The XHamster Wikipedia Page Is Suddenly Immensely Popular, and No One Knows Why (theoutline.com) 129
An anonymous reader shares a report: At the beginning of June I started to notice that XHamster, the third most popular adult website after Pornhub and XVideos, had one of the most viewed Wikipedia pages. On May 29, XHamster's Wikipedia page went from receiving around 100,000 views to 200,000. By June 1, it was getting more than 300,000 views a day for no apparent reason. There haven't been any viral stories about XHamster lately. There are no controversies about the page itself that would have prompted sustained attention or an edit war. [...] Pageviews on XHamster's Wikipedia page, however, has been bonkers throughout the month of June for no obvious reason. That's according to a pageview analysis tool from Wikimedia Labs, and confirmed by a Wikipedia spokesperson. I reached out to Wikipedia to see if it could shed some light on this puzzle. In an email, a spokesperson verified that the pageviews were accurate but that they didn't know what was causing the surge. Wikipedia's spokesperson pointed out that the edit activity, unlike its pageviews, has remained steady.
Add-ons (Score:1)
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Re:Add-ons (Score:4, Interesting)
It could correspond to an increased use of DuckDuckGo as a search engine default. DuckDuckGo typically includes a Wikipedia page in a feature box, next toits top-line search item, if a domain is typed in the URL bar without a TLD designator.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.... [dropboxusercontent.com]
Worth investigating.
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Recently XHamster started adding tricky to remove watermarks to its videos, probably because it was tired of people re-posting content without attribution.
Of course, the watermarked videos got taken, and served to people who did not know about Xhamster. They must have liked what they saw, and searched for the website, so that they could get more of the same. And the search engines displayed portions of the Wikipage.
Damn. What will people make into a mistery next?
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This makes sense, too.
Funny, them watermarking stuff that they never produced, only hosted - including presumably, user generated content.
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As in, this is a hoax story. Person A created a lot of "visitors" so that person B could write a story about the "anomaly." Persons A and B both either work or have interests in that company. Person C realizes what is going on and uses it to generate clickbait revenue on her Digg reincarnation, Slashdot, once touted a "News for Nerds" site.
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I was thinking something far more innocuous, like some tiny fascist dictatorship has banned all porn with a global proxy that filters everything based on request URL and referrer string comparisons. Then randomly one day someone notices that anything with a wikipedia referrer passes the filter and word gets out.
i visited xhamster once (Score:5, Funny)
Re:i visited xhamster once (Score:5, Funny)
and there were not any hamsters, but lots of poor people that could not afford to even buy clothes to wear
Oh there were hamsters, you just didn't look in the right category!
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Whatever you do, don't google feltch.
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or tub girl
Re: i visited xhamster once (Score:2, Funny)
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Yeah those people are so poor, they're basically fucked.
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You've got to look under "duct-tape".
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Be happy you did not find the hamsters.
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I'm even old enough to remember where the song is from.
If you don't use Adblock... (Score:2)
...many windows open when you are trying to see that school girl railed.
Who knows where they go.
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Someone woke up with a dick in their ass it seems.
Botnet? (Score:5, Insightful)
My first thoughts are a botnet using a wikipedia page to check for instructions (since wikipedia is unlikely to be blocked)....otherwise, random IP accesses to a page like that would be very weird.
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Yup, sounds like a command and control network.
Are all the hits to the main page, or are there also a bunch to the history, talk and talk-history pages?
I blame Russia (Score:2)
Eh, my first thought is spammers or affiliate marketers (yes, I'm repeating myself....).
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Spammers do weird things like flooding sites with fake referrers because the logs may appear publicly. I'm not saying it's even real traffic, necessarily, but yes, it should be obvious with some more investigation.
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They mention that possibility in the article, but rule it mostly out on account of the fact that 95% of the traffic to the page is from mobile devices, which are fairly atypical for botnet attacks.
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Atypical? That is completely invalid claim when you take into account that one of the biggest active botnet today actually runs out of infected Android phones.
Re:Botnet? (Score:4, Interesting)
If it is on mobile I reckon it might be Chromes Awesomebar.
People enter: xhamster which results in a google search. With safe search on wikipedia is the top entry.
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That's was my first thought as well. But why the sudden spike then... chrome etc has operated that way for quite a while.
I think the botnet c&c theory makes more sense to me; or some other virus related issue ... e.g. a misconfgured malware that is trying to direct people to xhamster but is instead ending up on the wikipedia page.
Re: Botnet? (Score:1)
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Unless it's a bot, trying to deceive the server.
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They mention that possibility in the article, but rule it mostly out on account of the fact that 95% of the traffic to the page is from mobile devices, which are fairly atypical for botnet attacks.
Other AC has a great counterpoint. I'll offer another: The Wikipedia servers have no fucking clue what type of host is requesting the page. Anyone can send any packet with any headers. A botnet operator has reason to deceive, inveigle, and obfuscate (S04E04).
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Forged HTTP headers, not forged IP headers. The traffic will route just fine.
if you duckduckgo xhamster the FIRST LINK is the w (Score:4, Interesting)
an actual theory.
some country recently blocked xhamster domain for xxx censorship reasons. the people used to going there for their mobile porn fix instead end up on the wikipedia page.
if you duckduckgo xhamster the FIRST LINK is the wikipedia page.
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The British may have invented it, but the Irish perfected it:
"Otis liftywater I must dyke for it, Father, plash me for I have skimmed. Or shuteye see, blush me, Farber, for I am skint? Hamsters on boastcart, please."
