We have removed all communities involved in Einstein Engines (EE) due to violation of the Space Wizards Hub Rules:
- 1.1 Do not harass, bully, brigade, defame, or doxx players, developers, or communities.
This affects the following communities, other communities not listed here are not affected:
- Singularity Network (Deep Station, Nuclear 14, SCP 14)
- Lost Paradise
- Grimbly Station
- The Den
We are not going after people just using EE’s code, we’re only concerned with involvement in their “council”.
The TL;DR of the entire incident is:
- Einstein Engines members worked together to send a bad-faith abuse complaint to our hosting provider, with the intent of getting our service pulled to shut down SS14.
- Einstein Engines has engaged in much harassment against us, and we are finally putting our foot down.
Details
Abuse Complaint
Yesterday we received an abuse complaint against our hosting provider, sent by White Dream, about us continuing to list the Russian community Sunrise on our hub. The complaint touches on two subjects:
- “CSAM / NSFW content aimed at younger audience”, specifically in regards to Lust Station not banning underage people
- “Copyright infringement”, specifically in regards to license violations about some code, and us failing to respond to a DMCA support email to a timely manner.
These kinds of complaints are not a joke, and we are required to make a counter statement in 24 hours or Hetzner will pull our service. If we failed to reply for any reason, that would mean the entire game going down.
I will be addressing these points separately:
“CSAM / NSFW content aimed at younger audience”
For starters, there is no evidence whatsoever that there is any CSAM content on Lust Station / Sunrise. This is a highly specific term and it is not the kind of shit you go to complain about Hetzner to. If you have evidence of CSAM, then you contact the fucking police and Discord immediately. CSAM is not something anybody reading this has the authority to properly handle other than “report to the authorities and wipe it off every drive you possibly can”. This also means there is no goddamn way to ever sent us evidence of these claims, because if you did you yourself could be arrested. Understand?
Improperly handling minors on an 18+ server is completely unrelated to CSAM, and is worth discussing further: we receive tons of complaints about basically every 18+ server, and every time we investigate we come up with exactly the same shit: the underage person in question is already banned. This is no exception for Lust Station.
We still have no evidence that Lust Station staff intentionally allows minors onto their server. We re-evaluated the evidence we have after we got the abuse complaint, and the verdict remains. We’re continuing to be vigilant about this, of course, but currently do not believe this to be an issue.
Also, the fact that this is coming from White Dream of all servers is serious “pot calling the kettle black”, but you know.
We see usage of the term “CSAM” in this context as nothing but a lie with the intent of getting our hosting provider to panic and pull the plug.
“Copyright infringement”
White Dream and Sunrise got into a license dispute about some code. Normally, these kinds of complaint are handled in private by contacting us, but considering White Dream basically got blocked by all our staff after their dehubbing, this was not an option.
They first sent a DMCA takedown request to GitHub (2024-11-25), which complied and took down their repo. Sunrise then filed a counter notice (2024-12-03), and got their repository reinstated because White Dream did not get proper court records in 10 days (required under DMCA).
White Dream sent us a support email on 2024-12-04 demanding we take down Sunrise’s server listing, citing the GitHub takedown, the original takedown they sent to GitHub, and Sunrise’s counter notice.
We failed to respond to this DMCA takedown and the follow reminder email. That’s on us. They decided to then contact Hetzner due to our failure to respond.
Anyways, I will now elaborate why this is a toilet paper DMCA takedown notice:
- Nobody involved here is in the US. The DMCA doesn’t apply.
- The notice we received from White Dream is not a valid takedown notice. If it were, they would’ve had to sent me a phone number or home address. The copy of the GitHub takedown they sent has this information redacted, of course.
- We’re only linking Sunrise, not hosting the content.
- They didn’t even demand the content be taken down in the original email.
Regardless, upon becoming aware of this we took down Sunrise’s hub listing, contacted them, and told them to remove the infringing content, which they did. They will be allowed to reinstate the content in 10 working days (DMCA minimum) unless White Dream can give us proper court documentation indicating they are suing Sunrise, which they claim they are trying to get.
I would like to remind you that we normally handle these things via private contact without invoking the nuclear option, and we have handed out strikes like this in the past.
Context Surrounding The Abuse Complaint
We believe we have sufficient ground to say this abuse complaint was made in bad faith, not to simply get their copyright fixed, but also to damage all of Space Station 14 by hoping Hetzner would pull our service.
