Here are a couple fantastic articles (that i will not reproduce here in their entirety, to spare you the scrolling but) that i highly recommend you browse.
First, Why is the Web So Slow? talks about the coming bandwidth crunch, and makes some really great points and analogies. It refers to these also great articles in context: What the 250 Gigabyte Download Cap Means to You, and a Comparison of Bandwidth to Gas, in regards to the industrial age vs. the information age, and telco/oil companies.
And this is a nicely readable 4 page article on the Failing Flight Control Systems in America, and what problems it causes.
Monday, September 08, 2008
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
Hiding Behind the Bushes
There’s a reason that Americans have an idiot for a President.
Every random population is distributed along a bell curve. There are some people in the American population who are very intelligent, thoughtful, and eloquent. There are some who are complete morons. There are people in every country that are complete morons. The average American, like the average person in other countries, isn’t very bright. They are not necessarily less bright than average people in other countries; this is a very important point. They are just average, and it turns out that average is not very bright.
Now here’s the thing: when George Bush comes along and says “I’m just a regular guy, like you,” people don’t think that through the way they could. Even a not-very-bright person could understand that a regular guy, like the average American, is not fit to run the most powerful and complicated economy on the capitalist planet. This is something that used to be understood by people intuitively; no one would have said “Oh that John F. Kennedy, Jr.! I’m just as good as him!” or, “I could do anything George Washington could do!” There used to be an understanding that “Damn, the job of President is hard. Someone smarter than me should probably be taking care of that.” But nowadays, we make a national pastime of creating celebrities out of people with no talents or skills. We create reality TV shows to prove that the people we idolize are at best totally average in every way. But those are the people that are successful, famous, and rich.
Americans also tend to be extremely entitled people. They feel that they deserve things, and those things should be the best. They feel entitled because they feel that they are the best. They feel they deserve people who speak perfect English anywhere they might go, they feel they deserve to get gas at economically impractical prices, etc. etc. That sense of entitlement leads average people to the faulty belief that “Hell yeah! I should get whatever I want! I could be President!” So of course when someone comes along and says, “Hey, I’m just like you!”…you get the picture.
Every random population is distributed along a bell curve. There are some people in the American population who are very intelligent, thoughtful, and eloquent. There are some who are complete morons. There are people in every country that are complete morons. The average American, like the average person in other countries, isn’t very bright. They are not necessarily less bright than average people in other countries; this is a very important point. They are just average, and it turns out that average is not very bright.
Now here’s the thing: when George Bush comes along and says “I’m just a regular guy, like you,” people don’t think that through the way they could. Even a not-very-bright person could understand that a regular guy, like the average American, is not fit to run the most powerful and complicated economy on the capitalist planet. This is something that used to be understood by people intuitively; no one would have said “Oh that John F. Kennedy, Jr.! I’m just as good as him!” or, “I could do anything George Washington could do!” There used to be an understanding that “Damn, the job of President is hard. Someone smarter than me should probably be taking care of that.” But nowadays, we make a national pastime of creating celebrities out of people with no talents or skills. We create reality TV shows to prove that the people we idolize are at best totally average in every way. But those are the people that are successful, famous, and rich.
Americans also tend to be extremely entitled people. They feel that they deserve things, and those things should be the best. They feel entitled because they feel that they are the best. They feel they deserve people who speak perfect English anywhere they might go, they feel they deserve to get gas at economically impractical prices, etc. etc. That sense of entitlement leads average people to the faulty belief that “Hell yeah! I should get whatever I want! I could be President!” So of course when someone comes along and says, “Hey, I’m just like you!”…you get the picture.
Monday, August 25, 2008
A Better Class of Criminal
The whole 'stealing' music thing can be likened to killing a single roach or ant. Yes, in isolation, the act could be seen as 'wrong' (or, more properly, immoral) but in context, it is really, truly inconsequential. There are plenty more where it came from, and the colony is not actually harmed at all by the loss of that single member. In fact, the colony actually depends on both random and purposeful losses like that to shape & direct the colony as a whole.
According to several studies, the people who download are actually the ones who are most responsible for the dissemination of new music and exposing others to bands that they would not otherwise ever hear--bands whose music that they then buy. I wouldn't hang my hat on a study, so I want to point out that even if this is not true, the analogy still holds.
Even with nearly everyone in the world stepping on ants and actively trying to exterminate roaches, the roach and ant populations are doing quite well. In fact, they are doing better than ever, and we are now surrounded by a much higher quality of cockroach than we saw before we started this Red Queen's Race of artificial selection in the first place.
According to several studies, the people who download are actually the ones who are most responsible for the dissemination of new music and exposing others to bands that they would not otherwise ever hear--bands whose music that they then buy. I wouldn't hang my hat on a study, so I want to point out that even if this is not true, the analogy still holds.
Even with nearly everyone in the world stepping on ants and actively trying to exterminate roaches, the roach and ant populations are doing quite well. In fact, they are doing better than ever, and we are now surrounded by a much higher quality of cockroach than we saw before we started this Red Queen's Race of artificial selection in the first place.
Saturday, August 02, 2008
The Trolls Among Us
By Mattathias Schwartz for the NYT, from here
One afternoon in the spring of 2006, for reasons unknown to those who knew him, Mitchell Henderson, a seventh grader from Rochester, Minn., took a .22-caliber rifle down from a shelf in his parents’ bedroom closet and shot himself in the head. The next morning, Mitchell’s school assembled in the gym to begin mourning. His classmates created a virtual memorial on MySpace and garlanded it with remembrances. One wrote that Mitchell was “an hero to take that shot, to leave us all behind. God do we wish we could take it back. . . . ” Someone e-mailed a clipping of Mitchell’s newspaper obituary to MyDeathSpace.com, a Web site that links to the MySpace pages of the dead. From MyDeathSpace, Mitchell’s page came to the attention of an Internet message board known as /b/ and the “trolls,” as they have come to be called, who dwell there.
/b/ is the designated “random” board of 4chan.org, a group of message boards that draws more than 200 million page views a month. A post consists of an image and a few lines of text. Almost everyone posts as “anonymous.” In effect, this makes /b/ a panopticon in reverse — nobody can see anybody, and everybody can claim to speak from the center. The anonymous denizens of 4chan’s other boards — devoted to travel, fitness and several genres of pornography — refer to the /b/-dwellers as “/b/tards.”
Measured in terms of depravity, insularity and traffic-driven turnover, the culture of /b/ has little precedent. /b/ reads like the inside of a high-school bathroom stall, or an obscene telephone party line, or a blog with no posts and all comments filled with slang that you are too old to understand.
Something about Mitchell Henderson struck the denizens of /b/ as funny. They were especially amused by a reference on his MySpace page to a lost iPod. Mitchell Henderson, /b/ decided, had killed himself over a lost iPod. The “an hero” meme was born. Within hours, the anonymous multitudes were wrapping the tragedy of Mitchell’s death in absurdity.
Someone hacked Henderson’s MySpace page and gave him the face of a zombie. Someone placed an iPod on Henderson’s grave, took a picture and posted it to /b/. Henderson’s face was appended to dancing iPods, spinning iPods, hardcore porn scenes. A dramatic re-enactment of Henderson’s demise appeared on YouTube, complete with shattered iPod. The phone began ringing at Mitchell’s parents’ home. “It sounded like kids,” remembers Mitchell’s father, Mark Henderson, a 44-year-old I.T. executive. “They’d say, ‘Hi, this is Mitchell, I’m at the cemetery.’ ‘Hi, I’ve got Mitchell’s iPod.’ ‘Hi, I’m Mitchell’s ghost, the front door is locked. Can you come down and let me in?’ ” He sighed. “It really got to my wife.” The calls continued for a year and a half.
In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word “troll” to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single-topic Usenet groups. The trolls employed what the M.I.T. professor Judith Donath calls a “pseudo-naïve” tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise to the bait. The game was to find out who would see through this stereotypical newbie behavior, and who would fall for it. As one guide to trolldom puts it, “If you don’t fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.”
Today the Internet is much more than esoteric discussion forums. It is a mass medium for defining who we are to ourselves and to others. Teenagers groom their MySpace profiles as intensely as their hair; escapists clock 50-hour weeks in virtual worlds, accumulating gold for their online avatars. Anyone seeking work or love can expect to be Googled. As our emotional investment in the Internet has grown, the stakes for trolling — for provoking strangers online — have risen. Trolling has evolved from ironic solo skit to vicious group hunt.
“Lulz” is how trolls keep score. A corruption of “LOL” or “laugh out loud,” “lulz” means the joy of disrupting another’s emotional equilibrium. “Lulz is watching someone lose their mind at their computer 2,000 miles away while you chat with friends and laugh,” said one ex-troll who, like many people I contacted, refused to disclose his legal identity.
Another troll explained the lulz as a quasi-thermodynamic exchange between the sensitive and the cruel: “You look for someone who is full of it, a real blowhard. Then you exploit their insecurities to get an insane amount of drama, laughs and lulz. Rules would be simple: 1. Do whatever it takes to get lulz. 2. Make sure the lulz is widely distributed. This will allow for more lulz to be made. 3. The game is never over until all the lulz have been had.”
/b/ is not all bad. 4chan has tried (with limited success) to police itself, using moderators to purge child porn and eliminate calls to disrupt other sites. Among /b/’s more interesting spawn is Anonymous, a group of masked pranksters who organized protests at Church of Scientology branches around the world.
But the logic of lulz extends far beyond /b/ to the anonymous message boards that seem to be springing up everywhere. Two female Yale Law School students have filed a suit against pseudonymous users who posted violent fantasies about them on AutoAdmit, a college-admissions message board. 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.
---*---
Jason Fortuny might be the closest thing this movement of anonymous provocateurs has to a spokesman. Thirty-two years old, he works “typical Clark Kent I.T.” freelance jobs — Web design, programming — but his passion is trolling, “pushing peoples’ buttons.” Fortuny frames his acts of trolling as “experiments,” sociological inquiries into human behavior. In the fall of 2006, he posted a hoax ad on Craigslist, posing as a woman seeking a “str8 brutal dom muscular male.” More than 100 men responded. Fortuny posted their names, pictures, e-mail and phone numbers to his blog, dubbing the exposé “the Craigslist Experiment.” This made Fortuny the most prominent Internet villain in America until November 2007, when his fame was eclipsed by the Megan Meier MySpace suicide. Meier, a 13-year-old Missouri girl, hanged herself with a belt after receiving cruel messages from a boy she’d been flirting with on MySpace. The boy was not a real boy, investigators say, but the fictional creation of Lori Drew, the mother of one of Megan’s former friends. Drew later said she hoped to find out whether Megan was gossiping about her daughter. The story — respectable suburban wife uses Internet to torment teenage girl — was a media sensation.
Fortuny’s Craigslist Experiment deprived its subjects of more than just privacy. Two of them, he says, lost their jobs, and at least one, for a time, lost his girlfriend. Another has filed an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit against Fortuny in an Illinois court. After receiving death threats, Fortuny meticulously scrubbed his real address and phone number from the Internet. “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.”
While reporting this article, I did everything I could to verify the trolls’ stories and identities, but I could never be certain. After all, I was examining a subculture that is built on deception and delights in playing with the media. If I had doubts about whether Fortuny was who he said he was, he had the same doubts about me. I first contacted Fortuny by e-mail, and he called me a few days later. “I checked you out,” he said warily. “You seem legitimate.” We met in person on a bright spring day at his apartment, on a forested slope in Kirkland, Wash., near Seattle. He wore a T-shirt and sweat pants, looking like an amiable freelancer on a Friday afternoon. He is thin, with birdlike features and the etiolated complexion of one who works in front of a screen. He’d been chatting with an online associate about driving me blindfolded from the airport, he said. “We decided it would be too much work.”
A flat-screen HDTV dominated Fortuny’s living room, across from a futon prepped with neatly folded blankets. This was where I would sleep for the next few nights. As Fortuny picked up his cat and settled into an Eames-style chair, I asked whether trolling hurt people. “I’m not going to sit here and say, ‘Oh, God, please forgive me!’ so someone can feel better,” Fortuny said, his calm voice momentarily rising. The cat lay purring in his lap. “Am I the bad guy? Am I the big horrible person who shattered someone’s life with some information? No! This is life. Welcome to life. Everyone goes through it. I’ve been through horrible stuff, too.”
“Like what?” I asked. Sexual abuse, Fortuny said. When Jason was 5, he said, he was molested by his grandfather and three other relatives. Jason’s mother later told me, too, that he was molested by his grandfather. The last she heard from Jason was a letter telling her to kill herself. “Jason is a young man in a great deal of emotional pain,” she said, crying as she spoke. “Don’t be too harsh. He’s still my son.”
In the days after the Megan Meier story became public, Lori Drew and her family found themselves in the trolls’ crosshairs. Their personal information — e-mail addresses, satellite images of their home, phone numbers — spread across the Internet. One of the numbers led to a voice-mail greeting with the gleeful words “I did it for the lulz.” Anonymous malefactors made death threats and hurled a brick through the kitchen window. Then came the Megan Had It Coming blog. Supposedly written by one of Megan’s classmates, the blog called Megan a “drama queen,” so unstable that Drew could not be blamed for her death. “Killing yourself over a MySpace boy? Come on!!! I mean yeah your fat so you have to take what you can get but still nobody should kill themselves over it.” In the third post the author revealed herself as Lori Drew.
