Well the rationale is that they were announcing live to the world (and therefore also the website owner) that “all your base are belong to us”. So instead of giving the website owner time to fix their flawed IT security they just deleted all the infected systems at the end of the talk (including some backups and admin accounts).

Well that’s probably true. I mean lots of stuff was obviously hacked and deleted, and if you trust the script output in the stream mostly from whitedate. child and deal are later off-shoots it seems, but date had like 6k users, some paying, the main project basically. And it’s still offline. And whitedeal shows a 2019 copyright notice. :D

There was an interactive map of the user profiles hosted by the hacker at https://okstupid.lol/ but it seems to be down right now. And the journalists who participated in the talk (and pointedly left before the script was run) announced there will be more articles released soon.

Could be the site owner is in the process of restoring access, the talk (and thus the deletion) happened on 29th of December.

Are they? For me the website has a Cloudflare captcha leading into a 404: https://whitedate.net/

After the talk it had a rick-roll embed for some time. :D

Der zweite Link oben hat den Zeitstempel.

Not familiar enough with this particular project to know, but a quick glance at the commit log shows some overlap in commit authors, so I guess there is at least some level of sharing happening, probably just not through merges.

But being familiar with this kind of project in general, the branches will probably never be fully merged even in the future, just doesn’t make much sense because they are server software targeting very different versions of a game client. There are also two other branches, but they “only” diverged by like one or two thousand commits so far.