4chan and the nude pictures of Jennifer Lawrence

Lying in bed trying to go to sleep I watched some American news last night and they were talking about the ‘leaked’ nude pictures of Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Victoria Justice, and many other female film stars. As usual with these American round-table style news shows all the presenters looked like models and were about 23 to 28.

For anyone who is not aware of what happened here, earlier this week a truck load of nude and semi-nude pictures of lots of female film and TV stars were leaked via 4chan. The current theory is that these were copied from Apple’s iCloud picture storage using hacked or stolen credentials, and were then posted to 4chan by the thief(s).

The main spokes-girl went on for about two or three minutes on how she had never heard of 4chan and how it was some new dark evil underground place on the Web that regular folk did not use. The others on the round-table all murmured and nodded their agreement with her.

Seriously?

Just quickly, for anyone reading this who does not know about it, 4chan is a newsgroup style site with about 60 newsgroups. It includes newsgroups covering: the paranormal; Pokémon; Retro Games; Video Games; Travel; Television and Film; Sports; Photography; The Outdoors; Auto (Cars); Reading and Literature; Writing; and Technology (Computers).

Most people I know use 4chan. 4chan has a photography thread that I check into from time to time. It also has a Graphic Design group.

4chan is neither new (it goes back to about 2003) nor, in my opinion anyway, is it ‘evil and dark’.

4chan is not indexed by the main indexing engines such as Bing, Google, and Yahoo. Because of this it is sometimes referred to as being part of the ‘deep Web’. The deep Web is that part of the Web that is not indexed by the popular indexing engines (which only index the ‘shallow’ Web)—however, for those that know, there are indexing engines that do index parts of the deep Web.

Anyway, back to Jennifer Lawrence.

Having seen the 4chan nudes of Jennifer Lawrence I honestly do not think she has anything to worry about. Apart from the obvious fake ‘frosted face’ picture, which has been pointed out as fake by a number of 4chan users since it appeared (some even providing detailed forensic analysis schematics to prove their point), the other pictures are basically only Playboy-like R rated ‘boobs and bum’ pictures (with lots of digital noise)—a few of them are really quite cute; like the topless one of her sitting on the floor with a glass of red wine in her right hand and her left hand finger resting on her lips; and a sort of surprised look on her face like she might be  saying to the unknown photographer, “But I don’t have a top on.”

Seriously cute.