This article is hard to summarize. It is on the New York Times web site and will be in the newspaper on August 3rd.
Basically, it is a warning of a subculture that exists on the net to make things difficult for more “normal” people.
My summarize command in OS X created this:
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. … 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.
…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.
…“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.
…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.
…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.
…If we can’t prosecute the trolling out of online anonymity, might there be some way to mitigate it with technology?
Hopefully those “quotes” will create a desire to read the complete story. It will require a log-in, but you can use your “throw away” account or any of the ones on the net that provide passwords such as bugmenot.com.
Read the article here.
