A subreddit dedicated to cataloguing the posts and comments that will go down in reddit history
When Kim Kardashian tried to break the internet in November, it was still still recovering from being broken a few months prior. Beginning on 31 Aug 2014 and lasting a few weeks, the internet was hit with an event that became known as the Fappening, a portmanteau of happening and fap, internet slang for masturbate.
Ignition was triggered when these two posts of naked photos of Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton were submitted to their respective subreddits. Within minutes they were both on the frontpage of r/all, with everyone wanting to know where the pictures came from. It soon became known that someone had hacked the iCloud where a large number of celebrities had stored private nude photos of themselves. Unperturbed by this breach of privacy, people demanded more. And more they received.
Within the next few hours of the initial 2 posts, several other nude celebrity photos, including Kirsten Dunst, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kaley Cuoco, Yvonne Strahovski, much more Jennifer Lawrence and many others were posted to reddit. Eventually, someone decided to name this event, and so it was dubbed The Fappening. The deleted comment in that link said there should be a subreddit for it, and the follow up by u/johnsmcjohn was to let people know that he'd created it.
The subreddit exploded instantly. In all of reddit's history, no subreddit has ever come close to being as initially popular as r/thefappening. With the first 24 hours, it amassed 100,000 subscribers. As it happened over the weekend, it bough an influx of people who weren't at work to the site. An influx that led to 141 million page views in one day. That is roughly what r/AskReddit gets in a month.
Over the next week, more naked photos (mostly of Jennifer Lawrence) kept getting posted. The site was continually going down because of the massive amount of traffic from all across the web. Discussion started popping up in threads all over the site about the morality of the event, whether it was stealing or not, and talks on invasion of privacy, pleas for Emma Watson photos, and random accusations of reddit's hypocrisy. Eventually, the admins posted this. Very soon after, r/thefappening is banned. Mirror subreddits pop up in droves instantly, and are all smited faster than they can be made. The next day, /u/alienth steps in. Any chance of r/thefappening being reopened is quashed. The admins quickly face a gargantuan amount of backlash due to accusation of censorship and only blocking unfavourable content when it makes reddit look bad in the media. The admins adopt a very diplomatic stance, taking care not to upset people more, but it only angers the horde more as the answers they want never come.
Over the next week, people still try to hold onto hope that there will be another resurgence, and reddit got their wish. On Sep 20, a second batch of photos was released on 4chan, and then posted to reddit before they were quickly removed from the hosting sites. More photos followed in the days to follow, but as with all things, reddit slowly drifted its attention toward other things and The Fappening faded into the background, a memory of mixed feelings for the masses.
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This barely even touched the surface, there were so many nuances and things going on. Speculation about everything, trying to validate or confirm identities, if someone was underage or not, trying to figure out what else would/could be leaked, which charities to donate too, bitching about those charities rejecting those donations, posting the celebrity reactions, sometimes feeling remorse, reposting and rehosting the images.
It was quite the phenomenon. For such a short lived...thing...there was so much going on.
It's kinda hard for me to document every discussion from every thread about it. I could talk about the discussions of whether that chick taking a load to the face was J-Law or not, all the different ones of people like Bar Rafaeli, Victoria Justice and Blake Lively and the million threads pointing out things like moles, beauty spots and paint chips on the walls in the background trying to prove the identity of them, or the ones where the chick was sitting on a vibrator and people trying to solve that one, or how people were disappointed that the first one of Kaley Cuoco was her sitting on the dunny, and how Kate Upton's body is actually kinda dumpy, and the various discussions of "are they sluts for doing this/stop slut-shaming they can do what they want" or...