---*---
This post received more than 3,600 comments. Fox and CNN debated its authenticity. But the Drew identity was another mask. In fact, Megan Had It Coming was another Jason Fortuny experiment. He, not Lori Drew, Fortuny told me, was the blog’s author. After watching him log onto the site and add a post, I believed him. The blog was intended, he says, to question the public’s hunger for remorse and to challenge the enforceability of cyberharassment laws like the one passed by Megan’s town after her death. Fortuny concluded that they were unenforceable. The county sheriff’s department announced it was investigating the identity of the fake Lori Drew, but it never found Fortuny, who is not especially worried about coming out now. “What’s he going to sue me for?” he asked. “Leading on confused people? Why don’t people fact-check who this stuff is coming from? Why do they assume it’s true?”
Fortuny calls himself “a normal person who does insane things on the Internet,” and the scene at dinner later on the first day we spent together was exceedingly normal, with Fortuny, his roommate Charles and his longtime friend Zach trading stories at a sushi restaurant nearby over sake and happy-hour gyoza. Fortuny flirted with our waitress, showing her a cellphone picture of his cat. “He commands you to kill!” he cackled. “Do you know how many I’ve killed at his command?” Everyone laughed.
Fortuny spent most of the weekend in his bedroom juggling several windows on his monitor. One displayed a chat room run by Encyclopedia Dramatica, an online compendium of troll humor and troll lore. It 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.” A few days later, he wrote and posted a guide to safe Web surfing for epileptics.
On Sunday, Fortuny showed me an office building that once housed Google programmers, and a low-slung modernist structure where programmers wrote Halo 3, the best-selling video game. We ate muffins at Terra Bite, a coffee shop founded by a Google employee where customers pay whatever price they feel like. Kirkland seemed to pulse with the easy money and optimism of the Internet, unaware of the machinations of the troll on the hill.
We walked on, to Starbucks. At the next table, middle-schoolers with punk-rock haircuts feasted noisily on energy drinks and whipped cream. Fortuny sipped a white-chocolate mocha. 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.
---*---
On Monday we drove to the mall. I asked Fortuny how he could troll me if he so chose. He took out his cellphone. On the screen was a picture of my debit card with the numbers clearly legible. I had left it in plain view beside my laptop. “I took this while you were out,” he said. He pressed a button. The picture disappeared. “See? I just deleted it.”
The Craigslist Experiment, Fortuny reiterated, brought him troll fame by accident. He was pleased with how the Megan Had It Coming blog succeeded by design. As he described the intricacies of his plan — adding sympathetic touches to the fake classmate, making fake Lori Drew a fierce defender of her own daughter, calibrating every detail to the emotional register of his audience — he sounded not so much a sociologist as a playwright workshopping a set of characters.
“You seem to know exactly how much you can get away with, and you troll right up to that line,” I said. “Is there anything that can be done on the Internet that shouldn’t be done?”
Fortuny was silent. In four days of conversation, this was the first time he did not have an answer ready.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I have to think about it.”
Sherrod DeGrippo, a 28-year-old Atlanta native who goes by the name Girlvinyl, runs Encyclopedia Dramatica, the online troll archive. In 2006, DeGrippo received an e-mail message from a well-known band of trolls, demanding that she edit the entry about them on the Encyclopedia Dramatica site. She refused. Within hours, the aggrieved trolls hit the phones, bombarding her apartment with taxis, pizzas, escorts and threats of rape and violent death. DeGrippo, alone and terrified, sought counsel from a powerful friend. She called Weev.
Weev, the troll who thought hacking the epilepsy site was immoral, is legendary among trolls. He is said to have jammed the cellphones of daughters of C.E.O.’s and demanded ransom from their fathers; he is also said to have trashed his enemies’ credit ratings. Better documented are his repeated assaults on LiveJournal, an online diary site where he himself maintains a personal blog. Working with a group of fellow hackers and trolls, he once obtained access to thousands of user accounts.
I first met Weev in an online chat room that I visited while staying at Fortuny’s house. “I hack, I ruin, I make piles of money,” he boasted. “I make people afraid for their lives.” On the phone that night, Weev displayed a misanthropy far harsher than Fortuny’s. “Trolling is basically Internet eugenics,” he said, his voice pitching up like a jet engine on the runway. “I want everyone off the Internet. Bloggers are filth. They need to be destroyed. Blogging gives the illusion of participation to a bunch of retards. . . . We need to put these people in the oven!”
I listened for a few more minutes as Weev held forth on the Federal Reserve and about Jews. Unlike Fortuny, he made no attempt to reconcile his trolling with conventional social norms. Two days later, I flew to Los Angeles and met Weev at a train station in Fullerton, a sleepy bungalow town folded into the vast Orange County grid. He is in his early 20s with full lips, darting eyes and a nest of hair falling back from his temples. He has a way of leaning in as he makes a point, inviting you to share what might or might not be a joke.
As we walked through Fullerton’s downtown, Weev told me about his day — he’d lost $10,000 on the commodities market, he claimed — and summarized his philosophy of “global ruin.” “We are headed for a Malthusian crisis,” he said, with professorial confidence. “Plankton levels are dropping. Bees are dying. There are tortilla riots in Mexico, the highest wheat prices in 30-odd years.” He paused. “The question we have to answer is: How do we kill four of the world’s six billion people in the most just way possible?” He seemed excited to have said this aloud.
---*---
Ideas like these bring trouble. 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.
We arrived at a strip mall. Out of the darkness, the coffinlike snout of a new Rolls Royce Phantom materialized. A flying lady winked on the hood. “Your bag, sir?” said the driver, a blond kid in a suit and tie.
“This is my car,” Weev said. “Get in.”
And it was, for that night and the next, at least. The car’s plush chamber accentuated the boyishness of Weev, who wore sneakers and jeans and hung from a leather strap like a subway rider. In the front seat sat Claudia, a pretty college-age girl.
I asked about the status of Weev’s campaign against humanity. Things seemed rather stable, I said, even with all this talk of trolling and hacking.
“We’re waiting,” Weev said. “We need someone to show us the way. The messiah.”
“How do you know it’s not you?” I asked.
“If it were me, I would know,” he said. “I would receive a sign.”
Zeno of Elea, Socrates and Jesus, Weev said, are his all-time favorite trolls. He also identifies with Coyote and Loki, the trickster gods, and especially with Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction. “Loki was a hacker. The other gods feared him, but they needed his tools.”
“I was just thinking of Kali!” Claudia said with a giggle.
Over a candlelit dinner of tuna sashimi, Weev asked if I would attribute his comments to Memphis Two, the handle he used to troll Kathy Sierra, a blogger. Inspired by her touchy response to online commenters, Weev said he “dropped docs” on Sierra, posting a fabricated narrative of her career alongside her real Social Security number and address. This was part of a larger trolling campaign against Sierra, one that culminated in death threats. Weev says he has access to hundreds of thousands of Social Security numbers. About a month later, he sent me mine.
Weev, Claudia and I hung out in Fullerton for two more nights, always meeting and saying goodbye at the train station. I met their friend Kate, who has been repeatedly banned from playing XBox Live for racist slurs, which she also enjoys screaming at white pedestrians. Kate checked my head for lice and kept calling me “Jew.” Relations have since warmed. She now e-mails me puppy pictures and wants the names of fun places for her coming visit to New York. On the last night, Weev offered to take me to his apartment if I wore a blindfold and left my cellphone behind. I was in, but Claudia vetoed the idea. I think it was her apartment.
Does free speech tend to move toward the truth or away from it? When does it evolve into a better collective understanding? When does it collapse into the Babel of trolling, the pointless and eristic game of talking the other guy into crying “uncle”? Is the effort to control what’s said always a form of censorship, or might certain rules be compatible with our notions of free speech?
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.
---*---
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?
Several state legislators have recently proposed cyberbullying measures. At the federal level, Representative Linda Sánchez, a Democrat from California, has introduced the Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act, which would make it a federal crime to send any communications with intent to cause “substantial emotional distress.” In June, Lori Drew pleaded not guilty to charges that she violated federal fraud laws by creating a false identity “to torment, harass, humiliate and embarrass” another user, and by violating MySpace’s terms of service. But hardly anyone bothers to read terms of service, and millions create false identities. “While Drew’s conduct is immoral, it is a very big stretch to call it illegal,” wrote the online-privacy expert Prof. Daniel J. Solove on the blog Concurring Opinions.
Many trolling practices, like prank-calling the Hendersons and intimidating Kathy Sierra, violate existing laws against harassment and threats. The difficulty is tracking down the perpetrators. In order to prosecute, investigators must subpoena sites and Internet service providers to learn the original author’s IP address, and from there, his legal identity. Local police departments generally don’t have the means to follow this digital trail, and federal investigators have their hands full with spam, terrorism, fraud and child pornography. But even if we had the resources to aggressively prosecute trolls, would we want to? Are we ready for an Internet where law enforcement keeps watch over every vituperative blog and backbiting comments section, ready to spring at the first hint of violence? Probably not. All vigorous debates shade into trolling at the perimeter; it is next to impossible to excise the trolling without snuffing out the debate.
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. A broader answer is persistent pseudonymity, a system of nicknames that stay the same across multiple sites. This could reduce anonymity’s excesses while preserving its benefits for whistle-blowers and overseas dissenters. 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.”
---*---
Of course, none of these methods will be fail-safe as long as individuals like Fortuny construe human welfare the way they do. As we discussed the epilepsy hack, I asked Fortuny whether a person is obliged to give food to a starving stranger. No, Fortuny argued; no one is entitled to our sympathy or empathy. We can choose to give or withhold them as we see fit. “I can’t push you into the fire,” he explained, “but I can look at you while you’re burning in the fire and not be required to help.” Weeks later, after talking to his friend Zach, Fortuny began considering the deeper emotional forces that drove him to troll. The theory of the green hair, he said, “allows me to find people who do stupid things and turn them around. Zach asked if I thought I could turn my parents around. I almost broke down. 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.”
Weeks before my visit with Fortuny, I had lunch with “moot,” the young man who founded 4chan. After running the site under his pseudonym for five years, he recently revealed his legal name to be Christopher Poole. At lunch, Poole was quick to distance himself from the excesses of /b/. “Ultimately the power lies in the community to dictate its own standards,” he said. “All we do is provide a general framework.” He was optimistic about Robot9000, a new 4chan board with a combination of human and machine moderation. Users who make “unoriginal” or “low content” posts are banned from Robot9000 for periods that lengthen with each offense.
The posts on Robot9000 one morning were indeed far more substantive than /b/. With the cyborg moderation system silencing the trolls, 4chan had begun to display signs of linearity, coherence, a sense of collective enterprise. It was, in other words, robust. The anonymous hordes swapped lists of albums and novels; some had pretty good taste. Somebody tried to start a chess game: “I’ll start, e2 to e4,” which quickly devolved into riffage with moves like “Return to Sender,” “From Here to Infinity,” “Death to America” and a predictably indecent checkmate maneuver.
Shortly after 8 a.m., someone asked this:
“What makes a bad person? Or a good person? How do you know if you’re a bad person?”
Which prompted this:
“A good person is someone who follows the rules. A bad person is someone who doesn’t.”
And this:
“you’re breaking my rules, you bad person”
There were echoes of antiquity:
“good: pleasure; bad: pain”
“There is no morality. Only the right of the superior to rule over the inferior.”
And flirtations with postmodernity:
“good and bad are subjective”
“we’re going to turn into wormchow before the rest of the universe even notices.”
Books were prescribed:
“read Kant, JS Mill, Bentham, Singer, etc. Noobs.”
And then finally this:
“I’d say empathy is probably a factor.”
One afternoon in the spring of 2006, for reasons unknown to those who knew him, Mitchell Henderson, a seventh grader from Rochester, Minn., took a .22-caliber rifle down from a shelf in his parents’ bedroom closet and shot himself in the head. The next morning, Mitchell’s school assembled in the gym to begin mourning. His classmates created a virtual memorial on MySpace and garlanded it with remembrances. One wrote that Mitchell was “an hero to take that shot, to leave us all behind. God do we wish we could take it back. . . . ” Someone e-mailed a clipping of Mitchell’s newspaper obituary to MyDeathSpace.com, a Web site that links to the MySpace pages of the dead. From MyDeathSpace, Mitchell’s page came to the attention of an Internet message board known as /b/ and the “trolls,” as they have come to be called, who dwell there.
/b/ is the designated “random” board of 4chan.org, a group of message boards that draws more than 200 million page views a month. A post consists of an image and a few lines of text. Almost everyone posts as “anonymous.” In effect, this makes /b/ a panopticon in reverse — nobody can see anybody, and everybody can claim to speak from the center. The anonymous denizens of 4chan’s other boards — devoted to travel, fitness and several genres of pornography — refer to the /b/-dwellers as “/b/tards.”
Measured in terms of depravity, insularity and traffic-driven turnover, the culture of /b/ has little precedent. /b/ reads like the inside of a high-school bathroom stall, or an obscene telephone party line, or a blog with no posts and all comments filled with slang that you are too old to understand.
Something about Mitchell Henderson struck the denizens of /b/ as funny. They were especially amused by a reference on his MySpace page to a lost iPod. Mitchell Henderson, /b/ decided, had killed himself over a lost iPod. The “an hero” meme was born. Within hours, the anonymous multitudes were wrapping the tragedy of Mitchell’s death in absurdity.
Someone hacked Henderson’s MySpace page and gave him the face of a zombie. Someone placed an iPod on Henderson’s grave, took a picture and posted it to /b/. Henderson’s face was appended to dancing iPods, spinning iPods, hardcore porn scenes. A dramatic re-enactment of Henderson’s demise appeared on YouTube, complete with shattered iPod. The phone began ringing at Mitchell’s parents’ home. “It sounded like kids,” remembers Mitchell’s father, Mark Henderson, a 44-year-old I.T. executive. “They’d say, ‘Hi, this is Mitchell, I’m at the cemetery.’ ‘Hi, I’ve got Mitchell’s iPod.’ ‘Hi, I’m Mitchell’s ghost, the front door is locked. Can you come down and let me in?’ ” He sighed. “It really got to my wife.” The calls continued for a year and a half.
