I was in the stream and while at least some of the feats accomplished (partitioning the disk, installing the right things, changing the password) seemed to have some authenticity to it, the chat started to try to install nmap, then it tried investigate networking capabilities, tried to ping 8.8.8.8, to start dhcpcd, then tried to ping 8.8.8.8 again...all in rapid succession before anyone really discussed it at all. It certainly seemed fishy.

It's kind of upsetting. It was very exciting in the beginning--the internet installing a bootable arch linux system by voting for a single character at a time in under 3 hours...seemed unimaginable. But after the dhcpcd stuff started, it felt like that victory was taken from us.

EDIT: it WAS a botnet, see the reply from pdaddyo