Once again, I’m using the social media-aggregation tool Storify to work up a story using the Twitter feeds of reporters & protesters on the scene. This time, it’s in Tahrir Square, where the confrontations between the police and the citizens (fed up with the emerging military dictatorship) are taking a darker turn. <a href=”http://storify.com/DaveLaFontaine/tahrir-square-nerve-gas-rumors-cause-panic” target=”_blank”>View [...] [...more]
Once again, I’m using the social media-aggregation tool Storify to work up a story using the Twitter feeds of reporters & protesters on the scene. This time, it’s in Tahrir Square, where the confrontations between the police and the citizens (fed up with the emerging military dictatorship) are taking a darker turn.
It turns out that they were perhaps using some kind of new tear gas – one that is invisible, but that still stings like a sonofabitch. If you’ve clicked the link above, you were taken to a page of clinical data from autopsies of British soldiers killed by gas in WWI. Grim, grim reading. Basically, the gas causes chemical burns all over your body, and you die from choking on the ragged, torn-up lung tissue that you cough up as you drown in your own blood.
Yeah. Fun times. There’s a reason we as a species have reacted with horror at anyone using these kinds of chemical weapons ever since.
Anyway, the rumor mills flew into hyperspeed on Twitter & social media, and you could see the rise and fall of the meme (fostered by a Twitter account purportedly belonging to Mohamed El Baradei) of chemical weapons use.
Here’s a short audio file i recorded at the close of the Civic Media conference this week at MIT. I’d like to add my own thanks to the sentiments expressed herein; thus was a fabulous antidote to the general malaise afflicting so many of our traditional media brethren… http://audioboo.fm/boos/395702-final-thoughts-and-thanks-at-civic-media-conference-at-mit-media-lab [...more]
Here’s a short audio file i recorded at the close of the Civic Media conference this week at MIT. I’d like to add my own thanks to the sentiments expressed herein; thus was a fabulous antidote to the general malaise afflicting so many of our traditional media brethren…
How 'bout we make sure that the revisions to the basic document viewing and sharing software that pretty much everybody uses has "features" in it that check to see if you're working with anything that's been flagged as Top Secret, and then finks on you to The Man. [...more]
This is only an educated guess, but something has changed in the past month in those voluminous End User Licensing Agreements (aka EULAs aka “That dense small-font document that nobody bothers to read”), and it seems to be coming from Homeland Security.
It looked so friendly and inviting on my taskbar...
It started innocently enough when I updated my Mac software and discovered a new icon down in the taskbar. Well hello there, App Store! Wow, it appears as though you launched with more than 1,000 applications already waiting for me to play with. Everyone’s been chattering excitedly about what this will mean for apps that do more than produce gastrointestinal sounds.
Cool! Can’t wait to start partaking of the free & open marketplace for creativity, ingenuity and that childlike sense of wonder – wha? A new Terms & Services Agreement? Again?
OK, I’ve got a few spare minutes and have been eating a high-fiber diet recently. Maybe it’s safe to scroll through and see if there’s anything particularly noxious about the rules governing how this App Store for my desktop Mac…
Good Christ, what’s this?
So the apps you’re serving up for me to use on my main computer, the one where I have the really important data stored, may just come with viruses, spyware and trojans. And in the next breath, I have to basically hold Apple harmless if they happen to sell me something that destroys my business? Hey, can car manufacturers and prescription drug companies get in on this kinda scam?
Can you imagine that? “Oh yeah, here’s your new heart medication. It may actually contain arsenic, other heavy metals or rat poison. We don’t know. We just shovel this stuff out the door. It’s on you. And if you happen to drop dead because of it, we ain’t responsible and you can’t sue us.” That’d go over well with all the peoplescreeching about Death Panels, wouldn’t it?
But where does HomeSec come in? Read this and see if you don’t feel ghostly fingers clenching around your throat:
You agree that Apple has the right, without liability to you, to
disclose any Registration Data and/or Account information to law
enforcement authorities, government officials, and/or a third party, as
Apple believes is reasonably necessary or appropriate to enforce and/or
verify compliance with any part of this Agreement (including but not
limited to Apple’s right to cooperate with any legal process relating to
your use of the Service and/or Products, and/or a third-party claim
that your use of the Service and/or Products is unlawful and/or
infringes such third party’s rights).
OK, maybe that’s just Hollywood, the MPAA and the RIAA again … what’s this?
You also agree that you will not use these products for any purposes
prohibited by United States law, including, without limitation, the
development, design, manufacture, or production of nuclear, missile, or
chemical or biological weapons.
Seriously?
Jesus Christ.
I’m not even going to get into all the creepy spyware language in Apple’s EULA, that basically says that they are going to record everything you do while online, match it up with your GPS data and whatever kinds of interactions you make on Facebook, blogs, Twitter, e-mail, chat, etc., and then bundle all that information together and sell it to the highest bidder. Plow through it yourselves, lazybones.
Next up was having to install/upgrade Adobe Reader so I can look at pdfs of reconciled accounts from Quickbooks (part of the joys of running your own shop – gahhhh!). By this time, I’m kind of in a state. I mean, like everyone else who’s gone from the CompuServe/Prodigy days of online to today’s web, I expect a certain level of monitoring of what I do online, and know that this is the price I have to pay for free (well, other than the damn escalating high-speed Time-Warner cable bill) access to all kinds of amazing content created & curated by geniuses all over the world. Maybe I’ll look at Adobe’s EULA. I don’t really expect much other than the usual boilerplate legalese.
