Upon returning to Christian Forums’ creationism vs. evolution board after a hiatus of around ten months, I’ve noticed that it has a new webmaster again. This was the second time they’ve changed webmasters in the same number of years.

In October of 2007, after running CF for six years, its creator Erwin Loh was replaced by someone named Lee Dodd. I didn’t approve of most of the changes that LeeD made to Erwin’s policies for the forum, but at least LeeD knew what he was doing from a technological standpoint, being the owner of an internet media company. But its newest webmaster, Pauler, doesn’t even have that to his benefit. When he replaced LeeD in this position, on January 22nd of 2009, he had been registered at CF for less than 24 hours. As of this month, CF’s current webmaster has been a member there for less than 1/7th as long as I have.

Actions speak louder that descriptions, so for the sake of comparison, here’s a typical announcement from Pauler, and one from Erwin. A couple of notable differences worth pointing out:

1: Pauler doesn’t know how to program the site himself, hence having to hire other programmers to help deal with the hacking attack against CF that was mentioned there. Since the programmer that Pauler hired wasn’t familiar with all of CF’s modifications to the VBulletin software, they had a lot of trouble installing the upgrade to this software and making it work. This is in contrast to Erwin, who programmed most of these modifications himself, and has also shared them with the wider VBulletin community, as mentioned here. Since Erwin was the creator of these mods, why didn’t Pauler ask just him to handle the upgrade, rather than hiring a programmer who had no experience with CF? I don’t know the answer for certain, but my money’s on Pauler being such a newbie that he didn’t even think of this.

2: Erwin has a total of 37,516 posts at CF, while Pauler has a total of 172. The fact that Pauler has only been registered for nine months, compared to Erwin’s eight years, can’t completely account for this difference. If they both were posting at the same rate during the time they’d been registered, Erwin would have a little more than 10 times as many posts as Pauler, while in fact he has more than two hundred times as many. The reason for this difference also explains Erwin’s ability to post announcements such as the one I linked to about WinAce—unlike Pauler, Erwin was actively engaged in his community, and as a result was able to notice things like when one of its members was dying and needed his help.

3: Erwin knew how to use proper grammar and capitalization. I can tolerate it when other members of a forum aren’t able to do this, but someone who’s posting announcements for a 36,000 member community should be willing to put forth the small amount of additional effort it takes for that.

Even beyond anything that can be seen from a pair of individual announcement threads, though, is something that I’ve gradually become aware of during the three and three quarters years that I was posting at CF while Erwin was in charge there. Unlike Pauler, Erwin was a perfect example of the sort of Christian whom I’m able to respect, despite my disagreements with Christianity. Education and intelligence is one factor—in addition to being an active contributor to VBulletin’s developer community, Erwin was a practicing lawyer and medical doctor, having graduated both medical school and law school. And more importantly, his view on how to make Christianity more popular was not based on advertising it, or enforcing any particular set of doctrine. His goal with CF was the create a Christian-run community that would be beneficial to members of all religions, including non-religious people such as myself, and thus show the rest of the world the good that Christians can accomplish without imposing their beliefs on anyone else.

Cutting back on Erwin’s policy of tolerance was one of the first changes that LeeD made after he was given control of the forum. The biggest example of this was the closing of General Apologetics, a section of the forum where non-Christians could ask questions about Christianity, due to the fact that non-Christians were winning too many arguments there. Based on what I’ve seen from Pauler so far, I doubt he’ll be changing this. Actually, I doubt he’ll be changing anything—he seems only barely able to maintain the forum as it is, let alone adding anything new.

As someone who’s been the webmaster of several forums, I have a fairly good understanding of the sort of skill and dedication that it takes to run one properly. With this in mind, I consider Erwin Loh to have been the best webmaster I’ve had at any forum where I’ve ever posted. LeeD and Pauler aren’t the worst—that distinction belongs to either Drach or Shoesie—but they’re certainly below-average. I’ve wondered a few times whether it would be worth creating a petition at CF to put Erwin back in charge there. I suspect I’d be able to get quite a bit of support for this idea, but considering how little attention Pauler pays to his community, if I were to create such a petition he’d probably just ignore it.

