Chapter 3
Feeling the need to take matters into their own hands, a group of oldfag vigilantes decided to band together into a group and call themselves Operation Valkyrie. The name was a reference to the ill-fated attempt to oust Adolf Hitler from power in the Third Reich by members of their own inner circle.
Operation Valkyrie's now-infamous poster.
Their purpose was to locate, raid, and eliminate as much of Boxxy as possible via hacking her YouTube, MySpace, FaceBook, and PhotoBucket accounts in order to find an identity and a specific picture Boxxy mentioned in “FOAR 4DD1 FRUM BOXXY” which showcased the moniker 4DD1 written on her upper chest.
Boxxy's sign for Addi on her upper chest.
The initiative left some people bewildered. To them, it made no sense for people to go to such lengths to harass and destroy someone who had done no one any harm whatsoever and who had not been active in any of her accounts for nearly a year. They disliked this strange obsession, and, as one person stated, it was “proof that /b/ is full of thirteen-year-old boys”.
Boxxy's already-known Gaia Online and YouTube accounts were quickly inundated with Operation Valkyrie’s spam tag. With some quick detective work, two photographs were located and taken from her Gaia Online friends’ PhotoBucket accounts. That was all they had ever managed to find. Operation Valkyrie was a failure, like its real-life counterpart. Nothing had been found. No MySpace, no email, and no FaceBook, aside from several charlatans.
Her location was still quite obscure. Some guessed, correctly, somewhere in California, such as Palo Alto, San Diego, Santa Barbara, and Sacramento. Another side said Florida, or even down under in Australia. Trying to decipher her accent was of no help either. However, the majority consensus seemed to be "anywhere down the West Coast," or in England, or in of the Eastern European states such as Poland and Bulgaria in particular. It was January 6th when a 4chan user purported to be Boxxy posted two seemingly new photos on /b/.
Debate as to whether or not this person was merely a look-alike troll ensued. Boxxy's YouTube channel disappeared, and her Gaia Online account was rendered inaccessible except to her friends later that same day. Did Boxxy step in, or had Operation Valkyrie secretly succeeded in hacking into her online accounts only to shut them down? No one knew. It should also be noted that an impersonation YouTube channel was created, BoxxyakaMoldyBread.
One of the pictures Boxxy herself had posted on /b/.
It was January 8th when the YouTube channel BoxxyBabee showed up. It featured the two original videos coupled with the message in the channel comments that read: “i'm awsum, new video tommorrow 01/09/09”. People weren’t sure what to make of this. Was this another troll account, or had the real Boxxy returned?
The very next day, Boxxy’s new and most controversial video, entitled “FOAR EVERYWUN FRUM BOXXY,” was uploaded onto the channel as promised. By now, Boxxy’s hair had grown noticeably longer by approximately four inches, and was parted on the right side of her head. Her complexion was now a creamy white, and her eyeliner’s style had changed slightly, now extending a bit further down in the corner, giving her a slightly cat-like appearance.
Boxxy responded to so-called recent events, i.e., the discussions appearing on /b/ and many blogs, by confirming that she was not on any kind of drugs, did not have ADD or Tourette’s Syndrome, and showed that it was truly her that posted the photos on /b/. She had been watching the entire thing the whole time, and clearly, at the time, enjoyed the attention.
On /b/, just about every thread was devoted solely to Boxxy and her new video. Over 70,000 views had accumulated within twelve hours, subsequently elevating it to the home page, along with others, as the most viewed video of the day on YouTube. The next day, the video had reached number one, with more than 300,000 views, coupled with hundreds of subscribers every single hour.
On the 12th, the YouTube celebrity Philip DeFranco included Boxxy in the intro for his new video and used her face as the thumbnail. Entirely ignorant of the back story, a wave of viewers sent from sxephil proclaimed, "Wow, sxephil made you popular. Thank him in a video!" They were all wrong, as he did nothing.
The vast majority of viewers were more or less clueless as to what Boxxy was talking about. However, a video explaining the subject matter was uploaded onto the channel SeanBoy80, and it is now mirrored on the channel TheBoxxyPhenom.
This was the spark that the oldfag community had been waiting for to wage war on the newfag community. All of the Boxxy threads were under a virtual blitzkrieg, reminiscent of when the Nazis had carpet-bombed the city of London during World War II. The spam tag "DIE IN A FIRE," repeated to the maximum limit and posted ten times in a row, had quickly become a fixture on the threads.
Many of /b/’s patrons simply gave up in frustration and announced that they were taking leave for a week, a month, a year, or even perpetually. War had also broken out at 7chan, with its /b/ board inundated with Boxxy. On January10th, with Boxxy’s videos and channel rapidly approaching 400,000 views and 10,000 subscribers, Boxxy haters now took a new approach which could be considered a form of Internet terrorism with the now infamous Operation Clampdown, a watershed in 4chan’s history.
Operation Clampdown.
Moot, 4chan’s owner, and the other administrators were warned that if they did not evict the users posting Boxxy threads on /b/, the site would be attacked and forcibly brought down courtesy of a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack, an effort to make a computer resource unavailable to its users.
Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of such an attack may vary, it generally consists of the concerted efforts of a person or people to prevent the targeted site or service from functioning efficiently, or at all. It may be either temporary or permanent.
4chan about to get nuked.
As the time of the strike neared, the instigators got ready by posting messages with several bad programs open as the clock ticked down. Soon after, the entirety of 4chan became slow with pages taking minutes to open, and then subsequently crashed, resulting in a blank white 404 page. It was like the internet version of a Japanese kamikaze mission, with the Boxxy haters deciding to annihilate everyone and everything. Nothing like this had ever happened in the history of 4chan.
Several hours later, 4chan returned, with Boxxy threads populating /b/ again as if nothing had happened. However, this wasn’t to last. Moot and the administrators had given into the attackers' demands by banning users for two days just for even mentioning the name Boxxy, or posting in a thread about her. This method seemed to have worked, even if Boxxy threads still appear on 4chan from time to time. Anonymous was not done with Boxxy or Cate herself yet. Looking back, one of the authors of this blog, bjnboy, believes that 4chan erred in judgment by giving into the attackers’ demand of getting rid of Boxxy and Boxxy lovers from /b/ after the Denial-of-Service attack.
4chan is Moot's site. He pays for it with his own time and money, and he holds the right to call the shots. However, it can be argued that he has set a bad precedent for other sites, as well as the freedom of speech and expression by appeasing the hostiles. Historically speaking, appeasement has never worked and has only resulted in the bullies becoming emboldened, allowing greater tragedies to occur.
The actions of Moot and the rest of the 4chan administrators inadvertently provided Anonymous with the means and motivations to attack other sites in a similar manner when their demands are not met. It is representative of why the United States of America does not negotiate with or give in to terrorists. Doing so would show weakness and a lack of resilience. In addition, it legitimizes harming people and places as a means for extremists to get what they want. Moot shouldn't have brought 4chan back to life in any hurry. Rather, he could have waited until the obsession with Boxxy had died down while the attackers would feel that their tactics were futile. Also, it would have been better if Moot had installed newer and stronger firewalls, or used the Cean-the-Pipes technique with Prolexic or Verisign software.
By Anonymous
Boxxy is a teenage girl whose YouTube videos caused an Internet sensation in early January 2009. This website chronicles her mysterious tale.
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