and center the text in all the 'yes' columns?

- back to the main page. This part:

"– all the portals belonging to a specified agent, including capture dates

– the longest-held portals for a given region

– heatmaps of agents’ activity, including home portals and frequently visited portals

– agents’ Ingress start dates"

should be formatted as an unordered list.

like:

<ul>
<li>thing</li>
<li>thing</li>
&c...
</ul>

- for each of the things I say, just take it or leave it. I know I'm being nitpicky AF, I just can't help it

- I think that list on the main page should just be the roster.

- and the menu option that currently goes to roster on a separate page should instead be an internal bookmark to the roster. The more it reads like a brochure, the better.

- Anatomy of a Hit is the most powerful piece of work on the site. It lays out in very clear terms what all thsi shit means

- sorry.

Um, instead of having a list of names on the main page, just put the roster on the main page.

- Keep the roster link on the menu, but instead of having it link to a separate page, have it scroll to the point on the main page where the roster is

- I think I like it

- [[Webpage]]oh gosh thanks. No. It's ingress.com/intel

- good catch

- no if you do then people will click it and get distracted.

- but, here's an example of something that should be links:

- "790 Resistance agents across the world, including Niantic employees, Vanguards, and anomaly POCs, currently have access to these features directly. There is no way to know how many other agents interact with the bots they administer, but it is estimated to be in the thousands."

- changes to:

- 790 Resistance agents across the world, including Niantic employees [1], Vanguards [1] [2] [3], and anomaly POCs [however many], currently have access to these features directly. There is no way to know how many other agents interact with the bots they administer, but it is estimated to be in the thousands.

- where the numbers are hyperlinks to the specific images where those people are captured, and those images are modified to include highlights around the specified people

- it's the whole point

- "this is not just your rank and file, it's your thought leaders"

- yeah I'll do the work one sec

- well maybe 20 mins. I need to walk around or something.

- so make it better :) you have a point

- yes but we're not saying those words. We're just putting the most relevant facts in front.

- true, it could be that also

- gradations are hard

- yeah ok. You guys are right

- I need to click the viewfinder back one notch

- anatomy of a hit does need a narrative link. After the first set of four thumbnail screenshots, maybe a hyperlink that says:

"Here's a complete example of how it works:"

- yes. I was just talking about inline hyperlinks to the most interesting bits. The language in quotes was internal monologue, not proposed exposition

- it would literally just be hyperlinks after the pertinent categories. For instance:

"Vanguards [1] [2] [3] [4]' where the numbers 1, 2, 3 and 4 are each hyperlinks to images that open in a new window, each depicting a RES vanguard

- it doesn't have to be like that. It's a feature, not a necessity. Maybe it's overkill, could totally accept that

- I dunno. Erich's driving this bus, he can decide.

- I'll make the information available if he wants to test it out

- lol

- I like this idea for the subtle knife effect, but I think the point should be to highlight them in the swamp of data. those screenshots are a lot to wade through. PIcking out the high points has some value.

- the point that we could just do this in the g+ posts has a ton of merit.

- Moving on for now. I'm going to become unconscious at some point against my will and there's a lot left to cover.

- I think if you change the word 'scraped' to 'extracted' in the lead paragraph, it solves Jillian's concern.

- It's a little semantic and fidgety, but she's right

- You can modify the 'master' tab of the 'broker's guild member-channel associations' spreadsheet to list AO and any relevant notes

- feel free to expand on them if you have something to add. There are several columns

- ok I think this is a good change:

Eliminate this line on the home page:

"This is a complete screenshot evidence archive documenting these claims."

and replace it with:

"Screenshot evidence showing each member of each of these channels is available here" where here is the hyperlink to the 'evidence' page.

The replacement line should come right after the paragraph that starts with '790 ...'

- the website is at the top of the pin, but it's not in release yet so you have to get email-based permission to access

- I like the structure that's coming together, where the entire homepage reads like a brochure with embedded hyperlinks, all of which is mirrored in the menu. There's more than one way to consume the data, and they don't contradict one another.

- a little formatting magic and a little cleanup and it's ready.

Do we already have people on the riot.one and RADAR pages?

- nice

- [[Photo]]

- er wut stuff

- oh. Yes I'm the actual worst.

- Always ok to tell me to fuck the fuck off.

- Seriously, I don't even have feelings to hurt.

- imma write that riot.one page first tho :)

- unless someone is already working on it

- ok. I'll quit nitpicking and do that for a while

- they won't. Erich's job is to read all the things, and he's doing a good job of it.

- right on. I'll share the document and we can DM to separate labor

- Yeah. It's the centerpiece of the document.

- If the website didn't need to be so dry by nature, we could lead with it

- but it jumps right off the menu. It'll get a lotta clicks

- It could work that way.

- with WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE as the last line

- and that goes to the current home page.

Like a splash screen

- that's...pretty fucking good

- #69minutes

- yes it's an awkward number :)

- can I get an embiggen?

- It's all good stuff for Erich to chew on. He'll make good decisions.

- I have a feeling our man has a surprise in store for us there.

- yeah. Nitpick. Riot.one is at least another half hour

- think about fonts. Listen to someone with design sense.

- Someone with design sense talk to Erich

- I have no aesthetics either, but the font should be smaller and sans-serif. I like Helvetica for this.

- and the paragraph breaks should be about a billion times less vasty

- Verdana is also fine.

- Fonts should match throughout the site, menu, marquee, etc. This is a no-nonsense, utilitarian thing. conform to the norm.

- Erich the site is getting more readable really fast, thank you

- Please embolden the text of the header row of the table, and color that row differently than the rest of the table

- we're making progress on riot.one

- guys, please read this:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VcR_yYwQBQuT23UgkNbYyORuy7qLHHfxg3l5SYpmAek/edit?usp=sharing

- it's a repackaging of what WB gave us..but really read it. Just editing it is freaking me the fuck out.

