Further to that hacking ...

[blamebrampton]

I joined marmalade_fish  to check out updates on the hacking of sarahtales , and two important points were raised.

The first is that if you have sarahtales  friended, the hackers currently have access to all of your private posts. So it may be a good idea to defriend for a little while.  ETA, she's back, but you should still consider the fishies, it looks like a fun comm, too!

The second is that there is a suspicion the hacker is not an opportunistic Russian con artist, but someone from fandom acting malevolently. Given some of fandom's history, that does not seem as unlikely as we might hope. Why some people feel it's necessary to pour crap on those who add hard work to their talent in order to become successful is a mystery to me. Wankers, the lot of them.

Comments

[furiosity.livejournal.com]

Sarah's been back in control for a couple of hours now, so it wouldn't do much good to defriend her...

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

Is that really her, though?

[norton-gale.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I had no idea this was going on. Though there's not much in my private posts except boring pregnancy stuff. ;)

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

Yes, mine just contain rants that are rantier than my usual rants ;-)

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

Yes. I would hope that it is just a justifiable paranoia, but having read through some of the madness that people can justify doing in the name of lj, it would not surprise me if it was an act of targeted malice. The timing makes it all very suspicious.

[jamie2109.livejournal.com]

I can't even understand why someone would bother doing that. I mean theoretically I understand it, but, god, why bother?

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

There are some sad, sad individuals out there ... At least lj keeps them off the streets.

[samena.livejournal.com]

I defriended, just until the dust settles, I guess.

This also brings up the question of LJ back-ups again. I used to have LJ archive, because I use Windows, but lost it when I got a new pc. I just tried to download it again, but can't seem to get it to open properly. Could this have anything to do with the fact that all of my LJ is locked?

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

That's one of the things I really liked about DW, it was, as the Australians say, a piece of piss to take my journal over there, now I am half wishing I had taken all my comments, too, though I have issues about the copyright concerns there ;-)

[http://users.livejournal.com/_inbetween_/]

No, IIRC it asks you for your PW anyway in order to dl.

[meredyth-13.livejournal.com]

There's a new post up saying she's back in control of her journal - but man, I thought it was a joke at first, you know 'oh hey, my book's about to come out, let's have a laugh' and thought the links might go to somewhere funny or at least quirky. *sigh*

You know, if it is a fandomer, and yes, I can think of at least one person who would do something like this (I may be prejudiced), then they should just hope that they never get caught. This is the lowest form of pathetic evol. *growls*

And the funny thing is, when I realised it wasn't something nice and fluffy, my first thought was 'OMG, I have no virus protection!' because I'm using my new laptop, and it's a mac. And all my searching proved useless - all I could find was things saying 'macs don' need no stoopid virus protection'. I swear, I feel kind of naked and vulnerable - this is not normal.

*tackleshugs*

Hey you - any progress on the cocktail odyssey southwards? Enquiring minds would like to know?

Have I mentioned that I'm hosting a stool warming party this Friday. You're invited. Make of that what you will. :D

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm not actually convinced that's her. She has never posted a single paragraph in all the time I have known her. I've PMed one of the Marmalade_fish girls who is checking it out, bless her.

The good news is that in terms of keylogging, Macs are pretty damn safe.

*tacklehugs back!*

And yes, it is looking like a weekend in June will happen, as I currently have the money, now I just need the time. Alas, this weekend is right out, which may be just as well given the word stool ;-)

[el-princess.livejournal.com]

If it was someone from Fandom that would be really out of order. She moved on to a different circle and it's her professional life they're messing with now. Besides, it's not really helping their cause, is it?

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

I hope that it is just paranoia, but given some of the things I have read in the last year (including the Ms Scribe saga), my views on what a small minority of fandom people think is normal have shifted somewhat. My new theory is that sometimes you just have no way of knowing the depths of the crazy.

[potteresque_ire]

I was just wondering how random hackers would know about the book release. They have to know about Demon's Lexicon and its publishing date to make that entry up. I was all ??????? when I saw the post...who would place their yet to be published book online like this?

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

Oh exactly, I thought it could be an odd joke, but went to M_F to check, and no. It doesn't even sound like her! Lazy-arse idiot hackers!

[calanthe-fics.livejournal.com]

I'm not a follower, but this is a crappy thing to do. Why do you think it wasn't bots?

I know the copying of lj over to DW has been frowned upon, but to me it makes real sense given that someone could get into my journal and wipe the contents. 3 years of exchanges is too much to lose.

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

That's Sarah's comment, from marmalade_fish. I had thought that it was a particularly clever con artist who had picked their target well, but she seems to believe there could be people closer to her who wish her ill, and I must say that such a thing is not unheard of, alas.

I am still not wholly comfortable with the copying of comments, but I have copied all of my entries across. Maybe I should just make a totally secret journal and copy across all the comments, too?

[bryoneybrynn.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the heads-up, lovely!

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

The Moon is in the Crazy House, Bry!

[vaysh11.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the warning, I defriended, too, until further bulletins emerge.

Don't you all find it a bit odd that both Shoeboxer_project and now Sara'S LJ have been hacked (days before her debut release, too), when all those authors went pro? I'd say someone has a serious agenda here.

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

It's a bit malicious, isn't it? But I'd like to think that if it is anything more than cunning con artists unfairly maligning innocent Russians, it's at least not all the one person!

[melusinahp.livejournal.com]

My first thought when I saw the hacked post was that it had a distinctly different tone than the other hacked posts. It was more specific in the details the person clearly knows about SRB and her book release. :(

I don't even know what to say. It makes me furious and sad. Not that we don't know there are crazy, malicious people in fandom, it's just such a shame when they manage to pull crap like this off.

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

Wankers, the lot of them!

Though, as my J is fond of saying, if crap people were not crap, they'd be barristers and bishops.

[absynthedrinker.livejournal.com]

This is really sad for poor sarah. Creepy slag who's responsible ought to be flogged!

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

YES! And creepy slag is quite right should it turn out to be a fandom malcontent.

[empress-jae.livejournal.com]

what cracks me up is that all this panic happened, people are going nuts of who or what it could've been, and i'm over here in my little bubble, drinking tea wondering, who's sarahtales? *shrugs*

*continues to be ignorant*

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

Formerly known as mistful.

And I am thoroughly intrigued by her theory that it could be a spiteful person targeting her.

[jennfic.livejournal.com]

I don't have her friended, but there's a lot of "fan-entitlement" crap going on in at least one Yahoo!Group (HPRecycleBin, iirc). A disturbing number of people seem to think that once something is published on line the author should have no control over it; and are taking it as a personal affront that the author asked people not to post her stuff online.

It all started, iirc, when somebody gleefully pointed out that the zip file was still available on the d/l site, and Sarah herself said (essentially)'oops, they were supposed to take that down'; at which point the entitlement whores decided that there were 90 million reasons why she couldn't (not shouldn't, but couldn't) do that, and it devolved into spiteful wank, and I stopped reading those threads.

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

Good grief! Do these people not have sex lives? Could they not donate that energy to helping out with stray animals? Or collecting money for Sudanese refugees?

I despair, J, completely despair!

[complications-g.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's awful! People can be such bastards. >:(

It's crazy how you can miss things when you move circles on lj.