Well, how bad can it be, really? I mean – pdfs, right? It’s just a basic document structure for people to …
The Software may cause your Computer, without additional notice, automatically to connect to the Internet and to communicate with an Adobe website or Adobe domain for purposes that may include providing you with additional information, features, and functionality. Unless otherwise specified in Sections 14.2 through 14.6, the following provisions apply to all automatic Internet connections by the Software:
14.1.1 When the Software automatically connects to the Internet, an Internet protocol address (“IP Address”) that is associated with your current Internet connection is sent to an Adobe website;
(snip)
Adobe may deliver in-product marketing to provide information about the Software and other Adobe products and Services, including but not limited to Adobe Online Services, based on certain Software and Adobe Online Services specific features including but not limited to, the version of the Software, including without limitation, platform version, version of the Software, and language. For further information about in-product marketing, please see the “help” menu in the Software;
Dude, WTF!
Your software is going to wake up in the middle of the night, dial the mothership, rat me out and then start serving ads into the middle of whatever I’m doing?
Not. Cool.
OK, is there anything about…?
…any end user who you know or have reason to know will utilize them in the design, development or production of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, or rocket systems, space launch vehicles, and sounding rockets, or unmanned air vehicle systems (each, a “Prohibited Use”), or (c) any end user who has been prohibited from participating in the U.S. export transactions by any federal agency of the U.S. government (each, a “Sanctioned Party”).
Guys. If I could use Flash Catalyst to make a space launch vehicle, I’d be kicking it James T. Kirk-style on my own moonbase right now, doncha think?
Great. Anything else?
Additional Terms of Use, the Adobe.com Terms of Use (http://www.adobe.com/go/terms) shall apply. Please note that the Adobe Privacy Policy allows tracking of website visits and it addresses in detail the topic of tracking and use of cookies, web beacons, and similar devices.
This just keeps getting better and better. So once again, you’re going to monitor what I do, turn it over to whomever you want, and somehow feel it necessary to put in a big scary paragraph about espionage and misuse of data?
Who owns your data? And I don't mean this guy...
I don’t remember all this garbage showing up in the earlier EULAs software/hardware companies crammed down our throats. Maybe I just wasn’t as observant. But it appears that someone has been having some very intense, shall be say, meetings with internet/software companies in the past month or so, with an aim towards making sure that if We The Users step out of line, there exists all manner of heavy-duty legal agreements by which to come down on our heads. All that alarmist verbiage about nukes & nerve gas can only come from a gummint agency that’s paid to be paranoid & fearful.
And what’s been on their minds lately? Oh yeah – Mr. Assange and his cohorts peeking under their skirts. How best to head this off next time around, before any of the 500,000 or so minions with Top Secret access get frisky? Hmmm … how ’bout we make sure that the revisions to the basic document viewing and sharing software that pretty much everybody uses has “features” in it that check to see if you’re working with anything that’s been flagged as Top Secret, and then finks on you to The Man.
A 12-step program to get your blog so’s it can go out in public again …when last we left the hacked blog, it had managed to delete the phony users and admins, and the permalinkspam was gone. Jump ahead to last week, when I noticed that my Google AdSense boxes were always full of creepy [...] [...more]
A 12-step program to get your blog so’s it can go out in public again
…when last we left the hacked blog, it had managed to delete the phony users and admins, and the permalinkspam was gone.
Jump ahead to last week, when I noticed that my Google AdSense boxes were always full of creepy advertising for boner pills. I have been playing with all kinds of plug-ins lately, trying to find something that will work well to “mobilize” this site. I wondered if any of them had done something to my header, so I clicked on “View page source” to see …
The list of links to sites underneath the noxious javascript ran for page after page. No woder my site loaded so sluggishy!
Great. Just great.
I know enough about Javascript to recognize when someone is being deliberately tricky about what they’re doing. The code in the window above uses the “Array” function, where all manner of short codes are stuffed in there to make nasty function calls and run a script that pulls in content and hides it out of sight in my header. This code then puts in the hypertext links such as the ones shown above (to some poor sap at a school whose computer is being used as a relay station for porno-pharma traffic).
Time to move to the next step in the program:
8. Made a list of all the plug-ins and started deleting them one by one
One of the really good rules for trying to fix something going heinously wrong on your computer is to start backtracking. Figure out what the last thing you did was, and try to undo it.
In this case, it was the plug-ins. I figured maybe someone had either gotten hacked, their plug-in was the way for a ‘sploit (hacker-speak for an “exploit” — a vulnerability in the software that they can worm their way through) to get into my scrupulously up-to-date blog. So I cacked all the plug-ins, and the next morning, opened up the Dashboard to find that the evil code was back in the header file.
9. No amends – only more evil code in the header
This happened two more times. It was time to start going through the PHP code line-by-line to try to figure out what the hell was going on. I used the editing tools that are integrated into the Dashboard on WordPress — to little avail.
I was starting to really wonder if the infection had reached the core PHP server, which would be epically bad news. I fired up my FTP program and started going through the library files. And there, I worked the next step:
10. I inventoried the files in the php-admin folder and admitted I had missed some pieces of the infection
I had to go through all the images for my blog postings, month by month, to find these little files. Even so, I damn near missed them – except that their edit dates were out of step with the dates that I uploaded the images.
Deliberately misspelled -- but fiendishly close enough to actual words so that you might just miss them.