- Like, on one level, I'm a rational person and I understand that this is all stuff that you can assemble

- Holy fuck you read a lot!

- on another level, I'm like 'what the fuck is wrong with you stalker fucking shitbags please get a new hobby'

- It didn't really hit me unti l had to do the work of reinterpreting the language

- we're getting closer on RIOT. It's a big chunk to swallow

- This thing is completely fucking absurd, John. Like...jesus.

- None of it is technically really mind boggling. It's not hard to see how any of it was done.

It's more the fact that no one ever took a breath and said 'whoa, maybe we shouldn't do this'

- This isn't about scope creep, it's about don't be a fucking creep.

- there's a pin. there's always a pin

- yeah I think we're mostly done

- well, we're close. I'm out of content. Rev is still tweaking and Lena is still redlining

- but it's real close

- be patient, there's more good stuff. This thing is a monster

- WB undersold it

- I think we're doing a good job of capturing the awful without being emotional or hyperbolic

- we're at the part where we have to wrestle with the stuff WB revealed in the chat

- like the spoofing, pay for hit stuff

- yeah ok

- get that

- my bad. hallucinating

- ok. I think you can go with it Erich

- oh it's ok love. I was just giving you a goofy hard time

- your edits were spot on

- um, yeah whatever you think is best. I think I need to stop thinking for a little bit.

- Let Lena decide, she's still conscious and knows words gud.

- @theprevaricator change 'scraped' in first paragraph of homepage to 'extracted'

- No. Light conversation. Data dumps are done. She's happy with the way things are progressing.

- @erich normalize capitalization of "slack" in 4th paragraph of homepage. Not sure which is correct.

- forwarding

- yeah, an absurdity of good work all over the map the last 36 hours

- TGR swarm best swarm :)

- well, let's not get our hopes too high :) this thing might still just fizzle

- and there's plenty of work to do yet to ensure that it doesn't

- but man, we've got to find a way to drag Ivan into this one.

- And the preachiest ...sorry, that's for chatter.

- ok, back to the website

- @theprevaricator is it possible to get the line breaks normalized on the home page? they should all look like the one after the bold text near the top

- some of them are awkwardly doubled

- I was! I was mistaken.

- getting it down into the local chats is going to be a big deal

- and getting those people to take the conversation OUT of their local chats and onto G+ where Niantic can see it is also a big deal

- and signal boosting when they do so...

- commentary should go up as standalone posts on g+. Not comments on other g+ posts, or reshares of other g+ posts with commentary, or (ffs) as comments on reddit

- I don't think so

- some of this raw exposure is good for driving the point home.

- I need to hire a cat.

- I'm thinking about this

- Can I write javascript on wordpress?

- if so, I can make search work

- ok let's table search for a second

- what else do we NEED to golive

- ok I'm still reviewing though

- like the 'how it works' index page needs a brief paragraph

- "RIOT is a series of subsystems that work together to create a comprehensive source of scraped information. Components include:

* item <brief description>
* item <brief description>

- make sense?

- maybe. send me WP access credentials if you're willing to so I can see if I can pimp the search.

- then you can work on the other thing heh

- the search is ludicrously easy if we can just edit javascript. We're not trying to do much, just type a word, push a button, and compre the word against a list of words

- it doesn't haven't index or search a database or any of that garbo

- and the results will be instantaneous. But one has to be able to do custom JS

- what wordpress is trying to do by default is search an index of files for a keyword. That's fine, it'll find them. If the agent name is there, it'll return a hit to all pages on which that agent name appears. But it's going to look gross, and it's not going to go straight to the entry

- another option would be to create a separate page for every screenshot, listing the name of each agent on that page, and ensuring that those pages appear on the search results ahead of the 'roster' pages - so that if you search for an agent name, you go straight to a page that has a screenshot of that agent's name

- but the best thing would be a simple javascript that pops up a little alert box with the agent name and a hyper link to the image where that agent is evidenced.

- but...we're also gilding the lily here. The search is a nifty hook, but it's not essential.

- yes

- I'm up until 5. Let's do some work :)

- snickers

- Evidence page needs a link to a page showing the riot users

- we miss about 120 uniques without those screenshots

- you can keep it small, but if you do, load the source image to an external image host (imgur.com for instance) and make the thumbnail a link that opens in a new window to the hyperlink target.

- that's a very good point

- thinking

- god we could leave comments on

- oh man

- yes, but we could just delete the shitty ones

- and keep the ones that are like 'this guy lives two blocks from me'

- tru tru

- ok. I'm over it

- but yes, locked down spreadsheet seems like a comfortable replacement for search

- and the resharing of it will be epic

- um...let's think about repercussions

- what account should own that sheet

- hey is 'cleangress' a thing?

- was thinking about that earlier

- it rolls nicer than cleaningress

- and portmanteaus make all the ladies damp

- oh ok np

- um..yes. I think the way to do it is to leave the inline HTML table in place, but provide a header link (view as google spreadsheet)

- I daven't even been hinkring

- seems like it's probably time for me to look at the website again

- Scanner-level stuff is mostly in RIOT, and the screenshots there were scanty. could ask for more

- there will be time in the morning. At 11:30 AM eastern we are convening for a flash mob website edit frenzy smorgasbord pants off dance off murder fest

- No. Some must die so that others may live.

- it's way too esoteric for the common man, but a useful datapoint for the kid with the banhammer, if he's paying attention

- yeah that's very good

- ohai Nadia

- this is the part where I tell you have to read the backlog :)

ENJOY THERE WILL BE A TEST

- tl;dr: shit hits the fan at 1 PM EDT on Thursday, October 19. That's 10 hours and 48 minutes from now.

- all pieces are in place. website release, well managed. Anonymous reddit splash for the reveal. g+ follow-ups as appropriate.

