From the “Collin Maessen is a now a fair game legal target” department and the “SkS double secret publicly browsable Tree-hut archives”, comes this unsupportable claim of ‘criminal hacking’ by Brandon Shollenberger.
My Hidden Information
by Brandon Shollenberger.
Some Skeptical Science members have been publicly accusing me of criminal hacking. None of them say just what it is I did that would be considered hacking. This is strange as I’ve explained just what I did. It should be easy for them to point to the illegal aspect. Instead, one of them (Collin Maessen) recently said:
I know exactly what you did and what you didn’t share about what you did. The details that you didn’t share would make it rather obvious that it was hacking. Even though it was at the script kiddie level.
If we’re to believe Maessen, I’m not just a criminal, I’m a liar too. Of course, Maessen refused to say what I “didn’t share.” If I held back information like he claims, it would be easy to prove. Why won’t he? Why won’t anyone from Skeptical Science? They claim it is obvious I lied and hacked. They just won’t give anyone the information which shows such. They’re doing so even when it requires violating their own moderation policies:
When making any claim provide references (links if possible). Failure to do so can result in the comment not going through moderation….
When asked to clarify an argument or point please respond; this isn’t optional.
Claims that are factually incorrect will not be allowed.
I don’t get that. Maessen accused me of a criminal offense, and he refuses to provide the slightest shred of evidence or information for his accusation. He apparently expects people to just take his word for it, even while he’s being completely hypocritical. Très bizarre.
Oh well. Since the Skeptical Science crowd doesn’t care to provide any information or evidence, I will. I’ve uploaded a list of every link I collected from the Skeptical Science forum. I collected these links by using URLs in the form of: http://sksforum.org/thread.php?p=X where X was a number.
You can see the numbers I used in the list (1-18633) along with the page I was redirected to. This is a list of links posted on the secret-secret Skeptical Science forum. You could have gotten any of these links by plugging their number into the URL I gave above.
You’ll note, many of the entries are given for a domain “secretdomain.org.” This isn’t the actual domain. I’ve replaced the domain of their secret-secret-secret forum with that because of certain concerns. It doesn’t matter because you wouldn’t be able to access anything on the site anyway. If you could though, this would be the link to look for:
2929 http://secretdomain.org/tcp_results.php
If you plugged that in, you’d have direct access to a page that looked like:
I don’t know what information I’m supposedly hiding, but I’ll provide some more. Here are a couple links showing what sorts of things I tried to access:
3031 http://secretdomain.org/thread.php?t=6738&r=15#61211 3513 http://secretdomain.org/members.php 7280 http://secretdomain.org/docs/coming-out-of-ice-age-volcanoes.pdf 8572 http://secretdomain.org/docs/rebuttal_status/18.details.htm
The first two of those required logging in to access. The third and fourth did not. That’s hardly surprising as many sites make documents and images directories publicly accessible so the material in them can be shared. Given some things were blocked and others were not, it is reasonable for a person to try various links to see what they’re allowed to see. Apparently, the Skeptical Science crowd thinks that’s hacking.
Interestingly, two other links in the list are:
10099 http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/tcp_raters2.gif 10100 http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/tcp_raters3.gif
While those links no longer work, they are the images I discussed in this post. They provide the identities of 12 of the raters for the Cook et al consensus paper. In that post I said:
This one also identifies nearly a dozen individual participants. It’s true we only found out about these images because of a hack, but that hack happened nearly two years ago. Surely the authors of the paper shouldn’t leave confidential information in a publicly accessible location for two years, even if people have already seen it.
But it’s worse than that. Not only were the images publicly accessible for nearly two years after being discovered, John Cook continued to make it possible for anyone to find links to them. Plus, the links I collected only begin after the original forum was hacked. Who knows if we could have found the same links via the original forum?