Check it out – they spelled “footer” as “fotter.php” so that it kinda blends in, but won’t break the blog. Like any good parasite, it knows that if it kills the host, then the blog won’t be up and functioning, and the little baby tapeworms won’t get to feast on the ill-gotten pharamaspam revenues that come from the links stuffed into my blog.
I also found a .gz file deep in a totally separate subdirectory under my wp-admin folder. I won’t show you the screengrab of that one, since it has some other identifying information in it. But again, as you look through all your folders and subdirectories, just keep an eye out for something that looks like it doesn’t belong. Think of the method that astroners use to find comets: they alternately flash big pictures of the sky, and look for the little dots that are strobing. Those are the points of light that are in slightly different positions from one frame to the next.
The problem also goes a bit deeper into some of the files on the PHP server; the links in the previous post will take you to pages that explain, far better than I could, how you can search for the vile infected strings of Javascript. Part of the problem is that they take advantage of a “reverse” function – where the commands are spelled out backwards, and then the server is instructed to read them that way. It looks again like gibberish to human eyes, but to a machine, it means “Stuff the trojans in here!”
Look for files that are wildly differing in size than they should be. If you do open them up, do it in a Text reader – not a Word document. Word probably won’t execute the Java code if it’s just pasted into a page as pure text, but man, with this stuff, it pays to be careful.
11. Prayed and meditated that I had at long last, cleansed the scourge from my blog
At this point, I’ve spent more than three days in all, fine-tooth-combing my blog and all the associated PHP, HTML and image files, folders, subcategories and god knows what all. I’m beat. Either I’ve gotten it or I haven’t, and it’s time to call in someone who is better at this than me.
And then on Sunday – I opened up the blog in my browser and hit “Page Source” … CLEAN!
And now for the last step (and I have tried to keep these steps at least vaguely in line with the instructions for AA and other 12-step programs):
12. Having had a blogging awakening, I try to carry this message to other bloggers, and practice the following principles with all my WordPress installs
I hope you’ve managed to get some learnings out of this strange screed. I know the presentation has been a bit quirky, and to be honest, about halfway through I realized I was pretty much beating the metaphorical dead horse into goo. But the point of all this is that I could have avoided all this pain, not had about 6 months of blog postings tainted and probably really awful Google page-rankings, if I had just kept the site properly updated.
When WordPress or other software does a critical release – for God’s sake, download and update it. The thing is, when they do a major release and bugfix, they have to publish exactly what bugs they are fixing. Which is like a paint-by-numbers for the hackers out there. They know exactly where and what the hole in the software was, and can start churning out botcode to take advantage of updating sluggards (like me).
Well, I have seen the light. no more slacking off on updating – and no more willy-nilly experimentation with fancy plugins on a site that I use for my business.
A 12-step program to send your out-of-control blog to rehab If your blog has been hacked, your first indication is when it starts acting like it’s in the late stages of particularly noxious drug addiction. Your once mild-mannered blog is a now a nasty Hollywood tart, reeling around, blowing toxic breath in random stranger’s faces, [...] [...more]
A 12-step program to send your out-of-control blog to rehab
At this point, you can either choose to slaughter and revive your blog (i.e. delete everything and do a clean re-install), or roll up your sleeves and start hunting down the rogue bits of code that are turning your blog into Britney/Lindsay/Paris. No matter what, you should back up your WordPress blog by using the WP-DB-Backup plugin.
However, there is no guarantee that even if you go for the nuclear option, that the virus snippets won’t have wormed there way somewhere into your database, and will just pop up again (which is what they did to me – repeatedly) when you restore from the backup. This is why I reluctantly armed myself with some PHP manuals and started digging around in the guts of my blog.
If your blog has been infected for a while, it may have already affected your Google page rankings; in some of the links above, you’ll see that they started getting de-listed by Google because they looked to the bots like pr0n0 spammers. It can take quite a while to recover from that; the whole thing reminded me so much of the by-now ubiquitous Hollywood paradigm of getting clean & sober that I broke it down into a 12-step program.
Step 1: Realize that we have a problem; then admit that we are powerless over what our blog is doing, and that is has become unmanageable
The first notice I got that some of the WordPress blogs that I use (and administer for others) had been hacked was when this strange code started showing up in the permalinks.
Kinda strange, right? Looks at first glance like some little bug with the extended permalinks function...
xxxx
Usually, when you choose long permalinks, that’s to give Google’s bots the chance to find & index your content correctly. But no prob, I thought: just go on in to Edit Post mode, and delete the code and re-save it.
Curious. I saved it with the real permalink and it turned up with some strange gobbledygood at the end anyway. Wonder if that’s having any kind of effect on the blog. Better check it in Google Reader.
Step 2: Come to believe that we are going to have to take serious action to restore the blog to sanity
Holy Sh-Nikes! Where did this come from?
Man, you never want to see this associated with your blog. This is screaming sirens, flashing lights, all spelling out "VIRUS ALERT!"
If you don’t get a jolt of adrenaline at seeing something like this where your blog contents are supposed to be, you don’t understand the gravity of the situation. This kind of pharmaspam is absolutely deadly; it usually comes from Eastern European hackers, and it means that the infection is serious.
One of the first things that I found was a long thread about how hackers register themselves as users.
Sure enough, look at the number of users. Also look at the number of admins.
Step 4: Made a searching and fearless inventory of the renegade users
I went through page after page, hoping that I would be able to figure out which were the responsible, decent users, and which ones were the identities of the various spambots that were using my blog like a passed-out sorority girl in Satan’s frat house.
