I don’t really have the technical knowledge to answer that question, but from what I understand, the pictures were stored in what was intended to be a private, password protected area on her server. Apparently her security measures were defeated/avoided fairly easily by the person that found the pictures.
It doesn’t matter about the pictures, at least not where the thread is concerned – the thread was inappropriate in any event.
I see. And Caught@Work above was able to give more technical (munged? 
) details.
OK, I’ll step back and rethink my position on this.
Nope.jpg
There was no password on any of the directories at all from what I understand reading the other threads. Yes, they were in directories that weren’t linked from the main albums page, but they WERE linked to the root index page and they WERE NOT protected in any fashion from there on out.
There was no hacking or bypassing or defeating of security measures. There were no security measures in place.
No. There were no security measures in place. Nothing was defeated, nothing was hacked.
I believe you. I think. I’m saying that the inconsistency among moderators and administrators is not conducive to a smoothly run message board. Others would not (indeed HAVE not, in the past). That means we never know what the rules or consequences for breaking them will be. Depends who’s working, I guess.
You misunderstand my question. I was asking what, specifically, you meant by “it gets the job done”. What was your goal? Because some goals would be inappropriate (“I WANTED TO BAN EVERYONE WHO POSTED IN THAT THREAD”) while others could be accomplished in myriad ways. And it wasn’t at all clear, especially given the questions raised by Marley and Miller, what your intentions were, or why you chose that method to accomplish them.
This goes without saying here.
For perfect clarity. There was no security. You could go directly to the directory. There was no security on the directory. From that directory you could list all of the pictures. The only indication that they might have been not-for-public-consumption was the directory called private. That’s not going to stop a person or search engine from looking into the directory and seeing all of the pictures.
The security by obscurity was the lack of link to the directory. All the links on the gallery were to pictures. If you took away the pic.jpg or pics.html you could see everything in the directory.
This is a web design 101 piece of knowledge and you never, ever allow directory browsing for the exact reason that has been seen here.
OpalCat did not mention any name of another message board in the thread now disappeared. In fact, she did not even say it was a message board but “certain other place”. Understandably upset about her personal photos being hacked, posted a thread to ventilate; no more extreme of a personal nature than many other personal type threads that others post regularly in IMHO and MPSIMS forums.
Deleting the thread was bullshit; she should have the right to post a personal thread to ventilate - like everyone/anyone else might. And once again, for those of you who seem to struggle so with the gist of it all (read: no fucking clue) no other message board was mentioned in the OP, not even the fact that it was a message board - only that it the hacked photos were posted at a “certain other place”.
The thread was basically a ventilation/complaint along the lines of “I am upset right now, this is what happened to me on the internet”.
If that were the concern, we’d have disappeared this thread, too. It was disappeared because we didn’t want a fight on this board, over something that happened on a different board entirely. In my view, disappearing it was probably overkill - locking it would have served the purpose sufficiently. But I can say with some degree of certainty that protecting Opal’s reputation is not a particularly important motivation for anyone on the moderation staff. The thread was moved because of concerns over a board war. Idle Thoughts went with the nuclear option when he decided to solve that particular problem. A bit excessive, but not improper, in my view.
This is not correct. “Let’s you and him fight,” is an entirely different MB phenomenon. A board war is when members of one board register en masse on a different board in order to fight about a particular issue. It’s most egregious examples are where someone says, “Let’s all go over to board X and tell them how much they suck,” but we also will sometimes shut down threads that are “board war bait” - they don’t include a specific call to go to another board, but are crafted in such a way that we feel it represents an unacceptable risk of someone on the other board doing that to us.
Note that, in the latter example, we’re not going to hand out warnings to someone for not realizing the potential for inter-board conflict because of something they wrote here. Hell, in the former example, we don’t usually hand out warnings unless the poster keeps doing it after being told not to.
Not entirely: a significant portion of most of the various SDMB satellite boards are posters who either quit here in a huff over something or other, or who were banned outright for their behavior. These are people (the second group, in particular) whom we do not want around here in the first place, and we’d like to avoid giving them any temptation to return.
