I've tangled with him, gosh, it's been about 12 years now, first in the Sims Online, then in Second Life (his name there is Urizenus Sklar so we called him Uri). I don't have time to fill in all the blanks now, but suffice it to say that Ludlow and his partner in crime, Mark McCahill (Pixeleen Mistral) spent years actively inciting and participating in griefing of me, even though I once collaborated with them on the newspaper about the virtual world called The Alphaville Herald.
Ludlow is one of those griefer professors (Edward Clift at Woodbury University is another; so is Gabriella Coleman) who thinks there is something fascinating and thrillingly "transgressive" and wonderfully interesting about hackers and their "emergent behaviour" online. What other normal people readily find to be ordinary harassment, heckling and even criminal acts, they think are part of "festival" or "whimsy" or 'innovation". They try to pretend that people who essentially spray graffiti on you or your home or who harass you with spam or obscenity or deliberately bother you are somehow the same thing as dissidents like Tesla or Turing actually doing science and making inventions. It's astounding.
Ludlow particularly believes that if he can just use language and invent a lexicon around the griefing phenomenon, he can transform it from its mundane thuggery and banality of evil into something wondrous in a Brave New World.
Uri was particularly mad at a group of us who got together once to create a composite fictional figure online, a teenage witch named Serena. We had Serena run to Uri and seek his shelter from wiccans and pagans who were luring her into their cult (supposedly) and even old lecherous warlocks who were sexting her and cybering with her online though she was underage. Like an early rendition of the Facebook Dinner Table ad for Home where the girl lives in a separate and subversive reality from her mom or grandmother, Uri would tell Serena to be subversive when she had to set the table in her proper suburban home.
"Put the fork instead of the spoon on the outside when you set the table," he would say, encouraging her to disrupt, disrupt, disrupt. This was a professor, in charge of young minds.
We worked hard to make Selena credible, and it took several of us, because one was an actual teen who had to supply teen music ideas; another was someone in an actual state and time zone they were willing to date stamp so that it would look like they were in a different place than us (and we wouldn't be suspected), and then several of us wrote dialogues and questions and kept the chat logs.
Uri claimed at the time that he had discovered an underage girl in the Sims Online who was engaged in online prostitution for money (well, simoleons, but they could be cashed out for some money at the time on ebay). He claimed to be scandalized, but it was just good copy. He then began researching this, strictly scientifically we suppose, and then gradually came to find out that the supposed teenage girl was a teenage boy, a minor at the time he began his research, but who turned 18. Uri got busy reporting this to the company, EA.com and trying to get this account banned and several others, and writing about it all the while. Because he kept reporting negative phenomena that wasn't supposed to be happening in this world, EA.com just found it more convenient to ban him. Then he made a big fuss everywhere about this as a "whistleblower" -- going to the scholarly and gaming press then the mainstream media, with articles in the Times and the Boston Globe.
While I obviously shared his concern about children as young as nine being allowed into this context with adult content, I was unimpressed for several reasons with Uri's "research*. First, when I went to check out "Evangeline" and did some research of my own, and I heard Uri also claim that when he outed this person's real identity somehow, and then began calling them at home in RL, only the mother ever answered and the supposed teenage boy was never available. That led me to suspect that maybe it was all in fact the mother or a woman making a bunch of characters. I also had research showing that there wasn't prostitution, but that what Evangeline would do with unsuspecting leches would take their money, then pile drive and expel them, never giving them their cyber fix. It was all a game.
Meanwhile, a thriving BDSM community went on in SL, something a number of us abuse reported because there was not supposed to be this kind of overt adult content in the game. Furthermore, it was not supposed to be on the profile, advertising links to real-life -- this was in fact how teenagers *did* get lured in and one woman in her 20s whom I met at the time even bragged that she started in BDSM online as a teen in just this way. Uri completely ignored this whole seamy side of SL, and even celebrated it in the Alphaville Herald, which made his crusade against this strange kid pretending to be a prostitute all the more weird. It was as if he was just looking selectively for sensations to make news, so that he himself could get covered. He later got a book out of all this.