A lot of them were easy to spot – they had the various names for the erectile dysfunction drugs as their “@blahblah” addresses.
5. Admitted to ourselves that we had been remiss in updating the blog
OK. I admit it. I was afraid to update the blogs because we’d installed some customized plugins, and I didn’t want to have to futz with them if they broke. Saved some real time, eh? Now I was spending hours going through my blog(s) trying to figure out what had happened.
As you can see, I started this whole process back when WordPress was still at revision 2.8.4. Oh, the shame!
6. Became entirely ready to get rid of these freeloaders
Cry havoc! And set loose the delete function!
7. Ruthlessly removed the false admins
These were where the hackers put their admin identities. All the way down at Z, where I had to trudge through hours of checking and deleting the other users to get to them. While I was in here, the hackers were trying to get back in to add more users. It was a race to see who was faster...
I couldn’t believe that the hackers were trying to add more users to the pile, to slow me down. I managed to delete enough of them to get down to the Z’s, where their admin identities were hidden. And then I deleted those. Success!
I conducted a series of interviews with journalists, bloggers, opposition political leaders and human rights workers in the cities of Astana and Almaty, Kazakhstan. They are begging for help to combat increased government attacks, censorship, harassment and intimidation. [...more]
Under the guise of “protecting citizens from terrorists and porn,” the government in Kazakhstan is eliminating freedom of speech and of the press via a particularly toxic cocktail of Old Stalinist School beatings, jailings and intimidation – and cutting-edge CyberWar attacks.
I conducted a series of interviews with journalists, bloggers, opposition political leaders and human rights workers in the cities of Astana and Almaty, Kazakhstan. I was there because in mid-October of 2009, the US State Department invited me to travel to Kazakhstan to do a series of training sessions on New Media and how journalists there could learn from the mistakes that First-World TV & newspapers have made, to prepare themselves for the future.
While I was able to show them some of the new technologies and techniques in online video, mobile, social media and web monetization that I’ve developed an expertise in, I found that their crisis is far more serious than that of US publishers and journalists, whose problems revolve around absurd levels of debt entered into by multi-billion dollar corporations, and the lack of a coherent business strategy.
Kazakh journalists are quite literally fighting for their lives – and losing.
I found this out myself, when I wound up in the hospital with a severe case of food poisoning, the night before I was scheduled to conduct a class for the pro-democracy rights workers, independent journalists and dissenting bloggers. I feel almost ashamed to bring this up, because compared to what the Kazakh journalists go through, barfing for 8 hours seems like a resort vacation. Still, the embassy doctor told me I was on the point of cascading organ failure from radical dehydration. Next stop: a pine box in the cargo hold on the way back to Los Angeles.
A couple days and 4 liters of IV fluid and antibiotics later, my vision cleared and I was finally able to reschedule with the Kazakhstan’s most independent journalists and bloggers. (I had to cancel a trip to Shymkent, where even more dissidents hoped to get my help.) They wanted to interview me, because they were suspicious about my absence. “You don’t honestly think that what happened to you was an accident?” they asked. I admitted that in my most paranoid moments, I wondered…
“There are no coincidences here,” they told me. They went on to state that repeatedly, journalists, human rights workers or others who have come from the U.S. or Europe to meet with them, mysteriously get sick – just the way I did – are hospitalized, and wind up going home a couple of days later without ever actually meeting or doing any work. They all wanted to shake my hand and congratulate me for joining the club of journalists who have gone to the hospital because of their political beliefs.
I will never know if it was just a bad piece of chicken, or if I barfed out some heinous admixture of polonium and whatever PCBs/Dioxins they fed to the former president of Ukraine that turned his face into a puffy, pockmarked lunar landscape. But I will admit that seeing a couple of goons waiting in an SUV every morning to tail us around contributed to my motivation to publish this piece.
First – a bit of scene-setting: Kazakhstan is an enormous country, spread out over vast empty sub-Siberian steppes (as you can see in my pictures here), with a relatively tiny population of 16 million. It’s floating on an ocean of oil and gas, and may soon be the world’s leading exporter of uranium – check out the Wikipedia entry, if you want more facts & figures.
Put simply, Kazakhstan is a popcorn shell jammed in the teeth of international war & petro-diplomacy. It’s stuck between China to the east, Russia to the north, and Afghanistan & Pakistan to the south. They export a billion barrels of oil a year to Russian refineries, and their natural gas keeps the lights on throughout Western Europe. The U.S. uses their airspace and bases for the war in Afghanistan, and rocket launches from the old Soyuz complex near Baikonur keep the International Space Station functioning.
Nursultan Nazarbayev has been president of Kazakhstan since it split off from the former Soviet Union in 1989. Just this year, the constitution was changed to basically allow him to be president for life, and it’s a tossup as to whether or not there will ever again be open elections.
While I was there, I visited the cities of Almaty and Astana, which represent the past and the future of Kazakhstan. In 1997, Nazarbayev decreed that the capitol would be moved from the ancient city of Almaty, which is in a green valley just north of the Himalayas, on the old Silk Road, to Astana, which lies in the midst of 1,000 miles of Siberian steppes, surrounded by nothing.
A brief aside on Astana: the best way I can describe this city is to ask you to imagine what would happen if you downloaded the brains of Albert Speer and Walt Disney into a 14-year-old ADHD sci-fi fan & meth freak, and then gave him a trillion dollars and asked him to design the capitol city of Mars. Dubai in the tundra? Shanghai without the workers or industrial base? Calgary with a creeping sense of menace?
