Geenstijl

Het is weer zover: GeenStijl ligt onder vuur, dit keer dankzij de vijftiende aflevering van de beruchte Wereldwijde Upload-Tournee. Webmaster Claus Jørstad van Elven Kingdom is woedend omdat de lezers van GeenStijl zijn foto-upload volblaften met onder meer wat Nederlands cultureel erfgoed. Meer dan 400 foto's moest de arme man verwijderen en dat is volgens hem reden om gerechtelijke stappen te ondernemen. In een woedende e-mail eist hij zonder enige steekhoudende juridische basis de ip-adressen op van de daders en wil hij dat we onze 'illegale activiteiten' stopzetten. "If none of this information is provided, will I take legal steps to have the site shut down, and the persons/company behind this will be held responsible." Tja, dat Claus in een fantasiewereld leeft was ons na het bekijken van zijn site al lang duidelijk. Maar vooruit dan maar: Rombo slijpt het pennetje alvast voor een ouderwetse reactie, maar heeft nog wat tijd nodig om het houtje-touwtje-Engels van Claus te ontcijferen.

From: Claus Jørstad
To: info@geenstijl.nl, abuse@hscg.net, fleischbaum@geenstijl.nl, abuse@kpn.net, noc@hscg.nl
Date: Sat, 18 Oct 2003 18:41
Subject: Complaint on www.geenstijl.nl activities

On 14.october 2003 20.00 GMT the following happened:
A massive attack involving uploads of unwanted pictures to our gallery on www.elvenkingdom.net. Our site and gallery is strictly related to the subject of the elves based upon the books by Tolkien, Lord Of The Rings & The Hobbit, and the movies based upon the book.

The upload attack involved pictures of most unwanted material, including pictures of obscene material like shit and piss, pornography, Hitler and other totally irrelevant and sick pictures. Our logs showed that most of the people who did this originated from Netherland or dutch users. This action forced us to take down the gallery, and gave us extra work in deleting these pictures. At the time we started to delete, the upload-attack was still going on, and the pictures in the moment was counting over 400. Only luck and fast reactions from our side prevented this upload-attack to continue for quite a while.

After this we questioned who was behind this, and why this happened, so it lead to further investigations. This was clearly a planned attack, unknown why. We spend alot of time making Elven Kingdom a good and valuable site for people has interest in the elves of Tolkiens world, so this attack on us was taken quite personally.

Days of checking on Internet lead us to the following site: http://www.geenstijl.nl/gm/archives/00000139.html. On this site is it obviously the page where all of this originated. It is a page where users are encouraged to upload pictures to a site. In this case our site. The postings on the site also matches the date and time of the activities, and the postings has comments involving our sites actions etc. I do not feel that this is coincidence, the facts speaks for itself on that page with both the article and the users comments. This is illegal activities, on the same line as spamming and harassment
on Internet.

I therefore demand the personal information (IP, names etc on users) on the persons posting there, and I also would like to point out that I will pursue this matter by law. I also want this activities stopped, which appearantly are regular actions since they were called "Wordwide upload tourne", meaning there are other sites which has been vicitims of such attacks. Example of their organized attacks is http://www.geenstijl.nl/gm/archives/00000167.html and http://www.geenstijl.nl/gm/archives/00000160.html.

If none of this information is provided, will I take legal steps to have the site shut down, and the persons/company behind this will be held responsible.

A copy of this email is sent to:
Geenstijl contact: info@geenstijl.nl; Abuse department of the sites host: abuse@hscg.net; The original article poster, Fleischbaum: fleischbaum@geenstijl.nl; The isp provider: abuse@kpn.net; The registrant behind the ip of the site: noc@hscg.nl; Police of Netheland.

Claus Joerstad, webmaster
Elven Kingdom