Incidentally, you may have noticed one of the links I mentioned being able to access had a number in it. As you may have guessed, there were a series of pages in the form of http://secretdomain.org/docs/rebuttal_status/X.details.htm. I scraped a number of them (392?), but they didn’t contain anything interesting. It was just some proofreading information about various posts at Skeptical Science.
That’s it. There’s no more information to disclose. I don’t know what the Skeptical Science crowd thinks I’m hiding, and I suspect it doesn’t exist.
And hey, now you can see ~18,000 pages the Skeptical Science group discussed!
Wow, a list of links! This is obviously some major hack here, have you talked to anyone at Wikileaks about this
/sarc
🙂
bushbunny says:
June 9, 2014 at 6:10 pm
Anyone with a knowledge of computer science can hack a computer without that person knowing.
——————-
Not quite .. all the ‘person’ needs is a firewall with logging turned on – every connection that comes through is logged then you will know there has been an attempted hack, all modern Windows XP+ have firewall built-in, in W7 and later it is turned on by default.
So unless the hacker is really good and can get around hardware or software firewalls, then computers hackers need to have a server installed on the target computer to get around the firewall. This is why you get all the phishing type emails, or a drive-by website might install something bad on your computer if you follow a bad link.
So having a knowledge of computer science is not all that is needed (Computer ‘science’ is not a necessity with modern hacking tools) and you need hacking software/tools.
All that Brandon did on SkS is what Google does everyday to enhance its databases, that is how the SkS image folder ended up on Google long before it got ‘hacked’
If you own a website, you have to tell search engines which folders you do NOT want it to index. Otherwise it will go for everything that is accessible.
If you genuinely believe that SkS has been hacked, then you better not go near it again until you are absolutely certain there is no malware installed on there.
@ur momisugly Mike Jonas
The problem is also which law Australian or USA?
It may get even more interesting because although SkS website was domain is listed to TPP wholesale an Australian company with the owner being John Cook a quick traceroute will tell you the servers are virtualized and hosted in USA.
Oh the lawyers will love this one because I am guessing that puts jurisdiction firmly under USA law.
I just don’t get it – what was so secret?
If they have nothing to hide, why would they get so excited about this? Surely this is all just more solid evidence for their claims?
It’s science, it’s supposed to be open and transparent isn’t it?
LdB
@Eric Worrall says:
There was extensive discussion about the issue by lawyers see the prior discussion on this at least under US laws. … You want to call it a hack then fine go ahead but don’t assume that implies any sort of criminality …
Absolutely, this would be a very difficult charge to make stick, in this case.
… and the bigger question you haven’t addressed is what was the damage and how is it being valued? The damage situation in a credit card number theft or the like is easy the damage in this sort of arena is going to interesting to try and justify.
I did mention this. My point is not that I think anyone could successfully prosecute Brandon, my concern is the SkS weirdos, backed by a sympathetic Obama administration, could potentially make life difficult for Brandon for a while. You don’t have to be guilty of anything, for a politically motivated witch hunt to create a lot of inconvenience in your life.
My suggestion was that Brandon have a response prepared, in case of this eventuality.
Hack all you want. My life is pretty boring. What would they use anyway? Anybody with any sense at all, and computers are cheap enough, has one they go online with, and the other never sees the internet. You can’t image how fast windows 95 is without the net.
Tim Hammond says:
June 10, 2014 at 2:56 am
I just don’t get it – what was so secret?
If they have nothing to hide, why would they get so excited about this? Surely this is all just more solid evidence for their claims?
It’s science, it’s supposed to be open and transparent isn’t it?
————————————————
This is SKS we’re talking about here, right?
They don do no steenking science.
Science, sks?
How, where and when does it start?
cn
Brandon, Eric might be right .
I hope you have your taxes and the rest of your life in order.
Time to cya.
They have ways of finding your skeletons and controlling your actions.
Here come the IRS, the FBI and Homeland Security.
Are you now one of Obama’s enemies?
cn
Not only have you helped them close a multi-year idiotic security flaw, you probably quadrupled their average traffic. At least, until the flaw was closed.