The oil billions have funded the construction of massive towers and buildings; of wide boulevards, lined with struggling fresh-planted saplings; of monuments to the ego of Nazarbayev, where wide-eyed rural citizens line up, and hold up their babies so they can put their tiny hands into the impression of the Glorious Leader’s hand, memorialized forever in a 20-pound block of solid gold.
“It’s all one giant money-laundering scheme,” a journalist confided to me. “The government says that it’s putting up these buildlings, making this city out of nothing for the future of the people of Kazakhstan. They keep comparing this place to Washington, D.C.
“But what it’s really about is that they budget $200 million, maybe for a new library or art gallery. ‘For the people, for the culture of our country,’ they say. Then they build it for $50 million, maybe $20 million. The rest all disappears.”
There is no real reason for this city, built for giants, and inhabited only by people who work for the kleptocracy, to exist, other than what you can read in “Ozymandias.”
““My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Yeah. It’s like that. Particularly the parts about the “sneer of cold command.” If you squint a little bit, from atop the big observation towers, you can see the tangled rusted girders sticking up out of the blasted, brown tundra.
As you’ll see in the following videos, the main problem they need help with is the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that are unleashed on them when they dare to step over the line and criticize the government, write about the massive corruption in the banking system, or report the latest bombshell from the president’s ex-son in law. (He fled the country, and now lives in Austria, from whence he periodically releases embarrassing information – such as audiotapes of government officials conspiring to murder & steal.)
In the interviews that are included here, the Kazakh journalists talk about these kinds of problems – of the beatings, intimidation, jailings, fines, cyber-attacks and other methods by which freedom is being systematically strangled to death. I will write more about this issue in other postings, but for now, I think the greatest impact is for you to hear their raw voices.
I apologize in advance for this video. I had to blur the face and distort the voice of this journalist, to protect him from the brutal reprisals that are becoming almost commonplace in Kazakhstan. I wish that I could show you the blood clot in this man’s eye, or the fading bruises at the corners of his mouth.
I wish that you could see the way he hunches his shoulders when talking about the beating, stomping and kicking orgy of violence that landed him in the hospital recently, or the anger that replaces that fear when he talks of the beatings that have been inflicted on his colleagues.
I hope that you can still hear in his voice the raw sadness and sense of loss that is evident when he talks about the feeble FlashMob protests that are the only act of defiance left to them, and how even that is being systematically taken away.
But I cannot. I cannot bring this story to you in this open and honest way; maybe it is paranoia, but if it is, then it is well-founded paranoia. The pervasive fear that has been pounded into journalists in Kazakhstan is communicable, and if I have succumbed to it as well, so be it. I would rather err on the side of caution with these interviews than expose some of the people in them to further harm. This is also why I have beeped out the names of some of the other recent victims, as well as other information that would make it easy to identify this person.
I do recognize that this journalist’s voice and accent make what he is saying a little hard to understand, and so I am adding subtitles.
These journalists told me that the hardest part for them is the feeling of being utterly alone; that the daily outrages against them have been covered up, denied, made to disappear as they themselves are being made to vanish, one by one.
I decided to share these improvised videos (recorded before and after training sessions I led) because the journalists and bloggers I met pleaded with me to share their stories in the hopes that someone in the outside world would pay attention. To them, the internet represents the last, best hope of writers and photographers and editors who dare to speak truth to power. They have been pushed to the brink, and the DDoS attacks now threaten even that.
I was authorized to show the face and voice of journalist Yevgeniya Plakhina of Respublika.kz, and so she appears here undisguised, although there were some subjects that we discussed that she later requested be edited out. I will post some of the other videos in a later post, since this is getting a bit long.
This is the Dark Side of internet fame. You can see it in the message boards, in the comments section on any YouTube video that reaches a certain level of popularity.
Back in 1989, one of the very first celebrity stories I had to cover in Los Angeles, remains one of the saddest & most disturbing stories. The murder of Rebecca Shaeffer, a lovely young actress by obsessed stalker Robert Bardo. I can see some clear parallels between that case, and the way that online attacks are escalating into offline violence. [...more]
I can’t decide if this is one of those “sign of the deteriorating times” type stories, wherein I get to pontificate about how the free-for-all, no insult too depraved, “culture” of the internet has led to yet another sad incident …
…or if it’s a function of the pressures being put on start-ups by the generally shitty global economy, which is starting to incite people into truly depraved acts of violence…
Yesterday as I was leaving the DLD Conference in Munich, Germany someone walked up to me and quite deliberately spat in my face. Before I even understood what was happening, he veered off into the crowd, just another dark head in a dark suit. People around me stared, then looked away and continued their conversation.
(snip)
Something very few people know: last year over the summer an off balance individual threatened to kill me and my family … Seeing my parents fear for their lives and not understand how or why their son was in this position changed me, made me a much less forgiving person in general.
The Internet is the greatest revolution in democratic practice since popular suffrage. Everyone knows that, and I am just as dependent onthe Internet as anyone else. In the wake of a democratic revolution like that, there’s both an enormous explosion of information and expression, much of it useful or fun, and also an explosion of pent-up rage, social anguish, resentment, bilious, other-annihilating nastiness, prejudice and all the rest of the dark side. If that stuff is destroying conversation threads, screwing up people’s…
…reputations, spreading around unchecked rumor or just snark, it’s worth pointing to it and saying, “Stop lousing up my revolution.” The point of the book is to protect the best kind of humor by criticizing the worst.
