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Oh no!
Adam's Block is gone. For now, anyway. (Somebody else will, it seems, step in to get the camera up and running again.) Last night, Adam (or a hacker, as one tipster suggested) posted this missive on his popular-but-lying-in-a-state-of-coma site.
Thursday, December 11th: Hopefully, tonight will be the end of this. The following is written to everyone who was affected by my webcam both positively and negatively. I'd like to outline my intention in this project. My intention was to show "the noises that kept me awake at night" and that statement wasn't singling anyone out. It was a general statement that my apartment was in a noisy neighborhood. I had someone make a banner and then started broadcasting. The chatroom became full of hatefull comments so I brought on some moderators who gave a lot of their personal time to ensuring laws put in place at the dawn of civilization were maintained. The golden rule comes to mind and any comment that singled out someone's way of life, race, color or how much they made was shut down and those persons were banned. I ensured that the chat room was a safe place for all walks of life and most of the time it was. After 2 weeks of broadcasting, I received dozens of emails asking if they could donate to make the feed look better. I accepted these donations and put the money in to the camera. My stated intentions were that once equipment was purchased, all further donations would go to Glide church and a fundraiser would be held on Saturday the 13th to raise 5 thousand dollars for Glide Church. This institution does so much for San Francisco's citizens and I encourage everyone to donate to that church this Saturday despite the fact that I won't be doing a telethon DONATE HERE and prove that we can still make a difference despite the absence of a camera.
On Tuesday, December 9th, a banner was advertised on the webcam via the live feed as a few people held up a sign down on the street. I went to this site and initially ruled out that it was a website dedicated to illegal activities. Thus, I removed the clip. This was the start of what has become the worst 48 hours of my life. The site was upset and since they had free speech, I should have kept the clip up. Actually, I was in my right to keep the clip deleted but after learning that they weren't doing anything illegal, the clip was restored as a good gesture to me admitting that I was wrong. It didn't end there and I'll summarize what has happened since that evening:
* I was followed to work this morning by men in hooded sweatshirts, and my girlfriend was followed home from work.
* Someone called up my boss today and asked, "did you know that you employ a pedophile?"
* I've received death threats over the phone and I won't reveal the context of those conversations for legal reasons.
* My career as a social media consultant has been ruined due to bombarding of my social media profiles with misinformation and hateful comments
* I have to somehow find money to move out of this apartment building because my girlfriend can't come home at night and is staying in a hotel in fear.
There's nothing I can do about this other than an issue an apology and reveal my "true intentions" of this camera. My camera was placed in my window to showcase the homeless people of San Francisco and to make fun of them. I like making fun of people who have mental illness, can't hold a job and piss themselves on the street. My goal was to broadcast every day and night just to raise money for myself and show the world what a racist and ignorant human being that I am. I don't give a crap about this city and am a yuppie blogger who feels that he's too good for all of this. I'm sorry to San Francisco and this community for the harm I caused and I'm moving to a place filled with other yuppies so we can make fun of this disgusting neigbhorhood known as the Tenderloin. Glide, good luck with everything cause I'm not ever going to donate to your cause cause I don't care and I'm embarrassed to have ever lived here.
Now that I have that out of the way, feel free to discuss things below in the chat room. You won't see much of me anymore as I need to rethink my way of life after making so many enemies. AdamsBlock will continue but I won't be a part of it in any way, shape or form. It's someone else's baby and you can hate on that person now. I want to send a huge thanks to 12oz Prophet for helping me realize how much of a douche I am.
Son of a damnit. This sucks. And what with live cams beamed all over the city, he shouldn't have to explain himself at such length. But: Internet fame does strange things to the psyche -- as do threats against one's life. Anyway, we loved you, Adam, and we're saddened and surprised to see you go.
Or, as some commenters have already pointed out, this is the work of a sinister hacker! Let's hope. But as his Twitter points out, Adam has some much needed, um, relaxation to do.
"@adamsblock Writing an apology to the group who has destroyed my life. about 10 hours ago from web"
Oh dear. Bluoz, Adam needs your counseling, post-haste!
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
Maybe his site was hacked? The last couple of paragraphs, in particular, give me pause. A link to a .zip file in that last sentence? Hmm... definitely suspicious enough not to click on.
Wow. Why is pointing a camera at a (completely crummy) intersection deserving of threats like this?
Who wanted the cams shut off?
And how much of Adam's goodbye message was true and how much of it is an "art piece"?
