Month: August 2008

Web Trolling

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.

/b/ and trolls in general

Helios Voting

Helios offers verifiable online elections. We believe democracy is important, whether it’s your book club, parent-teacher association, student government, workers’ union, or state. So we’ve made truly verifiable elections as easy as everything else on the Web. Helios elections are: private: no one knows how you voted. verifiable: each voter gets a tracking number. proven: Helios is open-source, vetted by top-tier experts, and in use by major organizations. 2m votes have been cast using Helios.

ben’s implementation of his thesis, iirc

Newark Surveillance

MA: You became mayor in July of 2006, you’re a couple of years in to your 4 year term. It sounds like right away when you became Mayor you started thinking about how surveillance could help some of the crime problems in your city. Can you talk about the Community Eye initiative, what it was when you started as Mayor, and what it’s become since then. CB: Sure, there was not really any kind of coordinated camera program what so ever. There may have been a few cameras out, but there was no monitoring, there was no substantive, strategic approach to using them. We realized right away that, one, from looking at other cities, and trying to learn from successes internationally to here in America, there was a lot of security leaders that talked about cameras as a positive thing. I knew we had to get more police on the streets. But we also had to find things that were force multipliers, ways of spreading out our police for in a way that gave us dramatically more coverage in preventing crime, reacting to crime, and adequately responding with emergency resources. So we began to explore the use of cameras, the first thing we did was use a local UEZ program, Urban Enterprise Zone to fund some cameras. Again, they were expensive, and I inherited a city that had a tremendous budget deficit. So I was trying to figure out ways to fund more cameras, we had already started a police foundation which was critical for helping with key technology advancements, from just getting computers into police cars, to other cutting edge things, they also funded our anonymous hotlines and tip lines for people who call in, and let the police know someone’s carrying an illegal gun and I know some information about a crime and get up to $2000 as a result of that. So we had a void, to try to meet my dream of having a huge wireless for cameras, and something else called gunshot detectors. Which means if a gun goes off in a zone, we’d be able to identify in seconds where the gun went off.

an update from the transparent society. wireless cameras and gunshot triangulators