Forecast: death and destruction.

- if there are things you would like to know, I'm happy to fill you in. I'm up for a few hours yet.

- Trying to catch up on backlog is not a realistic enterprise. That firehose has a wide mouth.

- ok

- rgr

- edits doc added to pin

- nope!

- but that's ok. I think you're thinking I won't be awake

- that's possibly true, but probably not true

- anyway, if there's stuff you feel like you need to know, just ask and if I'm awake I'll tell you

- that seems fine

- I like it when people read things

- just realize this thing has moved absurdbly fast over the last... uh... 38 hours? Time is compressed. You'll read something from seven hours ago that alarms you, that five hours ago seems five, that three hours ago is completely on fire, that we just solved and is fine again.

- you're going to want access to the website, but you're not going to be able to get it because Erich is in bed. The FOMO is going to be super real

- but this document will help some:

- https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VcR_yYwQBQuT23UgkNbYyORuy7qLHHfxg3l5SYpmAek/edit

- and really it's fine, because the website will be available in 10.5 hours. We already advised Andrew of this, but he's on vacation for the next two days, which is FUCKING HILARIOUS

- but really, by being on vacation he'll be doing the same thing he would have otherwise been doing, which is nothing public-facing

- but several people are going to have a long and sweaty three or four days

- yep. you'll get to that point in the backlog in about 35 minutes

- YEP

- no.

- Only slack handles and channels associated

- Yeah. The annotations are completely out of scope for this.

- thanks!

- tl;dr: 3 vanguards, 1 niantic employee, 1 angel investor, more anomaly pocs than anyone can shake a stick at

- and the 1 trusted reporter, just in case that's a thing

- just wait until you get to the interesting comments from WB about BRRN :)

- it's like an ordinary investor, only....ehh

I'm too tired to be snarky

- [[Webpage]]http://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/angelinvestor.asp

- it's ok. I only know because work.

- go to bed Strandit

- you should not be an awake person. It's not normal.

- Why are you in Korea?

- it's a good note. We started editing that sheet at a different phase in the development of this project. It could stand a normalization pass now that things have matured.

- I think relationships among agents is valid.

- so I'm doing a pass to moderate some of the notes

- leaving most things

- @theprevaricator I'm sorry to do this to you, because I imagine it's going to be a giant pain in the ass, but every single-image needs to become a gallery so that the images can be expanded.

- people are just too used to being able to click an image to embiggen and actually read. And these images all need to be read. This is a non-negotiable thing.

- I'll do what I can to help. Setting an alarm for 10 eastern

- also: "Some members are quite prolific"

that's fucking awesome.

- Every 'how it works' detail page needs a hyperlink at the bottom of the page connecting to the corresponding 'evidence' page

- read the omnivore page for a powerful example. imagine a link at the bottom of that page that reads 'What agents have the ability to set up these local bots?'

- And every 'evidence' page needs a link in the header to the stripped spreadsheet anonymous share spreadsheet showing all 800 participants

- [[Photo]]

- you can do this. I have complete faith in you.

- Last reminder to everyone:

Go change all your passwords, RTFN.

- We've learned some things about blue team in the last 36 hours:
- they're institutionally spiteful
- they're very sophisticated techincally
- they have some extremely competent crackers on board

What makes you think you won't be targeted for penetration?

- do basic maintenance. If you're already doing that, great!

- we're 38 people. At least half of us use the same password for everything and it involves our mother's maiden name or our firstborn's birthday or some shit. It's the nature of the internet.

- I'm not going to keep harping on it. I'm just saying, now is a time to practice good hygiene.

- It's just not ever a safe assumption. Ain't nobody judging anybody, but we're all only human. We do dumb shit. God knows I have.

- If you know you're reasonably likely to get attacked, lock up tight. Now is that time, for everyone here.

- I've asked WB to provide screenshots of lookup data on a specific agent for each of the raid.one agent-specific tabs.

- it would be a powerful addition to the website. asked her to post these to a shrill sound

- "790 Resistance agents across the world, including Niantic employees, Vanguards, and anomaly POCs, currently have access to these features directly. There is no way to know how many other agents interact with the bots they administer, but it is estimated to be in the thousands."

Recommend removing 'resistance' from this paragraph. Why refer to faction if we don't have to?

- same deal with the header text to the inline roster on the home page. remove 'RES'

- you haven't gotten to that part yet

- keep reading

- I'm just saying, you haven't joined the really interesting chat yet

- you've got 8 hours. Better hurry

- Welcome to the new normal Nadia!

- awwww

- Eastern Standard Tribe gives zero fucks :)

- ohai Jillian

- god if we're not suppressing wordpress comments let's please do that

- off. off. off.

off.

- off.

- and in conclusion

- off.

- the reddit part is bad enough

- it's been a long night

- we may be done splitting hairs

- But, you know, who knows what will happen when Erich wakes up?

- no, please do those things. Look for big problems more than little ones.

- good, good

- right. With 6.6 hours to go, and maybe 2 of those waking and productive, we're down to just big stuff.

- nitpicking was last night

- the volume of comms is/was completely insane

- good morning Amber!

- anonymous male is a thing that's gonna happen from time to time, even in the modern era.

- checking

- I go back and forth

- noting for forwarding purposes. Only Erich has the ability to make changes.

- lol you're not really talking to me anyway :) Erich will be along soon and FRESH AS A DAISY

- ohai Nadia. How's the ferry?

- you're super sideways. It's late/early and my neck doesn't want do to that

- that's an interesting question. Is it better if it looks piecemeal of it looks uniform?