If that were the chief concern, it would seem to me that making her threads disappear would be the best possible response. If you can’t see her threads, you can’t see her drama, either.
Nothing was hacked.
A diary is not (usually) kept secret by intricate locks and shoeboxes of naughty photos are not protected by industrial safes but rather by the societal expectation that one does not simply poke around in other people’s stuff. The internet makes that weird with blogs and tumblr and twitter and flickr, but I don’t think it’s too out there to understand that a passworded or private album is not for general consumption and whoever first found the pictures knew they were violating a trust but chose to share the pictures because they knew it would hurt Opalcat and her feelings were not important to them. That’s pretty callous.
No, she did mention another message board. It was a huge wall of text, but believe me, she used the words “posting them on a message board” in reference to those who found her pictures. It was clearly bringing off-board drama here.
The mods took action, per their own policy on that sort of thing. I’m glad they did, though there’s a lot of quibbling about the specifics of the action.
That may well be true. The technical end of this is well above my level of proficiency, and I probably misunderstood the things I’ve read elsewhere about how this was accomplished. The bottom line is that pictures that were intended to remain private are now public, and this was done out of malice and/or spite.
You’re right. What does that have to do with here, again? (except that she brought it up…)
I think you’ll find the number of posters who are actually banned who post at any of the satellite boards is a lot lower than “a significant portion”. And most of the people discussing Opal’s behaviour are posters who are not in any lowered standing on the dope, but either frequent the other boards because they like the tenor of them, or who wanted somewhere to be able to unload their frustrations without being subject to the myriad byzantine rules about where what who and how someone can say something around here.
There was no great movement anywhere to suddenly upswell and come over here despite what Opal posted. The people who were posting in her thread are people who are still regular posters here anyway.
Deleting it because of fear of a board war is absolutely ridiculous. The people who don’t want to be here aren’t going to come back simply because of this.
Yes, as a matter of fact, she did. She published those pictures on galleries.opalcat.com.
There was no security. There were no passwords. There was no hacking, no defeating of security measures, no avoiding security. There just wasn’t any of that at all.
It went something like this:
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Someone posted a link to a picture. It was, IIRC, a head-shot, fully-clothed. at galleries.opalcat.com/albums/xyz/pic.jpg That would be akin to posting a link to this thread: Why was Opal's MPSIMS thread removed? - About This Message Board - Straight Dope Message Board
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Interested parties deleted the “xyz/pic.jpg” part of the URL and got an index page that showed links to all the pictures and the other galleries. That would be akin to going to: Straight Dope Message Board - Your direct line to thousands of the smartest, hippest people on the planet, plus a few total dipsticks. I fail to see where there is any wrong-doing in this.
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There was one (1) subfolder that was called “private”. The rest had names that reflected stuff like years, who was in the gallery, etc. I could see, potentially, some claims to wrong-doing in opening the “private” folder, but again there was no security at all. And in any case, most of the pictures that were linked to or discussed came from other folders anyway.
Except it apparently wasn’t actually passworded/private. Comparing this to hacking is like if I type in “http://boards.straightdope.com/” instead of “http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/index.php” and find the moderator board listed there, and the admins go “OMGZ haX0r!”
(And it’s a newbie mistake. I used to make webpages in the ancient days of the web, and you bet I watched what I uploaded where and I put in index pages and other things to try to defeat directory surfing.)
And Idol Thoughts actually thought this would happen in this case? Seriously?
Peeta and others seem to be supposing this idea that people passing the photos around is some natural phenomenon like the tides or snowfall and her privacy can never be regained. It’s not. The people who found the photos and the people who are passing them around could quite easily decide to respect her privacy and not share or release the photos, especially since she’s made it clear she does not want them out there. If no one were to go looking for them, they’d be functionally private again.
(Of course, I have a hard time believing all the people who told her to stop being a drama queen when after the thread she started gets moved to a hidden forum, another thread is started by the posters riding her for attention-whoring about the same topic. If you truly think she just likes calling attention to herself, you’d stop giving her attention.)
That doesn’t really matter. Anyone that has been around here long enough would know exactly which board would allow something like that.