Fake. Viral marketing. Crackheads don't care about a young white dude with a webcam.
What's a "social media consultant?"
I don't think his site got hacked.
Read his Twitter feed for more.
http://twitter.com/adamjackson
This is scary,
"I was followed to work this morning by men in hooded sweatshirts, and my girlfriend was followed home from work.
# Someone called up my boss today and asked, "did you know that you employ a pedophile?"
The last part sounds like it was written by someone else. I hope he is in contact with the police.
oh! an art-school project!
I got some advice..Adam can still do this, but the problem is, his photo and names been pasted all over.
However, if running a cam is the sole goal, he just needs to do some networking of the technical type. That is, get the cam on a long leash, wired or wireless, and parked away from his window or building.
Not sure if you can do it with HD cams, but you can run 200 feet of telephone wire (cheap) halfway down the street and put the cam on another building (technically possible - I've done it)
You can do 100 feet with wireless, and all you need is a wall socket. The point is, he had it parked on his own windowsill, facing the street, so all anybody had to do was look up.
This is basically why the police cams are high up on their own telephone poles and wired to a distant location. In Adams case, the cam was not distant from the computer
I remember 8 years ago when I did the exact same thing and got in the news. I knew enough then not to let any of the TV stations or newspapers show my face because I got the same threats. KRON showed me in sillhouette. The cam at the time was wired 50 feet from my window that was not facing the street.
If you do that, you get an apartment on the interior of the block, away from the street, then wire the cam out onto the street
that's my Bluoz advice
Oh no, now where am I going to go to eavesdrop on other people's misery?
@PGM, zip archive contains a bunch of PDF files with a thread archive from a bulletin board apparently devoted to the "art" of graffiti, being anti-yuppie, and keeping the "block on lock" for OC dealers. The file itself seems safe to me, at least on my Macintosh.
yeah, those PDF's are fine for windows...Read them and you can see they were all over Adamsblock.
Maybe Mattymat can go through all that and make nice pictorials like he did with the Muni PDfs.
that ought to be a good one..Nasty stuff in there from the few I've read so far
It's not a hacker...confirmed w/him on Twitter.
@MalcoveMagnesia, thanks for the info. ~72mb... that's a lot of thread.
If you can spare (or raise) the cash, there are quite a few wireless webcams that you can either hook into a very low power solar battery, or get a battery powered adapter to run.
Figure out a place you can stash it that it won't get stolen, broken or otherwise fucked with (which basically means a semi-secure roof that you know your neighbors won't trash) and have it wirelessly beam the pics back to your computer and/or straight to your webserver. In SF you can surely find a free wi-fi signal to use to upload small JPG's with.
Then, nobody has to know who's got the camera. Use a hosting provider that masks who owns a domain and you've got a %100 anonymous webcam on any block in the city. It might run you a couple hundred bucks for a decent setup.. but if it's popular enough you could probably make that back in a couple months time with just google adwords or whatever.
I don't live on an interesting enough block to do this for the web, but I've set up several security systems with wireless cameras and wi-fi that record to the web and a DVR for the extra paranoid condo owners.
actually, that's right @masterdave..You can get some decent tiny micro wirless NTSC cams for around 50 bucks on Amazon.
not only that, you could in the future use IP cams because Mayor Newsom is currently on a drive to add wireless to all the supportive housing units in the tenderloin, and Adams block is very close to much of this.
Just two blocks away, TNDC (tenderloin neighborhood development corp) has already installed wireless transmitters in most of their buildings..they use wall sockets all over the interior of the building. ( I have a friend that lives in one of them and gets free wireless, courtesy of the City)
So all anyone has to do is get an IP cam somewhere close to one of those nodes and there ya go
Threatened by Tenderloin Mafia, Glide?
The last part doesn't sound fake; it sounds like incredibly furious sarcasm.
Yeah, I would expect that after this all happened he would just say "screw y'all" and kill it. Which seems to be exactly what he posted, though in more words.
Everything written there was true except part 4. Paragraph 4 "the apology" I was forced to write. The group against me said if I didn't apologize in that fashion, they would continue this and then I received calls that I need to apologize or they're going to kill me and my girlfriend.
This was political and I was in the middle of it. They've destroyed a big part of me and I probably won't be recovering very soon.
Just know my camera was for good and not bad. I linked at the bottom of the post a zip file that contains 55 pages of hate from the group that did this.
