Mother Jones
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If you’ve ever read anything on the internet, chances are you’ve encountered a troll. No, not the kind that live under bridges, or the ones with a shock of neon hair. We’re talking about those annoying commenters who get their kicks by riling people up as much as possible. But have you ever wondered who these people really are? Well, we found out.
Internet researchers at George Mason University recently found that when it comes to online commenting, throwing bombs gets more attention than being nice, and makes readers double down on their preexisting beliefs. What’s more, trolls create a false sense that a topic is more controversial than it really is. Witness the overwhelming consensus on climate change amongst scientists—97 percent agreement that global warming is real, and caused by humans. But that doesn’t settle the question for Twitter addict and Climate Desk perennial thorn in the side Hoyt Connell:
“If you allow somebody to make a comment and there’s no response, then they’re controlling the definition of the statement,” Hoyt says. “Then it can become a truth.”
We first encountered Hoyt, or as we know him, @hoytc55, several months ago on our Twitter page, taking us to task for our climate coverage. And the screed hasn’t stopped since: In April alone, Hoyt mentioned us on Twitter some 126 times, almost as much as our top nine other followers combined. So we did the only thing we knew how to do: track him down, meet him face to face…and ask a few questions of our own. So we did, in Episode One: Trollus Maximus (above).
Episode Two: The Troll Slayer: Some online commenters are silent, watching from the wings, what internet researchers call “lurkers.” Not Rosi Reed, a 34-year-old nuclear physicist at the Large Hadron Collider and long-time internet truth crusader, who goes by the nom de guerre PhysicsGirl.
Finally, we launched an experiment: Episode Three: The Showdown. What if the trolls and the troll slayers met face to face and talked it out, analog-style (or as close as we can get with Google Hangout)? For all their differences, Hoyt and Rosi have one thing in common: They aren’t cowards. They agreed to square off in a debate about online commenting, climate change, and what defines truth in the digital age.
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Mother Jones
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Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors and the private space travel company SpaceX, has parted ways with FWD.us, the tech-centric political group that Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg launched last month. So, too, has investor and entrepreneur David Sacks, who created the social network Yammer and financed the satiric 2005 movie Thank You for Smoking. The tech news website AllThingsD first reported the departures of Musk and Sacks, and their names have been removed from the list of nearly two-dozen “major contributors” to FWD.us.
Zuckerberg and Facebook “Causes” creator Joe Green founded FWD.us to lobby on behalf of Silicon Valley firms in Washington. They quickly earned the endorsements of a host of other tech superstars. The group—which, as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, does not have to disclose its donors—has reportedly raised more than $25 million so far. The group chose the ongoing fight over comprehensive immigration reform as its first foray into Congressional politics, seeking to expand the number of visas available to engineers and other high-skilled workers that tech companies would like to recruit. By all accounts, FWD.us’ message has gotten a warm reception on Capitol Hill.
But the group caused a political firestorm recently when it ran TV advertisements praising Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska) for supporting more oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve. Another ad depicted Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) criticizing Obamacare and President Obama’s refusal (so far) to green-light the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. FWD.us ran the ads to give Begich and Graham some political cover on immigration reform, the theory being that by touting the senators’ conservative bona fides, they could give them the space to take a moderate position on an immigration reform bill. The Begich and Graham ads ran for a week and are no longer on the air. Liberal and environmental groups reacted furiously to FWD.us’ conservative and anti-environmental message, protesting at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. And last week, nine progressive groups, including MoveOn.org, Progressives United, the Sierra Club, and Daily Kos, pledged to pull down their existing paid Facebook ads or cancel future ad buys for at least two weeks.
It’s not surprising that Musk would break with FWD.us. Tesla Motors builds high-end electric cars; its entire business model is built around a clean-tech economy. Musk also sits on the board of SolarCity, a company that delivers, installs, and maintains solar panels powering homes, businesses, and government offices.