SkS is sure an ungrateful lot!
Personally, I don’t believe it.
That is, I don’t believe that anyone would want to hack and read 18,000 pages of SkS drivel! Please ensure it is kept out of reach of children, or anyone without a strong stomach.
Maybe that’s the answer? They left their files open in the hope that someone would actually read it and make sense of their nonsense?
I’m reading a book called Queen Bees and Wannabes. It’s about the behavior of teen and pre-teen girls (yes, I have a daughter in that category). The description in this book of how a pre-teen behaves when she’s confronted with her bad behavior is remarkably similar to the behavior of Mr. Maessen.
Hacking is exactly what SkS and company think is possible and what we should be doing TO the climate. If we could just decide on what ppm of CO2 to drive it to, and what global temp would be best for us guests here on this rock. Perhaps a UN vote could decide that. Meanwhile, a very large portion of low info climate followers this Sks is actually skeptical. Ugh.
Brandon Shollenberger,
John Cook’s inner circle (aka: secret forum / super secret forum / secret secret forum / tree house cult) do exhibit extremely vindictive statements and seem to advocate openly belligerent approaches towards those who do not agree with their idea of consensus on alarming AGW from fossil fuel.
I think one cannot expect them to act rationally in lawsuits or in political action against you.
Be careful when playing games with the irrational. It is like playing with wild animals. Unpredictable.
John
If this is true then whatever happened to calling the police? They police won’t be called and even if they were THEY would be arrested for wasting police time.
Did you find any more taxpayer funded SS day dreams during your ‘hack’?
Quite why you worry about what these Teenage Tank Commanders think about what you did or didn’t do is beyond me. Any credibility they may have had dissipated about the time they were caught ‘dressing up’.
Sad little boys in a world of fantasy.
@ur momisugly Eric Worrall, June 9 at 5:42 pm
Bingo.
I cannot say any more than that.
[snip – calls for criminal behavior, policy violation -mod]
It was meant to be irony – using their own words against them.
Brandon,
Maessen is calling you more than a criminal and a liar. He also claimed you are inept (at the script kiddie level).
I doubt he recognizes who is the childest “kiddie level” one in this exchange. SkS was one of the very first sites I visited when I started following the climate change discussion. I’m convinced they have created more skeptics than any other single source.
Brandon is included in an article just linked to by DrudgeReport.com:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/climate-cultists_794401.html
Screenshot: http://oi62.tinypic.com/21mvgxh.jpg
“In other words, two-thirds of the articles expressed no opinion about the human causation of climate change, while the one-third that did were twisted by Cook into a simpleminded tautology: Among all the scientists who agree with the “consensus” are all of the scientists who agree with the consensus. Cook, incidentally, refused to share how he and his graduate students coded the 11,000 abstracts, which is reminiscent of the East Anglia cabal and their withholding of tree ring data. But as with the East Anglia group, someone at the University of Queensland left the data on the Internet, where blogger Brandon Shollenberger came across it and starting noting its weaknesses. The predictable happened: The University of Queensland claimed that the data had been hacked, and sent Shollenberger a cease-and-desist letter. Nothing bespeaks confidence and transparency like the threat of lawsuits.
The only real surprise about Cook’s conclusion is that the number wasn’t 100 percent, since a human role in climate change is acknowledged by every single prominent climate skeptic including Pat Michaels, Roy Spencer, John Christy, Freeman Dyson, Judith Curry, and Richard Lindzen. Studies like Cook’s seek to establish something that virtually no one is arguing. The real argument is over how much future warming is reasonable to expect. Lindzen, Michaels, and others think that we’ve seen most of the temperature increase we’re likely to see, even with further increases in greenhouse gas levels.”
I fully agree, personally, that this is not hacking.
The legal system, depending on your country of choice, might disagree though. Read through the courts reasoning here (not guilty in the criminal case, guilty in the civil) for more information:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/french-journalist-fined-4000-plus-for-publishing-public-documents/