Annotated Bib Draft

Chris Demmons
February 9, 2010
ENC-1102-431
Professor Wilson

Misinformation in Complex Systems
Annotated Bibliography

    My research paper will cover the societal effects of misinformation in complex systems. Imagine for a moment that a few simple lines of text in an electronic mail could cost two first world governments millions of dollars, force a national charity to move their headquarters, and cause you to be fired from your job or ostracized by your friends? Those lines of text are not a new super virus developed by the Chinese government, they are emails and social media posts written by your friends, family and co-workers. The Craig Shergold chain email forced the British postal service to process millions of letters over the course of more than twenty years. A mutation of the same email caused the Make-A-Wish foundation to move its headquarters and provide a special toll free number to disseminate information about the hoax. The U.S. Postal Service is still receiving mail for Make-A-Wish at its Atlanta processing center which must be stored at considerable cost. The "don't add" chain status on Facebook, which runs: "Don't add Person Name, he is a(n) undesirable thing," typical examples of undesirable things have included accusations of pedophilia, hacking, and other criminal misdeeds. It is not difficult to see how messages like these spread to thousands of people could result in serious real world consequences.
    A viral message is one passed on through a chain of receivers, who then in turn become senders to a new generation of receivers. This is best visualized by the game of Telephone that many people played as children. A group of ten or more kids form a line, far enough away from each other that a whisper cannot be easily heard more than one position away. The child at the far end of the line whispers a simple, easily remembered message or phrase to the second child, who in turn whispers it to the next and so on until the message reaches the end of the line. By the time the message reaches its final destination and is compared with the original message, it has usually undergone a dramatic transformation and is no longer recognizable as the original. On the internet, each sender may have millions of receivers within a single generation or hop of the message. For instance, popular fantasy author Neil Gaiman has approximately one and half million followers on the social networking site Twitter. On Facebook, he has more than one hundred thousand fans and his fan page has only been available for a few days. His blog has a very large circulation, I do not have specific traffic data but from my experience on the web, I would conservatively estimate it at somewhere between three to five hundred thousand unique visits per day. While a given person may receive messages from Mr. Gaiman on more than one channel, when Mr. Gaiman speaks an American city approximately the size of Philadelphia is listening. Each one of those listeners may not have as large a group of followers, but they can retransmit the message to others over a variety of channels and so on. Clearly Mr. Gaiman is not posting messages about sending post cards to Craig Shergold or recommending you avoid friending someone on Facebook. I merely use him to provide a specific example of how the internet is similar, but at the same time a great deal more complex than the traditional game of Telephone.
    So what is being done? Not much at the moment. This issue is not seen as a social problem by the public, and most people hold erroneous belief that what happens on the internet stays there. Many agencies including the United States Marine Corps, most major corporations and our own college have policies that forbid, either expressly or implicitly, these kinds of messages. Despite these admonitions, as many emails and social networking posts are made from work or school as are made from home computers. The National Science Foundation has provided a grant to study email chain petitions. It is a good start, but as I will show, this study is too limited in scope. The National Security Agency is currently studying social networks as well according to several journalistic sources. The details of this study are unavailable, and are unlikely to focus on this aspect of social networking given the N.S.A.'s mission of communication security and surveillance. There is no body of previous research to draw on, remember that the internet as an instrument of mass communication is only a little over twenty years old.
    Not all messages are dangerous, many are chain letters, sappy stories, political polemics and cautionary tales. I feel these messages are just as important to study as messages that present a threat to our society. In communications theory, these messages are considered "noise," and are regarded solely as a negative. According to economics, which assumes human beings are rational actors - always striving to maximize our advantage in a given scenario, these messages should not exist. I believe these messages can not only provide valuable data on how we interact as human beings, they can also provide valuable insights into the hopes, fears and dreams of each sender. I hope to answer the truly important questions regarding this phenomena. How old are these kinds of communication? What traits does the average transmitter possess? Why are these messages sent? Can anything be done to stop them, and if so, should we? Are new forms of social media causing any changes in the way these messages are transmitted, received or their mutation rate? I will pursue the answers to these questions by examining the relevant academic information on communications of this kind which does exist, and through my own original research. My research will include observations of past messages, those currently found in the wild, and through information gleaned from surveys and interviews with people who transmit these sorts of messages on the internet.

