Aug 19 2008 09:21 - [perm]
trolling in the nytimes! they define lulz
excerpted: 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.
Why inflict anguish on a helpless stranger? It’s tempting to blame technology, which increases the range of our communications while dehumanizing the recipients. Cases like An Hero and Megan Meier presumably wouldn’t happen if the perpetrators had to deliver their messages in person. But while technology reduces the social barriers that keep us from bedeviling strangers, it does not explain the initial trolling impulse. This seems to spring from something ugly — a destructive human urge that many feel but few act upon, the ambient misanthropy that’s a frequent ingredient of art, politics and, most of all, jokes. There’s a lot of hate out there, and a lot to hate as well.
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.
That the Internet is now capacious enough to host an entire subculture of users who enjoy undermining its founding values is yet another symptom of its phenomenal success. It may not be a bad thing that the least-mature users have built remote ghettos of anonymity where the malice is usually intramural. But how do we deal with cases like An Hero, epilepsy hacks and the possibility of real harm being inflicted on strangers?
Aug 17 2008 09:55 - [perm]
discover magazine - teleportation? very possible. next up: time travel
Aug 15 2008 15:02 - [perm]
Olympic diving camera uses fantastic new discovery, "Gravity", to stay in time with the diver.
Aug 14 2008 10:36 - [perm]
Cockeyed.com Presents: You Found My Money!
Aug 13 2008 17:18 - [perm]
Don't Do What Your Users Say To Do
a wonderful usability testing story that applies to anyone building things for a client
Aug 11 2008 16:36 - [perm]
consbreastution - use google to see who made really poor word filters using find and replace
buttbuttination is also a good one
Aug 11 2008 16:00 - [perm]
heading to the dark knight imax experience, its a big screen, just not a full imax screen, not like the one at the space center
watched gotham knight last night, so i'm all kindsa amped
--
must see the dark knight again, it was brilliant, paced just like a comic book, loved the quick wrap-up because it just leads to the story going on and on and on
i keep almost going to the regular theater and then saying, no must wait until we can make the journey to the imax, once on a crappy screen was enough
--
batman begins bluray special edition is awesome. i'm loving the popup menu feature though i was confused at first when it just started playing and menu button said "operation not supported"... though an accidental press of the square button on the ps3 remote and i was all better.
the commentary track with pop in video balloons showing talking heads and behind the scenes shots was spectacular and the first 6 minutes of dark knight in hd really gets me jazzed, just 10 more days!
--
we totally use xml files to load all our data into our flash sites... waiting on you google, are you just gonna grab 'em? are you going to figure out how to play nice? are you going to give away everybody's media files just because they load them somewhere in their flash file? strange business is afoot...
--
when oh when can we really end support for IE6, i envy you 37signals!
archive