The Null Device

It has emerged that children in Britain are posing as paedophiles online to intimidate each other.

Officers have warned parents and children to be vigilant after as many as nine youngsters in Padstow, Cornwall, were targeted through the networking sites Bebo and MSN. Police initially believed a local man was trying to groom the children by befriending them online and arranging to meet them. But a member of the public has come forward and told them that youngsters are trying to settle playground disputes by posing as a paedophile to frighten their rivals.

A spokesman for Devon and Cornwall police said: "Information from the public has highlighted a possibility that the offenders could be children aged 10 and over, masquerading as a paedophile. The investigations are continuing and at this moment we are looking into every line of inquiry and are not ruling out any possibility. However, the language used on the social networking sites such as Bebo and MSN is at times childish. It could be youngsters playing a sick game to try and intimidate friends they have fallen out with. This will be treated seriously and we will be contacting the families of the children involved and we will try and help them by involving social services."

(via Boing Boing) ¶ bullying children hoaxes irony moral panics online paedoterrorists society uk [no comments]

The LA Times tracks down Rick Astley, asks him about the unexpected second act of his 1980s pop career, this time as an internet meme. Astley seems quite cool about it:

“Listen, I just think it’s bizarre and funny. My main consideration is that my daughter doesn’t get embarrassed about it.”

(via MeFi) ¶ culture memes online rick astley rickroll [no comments]

International Association of Time Travelers: Members' Forum Subforum: Europe – Twentieth Century – Second World War; Page 263; a fiction about time travel and online forum etiquette/politics:

At 02:21:30, SneakyPete wrote:
Vienna, 1907: after numerous attempts, have infiltrated the Academy of Fine Arts and facilitated Adolf Hitler's admission to that institution. Goodbye, Hitler the dictator; hello, Hitler the modestly successful landscape artist! Brought back a few of his paintings as well, any buyers?

At 02:29:17, SilverFox316 wrote:
All right; that's it. Having just returned from 1907 Vienna where I secured the expulsion of Hitler from the Academy by means of an elaborate prank involving the Prefect, a goat, and a substantial quantity of olive oil, I now turn my attention to our newer brethren, who, despite rules to the contrary, seem to have no intention of reading Bulletin 1147 (nor its Addendum, Alternate Means of Subverting the Hitlerian Destiny, and here I'm looking at you, SneakyPete). Permit me to sum it up and save you the trouble: no Hitler means no Third Reich, no World War II, no rocketry programs, no electronics, no computers, no time travel. Get the picture?

(via jwz) ¶ fiction forums history hitler humour online scifi time travel wiki [1 comment]

The Napsterization blog (which is not about craptacular DRM-shackled music-rental services but about the social and economic implications of disruptive technologies) has a piece on the lengths Facebook application authors go to get people to install their applications, such as doing sleazy things like not only requiring users to install their application to see messages from friends, but wilfully misleading them into believing that if they don't forward a message (of a pornographic tone) to some friends, they won't get to see it. As a result, the maker of the app gets a juicy boost to their installation figures, whilst pissing all over people's social relationships and making your user experience that much crappier.

In this case, the culprit was Slide, with their popular FunWall application, though neither Slide nor Facebook will accept the blame for this:

Facebook pointed the finger at Slide (the app maker in this case), and said, "There is nothing we can do. We have no control over the apps people make or the stuff they send." Oh, and if I wanted Facebook to change the rules for apps makers? I'd have to get say, 80k of my closest Facebook friends to sign on a petition or group, and then they might look at the way they have allowed porn spam to trick people into forwarding, but until then, there would be no feature review.

Slide said that they thought Facebook was the problem, because as the "governing" body, Facebook makes the rules and "Slide wouldn't be competitive if they changed what they do, and their competitors weren't forced to as well." In other words, Slides competitors use the same features to get more users (or trick more users as the case may be) and Slide didn't want to lose out on getting more users with similar features, regardless of the effect the features have on us and our relationships.

¶ ethics facebook irritainment online social software society spam [no comments]

Behold the Mall Ninja. Originally a shopping mall security guard, he saved the influential mayor's nephew from being sodomised by bad guys, was granted a special exemption, only given to heroes, from restrictions on weapons, and now is Sergeant of a three-man Rapid Tactical Force, covertly defending an unnamed shopping mall somewhere in America from heavily-armed gangbangers and apocalyptic hordes of neo-Nazis, in between shooting to wound shoplifters, and bragging extensively to gun forums on the internet:

If a kid picks up a candy bar and runs, you give him a warning before you cuff him. Same with those mindless teenyboppers who go to the Hickory Farms store, and then take double samples of fruitcake and cheeselog, you warn them that they will be charged with a felony(grand theft), and that if they attempt to fight and run, they will be, unfortunately, first tazered, and if they continue to resist violently with intent to maim, then wounded. Fortunately, wounding fire to suppress teenage kleptomaniacs is relatively easy, they all run in straight lines, and a hit in the knee will be relatively simple from the second floor. But they all get a warning first, we do not simply shoot shoplifters unless they resist violently.