"...I let him keep it as if I forgot it to think of me when I saw him slip it into his pocket of course hes mad on the subject of drawers thats plain to be seen always skeezing at those brazenfaced things on the bicycles with their skirts blowing up to their navels even when Milly and I were out
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My main theories are the following.
Xhamster was commented as part of a news story or webcomic that had a population that just didn't get it so they looked it up.
Xhamster did something to get better search results for a particular fetish so where it didn't show up it may had topped the search list. And people wanted to verify it as a legit porn site.
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before every normie had a web browser in their pocket
Just a friendly word of advice, but using the word "normie" makes you sound like a stupid fucking twat.
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Yes, but who'd want to extort money from goat herders?
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This.
Actually, /. would make a great botnet C&C server. It's notorious for not deleting anything, no matter how inane, it's publicly accessible, not well known enough to be blocked by any national entity (or blacklisted in any corporate proxies)... /. would be the perfect C&C server. Just make your trojan read certain topics that invariably pop up where people post mostly bullshit and nobody really reads anything anyway (Trump comes to mind. Or global warming), encode what you want your trojan to do
Another surge on July 5 happened (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Another surge on July 5 happened (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone knows in Soviet Russia, the commerce controls YOU.
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Not to mention inquiries about one's preferred brand of crack and references to Natalie Portman.
Ah, the good old days.
Re:Another surge on July 5 happened (Score:5, Funny)
If only I had a beowulf cluster of the posts.
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In Soviet Russia, car analogy has YOU.
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Mae Ling Mak, naked and petrified.
They've really started branding their videos (Score:4, Interesting)
XHamster has started aggressively branding and marking the videos on their site. These videos are then uploaded elsewhere and suddenly, people see them. Given they started doing this about 2-3 months ago, it would coincide perfectly with this surge.
Re:They've really started branding their videos (Score:4, Funny)
Back in my day, we had to use Zmodem to download porn PICTURES. It once took two days to masturbate because mom kept making phone calls and interrupting my download. We sometimes had to wait 16 hours from the time we saw nipple until we got bush.
Fucking ungrateful assholes... Get off my lawn!
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As opposed to CNN's LULZaganda about Russia?
Malware/Dead drop (Score:4, Insightful)
Gut guess is the page being used to help infected clients find their C&C server, like this - http://www.businessinsider.com/russian-hackers-turla-communicate-malware-britney-spears-instagram-comment-2017-6
Probably for C&C (Score:5, Interesting)
Something like this is my guess:
https://arstechnica.com/securi... [arstechnica.com]
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India? (Score:2, Interesting)
As a frequent visitor of xhamster I can say that in the last weeks a big amount of Indian porn was uploaded. See explanation #1 in source.
If you use a family-friendly search engine (Score:1)
If you use a family-friendly or filtered search engine like DuckDuckGo (on its default settings), if you search for a porn site you'll get its Wikipedia page, but not the site itself. I wonder if something like that is involved here.
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family-friendly or filtered search engine like DuckDuckGo
Hmm. DuckDuckGo puts the Wikipedia entry way down near the bottom of the first page (in addition to the Wikipedia frame on the right). Google puts it at around #4. Both search engines return the web site URL first.
simplest explanation: Google SEO change. (Score:2)
It shows up as the 4th link in the google results when I do a google search for 'xhamster' It could be even higher for certain users. What position did it show up at 2 months ago? My guess is that google changed their sorting algorithm to give wikipedia more prominence, articles more prominence, or something of the sorts. A large percentage of people search for websites instead of going directly to the url even if they know the url.
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I wouldn't be surprised if a Wikipedia page shows up in the top 4 link of 1/3 of all Google searches. There is nothing unusual about that.
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I agree. Does not make any sense. Systemd only make bogus connections with User=0day.
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He looks harmless, but he came from Syria and now he's spread all over the globe. And we don't know his affiliation, what we know is that most of the time he's sleeping, we currently list him as a "sleeper".
Viral advertising (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps the person 'noticing' the phenomenon, is the originator of the phenomenon and trying to increase traffic to the said porn sites by calling attention to this 'mystery'.
Analysis of Variance (Score:2)
Almost correct. Its statistics.
At any point in time, one of the millions of Wikipedia pages will experience a surge, just by luck. If you then look for the page with the greatest surge you will certainly find one. That's why statisticians use ANOVA.
Not command and control (Score:2)
XWhat? (Score:2)
I didn't know what XHamster is, so I visited its Wikipedia page and... Oh, wait.
I was one of those Wikipedia views (Score:1)
I went to wikipedia to try to figure out WTF was happening, since I wasn't familiar with XHamster. So blame Google's garbage algorithms and a
Scraping the bottom of the barrel (Score:1)
Just gotta find some way not to post any story about CNN
Parent company (Score:1)
What's the parent company? Is there perhaps something going on with the stock? Maybe a market expansion planned?
It's obvious (Score:1)
Malware using the page to test it's internet connection.
I'm so naive ... (Score:2)
I read the headline and expected a story about animated dancing rodents, set to a catchy MIDI tune.
Ah, the good old days.
Hmmm, using page as a dictionary? (Score:2)
Like line x, letter y gives an encoded output somewhere.
Am I the only one... (Score:2)
... who though - what, there is an xhamster?! i only know xteddy & xpenguin!
Internet of Things? (Score:1)