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Annotated Bibliography

Ariely, Dan. Predictably Irrational. New York: Harper, 2008. Print.

        Ariley's work is concerned with human decision making in the field of behavioral 

    economics, and can provide insight into why people forward viral messages though 

    it does not address this topic directly.
Boese, Alex. The Museum of Hoaxes. New York: Penguin, 2003. Print.

        Details several viral messages in a variety of media from nineteen-ninety to two 

    thousand and eight.

Biehl, Chuck. "ADMIN: Unathrized (sic) Chain Letter Hurts Make-A-Wish (fwd)."
    dimacs.rutgers.edu listserv. dimacs.rutgers.edu listserv. 11 Nov. 1996. Web. 12 Feb.
    2010.

        An entry from the rutgers.edu listserv from 1996. This shows the extreme longevity
    of the Craig Shergold hoax, as well as describing the effects on the Make-A-Wish
    foundation.

Brunvard, Jan Harold. American Folklore: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland, 1998.
    NetLibrary. Web. 10 Feb. 2010.

        Brunvard describes how technical folklore has trickled down to the less adept 

    computer users, and describes how chain letters are often considered a serious 

    threat to system resources and security.

Bryant, Ron. "Majority in Unscientific Fox News Poll Pegs Tea Party Movement 'Racist'."
    The Raw Story. Rawstory.com. 11 Feb. 2010. Web. 12 Feb. 2010.

        This article describes an evolution in viral media. Fox news created an unscientific
    poll asking users' opinion of the tea party movement. A member of the Democratic
    Underground posted a link to the poll on the social bookmark aggregator Reddit.
    When the poll produced results contrary to what most conservatives expected, they
    accused Reddit users of skewing the data.

Cluely, Graham. "The Automation Labs Facebook Security Scare." Sophos. Sophos. 3
    Feb. 2010. Web. 5 Feb 2010.

        This is a debunking of a widely propagated viral status on Facebook came from a
    leading British internet security company. The hoax accuses a bot developer for the 

    Farmville game on Facebook of accessing private user data. This source will provide 

    background and technical detail of an emergent multimedia hoax.

Donovan, Pamela. No Way of Knowing: Crime, Urban Legends and the Internet. New
    York: Taylor, 2004. Wilson. Web. 6 Feb. 2010.

        This source focuses specifically upon viral messages related to crime, why these
    messages have become more common in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and
    why debunking at the mass media and personal levels are often ineffective. This source
    will be reviewed as we look at why senders transmit viral messages regardless of content,
     why these stories are widely believed and why traditional debunking is often ineffective.
    This source will also be used for comparison when looking at organization strategies for 
    dealing with viral messages.

Facebook Security. "Facebook Security Links: The Automation Labs Facebook Security
    Scare. | Graham Cluely's Blog" Facebook. Facebook Security. 3 Feb. 2010. Web. 5
    Feb. 2010.

        Facebook security's link to Sopho's blog entry on the Automation Labs Hoax. This cite, 

    and the user comments associated with it show how Facebook inadvertently gave the 

    hoax additional credibility. 
Ford, Hannah. "another chain letter..." Facebook. Facebook Chain letters group. 20 Jan.
    2010. Web. 6 Feb. 2010.

        A chain letter spotted in the wild by a Facebook user in a user group dedicated to 

    chain letters sent via the internet.

Gaiman, Neil. "Fascinating Paperchase plagarism over at http://bit.ly/cdrzKZ. Bad
    Paperchase." 11 Feb. 2010. Web. 11 Feb 2010.

        This shows another evolution in viral messages. Mr. Gaiman read an account of an 

    Etsy.com artist accusing a large British consumer goods manufacturer of plagiarizing 

    her work. This is a cite of the message he sent out a message on the Twitter social 

    network concerning it. This also represents a measure of his followers on Twitter.

Gaiman, Neil. "Neil Gaiman's Facebook Fan Page." Facebook. 12 Feb. 2010. Web. 12 Feb. 
    2010.