Do you see my point? Describing every single minutiae of the entire thing would be pointless, and it would also take several years to track down all the links
Can you put a link for the second bath of pics please? ;)
There wasn't any big thing like the first wave. It was just individual threads in the celebrity subreddits
well said. it was a MOMENT! I remember it broke towards the end of my work shift...i was obsessed. I was calling my dad about it...other friends...we were all waiting around for the next "drop" And like, i didn't even really care sooooo much to see nude celebs...but it was more like, i just really felt i was RIGHT THERE when SOMETHING was HAPPENING....i was RIGHT THERE on the front lines of internet history......it was a MOMENT! it was the event that finally got me to create a username and join reddit (see username)
Dont forget about reddit trying to donate money to JLaw's charity
I thought it was just a random charity that they picked and said it was on her behalf. It was a men-centric one too at that was it not?
I think first was for prostate cancer and the second was water.org.
Comment deleted by user
Well who can blame them? It's bad PR.
Fine by me.
I remember all the jokes in that thread about how we were "literally worse than cancer."
I love how Reddit will try to justify any terrible thing they do by trying to set up a charity drive.
"But look! We're donating for a good cause! We can't be doing anything bad!"
Its really disgusting IMO. Charity being used to persuade others you're a good person instead of doing it out of the kindness of your own heart.
This is what Ayn Rand is all about...
definitely disgusting IMO
happy cakeday
tips JLAW's charity
You also forgot to talk about the mass genocide of most souls in r/nofap
countless potential humans died on sheets, in toilets and everywhere else that day
"Remember remember, the day 'fore September."
~ Some random Redditor, the name of which I do not remember
The Lord may have taken robin on the 11th, but he gave us the greatest day in Internet history on the 31st
I'm pretty sure it was u/exileonmeanstreet who named it The Fappening, just fyi.
Follow the link where I talk about it being named.
Ah, my bad. I only read the text itself.
My penis remembers
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He's a pom. I'm Aussie.
I'll imagine Pauline Hanson then.
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Just the first annoying Aussie that popped into my head.
ba doom tish !
Ugh, fuck that
This is even more confusing to me about the abbreviation JLaw being thrown around.
yeah i've been posting jude law nudes but no one seems interested.
I am!
Would a write up about how this was not an iCloud hack, be outside the scope of this thread?
That should do
Don't victim blame for a weak password on a brute force attack.
Well, since there was no iCloud hack, yet people continue to perpetuate that myth, something should be written to debunk it.
There was a vulnerability in Find My iPhone that let hackers brute force weak iCloud passwords.
Saying iCloud was not hacked relies on a very narrow definition of what constitutes "hacking", most of the photos did come from unauthorised access to iCloud accounts and Apple admitted this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_celebrity_photo_leaks
Could you source that? Your apple quote doesn't support this in fact it says the opposite that the passwords were the weakness not iCloud. I have an android and Windows PC before you shout me down as an Apple fanboy.
It's mentioned in the Wikipedia link.
Whether the hackers actually used the vulnerability in Find My iPhone to brute force passwords isn't known conclusively, but that it was possible to do so is not in doubt. Apple fixed that vulnerability but after the leaks had started, it seems that the service was vulnerable for an extended period.
http://thenextweb.com/apple/2014/09/01/this-could-be-the-apple-icloud-flaw-that-led-to-celebrity-photos-being-leaked/
Apple's statement was worded in such a way that you can't rule out that this vulnerability was used.
Quoting wikipedia doesn't make it true.
And saying that there wasn't an iCloud hack but providing no references whatsoever doesn't make that true either. It's hilarious the lengths to which Apple fanboys will deny reality about their favored phone manufacturer who can do absolutely no wrong, I mean there are scores in this thread denying there was any hack of iCloud when Apple themselves even admitted it.
The time Reddit actually did break the internet
Only time I saw the internet broken was when Michael Jackson died.
I remember trying to find out if his death was real or not, and trying to hit up the Google machine. That day was the only time that I remember their site struggling to come up, let alone return results.
The entire web that day was all sorts of crazy since everyone else was doing the same thing.
Also breaks Tumblr
Don't forget Yishan's "Everyman is responsible for his own soul" post talking about reddit being the "government of a new type of community"
Had so much backlash they had to call in alienth to clean up the mess.