As I mentioned at Gondolend and Mesozoic Outpost, there’s a particularly nasty hack against SMF that’s been going around this month, being propagated by someone who calls themselves “krisbarteo”. There are several threads about these attacks at the SMF support forum, but the main one is here. After joining a forum, this hacker generally uploads an avatar or attachment containing PHP code, which they then use to inject scripts into other parts of the forum to take control of it. When a site contains more than just a forum, krisbarteo often destroys the whole site, and sometimes also uploads viruses or trojans there in order to infect the computer of anyone who tries to repair the damage done to it.

This sort of thing has happened before with forum software, although I think this particular instance of it might be the worst example ever for SMF. But what’s particularly interesting about this round of attacks is something I’ve never encountered before, either related to hacking or anywhere else: nobody at the SMF developer community seems able to tell whether krisbarteo is a human being or a robot. Not even Ferahgo and I can agree about this—she thinks it’s probably a person (or more likely, a group of people), while I think it’s more likely a robot.

The argument in favor of her opinion is just the sophistication of what krisbarteo is capable of. Even the most sophisticated CAPTCHA codes, which are designed specifically to stop bots from registering at forums, aren’t any kind of obstacle to this guy. And as far as the attacks themselves are concerned, he/she/it is remarkably adept at determining the best possible way of destroying a forum, deleting the logs that could preserve records of how the attack was performed, and creating backdoors so they can reinfect the forum if its owner tries to repair it. In most respects, these attacks are on a par with what the best human hackers are able to do.

As for the theory that krisbarteo is a robot, one argument for this idea is the sheer quantity of forums they’ve attacked. A Google search for “krisbarteo” reveals around two hundred thousand forums where this hacker is registered—an increase of thirty thousand since yesterday—what person or group of people has that kind of time? In addition, there’s also the matter of what seems to be krisbarteo’s ulterior motive for these attacks. According to the SMF support thread, after krisbarteo has successfully conquered a forum, the ultimate result is the forum’s remains being plastered with advertisements for Viagra and penis enlargement pills.

This is the first situation I’ve encountered, and possibly the first time in human history, when a well-known individual has managed to make it a complete mystery whether they were a human or a robot. Everybody is so used to spambots nowadays that it’s easy to overlook how significant this is. Science fiction authors have been predicting at least since the 1950s that someday in the future, robots would become so advanced that they were capable of being mistaken for humans. If that’s what krisbarteo is, then what began as science fiction has once again become reality.

If krisbarteo is a robot, what he’s been doing would probably also be the most destructive attack that any robot has ever performed against humans. Since krisbarteo’s method of attack often destroys an entire website rather than just its forum, several companies that relied on their websites for business have lost money as a result of this. Viruses have been doing this sort of thing for over a decade, but while computer viruses mimic real-life viruses in the way they rely on their hosts to be propagated, krisbarteo is more akin to the Terminator: hunting down his victims under his own power, methodically determining the most effective way to destroy each of them, and then moving on to the next target after each attack is finished.

The situation in the SMF developer community this month seems like it could have been the tagline for a cheesy 1950s sci-fi movie or comic book: “In the year two thousand and nine, havoc reigns as a ruthless robot attacks thousands!” Science fiction has often been somewhat prophetic, but krisbarteo’s attacks involve at least one element that I don’t think anyone in the 1950s could have predicted. Who could have guessed that when robots rise up against humanity, the underlying motive would be in order to sell penis enlargement pills?

I’ve removed a few people from my friends list here and at Christian Forums. They’re probably aware of the reason.

I’m not going to remove anyone’s membership or submission from *Domain-of-Darwin at this point, since I think of participation in that community as being independent of how one treats its moderators outside of DA. I may reconsider this if they act the same way at DA also, though.

As most of my watchers have probably noticed, a spambot has just hijacked my DA account and used it to post spam comments on the userpages of everyone on my watch list. ~wynahiros’s page contained identical spam comments from two other users in addition to me, so my account appears to not be the only one invaded by this spammer. The spammees who were affected by my account have my apologies. (Is spammee a real word, or is there some other term for a recipient of spam?)

This probably isn’t as bad as the when my account here was hacked in 2004, since this time nothing in my gallery has been deleted, but it’s still embarrassing. According to the spammer, I’m a 23-year-old woman who wants people to visit her webcam porn site. I hope the people who were spammed from my account take the time to look at my userpage, so they can notice this journal entry and see from my profile that I’m a 25-year-old male.