For starters, I have already mentioned this complaint was sent by White Dream. I am going to link their dehub thread just so you can see all the bullshit they’ve been involved in. White Dream is part of Einstein Engines’ council, and they have sent these messages in their public #council-discussions channel:
I especially appreciate the comment by VMSolidus claiming that we should be aware of copyright disputes by using sockpuppets to stalk their Discord. I’m sure if we actually did that they’d just love it.[1]
Einstein Engines has discussed the possibility of alternative infrastructure before, fearing that we would go after them for various shit. Here’s the funny thing: maybe don’t create reasons for us to go after you, and we won’t? Literally half the reasons we even give a shit about them is because somebody would regularly pass us a screenshot of VMSolidus or Peptide or somebody else like that going “Wizden wants to dehub us” with no reason given and us not having any internal discussions like that because we don’t have any reason to. As an example:
We believe this to be clear evidence that Einstein Engines is complicit in trying to attack our infrastructure itself. This is not “we have a simple copyright dispute”, this is “you slipped up we think we can use it as a wedge to destroy your project”.
Of course, that’s only part one.
Further Harassment
After we received the abuse complaint, we obviously contacted Sunrise that we took down their server and worked with them about the DMCA thing. As I’ve already mentioned, they removed the copyrighted content, and while this was happening, our staff double-checked the underage complaints.
Talks of this happening presumably leaked through various staff channels and eventually into the EE Discord:
This is accusing us of playing favorites with pedophiles, and blatant harassment. I saw this conversation happen live, and decided to go foot down time and contact VMSolidus. He declined, even after we sent another staff member into their Discord to tell them “hey, you should really pick that up”:
Here’s some MORE harassment! This is all public!
Background: Einstein Engines
We’ve known about Einstein Engines for a long time, and have always just tolerated their behavior. It’s basically just the latest and biggest harassment community. They continually post lies and harassment about upstream Space Station 14, Wizard’s Den, and it’s staff. Just search for “PJB” in their Discord to see how tame they are. We tolerated this behavior for ages.
VMSolidus is a serial liar who has threatened people with false DMCA takedowns before. His biggest claim is being the “creator” of Vox and many other old Baystation12 species, which is a complete and utter lie (we have contact to the person that made Vox 10+ years ago, you know)[2]. One time I had to tell that if he ever threatened to send a false DMCA takedown again, I would ban him from every goddamn platform I could. He stopped talking in our Discord after that, strange.
When we placed the strike against Singularity Network, we did so based on significant harassment stemming from their Discord. VMSolidus came out of the woodwork to assert that Singularity Network has no harassment happening in it. Does VMSolidus think the above constitutes as harassment? I sure wonder. Well he doesn’t consider it important to tell his other Discord buddies to stop, so I think the answer is no.
I mean, as we all know, lying to our hosting provider with the hopes that they’ll take the project down is not “direct harm”.
ONIKS is the owner of White Dream, and I’m not going to go link the dehub notice a third time. They’ve done plenty of nasty shit.
People like Peptide operate a server that we’ve had to strike for harassment before, and they staunchly continue to deny that harassment is happening in the same chat that a few minutes prior, somebody called PJB a pedophile. Not to mention that he’s completely fine with taking down all of SS14 infra for a petty dispute.
There’s also basically every person in there we’ve ever had to remove, and we know for a fact none of these have improved in their behavior in the sometimes years it’s been since they’ve been banned. These names include Psprite, Parky, ODJ, Rane, and god knows who else.
These people are genuinely awful, and if we don’t have dirt on them themselves, they don’t give a shit about being friends with the worst people in the community we do have dirt on. And trust me, they all know who their friends are, what they’ve done, and what they continue to do. Fucking hell, you wanna do pedophile accusations? I have enough dirt to connect these people to real pedophiles, but I’m not fucking dumping any of that crap here.
This is already taking longer to write than I want to, but, if I had to dig up all the dirt and screenshots and blatant antagonizing these people have done we’d be here all day.
What happened next
So, given all of the above, we tried to contact VMSolidus effectively going “are you fucking dense? Do you not see how your community perpetuates harassment? Do you condone this?” We tried to contact VMSolidus and he refused, so that left us with no options for a civil resolution.
Due to the 24 hour deadline of the Hetzner response combined with the sheer amount of stress the situation and its surrounding context has caused, the initial message was written in a rush. After some time to cool down, the message sent to those associated with EE’s council was edited to the following:
Einstein Engine is a harassment community and will be treated as such, and we believe the evidence provided is sufficient to prove this. We have no interest in continuing to let this community exist in SS14 unchecked, so we have decided to contact hosts involved in EE about it. All hosts not willing to pull out of Einstein Engines given the above evidence will be considered as condoning the behavior, and they will be removed from the hub.
The last time we used a sockpuppet account on these people, they publicly dared me to “just come out, we know you’re listening”, then started whining about us using a sockpuppet to gather dirt on them the moment it became clear how much evidence we had. ↩︎
My favorite part of this is that he threatened that implementing Vox would violate the AGPL, even though no SS13 codebase at the time used the AGPL when these species were first implemented. ↩︎