- we're in pretty good shape either way for ~40 hours notice :)

- well, just show a little disicipline there yo. Ignore this thing, read the other thing. You've had HOURS already

- hey please edit "riot . One" - it comes up in TG desktop as a valid URL

- which goes straight to a google login

- this may not be a solvable problem in time

- this is what I see what I look at it on mobile:

- [[Photo]]

- it's not awesome, but it's not the worst thing ever, or anything I wouldn't expect from wordpress

- nah, that's an artifact of android chrome I think

- looks fine on desktop

- it's one of those bullshit godawful things makes web developers want to murder a bag of lemurs

- adorable baby lemurs

- I'm just saying, we can try

- but it's fucking free wordpress

- well, maybe get on that

- sorry, that was harsh. I've dealth with a lot of bullshit problems like this in my stupid career

- it's probably not a thing we can solve with money. It might be something we can solve by tweaking the template, but we won't know until Erich is done with eggs and bakey

- it's is almost certainly a skinning issue

- but as with all such things, fixing one thing will break something else

- so it comes down to time and developer bandwidth

- loathe as I am to disagree with Amber about anything, the color shift problem isn't THAT bad. It's not like we're using blink tags

- but it's a legit beef. If we can fix it with a simple template change, that's desirable

- tables fuck EVERYTHING

- it is known

- I mean, welcome to HTML 3.0

- le sigh

- <table><tr><td>column</td><td>other column</td></tr></table> fuck my life kill me with acid

- eh. It's up to Erich. He can fiddle with it or not.

- If I never debug another table formatting screen fit mobile desktop tablet fuck why doesn't this look perfect on MY screen issue again in my life it will be too soon

- It's probably good. We have two serious issues: the extraneous comment on the riot...one page and the table formatting issue on the homapage for mobile browsers

- he'll probably have a couple of waking hours to spend on these things before intended launch. Both should be manageable.

- if we can also solve some punctuation things and such, that's gravy

- yeah. we've come an awfully long way in the last 42

- {{FWD: Charlie Arnold, 17.10.2017 11:58:36}}
Hm.

- {{FWD: Dan [PA <span class="emoji emoji-spritesheet-3" style="background-position: -486px -36px;" title="us">:us:</span>], 17.10.2017 11:58:57}}
Uhoh

- {{FWD: Erich Bacher (@thePrevaricator WI, US), 17.10.2017 11:59:09}}
never a good sign this time of day

- I'm not arguing with you, it's just an obnoxious problem to have to solve.

- WB has nothing left to give us.

- work harder!

- everything in the shared folder 'WB Docs' was submitted by WB.

- I get you

- I can still hate it yo

- It's obnoxious like a Trump presidency. Doesn't mean we shouldn't fix it, just not sure how to do that well in the next 5.75 hours

- if we're going to display that table inline, no.

First fix is to change the skin and hope that wordpress has something that's optimized for mobile. Second fix is to shift from table to raw text list, which (in my opinion please don't beat me up over it) is worse than a busted table.

- but it's all splitting hairs. Neither method is going to fuck anything up.

- Leading with 'anatomy' might be kinda great, but it's late in the game

- if wordpress has a skin that comfortably fills a high percentage of the browser width, instead of a fixed width, and that also doesn't completely fuck the rest of the presentation, that'll probably work fine

- the table is the only thing in the content that is really dependent on formatting

- lol yes

- it would still be broken, it just wouldn't LOOK broken, so lol

- they're going to say every damn thing in the world.

- NUH UH
SO WHAT?
NO U DID!
UR MOM!

- these things would be true no matter what argument we were making

- The analogs between this situation and my day job are hilarious to me

- "Hi! We caught you stealing our software. Please buy it and also stop being awful."
"NUH UH IT WAS FREE OUR INTERN SAID SO"
"Allow me to introduce you to our General Counsel"

- have the upper hand. Giggle at the stupid counterarguments. It's fine.

- It's not a big deal, just grab the google sheet

- it has exactly the same data, just not the images. But the data is extracted from the images, and we spent a lot of eyeball time on getting that right. It's correct. Maybe a transcription error or 2

- imma take a nap. bb in time for final site review

- stuff goes live in 5ish hours

- Coming online now.

- Ok. Let's release.

- Yeah. Go.

- We will get it in asap.

- I was deeply unconscious 3 minutes ago.

- Reddit post first.

- @JemstarENL do that thing plz

- @theprevaricator make sure that the riot.one page is clean of the revision comment

- Ok. There is a guid screenshot that needs to be on that page. @Strandit please replicate that suggestion

- Ok. Great.

- not yet seeing our post on the ingress reddit listing

- lol factionfluid

- Sorry I kept you guys waiting. I swear I only closed my eyes for a minute

- don't lie to your friends.

"Looks like they have a leak"

- so, everybody be cool for a bit

- we should take a little while before further propagating. This will pick up its own momentum from here

- don't put yourself in awkward positions about having to explain how you knew so quick &c

- Yeah. It's going to be a long day.

- catching up on 500 deep backlog

- Just hit VL4NA

- [[Webpage]]https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16w5Wo4k3MkaKV2jbdZlgbf9OTtrf_RqfqDlS-2RG1oI/edit#gid=462476052

46 current viewers

- Subreddit is still lagging

- heh heh

- I'd give it a little bit to percolate

- It's in Chicago and VL4NA. That's a nice engine. Sit back and let it cook for a while.

- Yeah. 50 people currently viewing the roster spreadsheet.

It hasn't made it to the Ingress subreddit index page yet.

- That won't end well

- lol no

- he's just butt recording. happens sometimes. try to ignore it :) He'll notice and delete it soon.

- 23k is a non-trivial number of hits

- 75 viewers on the spreadsheet

- Krug is talking in VL4NA

- {{FWD: Andrew Krug, 19.10.2017 13:01:43}}
The one problem I have with this is just having access doesn't mean the person used the tool. Are there logs of who used it for what? Lord knows we are all invited to some shady chats unknowingly.

- {{FWD: Simon TuffGuy, 19.10.2017 13:02:17}}
Entire areas of ENL agents who are oddly stuck at 149?