Musk sent this statement to AllThingsD: “I agreed to support Fwd.us because there is a genuine need to reform immigration. However, this should not be done at the expense of other important causes. I have spent a lot of time fighting far larger lobbying organizations in DC and believe that the right way to win on a cause is to argue the merits of that cause. This statement may surprise some people, but my experience is that most (not all) politicians and their staffs want to do the right thing and eventually do.”
FWD.us spokeswoman Kate Hansen emailed this statement to Mother Jones: “We recognize that not everyone will always agree with or be pleased by our strategy—and we’re grateful for the continued support of our dedicated founders and major contributors. FWD.us remains totally committed to supporting a bipartisan policy agenda that will boost the knowledge economy, including comprehensive immigration reform.”
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Electric Car Guru Elon Musk Ditches Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us Group
Mother Jones
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Mark Fiore is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and animator whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, and dozens of other publications. He is an active member of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, and has a website featuring his work.
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WATCH: Apple Doesn’t Evade Taxes, It iEvades Them Fiore Cartoon
Mother Jones
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This spring, with millions of kids across the United States participating in sports leagues and other activities, coaches and harried parents are turning to social sharing websites to keep everything running smoothly. The most popular option is Shutterfly, which boasted around 5 million visitors per month as of March 2012. Shutterfly’s free “Team” service allows users (which includes anyone over 13) to upload photos of kids, home addresses, emails, gender information, phone numbers, school names, jersey numbers, and game schedules—all in one place. The American Youth Soccer Organization (AYSO) has a partnership with Shutterfly, and coaches actively encourage parents and coaches from over 50,000 soccer teams to utilize the service.
But there’s a catch: Even though Shutterfly’s privacy policy claims that the whole site is protected with SSL—a strong form of Internet security used to prevent websites from being hacked into—it isn’t actually using the encryption for much of the website, including the team pages that contain detailed information on the kids. While plenty of sites across the web don’t use this extra security, it’s more worrisome for a large social sharing site not to do so, especially one that features kids’ sensitive data. (Facebook, Twitter, and Google all use SSL, as do banks and many sites that conduct credit card transactions.)
Emails from representatives for Shutterfly, obtained by Mother Jones, show that the photo-sharing company has been aware of the problem for at least six months, but hasn’t taken action to fix it, nor asked users to remove their kids’ information from the site. That means that sensitive information about children can be easily obtained by anyone with basic tech skills, a quick download of a program called “Cookie Cadger,” and a computer with the right equipment.
“I was an AYSO coach for my younger son last fall, and I went to a coach training session where I was given a flyer about how to set up a Shutterfly account for my team,” says Tony Porterfield, who is also a technical lead engineer for Cisco in Los Altos, California. “So I went on, I set up a roster, and then I realized right away that there was no SSL security. I couldn’t believe it. I thought: ‘We’re protecting our credit cards, but we’re not protecting our kids?'”​
Eteamz, which claimed “at least several million members” as of 2008, is another social sharing site catering to youth sports teams that doesn’t use SSL across its entire site, also in apparent contradiction to its privacy policy. And TeamSnap, which has about 2 million users, two thirds of which are children, didn’t use SSL across much of its website until being contacted by Mother Jones on May 2. At that point the company moved swiftly to encrypt most pages containing sensitive personal information, though some pages on the site remain vulnerable.
As you’ll see in our following video demo, Porterfield used a computer to set up fake accounts on these websites. Then, with very little technical know-how needed, Porterfield was able to use another computer to download a program called Cookie Cadger and hack into these fake pages with just a few keystrokes. He was able to view and tamper with hypothetically sensitive information—such as home addresses and team schedules—as well as add his email to the team mailing lists to get updates on the whereabouts of the kids. (We’ve blurred and left out key steps in this process in the video.)
“We are aware of this issue and are actively working on a technology solution,” says Gretchen Sloan, a spokesperson for Shutterfly. “In the meantime, we recommend users avoid sending or receiving sensitive information over unsecured Wi-Fi networks.”
