Gay Nigger Association of America
The Gay Nigger Association of America (better known by its four letter abbreviation GNAA) is a self-aggrandizing Internet troll organization that primarily targets Internet communities in an effort to cause havok and disrupt their normal activities. The GNNA designed their name to be offensive and it is generally assumed to have been chosen because of the stigma that is associated with homosexuality and the impact of the racial slur "nigger". Despite the term "Association of America" the organization has participants from countries other than the United States.
Members engage in such nafarious activities as flooding weblogs, producing shock sites, prank-calling technical support telephone lines, and IRC channel disruption such as IRC floods. Due to these actions the normal operation of many popular websites such as slashdot.org and other organizations is interrupted, and sometimes the attacks force websites to shut down momentarily. As such, targeted communities generally consider GNAA members a nuisance and frequently respond with technological and social anti-trolling measures such as moderation systems to limit future disruption caused by the trolling. The inner-workings of the GNAA are not well known, and some speculate that the GNAA only consists solely of unconnected individuals acting in the name of the group.
Background information
The GNAA first appeared in January 2003, trolling Slashdot using ASCII art logos representing the organization and satirical news releases pertaining to the contents of Slashdot articles. As with other troll organizations, members of the GNAA adopt pseudonyms to preserve their anonymity and their true identities are generally not known. While its number of members are unknown, the GNAA has listed members "timecop" as the founder and President and "jesuitx" as a co-founder and Vice President. The internal structure of the GNAA is unclear, and some argue that have no real structure or actual members. Its business is conducted in secret, and those acting in its name may simply be individuals working under the GNAA "brand."
The GNAA's website features pictures of African American athletes and professionals that appear to originate from stock image archives in an apparent attempt to parody the designs of various corporate websites. It states that the GNAA does not either support or promote racism, homophobia, and other kinds of hatred. However, they continually poke fun at such as Latvians by characterizing them as "grotesquely obese, deformed goblin-like mongrels very closely resembling pigs, [ who ] practice Judaism and have a habit [ of ] creeping into houses and stealing the foreskins of babies". [1] While their main motivations are difficult to determine, they have targeted websites and blogs that promote "anti Gaynigger and pro-Zionist propaganda". [2]
GNAA members Rucas and Armorfist created a shock site called Last Measure which the GNAA often links or redirects to in their various activities. In order to automate their activities, the GNAA created many programmatic scripts for uses such as crapflooding sites. These source code of these scripts are usually made available under the revised BSD license.
Membership
GNAA encourages people to join by suggesting that potential recruits watch the 1992 Danish low-budget movie Gayniggers From Outer Space, from which their name derives. The GNAA's entry requirements also include successfully achieving a "first post" on Slashdot consisting of GNAA troll text, or registering support by upwardly moderating GNAA comments. A test on the subject matter in Gayniggers From Outer Space is then administered by an IRC bot.
The GNAA has a signature which their members use whenever they perform a crapflood or post a news release. The full "sig", which includes an embedded ASCII art picture of the letters "GNAA" on a wall, can be found on their website. It begins:
- GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the first organization which gathers GAY NIGGERS from all over America and abroad for one common goal - being GAY NIGGERS.
- Are you GAY?
- Are you a NIGGER?
- Are you a GAY NIGGER?
- If you answered "Yes" to all of the above questions, then GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) might be exactly what you've been looking for!
The signature text is significant because it identifies a GNAA attack. All the members of the GNAA are anonymous. One of the most oft-mentioned members in the GNAA is "Gary Niger", a play on the words "Gay Nigger". Gary, a fictional character coined by GNAA vice-president jesuitx, is cited as a press contact in most press releases the GNAA releases, and also frequently appears as the name in their trolling activities. Another member, "rolloffle", who has since left the GNAA, participated in many trolling incidents and created many scripts to cause problems for various software programs that are used in internet forums. "Rolloffle" was also the author of the article "Why your Movable Type blog must die", which was published on the website Kuro5hin. GNAA member "Rucas" is the lead developer of GNAA Last Measure and until recently hosted the largest Last Measure mirror at peoplesprimary.com. He has recently released latvianbotnet.pl, a Perl script to crapflood IRC channels. GNAA member "l0de" is listed as a head technician by the GNAA and is the host of his Internet radio show, the l0de Radio Hour.
