Don’t you just hate it when you’re trying to install Arch Linux, but then you accidentally end up installing Gentoo? Yeah, I don’t think anyone has ever had that problem until Sunday, when Twitch’s ludicrous attempt to collaboratively install Arch Linux by using crowd-sourced commands was hijacked by a botnet, which proceeded to derail everything and tried to install Gentoo instead. The botnet was eventually defeated, and Twitch has returned to installing Arch Linux.
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.