Yokoku.in (予告.in)

» see yokoku.in as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

On 8 June 2008 a man drove a truck into pedestrians in Akihabara and then attacked people with a knife. He had posted about it beforehand on a message board. Three days later Hiroya Masuda, the Minister for Internal Affairs and Communications, told reporters that the following year's budget request would include development money for software that could detect crime threats on the internet, and that it would cost several hundred million yen.

Satoru Yano read that and thought he could do it without the money and without the time. He built the site the next day and ITmedia covered it the same afternoon under a headline quoting him: zero hundred million yen, two hours. The address was yokoku.in, which reads as yokoku, the Japanese word for an advance notice or a warning, sitting on the Indian country domain.

What it did was plain. It ran periodic web searches against 2channel and against blogs for keywords that looked like criminal threats, pulled the hits automatically, and listed them on the front page. Anyone could also file a report through a form, and the submissions went out through the site's Twitter account. Threats were tagged by type, with a small icon for each category sitting next to the entry.

None of this reached me and it was never going to. The whole machine ran on Japanese-language pattern matching against Japanese message boards, and the community it policed was 2channel, which in 2008 had no equivalent I could have read. The interesting part travels anyway: a minister priced a piece of public safety software at several hundred million yen and one person shipped a working version of it before the budget request was written.

~ the dossier ~

~ the night it got hijacked ~

At around three in the morning on 3 August 2008, somebody planted a cross-site scripting payload on the site. Visitors on Internet Explorer and other Trident-based browsers such as Sleipnir were redirected automatically to other sites, and their machines posted a crime threat to the news flash board on 2channel along with a fusianasan tag, which exposes the poster's remote host. The people who got hit had their own addresses published as a side effect of reading a site about threats.

Yano patched it by four that morning, one hour. The links kept spreading, though: they had been posted to 2channel and into the Yokoku.in community on mixi, and other people piled on behind the original attack, disguising URLs as image files or running them through shorteners, and in some cases posting real threats copied word for word from the injected text so that the two could not be told apart.

~ what came of it ~

By November 2008 the Tokyo Chunichi Sports counted about twenty arrests that appeared to have started from a report on the site, ten of which Yano had walked through with the police himself. That is an unusual number for a personal project with no staff and no budget behind it.

The criticism arrived just as fast. GIGAZINE ran a piece at the end of July 2008 arguing the site had already hit its limit. The objection was that publishing every threat in one place amplified the behavior rather than deterring it, and that the keyword matching had drifted into policing words instead of intentions. Both objections were in print by 31 July 2008, seven weeks after launch.

~ the side project ~

On 18 February 2013 the satirical paper Kyoko Shimbun ran an invented story about a website for anonymously reporting corporal punishment in schools. Yano built it the same day and put it at taibatsu.in. ITmedia's write-up was titled along the lines of the fake newspaper coming true again. That one is also gone.

~ the last capture ~

There is no shutdown notice, because there was never an announcement. The Internet Archive holds a dense run of captures of the front page through 2018, each one with different content on it, which is what a live scraper looks like from the outside. The last of those is 28 January 2019. From 9 February 2019 the address returns a redirect to an empty response, and it stays that way.

The Japanese Wikipedia article settles for saying the link broke somewhere around 2018 or 2019. A site built in two hours to answer a minister who wanted several hundred million yen ran for a decade and then closed the way a personal project closes, with a bill nobody renewed.

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