In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word “troll” to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single-topic Usenet groups. The trolls employed what the M.I.T. professor Judith Donath calls a “pseudo-naïve” tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise to the bait. The game was to find out who would see through this stereotypical newbie behavior, and who would fall for it. As one guide to trolldom puts it, “If you don’t fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.”
Today the Internet is much more than esoteric discussion forums. It is a mass medium for defining who we are to ourselves and to others. Teenagers groom their MySpace profiles as intensely as their hair; escapists clock 50-hour weeks in virtual worlds, accumulating gold for their online avatars. Anyone seeking work or love can expect to be Googled. As our emotional investment in the Internet has grown, the stakes for trolling — for provoking strangers online — have risen. Trolling has evolved from ironic solo skit to vicious group hunt.
“Lulz” is how trolls keep score. A corruption of “LOL” or “laugh out loud,” “lulz” means the joy of disrupting another’s emotional equilibrium. “Lulz is watching someone lose their mind at their computer 2,000 miles away while you chat with friends and laugh,” said one ex-troll who, like many people I contacted, refused to disclose his legal identity.
Another troll explained the lulz as a quasi-thermodynamic exchange between the sensitive and the cruel: “You look for someone who is full of it, a real blowhard. Then you exploit their insecurities to get an insane amount of drama, laughs and lulz. Rules would be simple: 1. Do whatever it takes to get lulz. 2. Make sure the lulz is widely distributed. This will allow for more lulz to be made. 3. The game is never over until all the lulz have been had.”
/b/ is not all bad. 4chan has tried (with limited success) to police itself, using moderators to purge child porn and eliminate calls to disrupt other sites. Among /b/’s more interesting spawn is Anonymous, a group of masked pranksters who organized protests at Church of Scientology branches around the world.
But the logic of lulz extends far beyond /b/ to the anonymous message boards that seem to be springing up everywhere. Two female Yale Law School students have filed a suit against pseudonymous users who posted violent fantasies about them on AutoAdmit, a college-admissions message board. 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.
---*---
Jason Fortuny might be the closest thing this movement of anonymous provocateurs has to a spokesman. Thirty-two years old, he works “typical Clark Kent I.T.” freelance jobs — Web design, programming — but his passion is trolling, “pushing peoples’ buttons.” Fortuny frames his acts of trolling as “experiments,” sociological inquiries into human behavior. In the fall of 2006, he posted a hoax ad on Craigslist, posing as a woman seeking a “str8 brutal dom muscular male.” More than 100 men responded. Fortuny posted their names, pictures, e-mail and phone numbers to his blog, dubbing the exposé “the Craigslist Experiment.” This made Fortuny the most prominent Internet villain in America until November 2007, when his fame was eclipsed by the Megan Meier MySpace suicide. Meier, a 13-year-old Missouri girl, hanged herself with a belt after receiving cruel messages from a boy she’d been flirting with on MySpace. The boy was not a real boy, investigators say, but the fictional creation of Lori Drew, the mother of one of Megan’s former friends. Drew later said she hoped to find out whether Megan was gossiping about her daughter. The story — respectable suburban wife uses Internet to torment teenage girl — was a media sensation.
Fortuny’s Craigslist Experiment deprived its subjects of more than just privacy. Two of them, he says, lost their jobs, and at least one, for a time, lost his girlfriend. Another has filed an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit against Fortuny in an Illinois court. After receiving death threats, Fortuny meticulously scrubbed his real address and phone number from the Internet. “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.”
While reporting this article, I did everything I could to verify the trolls’ stories and identities, but I could never be certain. After all, I was examining a subculture that is built on deception and delights in playing with the media. If I had doubts about whether Fortuny was who he said he was, he had the same doubts about me. I first contacted Fortuny by e-mail, and he called me a few days later. “I checked you out,” he said warily. “You seem legitimate.” We met in person on a bright spring day at his apartment, on a forested slope in Kirkland, Wash., near Seattle. He wore a T-shirt and sweat pants, looking like an amiable freelancer on a Friday afternoon. He is thin, with birdlike features and the etiolated complexion of one who works in front of a screen. He’d been chatting with an online associate about driving me blindfolded from the airport, he said. “We decided it would be too much work.”
A flat-screen HDTV dominated Fortuny’s living room, across from a futon prepped with neatly folded blankets. This was where I would sleep for the next few nights. As Fortuny picked up his cat and settled into an Eames-style chair, I asked whether trolling hurt people. “I’m not going to sit here and say, ‘Oh, God, please forgive me!’ so someone can feel better,” Fortuny said, his calm voice momentarily rising. The cat lay purring in his lap. “Am I the bad guy? Am I the big horrible person who shattered someone’s life with some information? No! This is life. Welcome to life. Everyone goes through it. I’ve been through horrible stuff, too.”
“Like what?” I asked. Sexual abuse, Fortuny said. When Jason was 5, he said, he was molested by his grandfather and three other relatives. Jason’s mother later told me, too, that he was molested by his grandfather. The last she heard from Jason was a letter telling her to kill herself. “Jason is a young man in a great deal of emotional pain,” she said, crying as she spoke. “Don’t be too harsh. He’s still my son.”
In the days after the Megan Meier story became public, Lori Drew and her family found themselves in the trolls’ crosshairs. Their personal information — e-mail addresses, satellite images of their home, phone numbers — spread across the Internet. One of the numbers led to a voice-mail greeting with the gleeful words “I did it for the lulz.” Anonymous malefactors made death threats and hurled a brick through the kitchen window. Then came the Megan Had It Coming blog. Supposedly written by one of Megan’s classmates, the blog called Megan a “drama queen,” so unstable that Drew could not be blamed for her death. “Killing yourself over a MySpace boy? Come on!!! I mean yeah your fat so you have to take what you can get but still nobody should kill themselves over it.” In the third post the author revealed herself as Lori Drew.
---*---
This post received more than 3,600 comments. Fox and CNN debated its authenticity. But the Drew identity was another mask. In fact, Megan Had It Coming was another Jason Fortuny experiment. He, not Lori Drew, Fortuny told me, was the blog’s author. After watching him log onto the site and add a post, I believed him. The blog was intended, he says, to question the public’s hunger for remorse and to challenge the enforceability of cyberharassment laws like the one passed by Megan’s town after her death. Fortuny concluded that they were unenforceable. The county sheriff’s department announced it was investigating the identity of the fake Lori Drew, but it never found Fortuny, who is not especially worried about coming out now. “What’s he going to sue me for?” he asked. “Leading on confused people? Why don’t people fact-check who this stuff is coming from? Why do they assume it’s true?”
Fortuny calls himself “a normal person who does insane things on the Internet,” and the scene at dinner later on the first day we spent together was exceedingly normal, with Fortuny, his roommate Charles and his longtime friend Zach trading stories at a sushi restaurant nearby over sake and happy-hour gyoza. Fortuny flirted with our waitress, showing her a cellphone picture of his cat. “He commands you to kill!” he cackled. “Do you know how many I’ve killed at his command?” Everyone laughed.
Fortuny spent most of the weekend in his bedroom juggling several windows on his monitor. One displayed a chat room run by Encyclopedia Dramatica, an online compendium of troll humor and troll lore. It 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.” A few days later, he wrote and posted a guide to safe Web surfing for epileptics.
On Sunday, Fortuny showed me an office building that once housed Google programmers, and a low-slung modernist structure where programmers wrote Halo 3, the best-selling video game. We ate muffins at Terra Bite, a coffee shop founded by a Google employee where customers pay whatever price they feel like. Kirkland seemed to pulse with the easy money and optimism of the Internet, unaware of the machinations of the troll on the hill.
We walked on, to Starbucks. At the next table, middle-schoolers with punk-rock haircuts feasted noisily on energy drinks and whipped cream. Fortuny sipped a white-chocolate mocha. 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.
---*---
On Monday we drove to the mall. I asked Fortuny how he could troll me if he so chose. He took out his cellphone. On the screen was a picture of my debit card with the numbers clearly legible. I had left it in plain view beside my laptop. “I took this while you were out,” he said. He pressed a button. The picture disappeared. “See? I just deleted it.”
The Craigslist Experiment, Fortuny reiterated, brought him troll fame by accident. He was pleased with how the Megan Had It Coming blog succeeded by design. As he described the intricacies of his plan — adding sympathetic touches to the fake classmate, making fake Lori Drew a fierce defender of her own daughter, calibrating every detail to the emotional register of his audience — he sounded not so much a sociologist as a playwright workshopping a set of characters.
“You seem to know exactly how much you can get away with, and you troll right up to that line,” I said. “Is there anything that can be done on the Internet that shouldn’t be done?”
Fortuny was silent. In four days of conversation, this was the first time he did not have an answer ready.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I have to think about it.”
Sherrod DeGrippo, a 28-year-old Atlanta native who goes by the name Girlvinyl, runs Encyclopedia Dramatica, the online troll archive. In 2006, DeGrippo received an e-mail message from a well-known band of trolls, demanding that she edit the entry about them on the Encyclopedia Dramatica site. She refused. Within hours, the aggrieved trolls hit the phones, bombarding her apartment with taxis, pizzas, escorts and threats of rape and violent death. DeGrippo, alone and terrified, sought counsel from a powerful friend. She called Weev.
Weev, the troll who thought hacking the epilepsy site was immoral, is legendary among trolls. He is said to have jammed the cellphones of daughters of C.E.O.’s and demanded ransom from their fathers; he is also said to have trashed his enemies’ credit ratings. Better documented are his repeated assaults on LiveJournal, an online diary site where he himself maintains a personal blog. Working with a group of fellow hackers and trolls, he once obtained access to thousands of user accounts.
I first met Weev in an online chat room that I visited while staying at Fortuny’s house. “I hack, I ruin, I make piles of money,” he boasted. “I make people afraid for their lives.” On the phone that night, Weev displayed a misanthropy far harsher than Fortuny’s. “Trolling is basically Internet eugenics,” he said, his voice pitching up like a jet engine on the runway. “I want everyone off the Internet. Bloggers are filth. They need to be destroyed. Blogging gives the illusion of participation to a bunch of retards. . . . We need to put these people in the oven!”
I listened for a few more minutes as Weev held forth on the Federal Reserve and about Jews. Unlike Fortuny, he made no attempt to reconcile his trolling with conventional social norms. Two days later, I flew to Los Angeles and met Weev at a train station in Fullerton, a sleepy bungalow town folded into the vast Orange County grid. He is in his early 20s with full lips, darting eyes and a nest of hair falling back from his temples. He has a way of leaning in as he makes a point, inviting you to share what might or might not be a joke.
As we walked through Fullerton’s downtown, Weev told me about his day — he’d lost $10,000 on the commodities market, he claimed — and summarized his philosophy of “global ruin.” “We are headed for a Malthusian crisis,” he said, with professorial confidence. “Plankton levels are dropping. Bees are dying. There are tortilla riots in Mexico, the highest wheat prices in 30-odd years.” He paused. “The question we have to answer is: How do we kill four of the world’s six billion people in the most just way possible?” He seemed excited to have said this aloud.
---*---
Ideas like these bring trouble. 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.
We arrived at a strip mall. Out of the darkness, the coffinlike snout of a new Rolls Royce Phantom materialized. A flying lady winked on the hood. “Your bag, sir?” said the driver, a blond kid in a suit and tie.
“This is my car,” Weev said. “Get in.”
And it was, for that night and the next, at least. The car’s plush chamber accentuated the boyishness of Weev, who wore sneakers and jeans and hung from a leather strap like a subway rider. In the front seat sat Claudia, a pretty college-age girl.
I asked about the status of Weev’s campaign against humanity. Things seemed rather stable, I said, even with all this talk of trolling and hacking.
“We’re waiting,” Weev said. “We need someone to show us the way. The messiah.”
“How do you know it’s not you?” I asked.
“If it were me, I would know,” he said. “I would receive a sign.”
Zeno of Elea, Socrates and Jesus, Weev said, are his all-time favorite trolls. He also identifies with Coyote and Loki, the trickster gods, and especially with Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction. “Loki was a hacker. The other gods feared him, but they needed his tools.”
“I was just thinking of Kali!” Claudia said with a giggle.
Over a candlelit dinner of tuna sashimi, Weev asked if I would attribute his comments to Memphis Two, the handle he used to troll Kathy Sierra, a blogger. Inspired by her touchy response to online commenters, Weev said he “dropped docs” on Sierra, posting a fabricated narrative of her career alongside her real Social Security number and address. This was part of a larger trolling campaign against Sierra, one that culminated in death threats. Weev says he has access to hundreds of thousands of Social Security numbers. About a month later, he sent me mine.
Weev, Claudia and I hung out in Fullerton for two more nights, always meeting and saying goodbye at the train station. I met their friend Kate, who has been repeatedly banned from playing XBox Live for racist slurs, which she also enjoys screaming at white pedestrians. Kate checked my head for lice and kept calling me “Jew.” Relations have since warmed. She now e-mails me puppy pictures and wants the names of fun places for her coming visit to New York. On the last night, Weev offered to take me to his apartment if I wore a blindfold and left my cellphone behind. I was in, but Claudia vetoed the idea. I think it was her apartment.
Does free speech tend to move toward the truth or away from it? When does it evolve into a better collective understanding? When does it collapse into the Babel of trolling, the pointless and eristic game of talking the other guy into crying “uncle”? Is the effort to control what’s said always a form of censorship, or might certain rules be compatible with our notions of free speech?
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.
---*---
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?