- {{FWD: Andrew Krug, 19.10.2017 13:02:19}}
The optics are bad though.

- Yes yes. No one is surprised that Krug is hoping that this will go away. Stop 'I told you soing' for a second and think about this.

He's on vacation, and he's on VL4NA talking about the issue. Not just making an appearance, but actually engaging.

- {{FWD: Andrew Krug, 19.10.2017 13:11:16}}
All good points. I'm still digesting things.

- yow

- Yeah. He heard that message and several others.

- Nice post Becca, thank you. Reshared.

- We got what we got, and it is enough. It is as damning as it can possibly be. If the Niantic response to this is 'not enough information', then there CAN NEVER be enough information.

We should not enable that bullshit line of response. This is not the time for victim blaming.

- {{FWD: Andrew Krug, 19.10.2017 14:18:15}}
Question. I've seen some allegations of Slackfarmer using or selling data. The person said the proof was provided to Niantic. But how? Could it be provided to me?

- Do we have anything on this?

- I almost but not quite said those words to him.

- I agree. They're not going to do anything without Krug's input, but this one is over his head.

- lol I just posted this same question to one of our locals :)

- lol. A resource to get spoofers banned, where people also incidentally sit around and watch scraped data requests for guardians roll by all day every day. That defense is going to hold much water.

- [[Webpage]]https://plus.google.com/u/0/103330082416576450101/posts/RmDc1RCEXmh

- Anyone have a clue what this is about?

- gah telegram desktop is doing that obnoxious snapback thing that makes it impossible to read backlog

- thanks. I want to reshare

- starting to think about how I want to tailor my own message.

- make public thing do nao

- lets measure fifteen times and cut once

- we are not in a hurry anymore

- Is it time to spin up a swarm?

- Get the signal boost machine going?

- this would be a good time to revisit the soapbox

- all I'm sorry I'm pretty behind in here. Fatigue is catching me.

- if there's anything specific I've failed to address, please DM me. I'm going to go get some dinner and try to wrangle the backlog.

- well done

- Let's start using #riot

- Again everybody, if you are in this chat you should assume that you are going to be attacked by some bad, smart people.

Personal infosec hygiene passes, no exceptions

- This place was never intended to stay airtight for long. It's fine. Just assume that 50 people can't keep a secret, and some bad, smart people are going to be digging.

- We have all been high profile noisemakers on a number of recent topics. It is not hard to establish patterns. And we are going to be making some people very, very angry over the next few days.

- I am thinking about doing !riot @user x 800 on all comms as a bantest

- Same

- 275,000 page views.

Jesus look what we did.

- You people are monsters.

- Didn't inhale is not a defense.

- no idea if Pittsburgh is talking. that xfac has mostly been vacated by ENL strategic players

- IITC is a pocketknife. RIOT is a tacnuke. It's not fucking apples to apples.

- Stock IITC does not have a plugin for triangulating every message an agent sends on comms.
Stock IITC does not have a plugin for pinging me every time an agent I want to stalk takes any conceivable action.
Stock IITC does not show me heat maps of a player's daily activity.
Stock IITC does not enumerate every portal on which a player has a mod or resonator deployed.
etc.

- We're all occupying that space.

- Another point in that IITC vs. Riot conversation is this:

Niantic has been nodding quietly at IITC for years. Let's see what their response is to RIOT. If they ignore the issue and don't take any definitive action, sure, let's all just cheat as hard as we possibly can, because this game is fucking busted and we might as well squeeze a couple of weeks of broken fun out of it while we can.

- I've seen this a few times today. What's our read on this? Is this guy legit? He's pretty dificult to understand.

- Happy with what we've done.
Overextended and failing hard to deliver on other projects.
Very Tired.

- [[Webpage]]I'm seeing more of this:

https://plus.google.com/+JoeSears/posts/43WtWff4b3L

- going dark for a telecon

- good god reshare the shit out of this please

- gategate
metagate
gardengate

Just plain old #riot is perfect. It fits the mood and labels the thing.

- Word is getting around. Heartsbane just pinged me with a 'thanks for the lols' regarding #riot

- It is time to shift gears into assuming that your involvement with this project is a known thing.

- Yes. Just assume that word is getting around. I haven't talked to Heartsbane since Orlando. For him to ping me out of the blue is weird

- talks are being talked. It's ok. No one is in trouble, heh. It was to be expected.

- yeah but that's just a thing I do

- it is known

- goddamn Chris I'm sorry

- ..yeah

- done

- oh really? I rarely look at comms

- I'm not seeing anything untoward in my alerts.

- just a little trivial back and forth with onceamoose

- oh, yeah that guy. "SemiHard4Semi" /eyeroll

- I dunno, they try to troll me sometimes but they're terrible at it.

- lord who knows. I doubt it, he's not that clever. And he wouldn't go in for queer humor

- Oh yes I'm sure, but he wouldn't pin that on himself.

- I think I'm going to tailor my message as an attack on Guardian.

Six weeks ago, everyone was telling me there was no prayer of getting Guardian changed. Now it looks a lot more doable. And in a way that permanently blows GH and the people who love it out of the water, not whatever lukewarm bullshit the vanguards were probably going to do

- no I think I missed that, got a link?

- sorry I can just dig up the profile

- oh gosh, yes.

- +john hanke
+andrew krug
+nia ops
#riot

- Really good! I just left it.

- great message

- My Guardian 2.0 group had 3 Broker's Guild members, all of whom were in #bot. One of them provided an explanation, saying that she was just idle in there, had no idea what was going, didn't know anything about it, never used it.

- The other two are Stego and Telek, who are both old school and pretty savvy. Stego is a Vanguard.

- Neither of them said a word all day, despite ongoing conversations.

- So I eventually just explained that I didn't think the group would work anymore and left.