Dave DuPont, a spokesman for TeamSnap, said: “The security of any computer system hinges not on any single tool or element, but on a systemic approach to protecting all data, which we steadfastly employ. We’ve since expanded SSL encryption to the Roster and Photo pages, and it is a solid complement to TeamSnap data security strategy.”
A spokesperson for Eteamz declined to comment.
To understand how easy it is to break into a website without SSL security, it helps to know what SSL is. SSL (which stands for Secure Sockets Layer) is protocol that provides assurance that a site is legitimate, that the connection to the site hasn’t been modified by a hacker, and that no one is intercepting information flowing between the user and the site. Secure website addresses will start with “https” instead of “http.” When a website doesn’t use SSL, cookies—the small pieces of data that store your username and password—are not secure and can easily be obtained by a hacker, whose computer can “grab” the cookies over an open wi-fi network.
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How Shutterfly and Other Social Sites Leave Your Kids Vulnerable to Hackers
Mother Jones
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“We are not talking about things that will look like an army of Terminators,” Steve Goose, a spokesman for the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, tells me. “Stealth bombers and armored vehicles—not Terminators.” Goose, the director of Human Rights Watch’s arms division, has been working with activists and other experts to demand an international ban on robotic military weapons capable of eliminating targets without the aid of human interaction or intervention, i.e., killer robots.
The bluntly titled campaign, which at sounds like something from a Michael Bay flick or Austin Powers, involves nine organizations, including the International Committee for Robot Arms Control. The campaign is spearheading a preemptive push against efforts to develop and potentially deploy fully autonomous killer robots—a form of hi-tech weaponry that doesn’t actually exist yet.
“I’m not against autonomous robots—my vacuum is an autonomous robot,” says Noel Sharkey, a professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield and chair of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (and a fixture on British television). “We are simply calling for a prohibition on the kill function on such robots. A robot doesn’t have moral agency, and can’t be held accountable for crimes. There’s no way to punish a robot.”
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Mother Jones
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Darryl W. Perry says he’s running for president in 2016 as a libertarian, and he’s pledging to be the first White House hopeful to accept Bitcoin, the online currency currently en vogue in tech and libertarian circles.
Bitcoin appeals to libertarians who are skeptical of the Federal Reserve and other central banking institutions. As Jim Harper, the director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, recently told Mother Jones, “There are types like me, libertarian gold-buggish folks,” for whom “inflation is a constant worry” and who “see the cryptography in Bitcoin as insulation against inflation.” The US Libertarian Party accepts Bitcoin donations on its website, and the Libertarian Party of Canada joined the Bitcoin bandwagon in March.
Perry laid out his decision to accept Bitcoin in a recent open letter to the Federal Election Commission, the nation’s beleaguered elections watchdog. The Darryl W. Perry for President campaign, he said, will not accept any donations “in currencies recognized by the federal legal tender laws.” The only currencies going into Perry’s campaign war chest are Bitcoin, Litecoin (another online currency), and precious metals. “I am attempting to put into practice a belief that I hold that we should get rid of the Federal Reserve, which is a central bank,” he recently explained. “And unlike some who want to get rid of the Fed, I don’t want the government stepping in to fill the void.”
Believe it or not, refusing to accept actual money may not be Perry’s biggest obstacle to running for president. Unlike the Libertarian Party, Perry disavows the very existence of the FEC and denies its authority to regulate campaigns. Perry says he will not file any paperwork with the commission establishing his presidential campaign, nor will he disclose whom his bitcoin/litecoin/gold contributors are or how he spends their money. He ends his letter by writing, “I intend this to be the last communication I have with this commission as part of my campaign.”
How serious is Perry’s candidacy? His website is, well, far from inspiring, and there’s one brief mention of him on the US Libertarian Party’s website. But he’s nonetheless one of the early Bitcoin adopters in politics, following candidates in North Dakota, Vermont, and New Hampshire who decided to accept the online currency. Provided Bitcoin doesn’t bottom out in the months or years ahead—the price of a Bitcoin is vulnerable to wild swings, evidenced by a 60-percent drop a few weeks ago, quickly shedding $115 in value—I wouldn’t be surprised to see more libertarian types embrace Bitcoin donations.
