News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:HBGary, Palantir, Prism, Facebook and The Industrial Surv... by mindcrime on Tuesday July 02, 2013 @03:36PM (#5980209)
I don't know, but it's interesting to ponder how one would detect them if they were. I'd love to see a project to scrape HN comments and try to auto-detect the sockpuppet posts.

It's a bit scary though, since a false positive on that could really hurt someone's reputation... if I wrote something like that, I'd actually be a little bit reluctant to share it. :-(

Re:HBGary, Palantir, Prism, Facebook and The Industrial Surv... by samstave on Tuesday July 02, 2013 @03:41PM (#5980240)
We see them, or what we believe to be them on reddit a lot. Typically, they have a pro-military agenda - often posting "emotional" military pics from accounts that are days old in an attempt to garner a sympathetic response.

Other accounts post pro-government comments again from young accounts.

We ban them pretty quickly. If you look at a users comment history and they are clearly having an agenda to post - they are either misguided, uninformed or sock-puppets.

As a mod of a ~large /r/ I wish I could see the IPs of the people posting. Specifically, if I could see if they are .mil (i.e. Eglin) IPs - so I could ban the whole range.

Re:HBGary, Palantir, Prism, Facebook and The Industrial Surv... by jlgreco on Tuesday July 02, 2013 @03:48PM (#5980285)
> We see them, or what we believe to be them on reddit a lot. Typically, they have a pro-military agenda - often posting "emotional" military pics from accounts that are days old in an attempt to garner a sympathetic response.

So basically the weekly "Check out my dog! He served with me in Afghanistan!" posts on Reddit from hour-old accounts?

Re:HBGary, Palantir, Prism, Facebook and The Industrial Surv... by samstave on Tuesday July 02, 2013 @04:03PM (#5980384)
Yes, those and the accounts that come in attempting to shut down criticism and discussion on other topics where their is clearly a national narrative the MSM is trying to push.
Re:HBGary, Palantir, Prism, Facebook and The Industrial Surv... by MisterWebz on Tuesday July 02, 2013 @03:59PM (#5980357)
Ever thought of making a crowd sourced extension that would target these kinds of accounts? A select few people would have the privilege to tag these accounts, and everyone else using the extension would be able to see the tagged acounts.
Re:HBGary, Palantir, Prism, Facebook and The Industrial Surv... by jbooth on Tuesday July 02, 2013 @03:44PM (#5980262)
Pretty sure HN is under their radar for the most part.
Re:HBGary, Palantir, Prism, Facebook and The Industrial Surv... by negativity on Tuesday July 02, 2013 @04:00PM (#5980363)
Really? Because I'm not.