- but #catalystProblems couldn't leave leave because supergroup, so I just permamted. @JemstarENL is administering the thing now

- everybody stop badgering me about sleep. I'm not doing anything very brain intensive and I know what I need. I'll sleep when sleep is ready.

- and I'll probably stay that way for a very long time. It will be fine.

- We have some things in common.

- oh and you started off so strong with the not-momming

- heh. The team gets none-of-me until Saturday afternoon

- I've got an op Sat. morning that needs like...constant care

- valid

- that's you!

- It's so nice of you guys to listen to me.

- hmmm, I could fall asleep watching PP2

- that seems ok

- Drunk Cate is pretty entertaining!

- He does Amber, he just doesn't know yet.

- I'm watching PItch Perfect 2, drinking, and becoming sleep. STFU

- we're just in the first of what will probably three or four breathers.

- so much work left to do. And it's not clear what the next step is

- Krug is back on Monday. Probably not going to get a Niantic response on Monday.

- Tuesday or Weds., probably.

- What do we want that response to be?

- RES seem to be circling on this notion of 'We used it to catch spoofers', which is fine. It's absurdly easy to counter, if we decide that's what we want to do.

- I want a permanent change to guardian dynamics that completely eliminates that mode of gameplay in a way DEEPLY DISSATISFYING to those people for whom it is a primary motivation.

- Been thinking about that all night, and that's my personal microcrusade. It's easy to target and process, I think.

But we could have multiple goals here.

- agree

- ❤️

- I think that's still formative.

- we'd take a beating on that

- yeah. I mean, we need to be thinking about next things now, which is why I'm still awake.

- so I've got one: Permanently destroy guardian gameplay as we know it.

I like this because it's going to make a bunch of bullies quit, and that fills me with joy.

- Bans: my instinct is to say that we cannot explicitly push for this.

- API: maybe

- yes

- I want to achieve permanent culture change.

The current culture is "It's implicitly ok to cheat because Niantic never does anything about it."

- Yes. I think we have to concede that we can't do anything about scraping as a fielding tool.

- I just don't see a way to attack it.

- So.

Culture change, as manifested in the elimination of GH culture via code changes.

- and...? what

- what else can we angle for?

- Scraping is never going to go away. We can take a huge bite out of its current value by eliminating the aspect of gameplay at which its primarily aimed.

- this is tantamount to arguing for API

- I have an idea for that, but in light of what's happened recently, I like a hard charge to simply and immediately eliminate the badge altogether.

- it's pretty fucking easy to implement, and it hurts the bad guys by getting rid of their fun.

- you know what I'd love? EVERYONE GETS A GUARDIAN BADGE

- I mean, they won't do it, but it'd be hilarious.

- onyx guardian for errbody

- ok. This is good. Everyone is thinking now. Keep doing that.

- This will continue to evolve. We're not going to decide other things tonight. We have one direction, we might find another one.

- lol yes please

- it's a subtle message. How do we push for that?

- I think we have to accept as a given that enforcing prohibition against scraping is impossible. They literally cannot stop it from happening.

- spoofing, maybe a little

- ok. So we could push for a clearer TOS. Hard commitment on "Is IITC ok" for instance.

- actually the IITC thing is a nice, easy goal. They've basically given that up already.

- This got existential fast

- yeah yeah. Ok, Oprah style isn't really on the menu realistically anyway

- But there's a good argument in the IITC thing

- ok.

- Guardian Hunting as we currently know it goes away forever
- Give us IITC so we can end all this apples to oranges bullshit

- We need baby steps.

- Guardian Hunting is easier than something nebulous like 'tell us the rules'. They're already tracking for it, and the riot stuff dovetails nicely.

- 'tell us the rules' is a compelling tag, but to explicate you have to describe the ways in which the current rules are bad, and then suggest ways in which they could be better. It becomes a snooze really fast.

- A good rule request: "Anything that automates aggregation of data is not ok."

That would rule out some grey things, like outgress.

- This is a social media campaign. We succeed by capturing and harnessing approval in a short period of time and hurling it like mjolnir at an overwhelmed Niantic decision making corps

- we cannot achieve this goal if we're boring people to death.

- why? you have good ideas.

- lol good old Sirlin

- Did anyone play Kongai?

- Yeah. It just leads to predictable holy war between purists and fucktards

- geez I'm finally catching up on the Reddit thread

- it's way, way, WAY better than I expected.

- We need to be excerpting this stuff and feeding it back to Niantic on g+. Does anyone want to tackle that?

- [[Photo]]

- [[Webpage]]https://plus.google.com/+CharlieArnoldDerp/posts/Xcfu1Lqkq9B

- A few thoughts as I get through the backlog:

- I do not feel good about going after Krug. If we discredit him, who becomes our potential ally at Niantic? We should save shots at him until and if he demonstrates unwillingness to follow this strongly.

- I think we need someone to take point on attacking the RES position that they were using grey tools to do white work. It's a weak stance, easily attacked, and now that they're buying in to it en masse it's appropriate to yank that rug out from under them.

- Regarding an additional bomb, we have the "a shrill noise" interview, and WB has given us permission to quote

- This is a good conversation for g+. It needs a cogent and respected owner. Can't be me or erich.

- I don't think you can afford to be front and center

- Not yet anyway

- I mean, I am not the boss of you, just sharing my feel

- You would be very good for this job.

- The less polarizing and more respected the publisher, the better.

- Omg

- Would Lori do it? I do not even know how to ask.

- {{FWD: Charlie Arnold, 20.10.2017 12:57:57}}
I think we need someone to take point on attacking the RES position that they were using grey tools to do white work. It's a weak stance, easily attacked, and now that they're buying in to it en masse it's appropriate to yank that rug out from under them.

- Yeah. It's going to be a centerpiece of the next round of conversations. It's narrative control.

