To add some missing context to this:
-I'm part of the EA community and have been for several years. To the extent that you need a community member to blame for this, it is me. When doing this, I was operating under the belief that the community would be judging me personally, which is why I openly admitted to doing this on Facebook.
-I would have known about Petrov Day anyway regardless of Chris' message.
-Phishing attacks can often have in excess of 80% success rate. If you had received this, you would have likely entered the codes as well, even though every...
To the extent that you need a community member to blame for this, it is me. When doing this, I was operating under the belief that the community would be judging me personally
As a note, to the extent that you're trying to actively shoulder the blame here (rather than simply describing where you think it falls), this isn't a call you get to make. I'm not saying here that Chris does deserve blame; just that to the extent he does, you can't take that away from him onto yourself.
And... having this expectation seems like kind of the same sort of thing that w...
Phishing attacks can often have in excess of 80% success rate. If you had received this, you would have likely entered the codes as well, even though everyone thinks that they wouldn’t. Which is just one of the reasons why it doesn’t make sense to punish recipients for making this kind of mistake.
Seconding Daniel's request for a source. But also, to clarify, does your attempt here count as one phishing attack in total, or one per message you sent?
If it's one per message, then 80% is double-plus-super-higher-than-predicted. But if it's one in total, then...
"The campaign wasn't targeted at Chris, it was sent to lots of users. Retrospectively, I should have excluded Chris from the list of users. (I really regret not doing this, and I would like to apologise to Chris for this.)" - I don't know why you wouldn't consider me fair game. You really don't need to apologise to me.
Thanks, I'm glad to hear that. :) Also, very thankful that the LW community took this really well.
Beyond that, as for my motivations, aside from curiosity as to whether it would work, etc. I considered that it would be an interesting learning opportunity for the community as well. With actual nukes, random untrusted people also have a part to play. Selecting a small group of people tasked with trying to bring down the site might even be a good addition to future instances of Petrov Day.
For what it's worth, I took care to ensure that the damage from taking ...
Is there anyone that would have pressed the button if there was guaranteed anonymity, and thus no personal cost? If so, make a second account
If I understand you correctly, that won't work. The identity of the button-presser is not determined by which account pressed the button. It's determined by the launch code string itself -- everyone got a personalised launch code. (Which means that if someone stole and used your personalised code, you'd also get blamed -- but that seems fair.)
I think maybe 6-8, not sure. I was going to go further but the site went down too quickly. Users were selected based on having a large number of posts.
I wanted something to make it sound realistic. And rationalist/EA culture loves surveys and collecting data. :)