I’m not even technically employed by the mall I’m stationed at, my orders come from “higher up”, hint, hint. Sure, most regular overweight mall security guards would not be armed, they would lose a Fullsize frame handgun in the blubber on their waistline, why arm them? The elite, however, have specail privilages, and I can assure you that my orders go far-far enough that I could go around Kennedy airport yelling “Hi Jack!”, and that a simple phone call and codeword would have me released in 5 minutes, with my weapon, be what it may. As I said, my orders go far and while my reasons for protecting this mall remain a matter of national security, if the above does not convince you that I am employed in a capacity that goes above and beyond halting shoplifters, nothing will.

You are a doofus, of course there is no anti-armor capabilities for golf carts, the UNIMOG was woth the anti-armor work though. We would never consider using any missles larger than our modified surplus Shrikes,

Also, Neonazi skinhead gangs are the most difficult thing we currently must deal with, it is not Chechin thzat we have to worry about, it is the Australian militants, and I dan’t care if they reed this, they allready know that we are onto them and we will not give up.

(via Boing Boing) ¶ bizarre guns online psychoceramics unintentionally hilarious wtf [2 comments]

How To Behave On An Internet Forum, presented in the form of a retrostyled pixel-art video:

(via Boing Boing) ¶ culture godwin's law howto humour netiquette online pixel art trolls video [no comments]

Libertarian Troll Bingo; print it out and cross it off the next time Randroids invade your favourite discussion site:

(via reddragdiva) ¶ anarchocapitalism ayn rand humour libertarianism objectivism online [no comments]

A piece looking at the history of five generic domain names—music.com, eat.com, car.com, meat.com and milk.com—from their origins in the quirky innocence of the pre-commercialised 1990s to their present status:

meat.com: In 1996, meat.com was a classic bit of golden age Internet whimsy called L'Industrie De Meat: an oddish logo on standard-issue mid-90s textured background, with an anti-Communications Decency Act jeremiad, links to an "Internet hall of shame" (optimized for Netscape 2.0), and information about the "Transnational Church of Life on Mars." There was also a link to the site's creator's software offering: Color Manipulation Device, which helped HTML newbies choose the colors for their Web pages. Later iterations of the site foregrounded the software development angle, offering f.search, a metasearch program that would help you get the most of the pre-Google search offerings out there.

By early 2000, though, the proprietor of L'Industrie had sold the site (hopefully at full height-of-boom prices) to a company looking to sell and promote, well meat. Promising a directory of local meat suppliers and "delicious, mouth-watering entrees," it appears to have never really gotten off the ground, and by 2004 was in the hands of a domain registrar and offered for sale. Today, the site has reached the ignominious nadir for generic Websites: it's little more than a front-end for pages of text ads, with not very well thought out photo placement

milk.com: And sometimes, they just stay the same. Milk.com was snapped up in the unheard-of ancient year of 1994 by Internet denizen Dan Bornstein, and it's remained a classic homepage in the '90s sense -- sparse background, unformatted text, easy-to-find links -- ever since.

(via /.) ¶ commercialism culture domains history internet online [no comments]

The internet, with its detachment between online and offline actions and its lack of a private register, has spawned the phenomenon of griefers, or highly organised subcultures of people (mostly young men) who delight in ruining other people's online fun:

Consider the case of the Avatar class Titan, flown by the Band of Brothers Guild in the massively multiplayer deep-space EVE Online. The vessel was far bigger and far deadlier than any other in the game. Kilometers in length and well over a million metric tons unloaded, it had never once been destroyed in combat. Only a handful of player alliances had ever acquired a Titan, and this one, in particular, had cost the players who bankrolled it in-game resources worth more than $10,000.

So, naturally, Commander Sesfan Qu'lah, chief executive of the GoonFleet Corporation and leader of the greater GoonSwarm Alliance — better known outside EVE as Isaiah Houston, senior and medieval-history major at Penn State University — led a Something Awful invasion force to attack and destroy it.

"The ability to inflict that huge amount of actual, real-life damage on someone is amazingly satisfying" says Houston. "The way that you win in EVE is you basically make life so miserable for someone else that they actually quit the game and don't come back."

To see the philosophy in action, skim the pages of Something Awful or Encyclopedia Dramatica, where it seems every pocket of the Web harbors objects of ridicule. Vampire goths with MySpace pages, white supremacist bloggers, self-diagnosed Asperger's sufferers coming out to share their struggles with the online world — all these and many others have been found guilty of taking themselves seriously and condemned to crude but hilarious derision.