Still, the larger point here is one that is important. In all my stops as a New Media consultant in the last few years, the one issue that animates the local reporters/editors the most is the attacks on them by anonymous internet trolls.
Arrington says that:
On any given day, when I care to look, dozens of highly negative comments are made about me, TechCrunch or one of our employees in our
comments, on Twitter, or on blogs or other sites. Some of these are appropriately critical comments on things we can be doing better. But
the majority of comments are among the more horrible things I can imagine a human being say.
Actress Rebecca Schaeffer was murdered by an obsessed fan who tracked her down, showed up at her doorstep, and shot her in the heart.
Even a cursory search confirms that Arrington takes his shots. This is the Dark Side of internet fame. You can see it in the message boards, in the comments section on any YouTube video that reaches a certain level of popularity.
Back in 1989, one of the very first celebrity stories I had to cover in Los Angeles, remains one of the saddest & most disturbing stories. The murder of Rebecca Shaeffer, a lovely young actress by obsessed stalker Robert Bardo. I can see some clear parallels between that case, and the way that online attacks are escalating into offline violence.
This was a murder that really changed things in Los Angeles; the DMV rules were changed so that you could no longer get someone’s address by merely doing a search on DMV records to get the address off their driver’s license. And the Threat Assessment Department of the LAPD was formed, at least in part, in response to this murder.
One of the things that I learned from covering that case (other than that it sucks to be a reporter tasked to go to a funeral and try to get quotes from sobbing family members), is that wackos and obsessed fans follow an escalating behavior pattern. They start making threats, at first rather timidly. As the response to their threats fails to completely shut them down or punish them enough, they then begin to escalate their attack patterns.
The next stage – the one that Arrington is at, I fear – is what the LAPD shrinks called, “the humiliating encounter.” Basically, the stalker has an encounter with the person they are harassing that results in humiliation – either for the victim (they spit on their face) or the stalker (the studio security guards grab him, handcuff him, and frogmarch him off the lot).
In any case, this encounter then becomes the focus of whirling obsession for the next interval. The stalker sits and broods, going over the encounter in his head, over and over again, fantasizing about what he would have done differently, inventing a whole new encounter … only this next one will be far darker, far more violent.
There is going to have to be a fundamental shift in the way conversations are conducted on the internet. If a tech blogger – not someone in the political sphere, where the contentious nature is well-known – has to take a month off & flee to a beach to be able to deal, then clearly, the writing is on the wall.
This paragraph is probably going to become much more important in the years to come:
In California, under the stalking laws passed after this attach, a stalker is defined as “someone who willfully, maliciously and repeatedly follows or harasses another victim and who makes a credible threat with the intent to place the victim or victim’s immediate family in fear of their safety.” There must be at least two incidents to constitute the crime and show a “continuity of purpose” or credible threat.
UPDATE:
Paul Boutin, over at The Industry Standard, says that the hating has been growing for quite a while:
The most common accusation was that TechCrunch sold endorsements of startups, either in exchange for advertising buys on the site, or for outright cash payments.
This is important: None of these claims ever checked out. Sources would claim to know someone who knew something, but these mystery witnesses never showed up to tell their stories to a reporter. Arrington’s success, both as a blog-era publisher/writer and a startup businessman, inflames less successful entrepreneurs and journalists with off-the-scale envy. How does he do that?
Nobody directly involved will admit it, but this is looking more and more like one of the more nasty, yet brilliant, scams of the last couple years. It may have been pulled off by the legendary Nigerian internet scammers, but it’s beginning to look like it may have been the work of a vast leftwing [...] [...more]
Nobody directly involved will admit it, but this is looking more and more like one of the more nasty, yet brilliant, scams of the last couple years. It may have been pulled off by the legendary Nigerian internet scammers, but it’s beginning to look like it may have been the work of a vast leftwing conspiracy with a twisted sense of humor.
It gets complicated, as these things often do, but the core appears to be:
2. Nobody seemed to notice that the API’s headquarters are in Norway.
3. In the weeks leading up to the election, as John McCain’s campaign was trailing smoke and in a steep vertical dive (to use an Air Force-appropriate metaphor), a ragtag bunch of deranged Obama-haters his desperate supporters seized on this story as a last-minute chance to save the U.S. from an Obama presidency, which they had come to believe would be some horrible combination of Stalinist Russia, the Taliban and a San Francisco gay bathhouse, circa 1978.
4. The overheated right-wing blog echo chamber started to scream and yell about the tapes, hoping to spark an uproar.
5. The API started getting erratic in its pronouncements about the tapes, on the one hand demanding money, on the other alleging mysterious dark conspiracies that were preventing the release of the tapes, conspiracies involving shadowy pro-Obama forces.
5. Still believing that these tapes existed, the right-wing blogs started collecting money from their readers to buy the tapes. From the Ace of Spades website:
$20,000 $25,000 Reward for Obama/Ayers/Dohrn/Khalidi Tape
Well, I don’t know if one will step forward. I can guarantee, though, that if the goods are delivered the blogosphere can contribute $20,000. In a matter of hours.
Maybe more. More would depend on the tape.
This offer includes is particularly directed towards Los Angeles Times employees. Maybe ones that just got fired. Or will get fired in the next couple of weeks.
Guaranteed.
Anonymous.
That’s how we roll.