Several state legislators have recently proposed cyberbullying measures. At the federal level, Representative Linda Sánchez, a Democrat from California, has introduced the Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act, which would make it a federal crime to send any communications with intent to cause “substantial emotional distress.” In June, Lori Drew pleaded not guilty to charges that she violated federal fraud laws by creating a false identity “to torment, harass, humiliate and embarrass” another user, and by violating MySpace’s terms of service. But hardly anyone bothers to read terms of service, and millions create false identities. “While Drew’s conduct is immoral, it is a very big stretch to call it illegal,” wrote the online-privacy expert Prof. Daniel J. Solove on the blog Concurring Opinions.
Many trolling practices, like prank-calling the Hendersons and intimidating Kathy Sierra, violate existing laws against harassment and threats. The difficulty is tracking down the perpetrators. In order to prosecute, investigators must subpoena sites and Internet service providers to learn the original author’s IP address, and from there, his legal identity. Local police departments generally don’t have the means to follow this digital trail, and federal investigators have their hands full with spam, terrorism, fraud and child pornography. But even if we had the resources to aggressively prosecute trolls, would we want to? Are we ready for an Internet where law enforcement keeps watch over every vituperative blog and backbiting comments section, ready to spring at the first hint of violence? Probably not. All vigorous debates shade into trolling at the perimeter; it is next to impossible to excise the trolling without snuffing out the debate.
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. A broader answer is persistent pseudonymity, a system of nicknames that stay the same across multiple sites. This could reduce anonymity’s excesses while preserving its benefits for whistle-blowers and overseas dissenters. 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.”
---*---
Of course, none of these methods will be fail-safe as long as individuals like Fortuny construe human welfare the way they do. As we discussed the epilepsy hack, I asked Fortuny whether a person is obliged to give food to a starving stranger. No, Fortuny argued; no one is entitled to our sympathy or empathy. We can choose to give or withhold them as we see fit. “I can’t push you into the fire,” he explained, “but I can look at you while you’re burning in the fire and not be required to help.” Weeks later, after talking to his friend Zach, Fortuny began considering the deeper emotional forces that drove him to troll. The theory of the green hair, he said, “allows me to find people who do stupid things and turn them around. Zach asked if I thought I could turn my parents around. I almost broke down. 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.”
Weeks before my visit with Fortuny, I had lunch with “moot,” the young man who founded 4chan. After running the site under his pseudonym for five years, he recently revealed his legal name to be Christopher Poole. At lunch, Poole was quick to distance himself from the excesses of /b/. “Ultimately the power lies in the community to dictate its own standards,” he said. “All we do is provide a general framework.” He was optimistic about Robot9000, a new 4chan board with a combination of human and machine moderation. Users who make “unoriginal” or “low content” posts are banned from Robot9000 for periods that lengthen with each offense.
The posts on Robot9000 one morning were indeed far more substantive than /b/. With the cyborg moderation system silencing the trolls, 4chan had begun to display signs of linearity, coherence, a sense of collective enterprise. It was, in other words, robust. The anonymous hordes swapped lists of albums and novels; some had pretty good taste. Somebody tried to start a chess game: “I’ll start, e2 to e4,” which quickly devolved into riffage with moves like “Return to Sender,” “From Here to Infinity,” “Death to America” and a predictably indecent checkmate maneuver.
Shortly after 8 a.m., someone asked this:
“What makes a bad person? Or a good person? How do you know if you’re a bad person?”
Which prompted this:
“A good person is someone who follows the rules. A bad person is someone who doesn’t.”
And this:
“you’re breaking my rules, you bad person”
There were echoes of antiquity:
“good: pleasure; bad: pain”
“There is no morality. Only the right of the superior to rule over the inferior.”
And flirtations with postmodernity:
“good and bad are subjective”
“we’re going to turn into wormchow before the rest of the universe even notices.”
Books were prescribed:
“read Kant, JS Mill, Bentham, Singer, etc. Noobs.”
And then finally this:
“I’d say empathy is probably a factor.”
Sunday, July 20, 2008
I Fucking Hate Spiderman
Allow me to just say that Doc Ock from Spiderman 2 is one of the most ridiculous villains of all time, not to mention insulting to anyone that has any knowledge of contemporary science. His 4 tentacle-arms, ostensibly designed simply to help him contain a plasma to allow sustained nuclear fusion, contain at least half a dozen technological achievements that are infinitely more significant than simple cold fusion.
1) The AI that is built into each arm is not only itself miles ahead of anything that we are even close to with modern computer science, but it fits into a negligibly sized, well-shielded space within the design of a fully functional prehensile tentacle. They are also incredibly fast, able to make independent decisions and function many times quicker than biological musculature.
2) The tentacles themselves are far ahead of the most theoretical work in materials science. Not only are they fully articulated, flexible and extensible in every dimension, and capable of lifting many tons each, but they are also made of a super hard substance that is practically indestructible and impervious to damage, including the incredibly high temperature, radiation, and wildly fluctuating magnetic fields associated with a fusion reaction not unlike what goes on at the core of the sun. We can’t even design a spacecraft that can survive on the surface of Venus for more than about 50 minutes.
3) The interface with Doc Ock himself is something that has not yet been even postulated as possible in the future of man-machine interfaces. It connects to his spine, yet has access to higher brain functions without even mating with the cortex in any way. It is also strong enough to actually serve as a point from which the Doc’s entire (considerable) weight can be dangled without any discomfort or damage, despite looking surprisingly unobtrusive and delicate.
4) The fact that the interface is so perfect that it can alter personality traits, perform higher order calculations and original thinking, and suppress host memories and willpower apparently without the host even being fully aware of what’s going on until the control is withdrawn. Talk about military, intelligence, and general governmental applications if such technology became possible.
5) The “neural inhibitor chip” built into the base of Doc Ock’s neck that prevents the incredibly advanced AI of each arm from taking over his own brain would be something that every human on Earth would presumably use as soon as it became available (despite the fact that it can be disabled quite simply by a brief electrical pulse that causes no damage whatsoever to the neural tissue of the host or the AI hardware of the arms). The adoption rate of such a technology would put cell phone distribution economics to shame.
6) The power source for the tentacles appears to be arbitrarily compact, portable, and does not need to be recharged within any reasonable amount of time. It can also provide nearly unlimited amounts of power to any point of any arm practically instantaneously. If we had a power source capable of all these things, we wouldn’t need cold fusion.
And those are just the things I can come up with off the top of my head in less than 5 minutes. And that’s just the movie version! The comic version is actually even far more advanced, including the ability to control the arms telepathically from arbitrarily long distances, provide rudimentary sensory feedback back to Doc Ock, and generate 50 mph winds when spun like a fan. I can’t remember if the movie version had laser capabilities, but if so, it would easily be number 7 on the list of fantastic achievements, and lend that much more fantastic-ness to number 6 (the power generator).
All of this was designed by someone who has no formal training in computer programming or design, electrical engineering, or any other relevant field, has made no intermediate steps in his inventions, and managed to keep all of his technological achievements secret, with no one else so much as contributing to his innovations.
The fact is, cold fusion is a problem with technical hurdles that could be overcome within a totally realistic timeframe if the ITER goes online as planned in 2018 for a cost of less than $10b. Compared to any one of the above technologies, it is child’s play. Besides, a fusion reactor that requires the constant, full-time attention of a highly trained and highly surgically modified human (wearing simple goggles) would not be such a windfall in any case. Not to mention the fact that if the “containment” were to fail on such a reaction, the thing would fizzle out rather than posing any real danger; that is a large part of the entire point of using fusion to generate power. The whole problem is that the reaction is not self-sustaining and actually quite difficult to maintain.
And don’t even get me started on Sandman from Spiderman 3. I’ll just go so far as to say that in addition to the very, very obvious technical faults involved, he is pretty pathetic compared to the somewhat similar Doctor Manhattan from Watchmen (which is being adapted into a movie by Zack Snyder of 300, despite Alan Moore’s refusal to have anything to do with the project or even watch the trailer).
1) The AI that is built into each arm is not only itself miles ahead of anything that we are even close to with modern computer science, but it fits into a negligibly sized, well-shielded space within the design of a fully functional prehensile tentacle. They are also incredibly fast, able to make independent decisions and function many times quicker than biological musculature.
2) The tentacles themselves are far ahead of the most theoretical work in materials science. Not only are they fully articulated, flexible and extensible in every dimension, and capable of lifting many tons each, but they are also made of a super hard substance that is practically indestructible and impervious to damage, including the incredibly high temperature, radiation, and wildly fluctuating magnetic fields associated with a fusion reaction not unlike what goes on at the core of the sun. We can’t even design a spacecraft that can survive on the surface of Venus for more than about 50 minutes.
3) The interface with Doc Ock himself is something that has not yet been even postulated as possible in the future of man-machine interfaces. It connects to his spine, yet has access to higher brain functions without even mating with the cortex in any way. It is also strong enough to actually serve as a point from which the Doc’s entire (considerable) weight can be dangled without any discomfort or damage, despite looking surprisingly unobtrusive and delicate.
4) The fact that the interface is so perfect that it can alter personality traits, perform higher order calculations and original thinking, and suppress host memories and willpower apparently without the host even being fully aware of what’s going on until the control is withdrawn. Talk about military, intelligence, and general governmental applications if such technology became possible.
5) The “neural inhibitor chip” built into the base of Doc Ock’s neck that prevents the incredibly advanced AI of each arm from taking over his own brain would be something that every human on Earth would presumably use as soon as it became available (despite the fact that it can be disabled quite simply by a brief electrical pulse that causes no damage whatsoever to the neural tissue of the host or the AI hardware of the arms). The adoption rate of such a technology would put cell phone distribution economics to shame.
6) The power source for the tentacles appears to be arbitrarily compact, portable, and does not need to be recharged within any reasonable amount of time. It can also provide nearly unlimited amounts of power to any point of any arm practically instantaneously. If we had a power source capable of all these things, we wouldn’t need cold fusion.
And those are just the things I can come up with off the top of my head in less than 5 minutes. And that’s just the movie version! The comic version is actually even far more advanced, including the ability to control the arms telepathically from arbitrarily long distances, provide rudimentary sensory feedback back to Doc Ock, and generate 50 mph winds when spun like a fan. I can’t remember if the movie version had laser capabilities, but if so, it would easily be number 7 on the list of fantastic achievements, and lend that much more fantastic-ness to number 6 (the power generator).
All of this was designed by someone who has no formal training in computer programming or design, electrical engineering, or any other relevant field, has made no intermediate steps in his inventions, and managed to keep all of his technological achievements secret, with no one else so much as contributing to his innovations.
The fact is, cold fusion is a problem with technical hurdles that could be overcome within a totally realistic timeframe if the ITER goes online as planned in 2018 for a cost of less than $10b. Compared to any one of the above technologies, it is child’s play. Besides, a fusion reactor that requires the constant, full-time attention of a highly trained and highly surgically modified human (wearing simple goggles) would not be such a windfall in any case. Not to mention the fact that if the “containment” were to fail on such a reaction, the thing would fizzle out rather than posing any real danger; that is a large part of the entire point of using fusion to generate power. The whole problem is that the reaction is not self-sustaining and actually quite difficult to maintain.
And don’t even get me started on Sandman from Spiderman 3. I’ll just go so far as to say that in addition to the very, very obvious technical faults involved, he is pretty pathetic compared to the somewhat similar Doctor Manhattan from Watchmen (which is being adapted into a movie by Zack Snyder of 300, despite Alan Moore’s refusal to have anything to do with the project or even watch the trailer).
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Summer Without The S
Amar is a stutter. It is a false start. It is a moment’s pause, while you think of something important to say. It is a place holder, a meaningless jumble of syllables designed to stall the ears while the mouth gets is bearings. It is the brain’s engine hum, the sound of a hiccup, a misfiring cylinder. Amar is what you say when you don’t have anything else to say. A stumbling block. A hurdle. The starting gate for a race to come. A breaking dam shrugged aside by flood waters. A familiar sound in an unfamiliar soundscape. A thought block. A brain fart. A premature parting of the lips when the tongue is not yet fully dressed. It is a way to say that you don’t have anything to say. It is a cough to clear the throat, an introduction to a new line of thinking, a gathering of thoughts in time for precise expression, a prayer to the gods of correct speech. It is the applause before the magic trick, the dimming of the lights before the show, the dramatic music before the climactic fight scene. Amar is the sound your mind makes when it thinks no one is listening.
Thursday, July 03, 2008
Somewhere else...somewhere cooler
I have become negligent; i don't know when or if i will start posting again, so go check out a much cooler blog: my sister's.
Whim Kit
The graphic at the top changes every week/few weeks, and it is always fun.