On the other hand, there is no such thing as the right to be respected, or even to not be ridiculed. If one posts a web page detailing one's peculiar political views, conspiracy theories and/or sexual fetishes online, one can expect to be laughed at and even snidely remarked about. Though there is a distinction between demolishing someone's homepage in a blog or discussion forum and actively gathering a posse and going out to hound them off the net.

Griefing happens in the real world, though it's usually called other things, such as bullying. The difference is that the internet has democratised bullying. In the real world, in more conformistic societies, bullies can typically only be those either of or contending for alpha social status, enforcing an exaggerated version of majority values by picking on those perceived to not conform to them (witness the use of the word "gay", sometimes semi-euphemised as "ghey", as a general-purpose term of derision), and in more liberal or pluralistic environments, even that is frowned upon. Online, anyone can find a group of like-minded misfits, make up a cool-sounding name, set up a virtual clubhouse and start picking on mutually agreed targets, with little fear of social consequences.

¶ assholes bullying culture furries griefers internet online psychology sadism society something awful the private register videogaming [1 comment]

As social network websites with user-generated content become mainstream, online dating websites, as a category, are dying. Which makes sense: the only reason that online dating sites (which are like the online equivalent of leks, full of of people putting on their best dating-profile face and saying whatever they think makes them look more attractive), now look even more starkly naff than they did when they were the only game in town. Or, when there are alternatives, going anywhere specifically to pick up doesn't reflect well on oneself:

There's a reason Mulligan and Helm are above online dating. They're part of the social networking generation. Neither would admit to going on sites like Facebook or News Corp.'s MySpace (NWS) expressly looking to hook up. And that's precisely why it's such a better answer to the problem of meeting someone interesting. It's like going to a bar with your friends. Maybe you are going to meet someone special, but maybe you're just going to hang out with your friends too. You can play it cool. "MySpace and Facebook feel like going to a nature preserve, [whereas] a dating site is like walking past a bunch of animals in cages at the zoo," Helm says.

Other sites that meld user-generated content with social networking to accomplish certain tasks can be even handier. Consider Yelp, where people write reviews of their favorite restaurants, bars, and other haunts, or Digg, where users vote and post comments on their favorite online stories. You can scope out Yelp or Digg users on their profile pages, which show pictures and list basic likes and dislikes. But you can really find out about them from the locations they Yelp about or stories they Digg. Both sites have features that even let you connect with fellow users based on shared traits. It's like a version of eHarmony you don't have to opt into. And while many online dating sites charge a fee, most new Web sites are free.

The Web moves fast. And sorry online dating, but you just didn't keep up. In the parlance of the kids who won't use you, you got "pwned."

¶ culture dating online sex society web [no comments]

In 2005, Olia Lialina wrote A Vernacular Web, a survey of the culture of amateur web design some years ago, cataloguing ubiquitous pheonomena like starry backgrounds, "Under Construction" signs, rainbow horizontal rules and animated "Mail Me" graphics. Now, she has returned to the subject with a look at how things have changed over the past few years in the world of non-professional web pages:

Home pages no longer exist. Instead, there are other genres: accounts, profiles, journals, personal spaces, channels, blogs and homes. I’d like to pay special attention to the latter ones.

If you look at the most viewed layouts on MySpace, you’ll notice that most of them have a big picture as a background, which repeats itself horizontally and vertically. This back-to-1996 design flaw is now forever linked to Web and amateur users, and nobody cares about eliminating it – neither services nor users themselves.

Firstly, glitter became a trademark of today’s amateur aesthetics, and I’m certain that in the future sparkly graphics will become a symbol of our times, like “Under Construction” signs for the 90’s. Glitter is everywhere (in the universe of user-generated pages), it has become a meta category. It has absorbed all other categories of ready-made graphics – people, animals, buttons, sex graphics.

Starry backgrounds represented the future, a touching relationship with the medium of tomorrow. Glitter decorates the web of today, routine and taken-for-granted.

¶ culture design fashion memes online trends web [no comments]

The latest online meme: wikigroaning. This involves searching Wikipedia for pairs of thematically related articles, the first being reasonably serious, useful and somewhat minimal, and the second being frivolously trivial, usually related to some aspect of pop culture, often of a fanboyish nature, and invariably much more comprehensive and more thought out than the first, i.e.:

Modern warfare
Lightsaber combat

List of conflicts in the Middle East
List of furry role-playing games

Hammurabi
Emperor Palpatine

Women's suffrage
List of fictional gynoids and female cyborgs

(via jwz) ¶ culture fanboys online wikipedia [no comments]

Attention LiveJournal/MySpace kids: not getting enough attention? You can always try faking your death online, and watching the gushing tributes flow in:

(via hazyjayne) ¶ amusing culture emo livejournal online [no comments]

Via the newly-resurrected bOING bOING: Everything in Moderation is an online forum (run by Tom "plasticbag.org" Coates) dedicated to the management of online communities, and more specifically, to moderating comments, encouraging good behaviour, discouraging trolls and the like. There you'll find fascinating studies in social engineering and useful practical tips such as simulating technical faults to get rid of unwelcome posters without provoking them into a war, and the use of cookies to detect trolls with multiple tentacles.