And 9 weeks after that post, Yishan resigned -- although all indications are the resignation had nothing to do with "thefappening"
Oh god. The most hypocritical cringey self-righteous post ever made by an admin. And that's quite a competition.
If you read the post, you'll see that I linked to that.
God speed.
This misses half of what the Fappening actually was and it miss-atributes the source of the images/videos to a hack that didn't happen.
Write-ups do exist, so I'm just going to give the tl;dr:
Insiders (friends, staff, former spouses etc.) have been stealing nude pictures and videos from other people's phones and posting them on the internet for years, some of those pictures feature celebrities. There are places, mostly in the deep web, where people trade these "special" nudes. One of those places was anonIB, an imageboard. A couple of weeks prior to the Fappening someone started offering celebrity nudes on anonIB, which later would turn out to be part of the same "sets" that would become public during the Fappening. Apparently people traded their own material with this person. (People claiming to be such "collectors" have claimed that the guy scammed them. But there really is no way to tell whether that's true or not.) On the friday before the Fappening, this person then offered all the material he had accumulated for sale on anonIB.
This was noticed by /b/-tards almost immediately, who started to discuss the offer's validity on /b/ over the weekend. During this time the seller's Bitcoin address recieved over $50k worth of Bitcoins. Then on Sunday evening (well, that depends on your timezone) someone started posting JLaw nudes on /b/. This was picked up by redditors in turn and the rest is described in the OP.
The origin of the hack myth might also be interesting: during the late hours of Sunday, people started asking where the nudes came from and someone just wrote "someone probably got their iCloud hacked." And reddit being reddit, it got upvoted massively and everyone just accepted it as fact. Even though many of the pictures and videos very obviously came from Samsung phones or had been leaked years ago. Some of the sets were known fakes as well, e.g. those "featuring" Jennifer Aniston or Allison Brie. Then the media picked it up and the "hack" became fact.
Oh and IIRC reddit did what it does best and doxxed a couple of people, getting them in trouble for being "the hacker".
edit: OK, I'm gonna answer people's counter-arguments once instead of replying to each comment.
"A very targeted attack on user names, passwords and security questions" is not a hack. And that's not even arguing over semantics. It means that someone either knew or guessed the target's password or the answers to the security questions. I.e. someone with special knowledge got through the security systems in the exact way they were designed, instead of breaking them. That's the digital version of someone opening a lock with a key instead of picking it.
As I had mentioned right at the start, this kind of thing has been happening for years and it is happening to millions of people every year. And crucially this happens to all kinds of accounts, including Google, Dropbox etc. (E.g. this is exactly how Palin's email was "hacked".) When your password is easily guessed, you don't log out of your computer/lock your phone or you give your password to people around you, even the best security systems couldn't keep your data safe.
Apple themselves put out a statement explicitly acknowledging that many of the photos were stolen from unauthorised access to celebrity iCloud accounts. I can't believe you have written such a load of completely unsourced bullshit that there was no hack and have had it voted up to the top comment.
Apple statement:
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20140902006384/en/Apple-Media-Advisory
Apparently brute force attacks that guess thousands of passwords a second are the celebrities' fault.
I get that you're trying to keep the information as accurate as possible but do you have to get angry and start cursing at others because you disagree with them?
Isn't that more likely to be phishing and not hacking?
The iCloud acconts were accessed by a brute-force attack not by phishing or informed guessing (like what happened with Palin). I don't know if that counts as a hack, they did exploit a vulnerability of the software but I imagine most of the people involved were just script-kiddies.
Phishing is a subset of hacking, they aren't mutually exclusive.
The Target and Home Depot 100m+ credit card thefts were down to phishing, I think you would still call these hacks. The theft of security tokens from RSA in 2011 likewise.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing#Notable_phishing_attacks
It is not clear that the Apple photo thefts were all down to phishing, either, it is very possible that passwords were brute forced and in some cases possibly reset.
You are getting into Bill Clinton "it depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is" territory if you are arguing that mass unauthorised access to computer accounts and theft of data is not "hacking".
