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The New York Times recognizes Trolling as a real thing

Conchaga

Conchaga

Let's fuck some shit up
The article I'm about to post is epicly long and speaks of things that most of us have seen or read about personally. I think it's interesting in how it speaks of trolling as a subculture. Anyway, if you're up for a long read, feel free.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/m...1375243200&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

It's a great article. Though, I think that interviewing people like weev and RFJason weren't the right ones to ask. RFJason got lucky and weev is a complete nutbar. I don't think the article captures the joy of making someone go nuts over words. Or, how most people who are trolls are nerds who just have angst issues and the internet is a great way to release them.

Either way, feel free to agree, disagree, or fuck off. I don't care.
 
Conchaga said:
I don't think the article captures the joy of making someone go nuts over words.
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I thought this part caught that pretty well:

He proceeded to demonstrate his personal cure for trolling, the Theory of the Green Hair.

“You have green hair,” he told me. “Did you know that?”
“No,” I said.
“Why not?”
“I look in the mirror. I see my hair is black.”
“That’s uh, interesting. I guess you understand that you have green hair about as well as you understand that you’re a terrible reporter.”
“What do you mean? What did I do?”
“That’s a very interesting reaction,” Fortuny said. “Why didn’t you get so defensive when I said you had green hair?” If I were certain that I wasn’t a terrible reporter, he explained, I would have laughed the suggestion off just as easily. The willingness of trolling “victims” to be hurt by words, he argued, makes them complicit, and trolling will end as soon as we all get over it.
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Which leads to the smartest line in the article, later on:

Ultimately, as Fortuny suggests, trolling will stop only when its audience stops taking trolls seriously. “People know to be deeply skeptical of what they read on the front of a supermarket tabloid,” says Dan Gillmor, who directs the Center for Citizen Media. “It should be even more so with anonymous comments. They shouldn’t start off with a credibility rating of, say, 0. It should be more like negative-30.”
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Conchaga said:
Or, how most people who are trolls are nerds who just have angst issues and the internet is a great way to release them.
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There, I agree. He could've rounded it out a bit more by taking a look at BrawlHall or somesuch site.

Other tidbits:

In China, anonymous nationalists are posting death threats against pro-Tibet activists, along with their names and home addresses. Technology, apparently, does more than harness the wisdom of the crowd. It can intensify its hatred as well.
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Leave it to an NYT reporter to throw in some shitty relativistic platitude.

[ED] was buzzing with news of an attack against the Epilepsy Foundation’s Web site. Trolls had flooded the site’s forums with flashing images and links to animated color fields, leading at least one photosensitive user to claim that she had a seizure.

WEEV: the whole posting flashing images to epileptics thing? over the line.

HEPKITTEN: can someone plz tell me how doing something the admins intentionally left enabled is hacking?

WEEV: it’s hacking peoples unpatched brains. we have to draw a moral line somewhere.

Fortuny disagreed. In his mind, subjecting epileptic users to flashing lights was justified. “Hacks like this tell you to watch out by hitting you with a baseball bat,” he told me. “Demonstrating these kinds of exploits is usually the only way to get them fixed.”
“So the message is ‘buy a helmet,’ and the medium is a bat to the head?” I asked.
“No, it’s like a pitcher telling a batter to put on his helmet by beaning him from the mound. If you have this disease and you’re on the Internet, you need to take precautions.”
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Love that last bit about the beaning. :D

“Anyone who knows who and where you are is a security hole,” he told me. “I own a gun. I have an escape route. If someone comes, I’m ready.”

...

Almost a year ago, while in the midst of an LSD-and-methamphetamine bender, a longer-haired, wilder-eyed Weev gave a talk called “Internet Crime” at a San Diego hacker convention. He expounded on diverse topics like hacking the Firefox browser, online trade in illegal weaponry and assassination markets — untraceable online betting pools that pay whoever predicts the exact date of a political leader’s demise. The talk led to two uncomfortable interviews with federal agents and the decision to shed his legal identity altogether. Weev now espouses “the ruin lifestyle” — moving from condo to condo, living out of three bags, no name, no possessions, all assets held offshore. As a member of a group of hackers called “the organization,” which, he says, bring in upward of $10 million annually, he says he can wreak ruin from anywhere.
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I'll get David Mamet working on this immediately...