I’ve just discovered an interesting book related to World War II: After the Reich by Giles MacDonogh. This book covers the mistreatment of German POWs and civilians by the Allies after the end of the war, which is a topic I’ve read about before, although not in this much depth. This post gives a few details about the contents of the book, as does this article in England’s newspaper The Telegraph.

I’d already known about the tendency of the Soviet Army to rape German women, but I hadn’t been aware of how widespread this was. Apparently almost no women in the Soviet-occupied territories were spared from this, not even children, and some were passed around like bottles of vodka to be raped more than 25 times in a single day. The war crimes of Stalin’s followers aren’t really news anymore, but what’s more surprising is that the Americans weren’t much better in this regard. According to part of the book quoted in the Dialog International post, the Americans made use of most of the same methods that SS officers at Dachau concentration camp had used against prisoners there. This is true in the most literal sense possible—quoting the Telegraph article, “Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and even Auschwitz stayed in business after the war, only now with the Germans behind the wire.”

This fact is worth pointing out to anyone who tries to assert the moral superiority of the United States over Nazi Germany. The Nazis were the creators of these concentration camps, and used them to kill around 10 million civilians as opposed to the 3 million Germans killed by the Allies after the war was over, but those ten million victims were spread out over a period of around four times as long as the Allied occupation of Germany. In other words, the average number of deaths per year was actually higher under the Allies than it was under the Nazis. From 1933 until 1945, the Nazis killed an average of 830,000 civilians and POWs per year, while from 1945 until 1948, an average of 1,000,000 German civilians and POWs were killed per year while these camps were in use by the Allied forces.

So how does this relate to revisionism? The answer has to do with the fact that I’d already been somewhat familiar with this topic, as a result of having researched it as part of a report for my tenth grade English class. (I’m not sure why they made us learn about World War II in English class rather than history class, but they did.) Back then there wasn’t a main authoritative book on this topic like the one I linked to, so what I knew about it was pieced together from several sources, all of which only mentioned it in passing. The reaction to my report was unequivocal—I was told that this was a Revisionist viewpoint, which was the word that class used for Holocaust deniers, and I was accused of academic dishonesty for allegedly failing to admit that my report was based on Revisionist sources. Since there wasn’t yet any individual mainstream source I could point to in support of my viewpoint, there was no way for me to disprove this allegation, and it was one of the justifications that the principal there used for kicking me out of his school at the end of the year.

Well, this idea isn’t so “revisionist” anymore, now that it’s been covered by a mainstream history book with articles about it in several widely-read newspapers. But people still seem to have the same amount of ire that they’ve always had for any ideas within the realm of what’s considered “holocaust revisionism”, except that this realm now contains one fewer idea than it did before.

I still think there’s probably no support for the most well-known idea in holocaust revisionism—the idea that the Nazi’s concentration camps were used only for forced labor rather than extermination, and that the people who died there died only as a result of malnutrition and disease. The main argument used for this idea seems to be Fred Leuchter’s examination of the gas chambers at Auschwitz, but Leuchter’s analysis involved several flawed assumptions, such as that the amount of cyanide residue left behind in a gas chamber used against people would be comparable to the amount left from using cyanide gas for de-lousing. (It wouldn’t—because lice have so much slower metabolisms than humans, the concentration of cyanide needed to kill them is several times higher.) But after seeing one of these formerly-reviled revisionist ideas gain mainstream acceptance, I’m much more reluctant to have this attitude towards other ideas currently regarded as such, since experience seems to show that what’s currently considered “revisionist” might not always be.

The British historian David Irving and the German-Canadian conspiracy theorist Ernst Zündel have both served time in prison for denying certain aspects of the holocaust in countries where doing so is illegal. Zündel’s ideas in particular are kind of hard to take seriously—among other things, he’s known for having claimed in the 1970s that Hitler was still alive somewhere near the south pole, and that from their secret underground base in Antarctica the Nazis were plotting to conquer the world using a battalion of UFOs. (I swear I’m not making this up.) I also wonder, though: is it really necessary to imprison someone for trying to convince other people of ideas like this? I think the eventual acceptance that the Allies committed these war crimes against Germans shows that in general, it’s best to critically examine unpopular ideas about history rather than just suppressing them. And, you know… it would be quite an embarrassment to Zündel’s prosecutors if Hitler’s underground Antarctic UFO base were discovered someday.