Did they phish the admin credentials or what? I don't see how you could phish 100m+ credit cards without altering the Home Depots site itself or simply phishing the admin credentials and obtaining them that way.
I don't see phishing as hacking because you are essentially tricking someone into handing over their credentials. There is no breaking or exploitation of the actual security systems.
I don't disagree at all that using an exploit to brute force a password would be a hack of a security system. Hacking is essentially using a tool in an unconventional way to get your goal accomplished.
I only saw one that was from a samsung phone, yvonne strahovski, and it was fake, those came from tumblr for some random girl.
I think around the time of the fappening I did see someone make a post about "nude trading rings" but this was reasonably quickly debunked. I was just curious what your sources are, I definitely hope not that same comment I had already read.
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those are the places real masterbators go to
Yeah this guy's talking out of his arse.
It is located on the normal Web at anon-ib.com and it is indexed by Google (try a search for "whatever site:anon-ib.com", you will get results). It's in no way the "deep web" any more than 4chan or Reddit. But he's pulled the entire post out of his ass so why not this little detail.
All of that happened on different sites. This subreddit details reddit's history. Not the whole internet
I found this more interesting.
Edit: Modern historians believe context is very important when going over historical events. Reddit does not exist in a vacuum.
Edit 2: I don't think we should be downvoting UnholyDemigod like this. He puts a lot of work into this subreddit, no reason to downvote him for a controversial opinion(he was at -15 when I wrote that).
True, and it help to know more about the context, but this subreddit is specifically for Reddit's history.
And to understand reddits history and why thefappening happened on reddit you need outside context. Skgoa provided some very illuminating context into the origins of the whole incident.
Yes but this was wrong.
But in terms of giving the event context, the details are important.
there's nothing wrong with background and context.
You mean it wasn't the evil hacker 4chan?
not only is this lousy but your grammar and syntax on the first line are very poor
for posterity you should at least fix this if not delete it
Deep web and Dark web are not the same thing at all although I can almost guarantee the passwords were from the deep web
What I still don't get is that only the owners of the photos can issue a DCMA notice, but these people said the photos weren't of them. How does that work?
Also, the photos aren't hosted on Reddit. Turn off thumbnails and DCMA is taken care of.
Well I for one completely missed out on the fappening. Kind of glad I did to be honest. The whole public reaction to it just felt icky to me. I'd rather not look at someone's leaked nudes that were released without their permission.
Wasn't the first batch from 4chan too?
Ah, I remember the days. One day I went to check for more and boom! r/thefappening was gone. I think the only way to have those photos now is to personally get them from people who originally saved them.
And then shortly after, everyone stopped giving a fuck. Just like everything else big that happens.
Not sure if you want to include it but this arguably sorta significant.
http://i1.minus.com/ilb96eMCbUcJ0.png
You might want to mention how this all started on 4chan, when some guy began posting leaked celebrity nude pics only if he got paid Bitcoin. Those photos were eventually posted on Reddit.
I was one of those initial subscribers, not because I was interested in the content (being middle-aged, I have no idea who most of those women are), but because I greatly enjoyed the drama.
r/watchitfortheplot
same
Have the sites with the pictures been taken down yet? or does anyone know of any links?
Can you still find the photos on 4chan???
I was there.
I WAS THERE
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Collections are still torrentable on various sites.
r/totse check the submissions
This comment is pretty much how I feel about the whole thing http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2foivo/every_man_is_responsible_for_his_own_soul/ckb999j
Actually all these images came from 4chan first.
Much like most of the content on reddit.
Truth
ahhhh yes....the event that finally brought me to reddit (see username)
Ayy lmao~5/31/15
immediately I know you have no idea what you're talking about. the magazine said, "Break the Internet", not her. honestly, reddit is so retarded sometimes.
I knew that, it was just easier to say than "when a magazine that featured a spread of Kim Kardashian"
I remember a user making a tool that would automatically sync drops to your pc folder of choice. It was legendary.
Definitely would love the full story and beginning because I'm not gonna lie I've known about that page for a while loll
Hi