- My candidates are Ana and cate

- I don't think we should ask Lori. It's too bad, she would be perfect

- He's too well known as a rabble rouser, and has feuds with NE

- Just being practical here.

- It's your job. Thank you for taking it on.

Make sure you have all your infosec on lockdown.

- Ok. Sounds like we have actions sorted for now?

- promote follow the money

- smash with Cate, signal boost

- prep the Krug splash, but hold for now

- possible WB interview release down the road.

- It's an exclamation point.

- Sorry, I am mobile and not being comprehensive.

I would like to keep Becca in the holster. She's been under the radar so far, and we will need another respected neutral choice for something later.

- This job is directly in Cate's wheelhouse

- For my part, I'm going to start beating the Guardian badge drum today. Everyone knows I was on that soapbox already

- I know.

The next thing I was going to say is....

I have been neglecting the fuck out of an op I'm supposed to be leading tomorrow am, and will be going off the radar soon to focus on that

- That's fine. We all have different opinions, and you know I respect yours. We can comfortably disagree about stuff.

- Sorry. I mean... I think we are going to need you as the release point for something big later.

- Rgr

- @theprevaricator this is a low priority nitpick: there are a few spacing issues on the Follow the Money page..just inconsistent spacing between paragraphs.

- I'm still feeling the urge to launch a #riot swarm TG channel

- There are a lot of smart people with time and giveashit to spend on this that we're not tapping as efficiently as we could.

Maybe another method.

- Those are good points and I agree.

- oh man. Are we smart and effective enough to engineer getting Becca invited to ENL.wtf?

- announcements only?

- we're getting that effect now, I think

- swarm = self organizing. People do shit, talk about the shit they're doing, piggybacking happens.

- I'm letting it go for now.

- This is a shot from a hangouts conversation between an ENL player and a RES player in the Morgantown, WV area. The speaker is Antitech, an effective strategic player in the area. He's on the outed list.

- [[Photo]]

- ^^ the above isn't for release yet, just wanted to get thoughts. I COULD post it to g+

- will check back later.

- oh sorry pappy! I only just saw it on unbounded slack, and I must have missed some backlog.

- I think this is a very clever gotcha, actually.

- !riot <name>

- the tail end of your window feels right. 5ish eastern

- ordered

- Whoa.

- Anyone in V can do this? I was only ever in the radar equivalent channels

- Oh ok

- Still scrapy, but at least not the devil

- Though obvs if you can look for your own it's possible to look for others, technically

- Yeah this was only a matter of time

- I have been thinking all day about publishing the whistle interview under my name.

- Just so they'll have a lightning rod to attack.

- I mean, just basically come out and say the truth.

- Yeah we should pin it and start populating it.

- I am mobile rn

- "All proceeds go to the victims of backlash doxxing"

- how'd he justify that?

- NA or global?

- Let's...take it real easy on that one. It's a charged topic, and not immediately relevant to the current conversation.

- I trust that if anyone has a difference of opinion on that score, they'll take it to DMs

- This.

Addendum to the top of the 'follow the money' page detailing the changes that were made. Keep it dry.

- Controlling. The. Narrative.

- Yeah, this is an important position to take for strategic reasons.

We're going to be very glad we do this when we're throwing ENL under the bus.

- This is culture building. You make the gesture sincerely. You get people to adopt that mentality. Most people who fucked up appreciate this and acculturate.

- There will be some recidivism, but not as much as you get from any other path.

- I made a few mistakes in my formative years. I spent time around better people and learned to make better decisions.

- who?

- Yeah, that stuff from Cherryal in the Guardian working group was hard to buy.

- mmmmm.

- this is a thing that we do pretty well. We're all different, and we all talk, and it's fine. That's rare and good.

- Comfortably disagreeing is the other thing we do pretty well.

- this is not necessarily true. Export to mymaps isn't hard.

#110 deep necro

- oh that's interesting. That's my language.

- " On the ENL side, there's enl.wtf, and cactus, and poptart. I don't know much about these things. Factionally, I'm not a cool kid. People know I'm awkward and moralistic. They don't invite me to controversial stuff. That's fine. If I knew more about them, I'd just blow them open. Everyone knows this."

- yep. Here we go.

- people in faction who are scared of what we are doing are now talking about what we're doing.

- this is the result of leaks, and that's fine

- it was going to happen. Just be aware that it's happening, and make decisions accordingly.

- classic cool kids club

- heh

- It's the middle of the night on a Friday. Let's be cool.

- Everything is fine. Erich needed to be in a different space for a while. There is no drama.

- we can comfortably carry on.

- yeah

- Lots of back channel conversations, I think.

- We've been saying dangerous things, and various people in various precarious positions are starting to freak out.

- /shrug that was inevitable.

- I talked to Erich, and he's ok. He just needed to be somewhere else for a while.

- I think he is. Just protecting sanity.

- KNOW? no, but it's inevitable. We haven't really been on lockdown since we went live. This group is large, and the people are wellc connected. People are talking, which was to be expected.

- NIA ops got about a 12 hour heads up. Specifically, one op. Krug got 24 hours

- We've been talking about a few days of the inevitability that the people on this endeavor will get attacked. If you haven't switched to two-factor authentication on all of your things yet, please get on that.

- Yes. We're on a fine course. Leaks are happening, and that's fine. We knew what we were getting into, and we're doing good work for good reasons.

- Lock your shit down ,and if you're not comfortable being here, feel free to take your leave with neither harm nor foul.

- hertz :)

- Yes, that's a good read. Leaks connotes negatively.

- People are talking. They had the freedom to do so, and we all knew that.

- It will be, but this is a high-stakes game, on two fronts:

1) We're putting ourselves in a position to be targeted by smart, technologically capable, mean-spirited people who would like to hurt us

2) Word about what we think and say is getting out to ENL influencers who might have a lot to lose if they get exposed doing Bad Shit.