Pretty pathetic that we have to try to bribe “newsmen” to release newsworthy tapes.
If your conscience is troubled, They should have released it anyway.
7. The bidding for the tape reached $150,000. In a move sure to be familiar to anyone who has studied the history of “The Spanish Prisoner,” the price for releasing the tape suddenly escalated to $2 million.
9. I’ll save you a whole bunch of mental consternation & possible suicidal impulses stemming from despair over the human condition, and cut to what I hope is the end of this story: the WordPress blog has been taken down, and the right-wing blogosphere has moved on (mostly) to its next alleged revelations of Obama conspiracies that will exterminate all mankind.
If your head is still spinning a little bit from all this, take a minute and look at some LOLcats or something.
Now then. How is all this relevant to the usual subject around here – New Media, newspapers, journalism? Well, as we debate migrating from the traditional media to a future where all our information comes at us over the Great Big Internet Pipe, I think it’s instructive to recognize that offloading some of the news-gathering & editing duties to the audience (i.e. crowdsourcing, Citizen Journalism, etc.), is not a process entirely free of risk.
Stories like this one were once confined to the utter fringes of our national conversation. Back when I first started working for newspapers, I learned that at least once a week, we’d get a long, somewhat smelly, letter from the local lunatic, ranting & raving about Zionist Occupation Government (“ZOG”) reading his mind with CIA laser beams. The single-spaced typewritten screeds were usually augmented by scrawling in red pen around the margins, in big circles. I’ve since learned that writing in big spirals is one of the warning signs of paranoid-schizophrenia, and in this case, of a person who has stopped taking their meds and is hearing the voices & acting on their instructions.
Unfortunately, as we open up the doors of the media to a more collaborative conversation between reader & journalist, fanatical factions are more easily able to hijack the national discourse, and divert us over into areas that are meaningless, pointless and an utter waste of time. Some would say that that has always been the case – that even in the traditional media’s heyday, we had stupid stories that for one reason or another, rose to the level where we were talking about them because everyone else was talking about them.
And yeah, I know that one of the benefits of the web is that the audience no longer just sits and passively accepts that the information being fed to them is true. That the Citizen Journalists are willing & able to step in to do research to expose fraudsters. That has certainly been the case here.
But this scam was, well, childish and poorly organized. A guy in Norway claiming to run an African news agency making wild claims? Already the red flags were waving.
However, if a much more well-funded and intelligent organization were to set out to concoct a Big Lie, and to use the low barriers to entry that the web offers to storylines, memes, etc., to deceive the public … how would we know? And if this organization were smart enough, and good enough at using SEO and other tools to bury and discredit its critics and their objections, what then?
One of the key moments in “Colors” came when “Pacman,” the young hothead cop (Sean Penn) was incorrectly identified as the guy that mistakenly shot an innocent black kid during a raid gone wrong. The word came down that the gangs, in retaliation, had “green-lit” Pacman for a retaliation payback assassination. The other gang strike [...] [...more]
One of the key moments in “Colors” came when “Pacman,” the young hothead cop (Sean Penn) was incorrectly identified as the guy that mistakenly shot an innocent black kid during a raid gone wrong. The word came down that the gangs, in retaliation, had “green-lit” Pacman for a retaliation payback assassination.
The other gang strike force cops protested that it wasn’t Pacman that had done the bad, stupid shooting – it was actually a cop who was Pacman’s enemy, and that they should tell the gangs the truth.
What does this 20-year-old gang movie have to do with the much-maligned Republican vice-presidential candidate? Well, stick with me here.
After watching Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live, and in the interviews airing this week on NBC, it’s becoming increasingly clear that she’s not a complete and total doofus. Yeah, maybe she’s not a total policy wonk, able to spout off the import-export stats on Burkina Faso off the top of her head, but she’s clearly not as bad as her public image would lead you to believe.
She can talk coherently, when she’s not so over-coached and micro-managed – it’s the panicking handlers’ fault that she comes off as a malfunctioning robot, spouting nonsensical phrases. She’s never going to be one of our leading governmental minds, never going to have a memorial dedicated to her next to Jefferson or Lincoln … but she’s also not quite the drooling, babbling dimwit she appears to be.
It’s also clear that that doesn’t matter.
Palin arrived on the scene, basically a blank slate, tabula rasa. The rollout of this new product at the GOP convention was greeted with a lot of fanfare – and initial euphoria.
In product marketing terms, the packaging was great.
The problem was that McCain’s handlers had nothing prepared beyond the initial product rollout. Big initial marketing push, lots of glitz & glamor, the American people take the product into their homes …
…and that’s when the troubles began.
See, they really hadn’t thought this whole thing through. They hadn’t prepared for what was going to come next. In much the same way that the invasion of Iraq was botched because nobody who was (allegedly) in charge stopped to ask, “And then what? After we destroy the Iraqi army and take over the country … then what? What’s going to happen next?”
In retrospect, this all becomes sickeningly clear.
Again, in product terms – the American people took this into their homes and tried to figure out what made it tick. The media, doing their jobs, tried to figure out what this newcomer to the scene was all about. And, in response, the Republican party had prepared … nothing.
You’d think they’d have the equivalent of what NBC does for the Olympics for the athletes – little pre-shot segments of the athlete at home, in training, interviews with family and coaches talking about the dedication that was needed for this underdog athlete to brave the odds and pursue her dreams… c’mon, you can see this in your mind’s eye already, right? All leading to a flatteringly lit scene with the athlete sitting in a loveseat with her adoring husband in front of a cozy fireplace, talking about the day she almost succumbed to her self-doubts, but (choking up a bit here), her faith in herself and the support of her family (stifled sob) carried her through…
If that had happened in the three weeks after Palin was introduced to us, we’d be having a completely different conversation about this election right now.