Activities
Disruption
One of the aims of the GNAA is to cause disruption on the Internet. They tend to target community webboards blogs and has been moderately successful in disrupting both major and minor sites. They first gained notoriety in the Slashdot community when they launched several flood attacks against the site. Slashdot subsequently implemented open proxy-banning measures in its posting system; GNAA members claim that their crapflooding campaign spurred this change. They also registered many usernames en masse to mark a Slashdot editor use who uses the name "michael" as their foe. [3] In late 2004, the GNAA discovered vulnerabilities in weblogging service Xanga. In a related attack, they launched a Denial of Service attack on Slashdot, taking down its search engine for a few days. [4] During May 2004, GNAA members flooded the popular image board 4chan, contributing to the fourth non-permanent shutdown of the site shortly thereafter. In the list of reasons why it closed down, the administrator wrote: "Flooding. GNAA put the final nail in the coffin, however I am thankful that they willingly ceased the flood after finding out it was costing me money." However, a poster on the Something Awful Forums later stated that this was only one of several factors that caused them to be shut down: "It was not the GNAA who killed 4chan (I quite like them actually), or really the moronic users, it was a man named Chris, who goes by the name TheRowan and runs a business that shuts you down if you fail to play along." [5] The GNAA cause more disruption on IRC as they are known to crapflood channels. Many IRC servers do not allow the GNAA channel to exist due to this disruption, for instance on Freenode's IRC server, the #GNAA channel redirects to #you_have_got_to_be_kidding with a warning message indicating that the network might be inappropriate. This is standard Freenode behavior for juped channels. Other IRC networks similarly jupe #GNAA.
Notable trolls
The two most notable trolls that the GNAA have peformed involved Mac OS X users and Harry Potter readers. In July 2004, GNAA member jesuitx submitted leaked screenshots of the forthcoming operating system Mac OS X v10.4 to the popular Apple Macintosh news website MacRumors, which read "With WWDC just days away, the first Tiger information and screenshots appears to have been leaked. According to sources, Apple will reportedly provide developers with a Mac OS X 10.4 Preview copy at WWDC on Monday. The screenshots provided reportedly come from this upcoming developer preview." [6] When people found out the source was the GNAA many declared the screenshots to be fake based on the organization's disreputability in the past. Later, the GNAA released a press release which claimed that the screenshots were genuine (cf. official Apple screenshots), and that they trolled the Apple community. [7]
In June 2005, the GNAA claimed to have created a fake Mac OS X Tiger release for Intel x86 processors which caught media attention from Mac Daily News June 11. [8] The next day, the supposed leak made front page news on Slashdot and was mentioned on the G4 show Attack of the Show [9]. The DVD image released onto BitTorrent merely booted an image of hello.jpg (goatse) instead of the leaked operating system as some had thought, and the remaining several gigabytes of space on the DVD was filled with a repitition of the text "GNAAGNAA....". The same hoax was created again in August of 2005, this time with a fake bootloader that gave generic error messages if the date was before August the 4th, and after that date it displayed the content from the shock site "Last Measure" [10]
Upon the impending release of the next book in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the GNAA claimed to have created a fake PDF file of the book, which contained various shock images and released it to BitTorrent. In addtion, the GNAA also posted various spoilers about the new book onto a Harry Potter fan forum which caused them to temporarily shut down until 1-2 days after the book's release, and a GNAA member by the name of Zeikfried also created a website a few days before the release of the book on which various plot spoilers of the book were disseminated . [11]
Several other notable incidents involved trolling anime fans and Dremel website administrators. In August 2005, the GNAA released a copy of Gay Niggers from Outer Space onto the fansub website Dattebayo, which was falsely labeled as episode 146 of the Japanese anime show Naruto. The film was preceded by the opening credits of the show. One possible link between the GNAA and Dattebayo was that both websites claim to have a member using the moniker 'timecop' and that the Dattebayo website was created by the GNAA. The Dremel website incident happened on October 31, 2004 and featured a pumpkin carving kit for Halloween and linked to a Goatse pumpkin image as an example of what could be achieved. GNAA members then added their logo to the pumpkin image, leading visitors to think the GNAA had hacked the Dremel website. [12]
Pranking
The GNAA runs a conference call system which they use to troll various companies and people such as America Online. They eventually produced an MP3 file which combines excerpts from their various prank calls to America Online with the "Hey, everybody! I'm looking at gay porno!" sample from Last Measure.