So, it's a predictable phase change. Consider where you sit with that and proceed accordingly.

- oh no, 40 person rooms are definitely inherently insecure :)

- We may disagree about the extent to which that is ok.

- At this point, it is appropriate for everyone here to assume that the members of this room and probably most of the contents of the chat of this room have been released within ENL OG circles.

- We're saying SCARY THINGS and various people are freaking out to one another about it.

If you care about currying favor or maintaining a pristine reputation within the faction, now is probably the time to cut bait.

- Eh. Old guard gatekeepers. Perennial anomaly orga.

- *shrug* it's a convenience term, you know that.

- it doesn't really bear picking apart.

- Yes. We have deeply entrenched factional prejudices against information sharing and supporting the sancticty of tools.

This isn't any one thing. It's a collection of signals hitting critical mass and setting off spidey senses, I think.

- ugh that seems impossibly tedious.

- I mean, if someone wants to tackle it, that's fine, but I think it probably does more harm than good.

- Here's the thing: if people are going to freak the fuck out about what we're doing, we need to just be ok with that and let them.

- If you're shy about getting cut from stuff, get outta here. That end of things is going to get way worse before it gets better.

- We've talked frankly about our willingness to expose wrongfooted ENL tools. That word is circulating. It's going to have repercussions.

- It's not what people are being told, it's what people responsible for those tools are choosing to interpret.

- This stuff is easy for me to say. I'm not an anomaly operator, nor will I ever be. I don't have any skin in that game.

- ENL nation already assumes I'm not to be trusted with tools, and I'm fine with that.

- My honest read is that if you're an anomaly operator with access to anomaly tools, you should probably get outta here if you have a commitment to preserving that privilege.

We have a deep, hard culture of rigidly protecting the sanctity of tools. The position I've taken on that sort of thing is going to rub off on everyone, and the paranoia wave is going to spread fast.

- yeah. I'm not trying to do that. If I came off that way, please forgive me.

- We win anomalies. I'd like for us to keep doing that.

- I guess I'm at a bit of a loss at how to properly describe the people on Green Team who are going to feel threatened by what we're doing, but I know they exist. "perennial anomaly orga" wasn't the best label. That's not really it.

- *sigh* I care about you guys and I don't want you to end up losing access to things you might care about as a result of jumping on a train like this. Things that make sense for me might not make sense for everyone else.

- *shrug* maybe. Probably. It's probably worse than you'd hope, but not as bad as you think.

- Yes. It's important that we all proceed with our eyes up.

- No witch hunts y'all, please. Just accept that someone is probably leaking stuff and move forward accordingly.

- It's the nature of an enterprise of this size.

- I think the current issue is that there's a healthy side order of 'or any other tools that are equally awful, regardless of faction'

- honestly, I think all of the issues we're currently facing are a result of that dynamic. Once we became institutionally comfortable about wrecking cheater platforms regardless of faction, it started making people nervous.

- that seems reasonable

- [[Webpage]]Somebody wrote really important words buried in a comment on a post:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+CharlieArnoldDerp/posts/7Njn2iD5urg

- just stuff. Predictable stuff.

- that's interesting

- I mean, that's really interesting.

- do these include the tools that others have been locked out of?

- the..whatever it is Australian guy cool kids club tools thing?

- I'm operating atm, but will check in asap

- I'm going to posit that this group has hit its natural end of life.

- We have a pretty serious problem with people leaking content. Direct quotes are getting passed into smoky rooms full of people who don't like what we have to say.

- I don't know who's doing it, and I don't really care. It's not an interesting problem.

- But I think we're putting people in awkward positions about having to decide whether to stay or not, and I'm not comfortable with that.

- It's become clear that things that are being said here are being directly handed off. Based on the pattern, I suspect by screenshot.

- Again, it's fine. I'm not on a witch hunt. I just think we've exceeded the reasonable threshold for that kind of thing, and it's time for this swarm to disassemble.

- It's not a bad thing, but perhaps a necessary thing.

- I'd prefer not to go down that long road. I hope it's enough to say that I've pieced enough together to feel that we've edged as closely up against problematic as we safely can.

- I'm sorry if that's unsatisfying.

- Swarms are temporary by nature. Part of the job is knowing when to dissolve, and how to reform.

- Swarm Dissolve 10/21/2017 7:00 PM Eastern

Grab whatever history you feel like you need to gang, this swarm has hit EOL. We did a good job, and we'll do more of them in the future.

Everything Will Be Fine.
.....21.10.2017 13:12:31, Charlie Arnold: >>unsupported service message type: messageActionPinMessage<<

- Word is that everyone in this room got removed from Bovine Ethology. Can people check and confirm?

- A restricted access toolkit. It has a lot of functions, I don't know them all. I coveted the one that lets you pull total MU for a field construct with a single click, for a while.

- but, eh. whatever. It's just bells and whistles.

- That's not a reasonable expectation. This is not solely a TGR group, and spinning it off of the main changed the nature and tenor of the conversation.

We brushed up against very hard topics about which people have very strong opinions.

Leaks were to be expected. Once they occurred, extraordinary reactions were to be expected.

- Much of the content from the room ended up facing D0gboy and Sarah New in real time. Foggy was talking about it. There was a lot of finger wagging and stern dadding. It was pretty humorous, tbh.

- I'm sure they'll read this too.

Fuck 'em.

- It's just a reasonable expectation. People have competing loyalties and we can't all possibly share the same ideals on something as polarizing as this stuff.

- It doesn't matter. The team did the job. We completed a vast amount of work and achieved a dramatically positive result in a short period of time. It could't have happened any other way.

Swarms have a lifespan. It's ok. Please don't try to witch hunt, or get all angry or betrayed. People do what people do.

- We'll just re-form and hit it again from another angle. It's the nature of these things.