Several of us thought this was pretty shabby and complained to the mainstream media interviewing him with such fascination. Then we did the "Selena" hoax and he fell for it completely, publishing the story, reprinting the chatlogs as if they were authentic -- which they weren't. We illustrated how easy it was to make fake people online and basically claim anything you want to journalists. This should have been a big cautionary tale. It wasn't. The Herald went on manufacturing news like that for years. They turned on me when I became critical of their collaboration with griefers to harass people and then report on them -- and they griefed me and made me a target of their "reports" as well.
Uri is of the persuasion that, like the Red Queen, if he can just say a thing and name it as he wishes, he can capture its meaning. So he invents the alternative world in which these "hacktivists" lives, idealizes them, and then exonerates them.
My replies:
- Catherine Fitzpatrick
- New York
"Hacktivists"
is a fake term that criminal hackers have invented themselves to engage
in reputational white-washing. People in activist movements haven't
expressed any felt need for them and haven't sought their "services" --
they merely try to worm their way into existing movements and offer
"help" that in fact is about them trying to come to power under cover of
causes like democracy in Iran or Egypt. When they tackle a group like
the Scientologists, it's not about freedom, it's about a turf war over
who will get to control the Internet with which cult.
Peter
Ludlow knows this full well, but he's always been part of the cunning
and knowing white-washing of these people as long as I have known him in
multiple virtual worlds, where he has sided with criminals against
law-abiding citizens.
Ludlow continues to believe that if he can
just change the language, he can just change the thought and then the
reality. But these hackers are criminals. All these cases are
tendentiously described, and the news stories of the New York Times
could set some of it straight. Keys, for example, isn't charged with
just defacing the LA Times, but with also taking emails from a Fox News
affiliate and causing damages over $5000,
The truth has to be
spoken in fact to the power that these hackers have become, with
enormous numbers of attacks on servers everywhere from government to
business to media to nonprofits. They take away all our freedoms, and
are not at all what they seem.
***
Rights are taken away every time your
friends the hackers take down a web page or server with a zero-day or a
DDoS or any kind of hack -- and hacking isn't what you say it is, it's
unauthorized entry of any protected computer, as defined by the owner
and user, not you.
Anonymous is as rigid and conservative as
Soviet communism. They don't want any one to use the Internet in ways
they don't approve. If PayPal refuses to pay for WikiLeaks, which is
aiding and abetting the theft of classified documents from the State
Department, they savage this business or Amazon which refuses to store
them. Unless you do Anonymous' bidding, you will face terroristic like
attacks and your right of association and right of free speech are
taking away. Anonymous is particular active in doxing people and
destroying their privacy, and stalking and harassing them. These are all
basic civil rights which they violate.
When my government or business or bank or magazine or blog have their web sites down, we are all deprived of rights.
***
@Len Charlap HBGary wasn't hired by the US government to harm Glenn
Greenwald. This is hysteria. A plan to counter Glenn Greenwald who often
takes extremist "progressive positions" was hyped as a possible
hypothetical but never put into practice. Even if it were, it might be
hard to prove that it was any different, than say, the Kremlin's RT
television with its many American dissidents planning to undermine the
US government. Free speech enables speech you don't like and which
undermines you.
Your logic regarding companies is hardly
persuasive, and is rather like what Anonymous, whom you whitewash here,
itself dubbed "rape logic" in Steubenville -- the idea that if a girl is
wearing suggestive clothing or is drunk and incapacitated, it's okay to
rape here. The right thing to do in cases like that is to call her
parents or even an ambulance, not rape her. In the same way, if you find
an exploit on an AT&T server, the right thing to do is to email the
information security officer or web master, not harvest data gleefully
from the exploit. Weev did not need to grab 120,000 private emails to
prove the point -- that hack was deliberate and cunning and was about
power, not service. He never tried to contact AT&T and lies about
this as do his many fans.
In every other case here, there are
many other factors that Ludlow is leaving out; the Boston judge ordered
Aaron Swartz to obtain mental health treatment when he was granted bail,
for example.
Recent Comments