A group which calls itself Twitch in the Shell embarked on a mission to crowdsource the installation of Arch Linux on a virtual machine.
The installation would be live streamed and viewers would be able to vote on which character to type in a terminal window.
Every ten seconds, the character with the highest votes would get typed.
Much trolling was predicted for this experiment, with naysayers predicting geek comedians would organise a way to type “
rm -rf /“, wiping the machine’s drive.
What ended up happening was that an enterprising hacker recruited a botnet to hijack the Twitch in the Shell chat, and managed to partially install Gentoo.
Arch Linux and Gentoo are both distributions of the GNU/Linux operating system, with Gentoo considered a rival of Arch Linux.
According to a report on Slashdot, the Twitch in the Shell community thwarted the botnet and was in the process of reinstalling Arch Linux.
