Audacity fork dev quits due physical abuse by 4Chan

There is no way to justify stabbing someone, but to blame it on ‘the hacker known as 4chan’ is a bit ridiculous. 4Chan is a website, it does not physically abuse people.

This began with idiots stalking this developer at his home address. There are laws against stalking people. Those laws need to be applied to these people so they see, hey, if I act like an idiot and go stalk someone because people on a website are egging me on, I go to jail, so I’d better not do that.

And if they’re to stupid to see that, they are in jail so they can’t stalk people.

Why would anyone in particular 4chan care about this fork? It's like 20 commits (but apparently 20 weeks of drama) ahead of audacity and you already need a decoder ring to read this thread.

A little surprising that software managed to somehow attract this level of drama. If there's any truth at all to these latest claims then 4Chan's got some way more screwed up folks among them than I'd previously heard about.

As for Audacity, I'ma just switch to another tool or tools altogther for the time being until this whole thing calms down a bit and one of the forks takes the lead. I still have KWave, LMMS, Ardour, and a couple few other options, so it's not as if I'll be unable to edit audio when I really need to. We've always got choices in the land of FOSS. ;)

Heck, I bet Blender 3D can even do audio editing if I dig around in it's docs a little bit. I know I can use it to edit video, so composing and exporting audio alone should be totally possible too I imagine.

> cookiengineer claims 4chan members took things considerably further, including into physical harassment. He claimed: "It was attempted murder with an illegal butterfly knife. In the whole state of Germany, butterfly knifes are considered an illegal weapon. There were three witnesses in place that saw the incident. I was slit in the arm. On private property, that you have to physically break into in order to enter."

This is scary to read. I cannot imagine being personally attacked for something as mundane as forking a Github repository and making some commits.

> "I am in contact with GitHub and the German BKA (federal police) as of now, therefore I will not disclose any more information publicly about what happened to anyone. Evidence has been gathered, submitted and will be acted upon. I will not legally let go of this."

It's good to hear that cookiengineer is taking this through the appropriate legal channels. Nobody should have to live in fear.

The GitHub issue where he explains why he stepped down and links to some charming 4chan threads: https://github.com/tenacityteam/tenacity/issues/99

I don't know what happened there, but some things in cookiengineers posts does not add up. There is no "BKA Heidelberg". The BKA has three offices in Germany, and Heidelberg is not one of them. Also, the BKA will likely not investigate in such a matter. It is doing large scale investigations crossing federal borders, like organized crime or terrorism. It is not working on local crime cases on the described scale. This is done by "normal" local police.

I don't go on 4chan, have no idea what "sneedacity" is, and have only been a critic of the new Muse team, but haven't paid attention to the forks.

For all intents and purposes, I'm an outside observer.

This doesn't make sense to me. Why would 4chan be involved? 4chan doesn't just get involved in something they don't care about. You usually have to piss them off in some way to gain their attention.

In almost 10 years of Github activity, I've never seen 4chan bleed over.

For claiming to have never posted there, you sure seem to know how it works. By contrast, people unfamiliar with it usually have no idea the boards are referred to as /g/ or /b/ or whatever. That doesn't sound like someone who's never posted there before to me.

So some random people showed up at your place here in Germany, you somehow figured out they were from 4chan, you were attacked, then you found all the links of them talking about you... all because of what? Like, what caused this? I don't believe for a second you had nothing to do and you were just a completely random bystander.

Because of this, your claim that you've "never posted to 4chan" doesn't make any sense to me. 4chan doesn't just fuck with people for no reason. I'm not defending them whatsoever, but there is some semblance of a method to their madness.

Further, you're saying "flag this repository for hate speech and violence". But I don't see any of that in that repo aside from some harmless memes. The maintainers of that repo have full names and pictures of themselves - surely they care enough about their safety not to be involved with this? Unless they're incredibly dumb.

In fact, that repository has quite a bit of seemingly legitimate original development work on it that isn't PR'd/cherry-picked from other repos. Why would people interested in simply harming you, randomly, also build up a seemingly legitimate fork of Audacity in the meantime?

Also, if that repository really is violating rules, and you really do have an open police case, then that repo will get taken down by court order anyway.

Lastly, three days after making this announcement, you >>updated<< your personal repository readme with the following text:

> [tackling problems including] defamation attempts by Internet Trolls >>and other (state-level) actors that abuse the power of unverifiable sources.<<

This doesn't sound like a person on level ground to me. This sounds like far-reaching paranoia or some kind of break down. If you were worried about state actors after this incident, why are you working with the German federal police? With Github?

This just doesn't make any sense. It comes off as someone who is emotional, unstable or upset about something, or even trying to cover up a mistake (it's similar to how I've acted when I've screwed something up when I was much younger).

This is a type of drama I've literally never seen on Github - and I've seen a lot. I am forced to assume cookieengineer's claim of not being involved whatsoever is just an outright lie, and thus this whole announcement kind of crumbles (no pun intended) for me.

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EDIT: Looking through the Tenacity fork, wow that whole entire team has drama issues. There are quite a few issues on there about people asking questions and having them deleted, long monologues about censorship and "this is the workplace of tenacity members", etc.

It feels very "kids club". It doesn't surprise me it's attracted weird drama/attention.

Take everything with a grain of salt here. The attempted murder claims are very fishy.

EDIT2: Also, worth pointing out that the federal police here wouldn't normally see a case like this, if I understand it correctly (I might not). Normally the Polizei would handle this sort of thing. It's the equivalent of going to the FBI for someone threatening you in the street.

Why is the title modified? The person quit due to stalking not due to physical abuse.

‘Physical abuse’? As in they’ve been actually striking him in person? Not verbal abuse?