Whim Kit
The graphic at the top changes every week/few weeks, and it is always fun.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
For the New Year(s)
Jan 11, 2008: Sweeney Todd [Tim Burton] (Stage Musical)
Jan 18, 2008: Cloverfield [J.J. Abrams]
Jan 24, 2008: Be Kind, Rewind [Michel Gondry]
Feb 08, 2008: In Bruges
Feb 14, 2008: Jumper [Doug Liman]
Feb 15, 2008: The Spiderwick Chronicles [Book Series]
Mar 07, 2008: 10,000 B.C. [Roland Emmerich]
Mar 14, 2008: Horton Hears a Who! [Dr. Seuss] (CGI)
Mar 28, 2008: Wanted [Timur Bekmambetov]
Mar 28, 2008: Run, Fat Boy, Run [David Schwimmer]
March, 2008: Battlestar Galactica Season 4 (Remake) (TV Show)
Apr 25, 2008: Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (Sequel)
May 02, 2008: Iron Man [Jon Favreau] (Comic)
May 09, 2008: Speed Racer [Wachowski Brothers]
May 16, 2008: The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (Sequel) (Book)
Mar 21, 2008: Synecdoche, New York [Charlie Kaufman]
May 16, 2008: Midnight Meat Train [Ryuhei Kitumara/Clive Barker]
May 22, 2008: Indy 4 [Steven Spielberg] (Sequel)
Jun 13, 2008: The Happening [M. Night Shyamalan]
Jun 13, 2008: Hulk 2 (Sequel)
Jun 20, 2008: Get Smart (TV Show)
Jun 27, 2008: Wall-E [Pixar]
Jul 11, 2008: Hellboy II: The Golden Army [Guillermo del Toro/Mike Mignola] (Sequel) (Comic Book)
Jul 18, 2008: The Dark Knight [Christopher Nolan] (Sequel)
Jul 25, 2008: X-Files 2 (TV Show) (Sequel)
Aug 01, 2008: Hellboy 2: The Golden Army (Comic)
Aug 15, 2008: DragonBall (Anime Remake)
Sep 26, 2008: Death Race (Remake)
Oct 03, 2008: Where the Wild Things Are [Maurice Sendak/Spike Jonze] (Live/CGI) (Book)
Nov 21, 2008: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince [J.K.Rowling] (6 - Book)
Dec 25, 2008: Star Trek XI (Prequel) (TV Show Adapt.)
Dec 28, 2008: El Orfanato
Late 2008: Watchmen [Zack Snyder] (Comic)
2008: Futurama 2: The Beast with a Billion Backs
2008: Futurama 3: Bender's Game
2008: Futurama 4: Into the Wild Green Yonder
2008: CJ7 [Stephen Chow]
2008: I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK [Chan-Wook Park]
2008: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead
2008: Franklyn
2008: Burn After Reading [Coen Brothers]
2008: Blood: The Last Vampire [Chris Nahon] (Sequel) (Anime)
2008: Redbelt [David Mamet]
2008: Choke [Chuck Palahniuk]
2008: RocknRolla [Guy Ritchie]
2008: Doomsday [Neil Marshall]
2008: The Box [Richard Kelly]
2008: The Informers [Brett Easton Ellis]
2008: Whiteout (Comic)
2008: Ponyo on a Cliff [Miyazaki/Ghibli]
2008: Paul [Simon Pegg & Nick Frost]
2008: Avatar: The Last Airbender 1 [M. Night Shyamalan] (Trilogy) (TV Cartoon)
2008: The Machine Girl (Japan)
Jan 16, 2009: The Spirit [Will Eisner/Frank Miller] (Comic)
May 01, 2009: The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Sequel)
June 2009: Battle Angel [James Cameron] (Comic) (CGI)
Dec 28, 2009: Avatar [James Cameron]
Summer 2009: Terminator 4 (Sequel/New Trilogy)
2009: Sin City 2: A Dame to Kill For [Frank Miller/Robert Rodriguez] (Comic)
2009: Sin City 3: Hell and Back [Frank Miller/Robert Rodriguez] (Comic)
2009: Ronin [Frank Miller] (Comic)
2009: The Prisoner [Christopher Nolan] (TV Show)
2009: Tintin [Steven Spielberg/Peter Jackson] (CGI) (Trilogy) (Comic)
2009: The Doubtful Guest [Edward Gorey/The Jim Henson Co.] (Comic)
2009: Come Drink With Me [Quentin Tarantino]
2009: The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus [Terry Gilliam]
2009: Magneto [David Goyer] (Prequel) (Comic)
2009: Tortured Souls: Animae Damnatae [Todd Mcfarlane/Clive Barker] (Toy Line)
2009: Splice (Vincenzo Natali)
2009: The Green Hornet (Comic)
2009: Gatchaman (Anime Remake)
2009: The Subtle Knife (Book) (Sequel)
2009: The Rum Diary [Hunter S. Thompson/Bruce Robinson]
2010: Logan's Run (Remake)
2010: Super Max [David Goyer] (Comic {Green Arrow})
2010: Metal Men (Comic)
2010: Justice League of America (MoCap) (Comic)
2010: Shrek 4 (Sequel)
2010: Knight Rider (TV Show)
TBA: Twilight Watch [Timur Bekmambetov] (Finale)
TBA: The Gene Generation
TBA: The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your New Happiness! [Timur Bekmambetov]
TBA: Chrysalis [Julien Leclercq] (French)
TBA: Nightwatching [Peter Greenaway]
TBA: Hinokio (Japanese)
TBA: The Diamond Age [Neal Stephenson] (SciFi Miniseries) (Book)
TBA: Samsara [Ron Fricke] (Sequel to Baraka)
TBA: Baltimore, or The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire [David Goyer/Mike Mignola] (Comic)
TBA: The Amber Spyglass (Book) (Finale)
TBA: X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Prequel)
TBA: Batman 7 [Christopher Nolan] (Finale)
TBA: TMNT 5 (Sequel)
TBA: Blue Submarine No. 6 (Anime Remake)
TBA: Ghost In The Shell (Anime Remake)
TBA: Idoru [William Gibson] (Anime) (Book)
TBA: Neuromancer [William Gibson]
TBA: Appleseed Saga: Ex Machina (Anime) (Sequel)
TBA: Hellraiser (Remake)
TBA: Kill Bill 3 [Quentin Tarantino] (Sequel)
TBA: Kill Bill 4 [Quentin Tarantino] (Finale)
TBA: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows [J.K.Rowling] (Finale) (7 - Book)
TBA: Transformers 2 (Sequel)
TBA: Transformers 3 (Finale)
TBA: Dragonball (Anime Remake)
TBA: Goonies 2 (Sequel)
TBA: Porno [Danny Boyle] (Sequel to Trainspotting)
TBA: Avatar: The Last Airbender 2 [M. Night Shyamalan] (Sequel) (TV Cartoon)
TBA: Avatar: The Last Airbender 3 [M. Night Shyamalan] (Finale) (TV Cartoon)
Jan 18, 2008: Cloverfield [J.J. Abrams]
Jan 24, 2008: Be Kind, Rewind [Michel Gondry]
Feb 08, 2008: In Bruges
Feb 14, 2008: Jumper [Doug Liman]
Feb 15, 2008: The Spiderwick Chronicles [Book Series]
Mar 07, 2008: 10,000 B.C. [Roland Emmerich]
Mar 14, 2008: Horton Hears a Who! [Dr. Seuss] (CGI)
Mar 28, 2008: Wanted [Timur Bekmambetov]
Mar 28, 2008: Run, Fat Boy, Run [David Schwimmer]
March, 2008: Battlestar Galactica Season 4 (Remake) (TV Show)
Apr 25, 2008: Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (Sequel)
May 02, 2008: Iron Man [Jon Favreau] (Comic)
May 09, 2008: Speed Racer [Wachowski Brothers]
May 16, 2008: The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (Sequel) (Book)
Mar 21, 2008: Synecdoche, New York [Charlie Kaufman]
May 16, 2008: Midnight Meat Train [Ryuhei Kitumara/Clive Barker]
May 22, 2008: Indy 4 [Steven Spielberg] (Sequel)
Jun 13, 2008: The Happening [M. Night Shyamalan]
Jun 13, 2008: Hulk 2 (Sequel)
Jun 20, 2008: Get Smart (TV Show)
Jun 27, 2008: Wall-E [Pixar]
Jul 11, 2008: Hellboy II: The Golden Army [Guillermo del Toro/Mike Mignola] (Sequel) (Comic Book)
Jul 18, 2008: The Dark Knight [Christopher Nolan] (Sequel)
Jul 25, 2008: X-Files 2 (TV Show) (Sequel)
Aug 01, 2008: Hellboy 2: The Golden Army (Comic)
Aug 15, 2008: DragonBall (Anime Remake)
Sep 26, 2008: Death Race (Remake)
Oct 03, 2008: Where the Wild Things Are [Maurice Sendak/Spike Jonze] (Live/CGI) (Book)
Nov 21, 2008: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince [J.K.Rowling] (6 - Book)
Dec 25, 2008: Star Trek XI (Prequel) (TV Show Adapt.)
Dec 28, 2008: El Orfanato
Late 2008: Watchmen [Zack Snyder] (Comic)
2008: Futurama 2: The Beast with a Billion Backs
2008: Futurama 3: Bender's Game
2008: Futurama 4: Into the Wild Green Yonder
2008: CJ7 [Stephen Chow]
2008: I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK [Chan-Wook Park]
2008: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead
2008: Franklyn
2008: Burn After Reading [Coen Brothers]
2008: Blood: The Last Vampire [Chris Nahon] (Sequel) (Anime)
2008: Redbelt [David Mamet]
2008: Choke [Chuck Palahniuk]
2008: RocknRolla [Guy Ritchie]
2008: Doomsday [Neil Marshall]
2008: The Box [Richard Kelly]
2008: The Informers [Brett Easton Ellis]
2008: Whiteout (Comic)
2008: Ponyo on a Cliff [Miyazaki/Ghibli]
2008: Paul [Simon Pegg & Nick Frost]
2008: Avatar: The Last Airbender 1 [M. Night Shyamalan] (Trilogy) (TV Cartoon)
2008: The Machine Girl (Japan)
Jan 16, 2009: The Spirit [Will Eisner/Frank Miller] (Comic)
May 01, 2009: The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Sequel)
June 2009: Battle Angel [James Cameron] (Comic) (CGI)
Dec 28, 2009: Avatar [James Cameron]
Summer 2009: Terminator 4 (Sequel/New Trilogy)
2009: Sin City 2: A Dame to Kill For [Frank Miller/Robert Rodriguez] (Comic)
2009: Sin City 3: Hell and Back [Frank Miller/Robert Rodriguez] (Comic)
2009: Ronin [Frank Miller] (Comic)
2009: The Prisoner [Christopher Nolan] (TV Show)
2009: Tintin [Steven Spielberg/Peter Jackson] (CGI) (Trilogy) (Comic)
2009: The Doubtful Guest [Edward Gorey/The Jim Henson Co.] (Comic)
2009: Come Drink With Me [Quentin Tarantino]
2009: The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus [Terry Gilliam]
2009: Magneto [David Goyer] (Prequel) (Comic)
2009: Tortured Souls: Animae Damnatae [Todd Mcfarlane/Clive Barker] (Toy Line)
2009: Splice (Vincenzo Natali)
2009: The Green Hornet (Comic)
2009: Gatchaman (Anime Remake)
2009: The Subtle Knife (Book) (Sequel)
2009: The Rum Diary [Hunter S. Thompson/Bruce Robinson]
2010: Logan's Run (Remake)
2010: Super Max [David Goyer] (Comic {Green Arrow})
2010: Metal Men (Comic)
2010: Justice League of America (MoCap) (Comic)
2010: Shrek 4 (Sequel)
2010: Knight Rider (TV Show)
TBA: Twilight Watch [Timur Bekmambetov] (Finale)
TBA: The Gene Generation
TBA: The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your New Happiness! [Timur Bekmambetov]
TBA: Chrysalis [Julien Leclercq] (French)
TBA: Nightwatching [Peter Greenaway]
TBA: Hinokio (Japanese)
TBA: The Diamond Age [Neal Stephenson] (SciFi Miniseries) (Book)
TBA: Samsara [Ron Fricke] (Sequel to Baraka)
TBA: Baltimore, or The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire [David Goyer/Mike Mignola] (Comic)
TBA: The Amber Spyglass (Book) (Finale)
TBA: X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Prequel)
TBA: Batman 7 [Christopher Nolan] (Finale)
TBA: TMNT 5 (Sequel)
TBA: Blue Submarine No. 6 (Anime Remake)
TBA: Ghost In The Shell (Anime Remake)
TBA: Idoru [William Gibson] (Anime) (Book)
TBA: Neuromancer [William Gibson]
TBA: Appleseed Saga: Ex Machina (Anime) (Sequel)
TBA: Hellraiser (Remake)
TBA: Kill Bill 3 [Quentin Tarantino] (Sequel)
TBA: Kill Bill 4 [Quentin Tarantino] (Finale)
TBA: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows [J.K.Rowling] (Finale) (7 - Book)
TBA: Transformers 2 (Sequel)
TBA: Transformers 3 (Finale)
TBA: Dragonball (Anime Remake)
TBA: Goonies 2 (Sequel)
TBA: Porno [Danny Boyle] (Sequel to Trainspotting)
TBA: Avatar: The Last Airbender 2 [M. Night Shyamalan] (Sequel) (TV Cartoon)
TBA: Avatar: The Last Airbender 3 [M. Night Shyamalan] (Finale) (TV Cartoon)
Friday, August 24, 2007
China's iClone
Cellphones, microchips, cars, even iPhones—there's virtually no high-tech Western product that China's cloners can't copy. Pretty soon, you might even prefer their work
By Dan Koeppel | August 2007
The little gadget was bootleg gold, a secret treasure I'd spent months tracking down. The miniOne looked just like Apple's iPhone, down to the slick no-button interface. But it was more. It ran popular mobile software that the iPhone wouldn't. It worked with nearly every worldwide cellphone carrier, not just AT&T, and not only in the U.S. It promised to cost half as much as the iPhone and be available to 10 times as many consumers. The miniOne's first news teases—a forum posting, a few spy shots, a product announcement that vanished after a day—generated a frenzy of interest online. Was it real? When would it go on sale? And most intriguing, could it really be even better than the iPhone?
I made a hastily arranged flight to China to find out. Ella Wong, a marketing manager at Meizu, the Chinese company building the new phone, had invited me to come to the annual Hong Kong Electronics Fair only days before it began this April. We had been trading e-mails for weeks, negotiating access to the miniOne and the operation that produced it. Meizu cloned Apple's iPod Nano last year, establishing itself as a significant force in a music-player market far larger than Apple's: international consumers who had little access to either Macintosh computers or the iTunes music store. The miniOne was going to be on display at the fair, and Jack Wong, Meizu's CEO, would also be there. If I made a good impression, I would be invited to the company's headquarters and research facility on the mainland. "You'll be warmly welcome," Wong wrote me.
