Today, 4chan’s 58 boards cover a whimsical array of topics, from the practical (do-it-yourself) to the creative (photography, music) to the shocking and pornographic (“sexy beautiful women”). “The URL for 3chan was taken at the time,” Poole told The New York Times in 2010, “so I just jumped to the next number.” But the numbers don’t accurately reflect 4chan’s importance what happens on the site often reverberates across the Internet.Ĥchan was founded in 2003 by a 15-year-old named Christopher Poole, a New Yorker known online by the handle “moot.” Poole modeled the site on a fast-paced Japanese Web forum centered on anime and porn called 2chan. Trafficked mostly by 18- to 24-year-old men, 4chan attracts more than 22 million page views per month and more than 1 million unique visitors every day-almost as much as The New York Times website. There is no search function and no tagging of posts. "The id of the Web"Īt first glance, 4chan looks like nothing more than a frenetic, image-based bulletin board.
Outguess cicada online code#
At the bottom of the text, he found the following message: TIBERIVS CLAVDIVS CAESAR says “lxxt>33m2mqkyv2gsq3q=w]O2ntk.”Īnd that was a code he thought he could crack. When one commenter suggested opening the image in the simple-text editor WordPad, he couldn’t help himself. Kinkle stared at the message, trying to suss out its meaning. Some call it the “deep Web,” and Kinkle was about to tumble down a virtual rabbit hole straight into it. What lies beneath is vaster, darker, and harder to understand-a shadowy world where data and hackers and criminals hide. But Kinkle, like others who delve into the Internet and the cultures that take shape there, knows that the Web is an iceberg: the part that shows being the smallest, least menacing piece. The cyberspace that most of us know and use daily is a place for connecting with friends, paying bills, and sharing funny cat pictures. His curiosity piqued, Kinkle followed the conversation as it moved to a math and science message board. Amid the thread of obscene comments that pass for conversation on /b/, some commenters were suggesting that the strange message might be an NSA recruiting exercise. government organization that engages in defensive and offensive cyber operations, was actively using 4chan to scout for hackers.
Kinkle had read that the National Security Agency, a U.S. There, a curious message snagged his attention. The bars downstairs hummed with nightlife.ĭistracted, Kinkle was scanning /b/, the infamous image-sharing board on the website 4chan. His desk shook every time the trains rattled across the Williamsburg Bridge. His workspace offered an unobstructed view of the glittering Manhattan skyline, but the young academic, who makes his living as a writer and translator, wasn’t feeling inspired. The 32-year-old cultural studies PhD was alone in his Brooklyn studio, working on a paper about institutional secrecy and the national security apparatus. on a Friday night in January, and Jeff Kinkle was procrastinating. But in a place where no one shows his face and no one plays by the rules, how do you tell where the game ends and reality begins? By Jed Lipinski When an unsuspecting researcher followed a mysterious command on a 4chan board, he found himself drawn into a scavenger hunt that led him down the darkest corridors of the internet and stretched across the globe.
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