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The XHamster Wikipedia Page Is Suddenly Immensely Popular, and No One Knows Why (theoutline.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: At the beginning of June I started to notice that XHamster, the third most popular adult website after Pornhub and XVideos, had one of the most viewed Wikipedia pages. On May 29, XHamster's Wikipedia page went from receiving around 100,000 views to 200,000. By June 1, it was getting more than 300,000 views a day for no apparent reason. There haven't been any viral stories about XHamster lately. There are no controversies about the page itself that would have prompted sustained attention or an edit war. [...] Pageviews on XHamster's Wikipedia page, however, has been bonkers throughout the month of June for no obvious reason. That's according to a pageview analysis tool from Wikimedia Labs, and confirmed by a Wikipedia spokesperson. I reached out to Wikipedia to see if it could shed some light on this puzzle. In an email, a spokesperson verified that the pageviews were accurate but that they didn't know what was causing the surge. Wikipedia's spokesperson pointed out that the edit activity, unlike its pageviews, has remained steady.
Kodi addons.
and there were not any hamsters, but lots of poor people that could not afford to even buy clothes to wear
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
...many windows open when you are trying to see that school girl railed.
Who knows where they go.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
My first thoughts are a botnet using a wikipedia page to check for instructions (since wikipedia is unlikely to be blocked)....otherwise, random IP accesses to a page like that would be very weird.
It is called slashdot effect. It used to be huge, back in the day when people were the first to welcome the overlords and talking about how the government controls commerce in Soviet Union and people had check marked lists in fixed point font describing why the proposed spam fighting solutions won't work.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Comment removed based on user account deletion
XHamster has started aggressively branding and marking the videos on their site. These videos are then uploaded elsewhere and suddenly, people see them. Given they started doing this about 2-3 months ago, it would coincide perfectly with this surge.
Gut guess is the page being used to help infected clients find their C&C server, like this - http://www.businessinsider.com/russian-hackers-turla-communicate-malware-britney-spears-instagram-comment-2017-6
Something like this is my guess:
https://arstechnica.com/securi...
-- Sent from a computer.
As a frequent visitor of xhamster I can say that in the last weeks a big amount of Indian porn was uploaded. See explanation #1 in source.
If you use a family-friendly or filtered search engine like DuckDuckGo (on its default settings), if you search for a porn site you'll get its Wikipedia page, but not the site itself. I wonder if something like that is involved here.
It shows up as the 4th link in the google results when I do a google search for 'xhamster' It could be even higher for certain users. What position did it show up at 2 months ago? My guess is that google changed their sorting algorithm to give wikipedia more prominence, articles more prominence, or something of the sorts. A large percentage of people search for websites instead of going directly to the url even if they know the url.
confirmed. they have natalie portman -- naked and petrified -- with a bowl of hot grits down her pants.
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I agree. Does not make any sense. Systemd only make bogus connections with User=0day.
Perhaps the person 'noticing' the phenomenon, is the originator of the phenomenon and trying to increase traffic to the said porn sites by calling attention to this 'mystery'.
Look at the page edits. There haven't been any edits in the last 6 months that look as if they could be hiding any information. There are some pretty stealthy forms of Steganography but I can't see any evidence of it on this page.
Mae Ling Mak, naked and petrified.
I wouldn't be surprised if a Wikipedia page shows up in the top 4 link of 1/3 of all Google searches. There is nothing unusual about that.
I didn't know what XHamster is, so I visited its Wikipedia page and... Oh, wait.
Open Source Network Inventory for the masses! Kuwaiba
Maybe the bulk of the surge is for the same reason as my visit: Katy Perry came out with a new video that has a cute hamster in it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gsGhdZDC-0). When I searched Google for "Katy Perry hamster," I got a bunch of porn in my results - thanks to Google's helpful "search for what we think you meant rather than what you typed" algorithms.
I went to wikipedia to try to figure out WTF was happening, since I wasn't familiar with XHamster. So blame Google's garbage algorithms and a popular music video by a pop star.
Eh, my first thought is spammers or affiliate marketers (yes, I'm repeating myself....).
Just gotta find some way not to post any story about CNN
What's the parent company? Is there perhaps something going on with the stock? Maybe a market expansion planned?
Malware using the page to test it's internet connection.
Almost correct. Its statistics.
At any point in time, one of the millions of Wikipedia pages will experience a surge, just by luck. If you then look for the page with the greatest surge you will certainly find one. That's why statisticians use ANOVA.
an actual theory.
some country recently blocked xhamster domain for xxx censorship reasons. the people used to going there for their mobile porn fix instead end up on the wikipedia page.
if you duckduckgo xhamster the FIRST LINK is the wikipedia page.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I read the headline and expected a story about animated dancing rodents, set to a catchy MIDI tune.
Ah, the good old days.
I wonder if someone or some malware is using the page as a dictionary.
Like line x, letter y gives an encoded output somewhere.
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
He looks harmless, but he came from Syria and now he's spread all over the globe. And we don't know his affiliation, what we know is that most of the time he's sleeping, we currently list him as a "sleeper".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
... who though - what, there is an xhamster?! i only know xteddy & xpenguin!
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
A new brand of IoT connected hamster wheels?