My journey was more than a pilgrimage born of techno-lust (though there was an element of that as well). Nearly every type of product can be—and is—cloned in China, sometimes so well that the ripped-off manufacturers inadvertently service the fakes when warranty claims come in. Cloners make air conditioners with the LG brand name in the country's remote west, along what was once the old Silk Road trading route. But cloners don't have to sell their wares under the same brand name: In Anhui province, near the Yangtze River, one of China's biggest auto manufacturers builds a part-for-part replica of a top-selling Chevrolet model, then slaps a new badge on the car. In the south, one cloning operation didn't just copy a technology company's product line—it duplicated the entire company, creating a shadow enterprise with corporate headquarters, factories, and sales and support staff.
But the miniOne represents the vanguard of this cloning revolution. Meizu isn't aspiring merely to copy the designs of a Western manufacturer on the cheap. The company plans to give the miniOne capabilities beyond the original. Does this signal the start of something bigger in China—the years of reverse engineering serving as a de facto education for the engineers who will soon transform China into a design and engineering powerhouse? Is China on the cusp of going legit?
Several hours after I arrived at the Hong Kong Electronics Fair, I finally found Meizu's (maddeningly unlisted) booth and asked for Ella Wong. She was sitting at a table, talking to a pair of potential customers. When she finished, I introduced myself. "Thanks for making this happen," I said. "Would this be a good time to start talking about the miniOne, or to make arrangements to meet Jack Wong?" I handed her a business card and a stack of magazines with stories I'd written. She thumbed through a few pages and smiled. "The phone? Mr. Wong? Oh, that may not be possible," she said. Silence. What about our e-mails, the conversations, the invitation? She was struggling to be polite. It isn't customary in China to be forced into an outright yes or no. "Come back," she said, "maybe in September."
Counterfeit Road
Sitting in a ground-to-a-halt taxi during rush hour along Beijing's third ring highway (five encircle the city; many more are under construction) gives a visitor plenty of time to rubberneck. The cars are familiar: Volkswagen, Honda and Toyota all have a presence here. But even vehicles with unfamiliar names cut recognizable silhouettes. There's a small SUV, emblazoned with the Laibao brand name, that looks like a twin sister to Honda's CR-V. Although the Geely Meerie is copied from a Mercedes C-class, it costs only 120,000 yuan, or about $15,000.
But at the sweet spot of the Chinese car market are vehicles that sell for around $5,000, just shy of the average middle-class Chinese family's annual income. When you're stuck in traffic, you're surrounded mostly by the ruler in that category: the Chery QQ.
The QQ is a part-for-part reproduction of a car known, depending on where it is sold, as the Chevy Spark or the Daewoo Matiz (the genuine vehicle is built as part of a joint venture between General Motors and the Korean company). Sparks are sold all over the world—in the U.S., an upgraded $10,500 variant called the Aveo is cheaper than any other car you can buy. But when the $5,000 QQ first appeared in 2003, GM—and American officials—were astonished. "If you didn't have name tags on the cars, you couldn't tell them apart," said Congressman James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin after a 2004 trip to China. "It's such a good knockoff that you can pull the door off the Spark and it fits on the QQ, so close that the seals on the doors match right up."
The ability to clone such technologically sophisticated products is a recent development in China. A report issued by the consulting firm A.T. Kearney breaks the growth of China's cloners into five distinct periods. The first, in the 1980s, was primitive, consisting mostly of cheap textile knockoffs like Mickey Mouse shirts. The second, starting around 1990, still involved clothing and accessories, but with enough authenticity—high-quality Nike and Reebok fakes led the way—to be accepted as handy substitutes by thrift-conscious Westerners. By the middle of that decade, Chinese copiers had moved from basic trademark infringement into low-end technology products: Duracell batteries and DVDs. From there, the study says, an era of "advanced technology piracy" began. Functionally close-to-the-mark products like Callaway golf clubs and counterfeit automotive safety glass appeared in 1998. By the millennium, piracy had reached levels of refinement that saw China offering functional duplicates of Intel processors, Viagra tablets and Bosch power tools.
In many ways, this is similar to the path industrial powerhouses like Japan and South Korea have taken. China has gone from making only cheap, toss-away goods, like budget toys and portable CD players, to creating alternatives to nearly every one of the West's most admired brands. But China is unique in that—as with its modernization in general—it's doing so at an accelerated pace, going from shoddy to quality in little more than a decade.
How to Clone Anything
The easiest way to clone a product is to use a "ghost shift": A factory contracted to make legitimate goods moves to 24-hour operation, churning out copies—some made with inferior materials, and others exactly the same, designed to be sold on the black market—from midnight to morning.
The only problem with ghost shifts is that they can't run full time. In the mid-'90s, developers began to build shadow factories—identical plants, often constructed from the same blueprints legitimate manufacturers used to launch their ventures. Sometimes the plans were sold by managers at the genuine facilities. Other times, local officials and organized crime conspired to create a second set of blueprints.
As technology companies became aware of the extent of the cloning problem, many began to use selective outsourcing. Less-secret components would be built in China, while more proprietary items, like circuit boards, might be manufactured domestically. Even so, sometimes a company's products are cloned even if it has no working relationship with China at all. The Thomas G. Faria Corporation, an American company that builds dashboard gauges for boats and military Humvees, discovered an entire plant in China dedicated to cloning its product, even though it had never done any manufacturing overseas, or even outside of Connecticut, where it is based. The clones were found all over the world, and although they worked poorly, they looked the part. "These clones bear our name and address," David Blackburn, the company's CEO, told the U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission. "The label . . . contains our catalog part number and the initials of a calibrator, as well as a final tester."
Cloners look for opportunity first, and manufacturers often give it to them, often in the form of a hot product that is released in a limited number of markets. Desire spreads worldwide, and the cloners are ready to fill any gaps that emerge in supply or distribution. (That's what's happening now with the iPhone, which for nearly a year will be sold in North America only.)
In November 2005, LG Electronics, a Korean company that is the world's third-largest mobile-phone maker, released a device that in many parts of the world was as anticipated as the iPhone was here. The "Chocolate" features a slide-out keypad, a large color screen and a very Apple-like navigation wheel; it plays music as readily as it makes calls and sends text messages. LG has sold 10 million of them worldwide—the same quantity Steve Jobs has set as the initial iPhone goal.
LG's phone began to sell out as soon as it was released, but it took four months for the Korean electronics giant to release a version for China. By then, it was too late: A doppelgänger Chocolate had hit the market first, and had become the preferred choice for Chinese shoppers. Quality wasn't an issue. The fake phone was "exactly like the real one in design," a company spokesperson told Chosun Ilbo, Korea's largest daily newspaper. "Chinese people think it's LG electronics that manufactures the fakes."
Last year, fed up with a torrent of bootleg cellphones that was costing the company a billion dollars a year, Samsung hired investigators to trace the phones back, through multiple supply channels, to their manufacturers. The results of that investigation, along with analysis done by independent researchers, uncovered some of the technical strategies undertaken by reverse-engineering operations.
The cloners start by deciding what phones would be most profitable to clone. They then learn everything they can about the device. They attend trade shows, furiously snapping photos of not-yet-released products until someone notices and shoos them away. They will be first in line to buy the new product whenever it hits stores. And they will look for shortcuts, such as a patent filed in China that can act as the beginning of an actual production guide.
The cloners hire a team of between 20 and 40 engineers to begin decoding the circuit boards. At the same time, coders start to develop an operating system for the phone with a similar feature set. (The typical cloner either uses off-the-shelf code, writes something entirely new, or modifies a publicly available Linux-based system.) Both processes take about a month. By then, ancillary items—plastic casings, accessories, manuals and packaging—are ready as well. Full production begins at another factory, one that is already building phones, within about eight weeks from the time the engineers are hired. After a run of about 30,000 units, the cloners move the operation to a new facility in order to avoid detection.
Samsung was impressed by the efficiency of the cloners, so much so that the company offered them jobs. The cloners said no. Earning about $1.25 per phone, the cloners said, they found it easier and more profitable to make fakes. The only known result of the investigation? Samsung now takes care to release products in China shortly after they come out in Korea. Its only defense is to give cloners a smaller window of opportunity.
Company Copy
In 2006, NEC, one of the 25 biggest consumer-electronics firms in the world, went public with the results of a two-year investigation. The company had been receiving complants about products it didn't even make: DVD players, cellphones, MP3 players. Investigators from International Risk, a private security firm employed by NEC, ultimately uncovered a shadow version of the company operating out of corporate offices in China, with ties to more than 50 manufacturing facilities. "On the surface, it looked like a series of intellectual-property infringements, but in reality a highly organized group has attempted to hijack the entire brand," says Steve Vickers, the former Hong Kong police inspector who was in charge of the investigation for International Risk. Executives had their own NEC business cards and e-mail add-resses. They had marketing plans and distribution networks in place. Some "company" facilities even had electronic signs bearing huge, lighted NEC logos. Most bold of all, the bogus NEC actually charged the manufacturers it worked with royalties on its designs.
The investigation led to raids last year on 18 of the manufacturing sites and the seizure of nearly 50,000 fake products. Yet the factories themselves are still operating, just not using the NEC name. The ringleaders of the scam have yet to be caught; like the Samsung copiers, they are thought to still be making fakes.
Death to the Bootleggers
The Chery QQ demonstrates more than just the skill of modern cloning. It also illustrates the danger. Easy-fit doors and rearview mirrors aside, there are differences—scary differences—between the Spark/Matiz and the QQ. As news of the copycat car spread last year, a German automotive club conducted and videotaped a comparative crash test between the two vehicles. When the Matiz hits the barrier, the front end crumples. The rear of the car bucks upward and then thuds back to the ground. An impact chart shows serious yet nonfatal injuries to both the driver's and passenger's head and legs (the chart distinguishes impact with color: the redder the deadlier). The Chery hits the obstacle at the same speed. The rear end of the car lifts higher than the Matiz and begins to rotate. The driver-side door pops open. Hood, engine and roof crumple into the passenger compartment. The frame buckles, bringing the vehicle flat to the ground. On the impact chart, the driver's head, neck and chest are brown and red: not survivable.
Over the past few months, concern over the safety of Chinese copies, as well as legitimate products with Chinese ingredients or brand names, has become more real to consumers in the U.S. In June, the FDA warned consumers about Chinese-made toothpaste, millions of tubes of which were on-sale in the U.S. The substance in the toothpaste—diethylene glycol, a toxic component of antifreeze—had been used as a substitute for glycerin, a common sweetener. A similar substitution killed about 100 people in Panama last year.
Ironically, well-publicized, embarrassing cases like this could actually provide some of the impetus necessary to vault China into the sixth stage of cloning—making better-than-real products. "If Western-style controls are put in place, that's just another way the infringers will learn how to do a better job of what they do," says Danny Friedmann, a Dutch intellectual-property expert who runs a blog called IP Dragon.
Although there have been legal victories against cloners, most of the time they have been minor and fleeting. Last year, Sony won a lawsuit against a Guangzhou company that was copying the company's camcorder batteries. In another of the most watched cases, Prada, Chanel, Gucci, Burberry and Louis Vuitton sued Beijing's organized "Silk Market," one of the city's most well-visited locales for fake goods, and shut it down. Despite the low monetary damages—$75,000 for Sony, and $12,500 in the Silk Market affair—the victories were hailed by some as part of a growing recognition in China that counterfeiting needs to be halted. The cases demonstrated the "strong resolve of the Chinese authorities in protecting intellectual-property rights," says Tan Loke Khoon, head of the intellectual-property practice in Hong Kong and China at the law firm Baker & McKenzie, which brought the two lawsuits.
But on my visit to Beijing, the Silk Market hadn't just reopened. It had expanded, turning itself from a seedy array of tiny stalls into a full-fledged modern shopping mall: a forbidden city of fakes. That's part of the dilemma in "fixing" the counterfeit problem, Friedmann says: "There's an impression that China is strongly controlled by the central government. The truth is that there's power everywhere. China is filled with 'little emperors' who can do whatever they want."
Yet when a cloner is brought to justice—especially if the case makes headlines, embarrassing the Chinese authorities—punishment can be both swift and harsh. On May 29, Zheng Xiaoyu, the former head of China's FDA, was sentenced to death after taking the equivalent of $850,000 in bribes. The bribes were given in part to secure the approval of a counterfeit antibiotic that later killed 10 people in 2006. The Chinese court said the sentence was warranted and that Zheng had "endangered public life and health," as well as "the efficiency of China's drug monitoring." According to Jiang Zhipei, a Chinese supreme-court justice specializing in intellectual-property cases, punishments like this show that "the judicial system is working actively to make people aware of how important this is." Zheng was executed on July 10.
Growing Beyond Fakes
The end of Chinese cloning will come when Chinese products become good enough to stand on their own, just as Japan's did in the 1970s and Korea's did in the 1980s. The difference is that China is moving much faster toward this goal than Korea or Japan ever did. Less than a year ago, the Chery QQ was junk. On July 3, Chery and Chrysler announced an agreement to build Chery vehicles that will wear the Dodge badge. Chrysler will sell the cars in Eastern Europe and Latin America beginning next year, and in 2009 will bring them to Western Europe and North America. The deal grew from Chery's plan to improve quality by outsourcing engineering and design to Western companies. There's little doubt that Chery will learn from its new partners.