This pretty much sealed it. Palin’s image is now cemented. She’s a doofus who, along with her fellow odious doofus, George W. Bush, is costing McCain his shot at the presidency.
It doesn’t matter anymore if she’s not what we think she is. In much the same way that it no longer matters whether or not Al Gore invented the internet, or Dick Cheney personally subjects prisoners to torture.
We think they do, so they do.
A lot of this damage was caused by the ham-handed way the McCain campaign dealt with the New Media. They’ve been late to that party this entire campaign. I don’t know if that’s because McCain doesn’t understand this medium, doesn’t care, or if the handlers that were so adept at playing the media back in ’04 have gotten fat & lazy with their successes.
And yeah – the selection of Palin without having a plan to deal with What Comes Next is indeed an indictment of McCain and his decision-making process (one of the key objections that just won’t go away). Snap decisions that later wind up being disastrous? I think we’ve had just about enough of them these last eight years…
In the movie Colors, Pacman is saved only because a prisoner rats out the plot to kill him, and the gangs attention then turns to silencing the rat. I don’t see any possible equivalent on the horizon that can save Palin, particularly in light of the recent revelations about her shopping habits, the cost of her makeup person, the fact that she and her husband are having to testify under oath today in “Troopergate,” and damn, just about everything else. Her image has been set, the die is cast, and from this point forward, all information that comes out that affirms our collective perception of Palin as a moron will get accepted and spread around, while contrary information is buried under the weight of all the “Can you believe what just came out of her mouth this time?”
Oh yeah – for safety’s sake – here’s the segment from Colors that I linked to above – damn YouTube links have been kinda sketchy lately. Enjoy the cheesy party scene. I can’t figure out if the redheaded kid is Carrot Top, or the villain from “Children of the Corn.” Both?
Still up in lovely Point Reyes, decompessing and re-imagining our web presence, so the output here has been seriously cramped. However, these three little items just beg for notice. 1. We’ve all seen the “MSM sucks, don’t believe what it says” meme gain strength the last few years, flourishing in the fertile soil of talk [...] [...more]
Still up in lovely Point Reyes, decompessing and re-imagining our web presence, so the output here has been seriously cramped. However, these three little items just beg for notice.
1. We’ve all seen the “MSM sucks, don’t believe what it says” meme gain strength the last few years, flourishing in the fertile soil of talk hate radio hosts, and migrating over to the Kos/Firedoglake end of the spectrum. Meanwhile, in the developing world countries that I’ve worked in the last few years, the people react with puzzled frowns to the thought that anyone ever would have any sort of uncritical trust in Big Media. Well, according to the Highway Africa media conference, the 3rd world on the way up countries are starting to really dig the idea of citizen journalists. Which makes sense, because they have the sad history of governments/revolutionaries, as their first act, seizing the TV/radio stations and firebombing the presses.
(snip)
the power of citizen journalism, in its objective and independent approach, is not to be underestimated.
“We need occasions where the actor in society gives us a very good insight on what is going in communities, where journalists cannot be found.
2. Responding to “catastrophic” circulation and ad revenue projections, the OC Register, long known as the dysfunctional family of California journalism (i.e. everyone knows Weird Old Uncle Floyd is not to be trusted around children, but nobody talks about it), is reportedly studying the idea, with intentions of perhaps forming a blue-ribbon committee that will issue non-binding recommendations, of maybe perhaps justalittle changing their format from broadsheet to tabloid.
Will wonders never cease?
Other cost-cutting measure being considered from the team reviews are Monday and Tuesday papers with fewer pages and self-service advertising options. Horne also says the paper may cut back on the number of distribution centers it operates, noting that it recently reduced the outlets from seven to six.
“Studying it and doing it may be two different things,” Horne stressed about the tabloid change and other moves. “Every newspaper needs to study driving down costs
3. And last, for everyone out there who is concerned over those searches that were done … late at night … after a few beers … y’know, just for a hoot … that could be traced back to their IP address …
…well, you only have to worry for nine months rather than 18. As part of their “Pay no attention to the all-seeing man behind the curtain” campaign, Google is reducing the latency of their caches of your searches. They are also supposedly working to “anonymize” the userinfo, although how that’s supposed to help when all Google search&response data goes thru the big computers at the NSA anyway is beyond me.
(Note to all NSA, FBI, ATF & IRS functionaries now tracking me: Just joking. Heh. Really. I have nothing to hide. I’m happy that the government is vigilant against evildoers of all stripes, foreign and domestic. Go Team America!)
Nicole Wong, Google’s deputy general counsel, told a meeting of computer industry privacy experts at Microsoft Corp’s Silicon Valley offices that her company planned to “anonymize” the computer addresses of its users more quickly.
“We’re significantly shortening our previous 18-month retention policy to address regulatory concerns and to take another step to improve privacy for our users,” Google officials said in a blog post released Monday night.
(snip)
….until a year-and-a-half ago, Google had kept personally identifiable information about its Web users on company computers for an indefinite amount of time.
Because surfing the Internet is like drinking from a firehose, David LaFontaine braves the torrent to tell you what trends and technologies to gulp down, swirl in your mouth, or spit out.