I thought this part was kind of weak:

One promising answer comes from the computer scientist Jon Postel, now known as “god of the Internet” for the influence he exercised over the emerging network. In 1981, he formulated what’s known as Postel’s Law: “Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others.” Originally intended to foster “interoperability,” the ability of multiple computer systems to understand one another, Postel’s Law is now recognized as having wider applications. To build a robust global network with no central authority, engineers were encouraged to write code that could “speak” as clearly as possible yet “listen” to the widest possible range of other speakers, including those who do not conform perfectly to the rules of the road. The human equivalent of this robustness is a combination of eloquence and tolerance — the spirit of good conversation. Trolls embody the opposite principle. They are liberal in what they do and conservative in what they construe as acceptable behavior from others. You, the troll says, are not worthy of my understanding; I, therefore, will do everything I can to confound you.
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And THIS:

If we can’t prosecute the trolling out of online anonymity, might there be some way to mitigate it with technology? One solution that has proved effective is “disemvoweling” — having message-board administrators remove the vowels from trollish comments, which gives trolls the visibility they crave while muddying their message.
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wat

So far, despite all this discord, the Internet’s system of civil machines has proved more resilient than anyone imagined. As early as 1994, the head of the Internet Society warned that spam “will destroy the network.” The news media continually present the online world as a Wild West infested with villainous hackers, spammers and pedophiles. And yet the Internet is doing very well for a frontier town on the brink of anarchy. Its traffic is expected to quadruple by 2012. To say that trolls pose a threat to the Internet at this point is like saying that crows pose a threat to farming.
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The last line's an interesting analogy. What happens when the scarecrows don't work? Or --just for argument-- replace the crows with locusts. Who breaks out the DDT and when?

"...The idea of them learning from their mistakes and becoming people that I could actually be proud of . . . it was overwhelming.” He continued: “It’s not that I do this because I hate them. I do this because I’m trying to save them.”
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Hm.

Overall, a good article. I especially like that series of posts he ended it with.
 
I still believed he could've done a more thorough job of researching trolling. He shouldn't have stopped with 4chan and ED. Those guys do shit en masse. Therefore, it's completely possible to succeed. And you know what they say about a room full of monkeys. Also, even RFJAson admitted that he got lucky with the craigslist thing. Saturation trolling and roll-of-the-dice trolling doesn't go into what I consider as trolling as an art form. Throwing an entire message board into a tizzy with just one post... THAT is good trolling. Taking something that seems innocent and serene and adding real life issues to an otherwise vacuuous space takes talent and intelligence. Simply posting flashing pics (although funny) on an epilepsy board is shooting fish in a barrell.

And you're right, Archie. Adding those chinese death threats isn't trolling, because it's not funny. I think he missed the completely underlying point that trolling needs to be funny. When it ceases to be funny, then it's not trolling and it's simply harrassment or hate crime, as the case may be. And the last thing I think he missed was that most trolls are young men ages 16-30 who think that fucking with people's sense of security on the internet is fun. He captures part of it in weev's statements about how he thinks that some internet society is completely useless and should be wiped from the internet.

Frankly, I think the guy missed the point completely and only did surface investigation. So, RFJason's comment about being a terrible reporter is correct.

Though, I would have loved to be a fly on the wall when he opened his e-mail inbox the day after this article was posted. I'm sure that he got e-raped to hell and back.
 
trolling has
Fonzie-775196.jpg
 
Interesting read, thanks for posting it.

I totally agree that he should have branched away from Anonymous and 4chan. Granted, they are the most predominant trolls (especially with the Scientology shenanigans) but they don't reflect every other troll out there.

And if he were mentioning /b/ exploits, he should have talked about Chris Forcand. (http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/Chris_forcand - and yes, I know ED isn't a reliable source, but there's lots of external links at the bottom). Trolling isn't all bad.
 
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