An important factor in this transformation is China's improving consumer economy. Just as the Chery deal made the news, the Beijing government instituted a nationwide minimum wage. Although the move was made as a response to rising food prices, it increases production costs for Chinese manufacturers, forcing them to move away from rock-bottom products. In cities, Chinese paychecks have already risen fast enough to create a thriving consumer class. As those consumers demand better products, China's manufacturers will begin to develop items that meet export standards.
Take, for example, the iPhone. The key to its simple interface is a screen that responds to several touches at once. It makes rapid text entry possible and allows keyboard-and-mouse-type navigation through Web pages and the phone's built-in applications. The screen is built by a German company called Balda, but the technology itself, licensed to Apple's supplier, is neither American nor European. It was originally developed to aid in the rapid input of Asia's huge, character-based alphabets. It comes from China.
The Next iClones
Copies of the iPhone are now dividing into two categories: the inspired-bys and the wholesale duplicates. The first category includes work-alikes manufactured by well-known cellphone makers, like HTC—one of the largest manufacturers of smartphones—and Sun Microsystems. HTC announced that it will be bringing its "Touch" model to the U.S. this fall. In May, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz followed in the footsteps of Steve Jobs (and Meizu's Jack Wong) by displaying his own one-off version of a touchscreen prototype at a software-developers convention. Sun's chairman, Scott McNealy, had no qualms about making the iPhone comparison: "We have our own shirtsleeve version of Steve Jobs announcing a phone," he told the audience.
The number of duplicates is also growing. Although Meizu may have gone silent because of fears of an Apple lawsuit—after my visit in Hong Kong, they stopped responding to my e-mails and phone calls—other companies are moving ahead. A few days before Apple's launch, an online video surfaced depicting a sleek new product called the P168 [watch the video below]. The phone came in a black box, marked with both the iPhone and the Apple logos. The video showed the phone being unpacked and operated (the start-up screen also featured the Apple branding). There were features that the iPhone didn't have, such as the ability to operate on two different networks at once; six speakers; and, addressing a major prerelease complaint about the iPhone, a removable battery. I asked my translator if she could find one on the street. They weren't available in Beijing—yet—but a few weeks later, a friend discovered one in Guangzhou. The manufacturer of the P168 wouldn't comment for this story, but the hardware was real, and it worked.
Neither the miniOne, the P168 nor even HTC's model are likely to carry the mystique or quality of the iPhone. But that's not really the point. Those phones will be available to millions more consumers than Apple's product, at a lower price. The rest of the world will accept the clones as if they were the original. That will make them no different than a flood of Chinese products—cars, pharmaceuticals, food, appliances—that are emerging from the shadows and climbing the learning curve to the point that they will no longer be clones at all. They'll be the real thing.
From Popular Science Magazine
By Dan Koeppel | August 2007
The little gadget was bootleg gold, a secret treasure I'd spent months tracking down. The miniOne looked just like Apple's iPhone, down to the slick no-button interface. But it was more. It ran popular mobile software that the iPhone wouldn't. It worked with nearly every worldwide cellphone carrier, not just AT&T, and not only in the U.S. It promised to cost half as much as the iPhone and be available to 10 times as many consumers. The miniOne's first news teases—a forum posting, a few spy shots, a product announcement that vanished after a day—generated a frenzy of interest online. Was it real? When would it go on sale? And most intriguing, could it really be even better than the iPhone?
I made a hastily arranged flight to China to find out. Ella Wong, a marketing manager at Meizu, the Chinese company building the new phone, had invited me to come to the annual Hong Kong Electronics Fair only days before it began this April. We had been trading e-mails for weeks, negotiating access to the miniOne and the operation that produced it. Meizu cloned Apple's iPod Nano last year, establishing itself as a significant force in a music-player market far larger than Apple's: international consumers who had little access to either Macintosh computers or the iTunes music store. The miniOne was going to be on display at the fair, and Jack Wong, Meizu's CEO, would also be there. If I made a good impression, I would be invited to the company's headquarters and research facility on the mainland. "You'll be warmly welcome," Wong wrote me.
My journey was more than a pilgrimage born of techno-lust (though there was an element of that as well). Nearly every type of product can be—and is—cloned in China, sometimes so well that the ripped-off manufacturers inadvertently service the fakes when warranty claims come in. Cloners make air conditioners with the LG brand name in the country's remote west, along what was once the old Silk Road trading route. But cloners don't have to sell their wares under the same brand name: In Anhui province, near the Yangtze River, one of China's biggest auto manufacturers builds a part-for-part replica of a top-selling Chevrolet model, then slaps a new badge on the car. In the south, one cloning operation didn't just copy a technology company's product line—it duplicated the entire company, creating a shadow enterprise with corporate headquarters, factories, and sales and support staff.
But the miniOne represents the vanguard of this cloning revolution. Meizu isn't aspiring merely to copy the designs of a Western manufacturer on the cheap. The company plans to give the miniOne capabilities beyond the original. Does this signal the start of something bigger in China—the years of reverse engineering serving as a de facto education for the engineers who will soon transform China into a design and engineering powerhouse? Is China on the cusp of going legit?
Several hours after I arrived at the Hong Kong Electronics Fair, I finally found Meizu's (maddeningly unlisted) booth and asked for Ella Wong. She was sitting at a table, talking to a pair of potential customers. When she finished, I introduced myself. "Thanks for making this happen," I said. "Would this be a good time to start talking about the miniOne, or to make arrangements to meet Jack Wong?" I handed her a business card and a stack of magazines with stories I'd written. She thumbed through a few pages and smiled. "The phone? Mr. Wong? Oh, that may not be possible," she said. Silence. What about our e-mails, the conversations, the invitation? She was struggling to be polite. It isn't customary in China to be forced into an outright yes or no. "Come back," she said, "maybe in September."
Counterfeit Road
Sitting in a ground-to-a-halt taxi during rush hour along Beijing's third ring highway (five encircle the city; many more are under construction) gives a visitor plenty of time to rubberneck. The cars are familiar: Volkswagen, Honda and Toyota all have a presence here. But even vehicles with unfamiliar names cut recognizable silhouettes. There's a small SUV, emblazoned with the Laibao brand name, that looks like a twin sister to Honda's CR-V. Although the Geely Meerie is copied from a Mercedes C-class, it costs only 120,000 yuan, or about $15,000.
But at the sweet spot of the Chinese car market are vehicles that sell for around $5,000, just shy of the average middle-class Chinese family's annual income. When you're stuck in traffic, you're surrounded mostly by the ruler in that category: the Chery QQ.
The QQ is a part-for-part reproduction of a car known, depending on where it is sold, as the Chevy Spark or the Daewoo Matiz (the genuine vehicle is built as part of a joint venture between General Motors and the Korean company). Sparks are sold all over the world—in the U.S., an upgraded $10,500 variant called the Aveo is cheaper than any other car you can buy. But when the $5,000 QQ first appeared in 2003, GM—and American officials—were astonished. "If you didn't have name tags on the cars, you couldn't tell them apart," said Congressman James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin after a 2004 trip to China. "It's such a good knockoff that you can pull the door off the Spark and it fits on the QQ, so close that the seals on the doors match right up."
The ability to clone such technologically sophisticated products is a recent development in China. A report issued by the consulting firm A.T. Kearney breaks the growth of China's cloners into five distinct periods. The first, in the 1980s, was primitive, consisting mostly of cheap textile knockoffs like Mickey Mouse shirts. The second, starting around 1990, still involved clothing and accessories, but with enough authenticity—high-quality Nike and Reebok fakes led the way—to be accepted as handy substitutes by thrift-conscious Westerners. By the middle of that decade, Chinese copiers had moved from basic trademark infringement into low-end technology products: Duracell batteries and DVDs. From there, the study says, an era of "advanced technology piracy" began. Functionally close-to-the-mark products like Callaway golf clubs and counterfeit automotive safety glass appeared in 1998. By the millennium, piracy had reached levels of refinement that saw China offering functional duplicates of Intel processors, Viagra tablets and Bosch power tools.
In many ways, this is similar to the path industrial powerhouses like Japan and South Korea have taken. China has gone from making only cheap, toss-away goods, like budget toys and portable CD players, to creating alternatives to nearly every one of the West's most admired brands. But China is unique in that—as with its modernization in general—it's doing so at an accelerated pace, going from shoddy to quality in little more than a decade.
How to Clone Anything
The easiest way to clone a product is to use a "ghost shift": A factory contracted to make legitimate goods moves to 24-hour operation, churning out copies—some made with inferior materials, and others exactly the same, designed to be sold on the black market—from midnight to morning.
The only problem with ghost shifts is that they can't run full time. In the mid-'90s, developers began to build shadow factories—identical plants, often constructed from the same blueprints legitimate manufacturers used to launch their ventures. Sometimes the plans were sold by managers at the genuine facilities. Other times, local officials and organized crime conspired to create a second set of blueprints.
As technology companies became aware of the extent of the cloning problem, many began to use selective outsourcing. Less-secret components would be built in China, while more proprietary items, like circuit boards, might be manufactured domestically. Even so, sometimes a company's products are cloned even if it has no working relationship with China at all. The Thomas G. Faria Corporation, an American company that builds dashboard gauges for boats and military Humvees, discovered an entire plant in China dedicated to cloning its product, even though it had never done any manufacturing overseas, or even outside of Connecticut, where it is based. The clones were found all over the world, and although they worked poorly, they looked the part. "These clones bear our name and address," David Blackburn, the company's CEO, told the U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission. "The label . . . contains our catalog part number and the initials of a calibrator, as well as a final tester."
Cloners look for opportunity first, and manufacturers often give it to them, often in the form of a hot product that is released in a limited number of markets. Desire spreads worldwide, and the cloners are ready to fill any gaps that emerge in supply or distribution. (That's what's happening now with the iPhone, which for nearly a year will be sold in North America only.)
In November 2005, LG Electronics, a Korean company that is the world's third-largest mobile-phone maker, released a device that in many parts of the world was as anticipated as the iPhone was here. The "Chocolate" features a slide-out keypad, a large color screen and a very Apple-like navigation wheel; it plays music as readily as it makes calls and sends text messages. LG has sold 10 million of them worldwide—the same quantity Steve Jobs has set as the initial iPhone goal.
LG's phone began to sell out as soon as it was released, but it took four months for the Korean electronics giant to release a version for China. By then, it was too late: A doppelgänger Chocolate had hit the market first, and had become the preferred choice for Chinese shoppers. Quality wasn't an issue. The fake phone was "exactly like the real one in design," a company spokesperson told Chosun Ilbo, Korea's largest daily newspaper. "Chinese people think it's LG electronics that manufactures the fakes."
Last year, fed up with a torrent of bootleg cellphones that was costing the company a billion dollars a year, Samsung hired investigators to trace the phones back, through multiple supply channels, to their manufacturers. The results of that investigation, along with analysis done by independent researchers, uncovered some of the technical strategies undertaken by reverse-engineering operations.
The cloners start by deciding what phones would be most profitable to clone. They then learn everything they can about the device. They attend trade shows, furiously snapping photos of not-yet-released products until someone notices and shoos them away. They will be first in line to buy the new product whenever it hits stores. And they will look for shortcuts, such as a patent filed in China that can act as the beginning of an actual production guide.
The cloners hire a team of between 20 and 40 engineers to begin decoding the circuit boards. At the same time, coders start to develop an operating system for the phone with a similar feature set. (The typical cloner either uses off-the-shelf code, writes something entirely new, or modifies a publicly available Linux-based system.) Both processes take about a month. By then, ancillary items—plastic casings, accessories, manuals and packaging—are ready as well. Full production begins at another factory, one that is already building phones, within about eight weeks from the time the engineers are hired. After a run of about 30,000 units, the cloners move the operation to a new facility in order to avoid detection.
Samsung was impressed by the efficiency of the cloners, so much so that the company offered them jobs. The cloners said no. Earning about $1.25 per phone, the cloners said, they found it easier and more profitable to make fakes. The only known result of the investigation? Samsung now takes care to release products in China shortly after they come out in Korea. Its only defense is to give cloners a smaller window of opportunity.
Company Copy
In 2006, NEC, one of the 25 biggest consumer-electronics firms in the world, went public with the results of a two-year investigation. The company had been receiving complants about products it didn't even make: DVD players, cellphones, MP3 players. Investigators from International Risk, a private security firm employed by NEC, ultimately uncovered a shadow version of the company operating out of corporate offices in China, with ties to more than 50 manufacturing facilities. "On the surface, it looked like a series of intellectual-property infringements, but in reality a highly organized group has attempted to hijack the entire brand," says Steve Vickers, the former Hong Kong police inspector who was in charge of the investigation for International Risk. Executives had their own NEC business cards and e-mail add-resses. They had marketing plans and distribution networks in place. Some "company" facilities even had electronic signs bearing huge, lighted NEC logos. Most bold of all, the bogus NEC actually charged the manufacturers it worked with royalties on its designs.
The investigation led to raids last year on 18 of the manufacturing sites and the seizure of nearly 50,000 fake products. Yet the factories themselves are still operating, just not using the NEC name. The ringleaders of the scam have yet to be caught; like the Samsung copiers, they are thought to still be making fakes.
Death to the Bootleggers
The Chery QQ demonstrates more than just the skill of modern cloning. It also illustrates the danger. Easy-fit doors and rearview mirrors aside, there are differences—scary differences—between the Spark/Matiz and the QQ. As news of the copycat car spread last year, a German automotive club conducted and videotaped a comparative crash test between the two vehicles. When the Matiz hits the barrier, the front end crumples. The rear of the car bucks upward and then thuds back to the ground. An impact chart shows serious yet nonfatal injuries to both the driver's and passenger's head and legs (the chart distinguishes impact with color: the redder the deadlier). The Chery hits the obstacle at the same speed. The rear end of the car lifts higher than the Matiz and begins to rotate. The driver-side door pops open. Hood, engine and roof crumple into the passenger compartment. The frame buckles, bringing the vehicle flat to the ground. On the impact chart, the driver's head, neck and chest are brown and red: not survivable.
