How Boxxy brought the web to its knees | Technology | guardian.co.uk - 0 views
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A year ago a young, unnamed and heavily-eyelinered young woman who hung around on Gaia Online made a video. She went by the handle of Boxxy.
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That's it. Or at least it was for nearly 12 months.At Christmas, the video - by then languishing in YouTube's vaults - got posted to i-am-bored, and from there hit 4Chan, and in particular the site's /b/ messageboard... the heartland for many memes (and definitely NSFW). Why? Nobody's sure. Was Boxxy herself behind it? Or was she simply a vehicle for fans who liked her camgirl approach, apparent ADD and weirdly excitable behaviour?Over the subsequent days and weeks, Boxxy became a topic of contention on 4Chan - with the site splitting into two groups; those who professed to love Boxxy and all she stood for and those who hated Boxxy and her fans. Every thread threaten to spill over into Boxxy spam or a flamewar, and hundreds of 4channers went hacking Boxxy's YouTube account and other websites in search of her true identity. So far they don't seem to have succeeded.
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Things really came to a head, though, when Boxxy haters - sick of seeing so much about her on 4Chan - decided to launch a denial of service attack on the website itself, bringing it down for some hours as a protest.
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