Counter-measures
Because of the nature of the activities the GNAA performs online, various websites instituted methods in an effort to stop or curb the amount of trolling by the GNAA. Slashdot has a moderation system that is supposed to curb activities such as "First posting", and the website explains that first post comments are usually "one of those odd little memetic hiccups that come out of nowhere and run amok." Their system moderates these posts and downgrades them for being off topic and makes them almost unreadable. This Slashdot tool is key, since the GNAA requires a user to perform a "first post" in order to join the GNAA. Slashdot and other websites also began to ban users for performing GNAA related acts or began to ban open-proxy addresses to prevent spamming. Users at different forums also have made fun of the GNAA and their members and have mocked their activities. In the words of one unimpressed Brawl-Hall poster: "Sorry, junior, but a Spam-a-thon that lasts fifteen minutes and taking over an IRC chat ain't a 'win'. Maybe you could take over some AOL chatrooms too, then you'd be 'teh c00l', right? Hah, what a joke." [13] Slashdot has also called the GNAA, along with Trollkore and anti-slash.org, the "axis of abuse" in a parody of the axis of evil.
The GNAA have been recognised as being deliberately disruptive by several organisations. For instance, on Freenode's IRC server, the #GNAA channel redirects to #you_have_got_to_be_kidding with a warning message indicating that the network might be inappropriate. This is standard Freenode behavior for juped channels. Other IRC networks similarly jupe #GNAA. Jodi Dean, Associate Professor of Political Science (Hobart and William Smith Colleges), in a presentation on blogging for a Cultural Studies Association meeting in Tuscon, noted that when she started blogging she was disturbed by neo-Nazi attacks and that:
- "I've also been unsettled by those I can't place, those who may be satirical, performative in non-pc ways, and those whose comments are just generally disruptive and malicious. For example, one guy posted from the GNAA—which seems to be an anti-blog group with various satirical elements and strategies for irritating bloggers. GNAA stands for Gay Nigger Association of America and apparently gets its name from a short 1992 Danish movie called Gay Niggers from Outerspace, a film that appears to be an actual movie, a porn send up, but I can't be completely sure." [14]
See also
References
- ^ GNAA press release insulting Latvians
- ^ Announcement of Aimgirl disruption
- ^ Slashdot – Editor Michael's "freaks list" – Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger for x86 Leaked? (June 12 2005)
- ^ http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/28/161214/43
- ^ Something Awful thread (Must be able to login to see the page)
- ^ Mac Rumours - Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) Screenshots? (June 26 2004) (discussion) – WWDC, Photos and More on Tiger (June 27 2004)
- ^ http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=520
- ^ forum discussing the Goatse GNAA image on the Dremel website (October 31 2004)
- ^ "Report: Apple Mac OS X 10.4.1 for Intel hits piracy sites", Mac Daily News, June 11 2005
- ^ GNAUK – G4TV Attack of the Show footage – Fake OSX #2 – Harry Potter on Bittorrent – Harry Potter spoilers in forum
- ^ http://forums.anti-slash.org/viewtopic.php?t=577
- ^ GNAA Thread
- ^ I cite : Blogging Theory, April 24 2005. Jodi's presentation can be found here.
External links
- GNAA Site
- Google: Query for name GNAA on Slashdot website
- Gayniggers from Outer Space at IMDb
- "James A. C. Joyce" (GNAA member rolloffle) (February 3 2004). Why your Movable Type blog must die. Kuro5hin.org.
- GNAUK - this United Kingdom branch is mentioned in some GNAA press releases (sources: 1, 2, 3)
- Article on the GNAA at Encyclopædia Dramatica. (Warning: a photo of Goatse is used in the article)
- Last Measure.com (Warning: may contain shock images)