GOD, what a doofus. A jaded doofus. This whole webcam thing has been sooo ridiculous. What was it all about, anyway? Apart from the self-serving parts of it, of course.
Yeah, now wouldn't it have been so cool to get the thousands of Twittr followers and Feedburner subs, and millions of page views and become a social media celebrity! Next thing you know, you're being profiled on Gawker, your girlfriend's drunken pics are made fun of on Valleywag, and you get to opine about the future of media on TV, right? All because of putting a webcam in your window... shit, that's pure genius!
Adam et. al., problem with you "social media consultants" is that you have got no clue about the world. Note: it consists of a lot more than impressionable young yuppies with an internet connection, cash to burn and time to spend on useless shit. And now that someone has pooh-pooh'd on your little online stream, you are the unsuspecting victim in all this. Well, you brought it onto yourself and hopefully you learned your lesson.
ps. Who the fuck cares what's going on on your block, anyway?
We all support you Adam and are sorry to see you go. I'm sorry there are people bad enough in this world that would ruin this great phenomenon you had going. Good luck in the future, and thank you.
Regardless of the reasons he was doing it, I hope they find and prosecute whoever was threatening him. That is not something we should be applauding or in any way condoning.
Best of luck to Adam.
This was political and I was in the middle of it.
Bingo. You might have pissed off some mid-level TL thugs, but you were also broadcasting to the world a side of San Francisco that city government would rather no one see. Bad for tourism, you know.
Sorry it came to closing down the camera, though.
Remember that this is San "No arrests have been made" Francisco.
Still, Adam, best of luck to ya, and I hope they get the perps. Death threats are a felony (IIRC).
Oh, and iBarna, who peed in your cornflakes?
Adam, I'm so sorry to hear this! And I'm even sorrier that some of the trash threatening you are obviously posting on this thread. This whole thing is incredibly scary, and while I can understand you wanting to "wash your hands," as you say, of this whole affair, I really hope you do cooperate with the police to try to get these people.
Best of luck to you and your girlfriend in putting all of this behind you.
Nah, I agree that "adamsblock.com" site should go. For those who don't know, Adam was actively encouraging those watching the cam to call the police on people. When such a thing happens in other countries, we call it "gestapo tactics". But when a 22-year-old know-it-all from the Florida suburbs moves into the Tenderloin, a part of a major metropolitan city with complex problems, and encourages people to call the police on every black or homeless person they see and assume to be a crackhead, it's the same thing: "gestapo tactics". Well, the neighborhood fought back and Adam's public demonstration of his naivete and lack of life experience is available for all to see.
I don't want to live in a society that values "snitches" and "rats". Adam is a snitch and a rat and those aren't positive things to be.
He could have run his webcam in peace but he took the little bit of fame thrown his way and it went straight to his head. When Big Brother isn't watching you, vigilante snitches are! Great!
I would prefer that there is an open-air heroin market in the Tenderloin until the government gets serious about drug rehabilitation programs instead of their incompetent "war on drugs" which has done absolutely besides fill our prisons full of people who would otherwise be decent human beings.
A website designed to laugh at the homeless, make fun of the mentally disturbed, and call the police on whomever they think is committing a crime is a damn shame. A DAMN sham.
I had no interaction with Adam and I wasn't involved in any death threats or anything, but I am glad to see this site offline. Shame on all you frat-boy mentality ignoramuses who thought this site was cool.
Ah, I see now:
Suggesting that the police do their job: gestapo tactics.
Anonymous death threats, harassment and extortion: a valuable life lesson.
Stay classy, sanfranciscoan. Stay classy.
I used to live on lower Taylor. Most of the people on the street are clearly mentally ill.
Turning them into unwitting participants of some kind of Internet freakshow for the sake of fame is a pretty fucked up thing to do.
You got what you deserve.
12ozprophet are criminals. They were criminals even before they started with the death threats. And they're whitewashing (or would they be kneejerk enough to say "blackwashing") their motives by accusing Adam of being racist and insensitive. 12ozprophet wanted the eyeballs. They wanted to tag somewhere that would be on camera. They didn't even take the opportunity to write something about how "racist" it all was. No, just their handle because that's all the territory pissers care about. It was only after they felt "censored" that they worked up this argument about how racist and insensitive it all was.
Tagging is a misdemeanor. Making death threats is a felony. Hope SFPD is on the case and rounds these carbuncles up and puts them away for a long long time. Then they'll have the time they so crave to get close to the population they elevate above law-abiding citizens.