Over the past few months, concern over the safety of Chinese copies, as well as legitimate products with Chinese ingredients or brand names, has become more real to consumers in the U.S. In June, the FDA warned consumers about Chinese-made toothpaste, millions of tubes of which were on-sale in the U.S. The substance in the toothpaste—diethylene glycol, a toxic component of antifreeze—had been used as a substitute for glycerin, a common sweetener. A similar substitution killed about 100 people in Panama last year.
Ironically, well-publicized, embarrassing cases like this could actually provide some of the impetus necessary to vault China into the sixth stage of cloning—making better-than-real products. "If Western-style controls are put in place, that's just another way the infringers will learn how to do a better job of what they do," says Danny Friedmann, a Dutch intellectual-property expert who runs a blog called IP Dragon.
Although there have been legal victories against cloners, most of the time they have been minor and fleeting. Last year, Sony won a lawsuit against a Guangzhou company that was copying the company's camcorder batteries. In another of the most watched cases, Prada, Chanel, Gucci, Burberry and Louis Vuitton sued Beijing's organized "Silk Market," one of the city's most well-visited locales for fake goods, and shut it down. Despite the low monetary damages—$75,000 for Sony, and $12,500 in the Silk Market affair—the victories were hailed by some as part of a growing recognition in China that counterfeiting needs to be halted. The cases demonstrated the "strong resolve of the Chinese authorities in protecting intellectual-property rights," says Tan Loke Khoon, head of the intellectual-property practice in Hong Kong and China at the law firm Baker & McKenzie, which brought the two lawsuits.
But on my visit to Beijing, the Silk Market hadn't just reopened. It had expanded, turning itself from a seedy array of tiny stalls into a full-fledged modern shopping mall: a forbidden city of fakes. That's part of the dilemma in "fixing" the counterfeit problem, Friedmann says: "There's an impression that China is strongly controlled by the central government. The truth is that there's power everywhere. China is filled with 'little emperors' who can do whatever they want."
Yet when a cloner is brought to justice—especially if the case makes headlines, embarrassing the Chinese authorities—punishment can be both swift and harsh. On May 29, Zheng Xiaoyu, the former head of China's FDA, was sentenced to death after taking the equivalent of $850,000 in bribes. The bribes were given in part to secure the approval of a counterfeit antibiotic that later killed 10 people in 2006. The Chinese court said the sentence was warranted and that Zheng had "endangered public life and health," as well as "the efficiency of China's drug monitoring." According to Jiang Zhipei, a Chinese supreme-court justice specializing in intellectual-property cases, punishments like this show that "the judicial system is working actively to make people aware of how important this is." Zheng was executed on July 10.
Growing Beyond Fakes
The end of Chinese cloning will come when Chinese products become good enough to stand on their own, just as Japan's did in the 1970s and Korea's did in the 1980s. The difference is that China is moving much faster toward this goal than Korea or Japan ever did. Less than a year ago, the Chery QQ was junk. On July 3, Chery and Chrysler announced an agreement to build Chery vehicles that will wear the Dodge badge. Chrysler will sell the cars in Eastern Europe and Latin America beginning next year, and in 2009 will bring them to Western Europe and North America. The deal grew from Chery's plan to improve quality by outsourcing engineering and design to Western companies. There's little doubt that Chery will learn from its new partners.
An important factor in this transformation is China's improving consumer economy. Just as the Chery deal made the news, the Beijing government instituted a nationwide minimum wage. Although the move was made as a response to rising food prices, it increases production costs for Chinese manufacturers, forcing them to move away from rock-bottom products. In cities, Chinese paychecks have already risen fast enough to create a thriving consumer class. As those consumers demand better products, China's manufacturers will begin to develop items that meet export standards.
Take, for example, the iPhone. The key to its simple interface is a screen that responds to several touches at once. It makes rapid text entry possible and allows keyboard-and-mouse-type navigation through Web pages and the phone's built-in applications. The screen is built by a German company called Balda, but the technology itself, licensed to Apple's supplier, is neither American nor European. It was originally developed to aid in the rapid input of Asia's huge, character-based alphabets. It comes from China.
The Next iClones
Copies of the iPhone are now dividing into two categories: the inspired-bys and the wholesale duplicates. The first category includes work-alikes manufactured by well-known cellphone makers, like HTC—one of the largest manufacturers of smartphones—and Sun Microsystems. HTC announced that it will be bringing its "Touch" model to the U.S. this fall. In May, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz followed in the footsteps of Steve Jobs (and Meizu's Jack Wong) by displaying his own one-off version of a touchscreen prototype at a software-developers convention. Sun's chairman, Scott McNealy, had no qualms about making the iPhone comparison: "We have our own shirtsleeve version of Steve Jobs announcing a phone," he told the audience.
The number of duplicates is also growing. Although Meizu may have gone silent because of fears of an Apple lawsuit—after my visit in Hong Kong, they stopped responding to my e-mails and phone calls—other companies are moving ahead. A few days before Apple's launch, an online video surfaced depicting a sleek new product called the P168 [watch the video below]. The phone came in a black box, marked with both the iPhone and the Apple logos. The video showed the phone being unpacked and operated (the start-up screen also featured the Apple branding). There were features that the iPhone didn't have, such as the ability to operate on two different networks at once; six speakers; and, addressing a major prerelease complaint about the iPhone, a removable battery. I asked my translator if she could find one on the street. They weren't available in Beijing—yet—but a few weeks later, a friend discovered one in Guangzhou. The manufacturer of the P168 wouldn't comment for this story, but the hardware was real, and it worked.
Neither the miniOne, the P168 nor even HTC's model are likely to carry the mystique or quality of the iPhone. But that's not really the point. Those phones will be available to millions more consumers than Apple's product, at a lower price. The rest of the world will accept the clones as if they were the original. That will make them no different than a flood of Chinese products—cars, pharmaceuticals, food, appliances—that are emerging from the shadows and climbing the learning curve to the point that they will no longer be clones at all. They'll be the real thing.
From Popular Science Magazine
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
What I'd Say To The Martians
By Jack Handey
From the New Yorker
"People of Mars, you say we are brutes and savages. But let me tell you one thing: if I could get loose from this cage you have me in, I would tear you guys a new Martian asshole.You say we are violent and barbaric, but has any one of you come up to my cage and extended his hand? Because, if he did, I would jerk it off and eat it right in front of him. “Mmm, that’s good Martian,” I would say.
You say your civilization is more advanced than ours. But who is really the more “civilized” one? You, standing there watching this cage? Or me, with my pants down, trying to urinate on you? You criticize our Earth religions, saying they have no relevance to the way we actually live. But think about this: if I could get my hands on that god of yours, I would grab his skinny neck and choke him until his big green head exploded.
We are a warlike species, you claim, and you show me films of Earth battles to prove it. But I have seen all the films about twenty times. Get some new films, or, so help me, if I ever get out of here I will empty my laser pistol into everyone I see, even pets.
Speaking of films, I could show you some films, films that portray a different, gentler side of Earth. And while you’re watching the films I’d sort of slip away, because guess what: the projector is actually a thing that shoots out spinning blades! And you fell for it! Well, maybe not now you wouldn’t.
You point to your long tradition of living peacefully with Earth. But you know what I point to? Your stupid heads.
You say there is much your civilization could teach ours. But perhaps there is something that I could teach you—namely, how to scream like a parrot when I put your big Martian head in a vise.
You claim there are other intelligent beings in the galaxy besides earthlings and Martians. Good, then we can attack them together. And after we’re through attacking them we’ll attack you.
I came here in peace, seeking gold and slaves. But you have treated me like an intruder. Maybe it is not me who is the intruder but you.
No, not me. You, stupid.
You keep my body imprisoned in this cage. But I am able to transport my mind to a place far away, a happier place, where I use Martian heads for batting practice.
I admit that sometimes I think we are not so different after all. When you see one of your old ones trip and fall down, do you not point and laugh, just as we on Earth do? And I think we can agree that nothing is more admired by the people of Earth and Mars alike than a fine, high-quality cigarette. For fun, we humans like to ski down mountains covered with snow; you like to“milk” bacteria off of scum hills and pack them into your gill slits. Are we so different? Of course we are, and you will be even more different if I ever finish my homemade flamethrower.
You may kill me, either on purpose or by not making sure that all the surfaces in my cage are safe to lick. But you can’t kill an idea. And that idea is: me chasing you with a big wooden mallet.
You say you will release me only if I sign a statement saying that I will not attack you. And I have agreed, the only condition being that I can sign with a long sharp pen. And still you keep me locked up.
True, you have allowed me reading material—not the “human reproduction” magazines I requested but the works of your greatest philosopher, Zandor or Zanax or whatever his name is. I would like to discuss his ideas with him—just me, him, and one of his big, heavy books.
If you will not free me, at least deliver a message to Earth. Send my love to my wife, and also to my girlfriend. And to my children, if I have any anyplace. Ask my wife to please send me a bazooka, which is a flower we have on Earth. If my so-called friend Don asks you where the money I owe him is, please anally probe him. Do that anyway.
If you keep me imprisoned long enough, eventually I will die. Because one thing you Martians do not understand is that we humans cannot live without our freedom. So, if you see me lying lifeless in my cage, come on in, because I’m dead. Really.
Maybe one day we will not be the enemies you make us out to be. Perhaps one day a little Earth child will sit down to play with a little Martian child, or larva, or whatever they are. But, after a while, guess what happens: the little Martian tries to eat the Earth child. But guess what the Earth child has? A gun. You weren’t expecting that, were you? And now the Martian child is running away, as fast as he can. Run, little Martian baby, run!
I would like to thank everyone for coming to my cage tonight to hear my speech. Donations will be gratefully accepted. (No Mars money, please.)"
From the New Yorker
"People of Mars, you say we are brutes and savages. But let me tell you one thing: if I could get loose from this cage you have me in, I would tear you guys a new Martian asshole.You say we are violent and barbaric, but has any one of you come up to my cage and extended his hand? Because, if he did, I would jerk it off and eat it right in front of him. “Mmm, that’s good Martian,” I would say.
You say your civilization is more advanced than ours. But who is really the more “civilized” one? You, standing there watching this cage? Or me, with my pants down, trying to urinate on you? You criticize our Earth religions, saying they have no relevance to the way we actually live. But think about this: if I could get my hands on that god of yours, I would grab his skinny neck and choke him until his big green head exploded.
We are a warlike species, you claim, and you show me films of Earth battles to prove it. But I have seen all the films about twenty times. Get some new films, or, so help me, if I ever get out of here I will empty my laser pistol into everyone I see, even pets.
Speaking of films, I could show you some films, films that portray a different, gentler side of Earth. And while you’re watching the films I’d sort of slip away, because guess what: the projector is actually a thing that shoots out spinning blades! And you fell for it! Well, maybe not now you wouldn’t.
You point to your long tradition of living peacefully with Earth. But you know what I point to? Your stupid heads.
You say there is much your civilization could teach ours. But perhaps there is something that I could teach you—namely, how to scream like a parrot when I put your big Martian head in a vise.
You claim there are other intelligent beings in the galaxy besides earthlings and Martians. Good, then we can attack them together. And after we’re through attacking them we’ll attack you.
I came here in peace, seeking gold and slaves. But you have treated me like an intruder. Maybe it is not me who is the intruder but you.
No, not me. You, stupid.
You keep my body imprisoned in this cage. But I am able to transport my mind to a place far away, a happier place, where I use Martian heads for batting practice.
I admit that sometimes I think we are not so different after all. When you see one of your old ones trip and fall down, do you not point and laugh, just as we on Earth do? And I think we can agree that nothing is more admired by the people of Earth and Mars alike than a fine, high-quality cigarette. For fun, we humans like to ski down mountains covered with snow; you like to“milk” bacteria off of scum hills and pack them into your gill slits. Are we so different? Of course we are, and you will be even more different if I ever finish my homemade flamethrower.
You may kill me, either on purpose or by not making sure that all the surfaces in my cage are safe to lick. But you can’t kill an idea. And that idea is: me chasing you with a big wooden mallet.
You say you will release me only if I sign a statement saying that I will not attack you. And I have agreed, the only condition being that I can sign with a long sharp pen. And still you keep me locked up.
True, you have allowed me reading material—not the “human reproduction” magazines I requested but the works of your greatest philosopher, Zandor or Zanax or whatever his name is. I would like to discuss his ideas with him—just me, him, and one of his big, heavy books.
If you will not free me, at least deliver a message to Earth. Send my love to my wife, and also to my girlfriend. And to my children, if I have any anyplace. Ask my wife to please send me a bazooka, which is a flower we have on Earth. If my so-called friend Don asks you where the money I owe him is, please anally probe him. Do that anyway.
If you keep me imprisoned long enough, eventually I will die. Because one thing you Martians do not understand is that we humans cannot live without our freedom. So, if you see me lying lifeless in my cage, come on in, because I’m dead. Really.
Maybe one day we will not be the enemies you make us out to be. Perhaps one day a little Earth child will sit down to play with a little Martian child, or larva, or whatever they are. But, after a while, guess what happens: the little Martian tries to eat the Earth child. But guess what the Earth child has? A gun. You weren’t expecting that, were you? And now the Martian child is running away, as fast as he can. Run, little Martian baby, run!
I would like to thank everyone for coming to my cage tonight to hear my speech. Donations will be gratefully accepted. (No Mars money, please.)"
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