And, surprisingly enough, the last one received a comment from an "avowed Slashdot troll", outlining how, against a serious troll with access to cookie-poisoning plugins, anonymous web proxies and thousands of trolling accounts (all automated, natch), such a scheme wouldn't work, and giving an outline of a determined troll's formidable arsenal of tools.

The moral of this story is: never underestimate the ingenuity of guys without girlfriends.

¶ moderation online social engineering society trolls [no comments]

Danny O'Brien on how the pervasiveness of the internet is bringing about the end of the private register, i.e., of the sphere between public and secret. He uses as his example a private get-together of Californian technotopian types. The details were published on a private web site, where master sleuth Andrew Orlowski (the guy who heroically exposed the sinister influence of blogs and "googlewashing") dug them up and used them to pilliory this veritable Bilderberg conference on Segways on its puffed-up self-congratulatoriness.

But, the problem here is that no-one was advertising themselves as visionaries and geniuses. There was no advertising at all. The Wiki Andrew found was private: it wasn't written as publicity for the camp. Sure, the invite talked about "changing the world" and "smart people" - but these words have different meanings when you are trying to flatter and cajole your friends to come to your house for free. And when people say to one another "oh, you're all so smart", it's not a festival of mutual self-congratulation. It's what you say to people you've met who seem quite smart. Well, you do if you're not sitting fifty yards from them, arching your eyebrow significantly.

Somehow, though, that only makes things worse. Oh sure, they weren't telling the world that they were geniuses, the critics roar. They were meeting, secretly, to say it to each other. Without telling anyone.

Danny goes on to point out that on the web, things intended for a small audience of friends have a way of being exposed to the harsh light of public scorn, in exactly the way that face-to-face conversations over a few pints don't. Which is why things like britneyblogs and web journals attract so much mockery -- because they're not meant for the general public.

(Which ties in to my reason for setting up a LiveJournal, and the emerging separation of powers between this blog and the LJ; with LiveJournals, you get the very important ability to make posts which are friends-only, and invisible to anyone save for those in your list of friends (or a subset thereof), which saves you from shooting your mouth off about your small life and exposing your weaknesses/what a boring person you are to potential lovers/employers and/or millions of bored teenagers looking for "losers" to ridicule (ask Ghyslain Raza about that). Granted, it involves your friends having LJ accounts, but that's probably easier to arrange than setting up a password system on your blog and persuading them to indulge your paranoia and log in. It's still in the secret register, as Danny would say, but the secrecy is transparent to anyone who already has a LJ membership. (Btw, if you personally know me and want a LJ creation code, email/IM me.))

¶ culture internet online privacy the private register [2 comments]

A NYTimes piece looking at the culture of away messages on instant messaging services, and how many users (typically young people) treat their messages like LiveJournal mood rings. (via Techdirt)

She said her friends often use away messaging as an emotional outlet. "One friend always has up song lyrics that reflect her mood," she said. Ms. Sanders has done that, too. During reflective moments, "I would be listening to sad songs and would be, 'That would make a great away message.' "

What's more, the away message "becomes a litmus test for personal worth," said Rebecca Blatt, another sophomore at Penn. "Writing 'having an awful day,' or 'drowning in a sea of tears' clearly invites a reaction. What if no one responds?"

And when it comes to sweethearts, especially former and future ones, away messaging adds a new immediacy. Those unwilling to delete a former flame's screen name can effortlessly if painfully keep track of a life they are no longer part of.

(Even if they never were part of it in the first place except in their fevered imaginations.)

Not that this is anything new, mind you; similar things have been happening on goofey for a decade or so; and then there are .plan files (remember those?) from back in the days when people used multi-user UNIX systems. Ah, that takes me back.

¶ away messages culture online unix [no comments]

A business model for the post-dot-com age: online begging, where people set up web sites with sob stories about dodgy spouses or crippling credit-card bills and wait for soft-hearted suckers to PayPal them money. The difference between a pockmarked junky begging on the street for heroin money and a woman in Brooklyn asking for money to pay off her Prada bills comes down to presentation; well, that and the social acceptability of the addiction.

¶ begging culture online society [no comments]