Therein lies a challenge: Explaining Bitcoin to the average voter is hard enough. If the FEC ever tried to regulate it, well, good luck.
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This Libertarian Presidential Hopeful Wants Your Bitcoin Donations
Mother Jones
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On Monday, three days after Boston police arrested 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in connection with the Boston Marathon bombings, Reddit general manager Erik Martin issued an apology. It had not been the best of weeks for his online community. Law enforcement officials had explained that one of their motivations for releasing surveillance camera footage of the Tsarnaev brothers was to put an end to the wild speculation on sites like Reddit, where anyone with a backpack was being floated as a possible suspect. Redditors never came close to identifying the Tsarnaevs, instead casting their suspicions on a missing Brown University student named Sunil Tripathi. (Tripathi was found dead in the Providence River on Thursday morning.)
Martin was contrite. “Some of the activity on reddit fueled online witch hunts and dangerous speculation which spiraled into very negative consequences for innocent parties,” he wrote, referring to a smaller sub-community, or subreddit, on his site that was devoted to catching the Boston bombers. “The reddit staff and the millions of people on reddit around the world deeply regret that this happened.”
Redditors have, for years, worked to use the resources of crowds as a force for good. There’s an entire subreddit dedicated to Redditors ordering pizzas for families and raising money for surgeries. But Boston represents a reality check. Can Reddit harness its greatest asset—the tireless brainstorming of millions—while reining in the speculative impulse that makes the site tick? And even if Reddit could solve crimes, would it be worth it?
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The Internet Is Actually Surprisingly Good at Fighting Crime
Mother Jones
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Tens of thousands of people were tracking the manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombing suspects on Friday morning when the police scanner went dark.* City officials had taken to Twitter to chide social-media users for publicizing unverified reports and key details, such as the location of police units. But the decision to shut the scanner down ultimately fell to Broadcastify, a company that offers a free online scanner app. “Boston area law enforcement feeds are temporarily offline to protect law enforcement resources and their efforts during the manhunt underway in the Boston Metro area,” a statement on the firm’s website informed users.
p.mininav-header-text background-color: #000000 !importantMore MoJo coverage of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings
How the FBI in Boston May Have Pursued the Wrong “Terrorist”
READ: Here Are the Federal Charges Against Boston Bombing Suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
The 11 Most Mystifying Things the Tsarnaev Brothers Did
What We Know About the Tsarnaev Brothers’ Guns
What These Tweets Tell Us About Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
Stunned Reactions From Former Classmates of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
Did Boston Bombing Suspect Post Al Qaeda Prophecy on YouTube?
Boston Marathon Bombing Suspect Charged With Using WMD
The suspension of the scanner feed was temporary, and by no means comprehensive; it was just a little bit harder to find. But that could soon change. Over the last few years, an increasing number of municipalities have ditched their old scanners for encrypted channels. That, in turn, has left reporters and transparency advocates scrambling to keep up. Given the post-manhunt focus on scanner traffic, Watertown could be the beginning of a big switch. As Breaking News‘ Cory Bergman tweeted, “Safe bet that every major police force in the country will encrypt their radios after this is over.”
Police scanners have been accessible to private citizens and shortwave hobbyists for years, but things have come to a head over the last decade, as technological advancements have made it possible for almost anyone to listen in—and from anywhere.
For now, regulation is fairly weak. In 1997, after a Florida couple secretly recorded a meeting of top House Republicans, Congress considered the Wireless Privacy Enhancement Act, which would have made it illegal for reporters to use scanners to monitor police and fire activity. (The bill passed the House but died in the Senate.) A handful of states, such as Indiana, prohibit the possession of police scanner smartphone apps due to concerns that criminals will use them to better avoid detection when they’re on the run—somewhat redundant, given that it’s already a crime to use police scanner information to aid and abet a crime.
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