        Neil Gaiman's Facbook page, this demonstrates how many fans he had on Facebook in

     a period of less than a week. It demonstrates Mr. Gaiman's reach in this medium. 

Gaiman, Neil. "With Great Power comes, well, something..." Neil Gaiman's Journal. 11 Feb.
    2010. Web. 12 Feb. 2010. 

        This entry from author Neil Gaiman's blog discusses the results of what happened after he 

    posted a message on Twitter regarding a dispute between a small crafter on Etsy and a large 

    British consumer goods firm. This shows how a public message can unexpectedly become viral.
Hameed, Bilal. "ALERT: AUTOMATION LABS DOES NOT HAVE ACCESS TO YOUR
    FACEBOOK PROFILE." All Facebook. All Facebook. 3 Feb 2010. Web. 5 Feb. 2010.

        This is one of the earliest mentions of the Automation Labs hoax that appeared on 

    the web outside Facebook. This particular hoax is of interest because it is multi-medium, showing 

    up in slightly different forms on both Facebook and in forwarded electronic mail.
KMBC. "Facebook Rumor Hits Gas Station Owner." KMBC.com. KMBC.com. 27 Jan.
    2010. Web. 11 Feb. 2010.

        Local news coverage of an Indian gas station owner in Excelsior Springs, Missouri who has 

    become the victim of a Facebook smear campaign. While viral messages usually target celebrities

     or political figures, this demonstrates how they can be used against average citizens and the effects 

    it can have on the victims daily life.
Lannen, Andrew. "Facebook 'Automation Labs' Warning" Facebook. Hoax-Slayer group.
    3 Feb. 2010. Web. 5 Feb. 2010.

        This entry is a post on an Australian Facebook discussion board regarding the effects of the Automation 

    Labs Hoax on those whose names came up in Facebook's suggestive search. Those parties received 

    threatening and harassing messages through Facebook, leading to the decision to by Facebook to block the 

    viral message server side.
Lee, Alfred McClung, Elizabeth Briant Lee. The Fine Art of Propaganda. San Franciso:
    International Society for General Semantics, 1939. Print.

        This book discusses propaganda, and specifically the highly emotionally charged language used in it. This 

    language is also typical in viral messages and this source will be used to compare the radio messages of Nazi 

    sympathizer Father Coughlin which are analyzed in this work to several popular viral messages which have travelled 

    over Facebook and through electronic mail forwards.

Lieben-Nowell, David, Jon Kleinberg. "Tracing Information Flow on a Global Scale 
    Using Internet Chain-Letter Data." Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 
    of the United States of America. 105.12 (2008): 4633 - 4638. Wilson. Web. 10 Feb. 
    2010.

        The only extant study of this phenomena. Lieben-Nowell and Kleinberg look at two internet petitions and 

    model the number of people who received, signed and forwarded these petitions.

Make-A-Wish Foundation. "Chain Letters." Make-A-Wish Foundation. n.d. Web. 12 Feb. 2010. 

        The Make-A-Wish foundation's educational page regarding chain letters. It identifies a number of hoaxes which involve 

    the organization, discuss some of the negative effects these messages have caused and suggest how to deal with 

    receiving such a message. This source will be used in examining the responses of groups that have been targeted by

    viral messages, and how effective their response was.

Meredith, Leslie. "Facebook Hoax May Be Clever Marketing Ploy." MSNBC. MSNBC. 4
    Feb. 2010. Web. 5 Feb. 2010.

        Coverage of the Automation Hoax by CNBC. This source will be used in examining the claim that the hoax was a 

    form of viral marketing.

Mikkelson, Barabara, David P. Mikkelson. Snopes. Snopes.com. n.d. Web. 12 Feb. 2010.

        A website devoted to collecting, examining and debunking rumors, and urban legends on the internet. This source 

    provides the largest library of viral messages sent by email anywhere and analyses of those messages. It also tracks the 

    popularity of these messages.
Otterman, Sharon. "E-Mail Hoax Raises Hopes Of a Day Off." New York Times 5 Jan.
    2010: A18(L). Academic OneFile. Web. 11 Feb. 2010.

        A New York Times account of a school disrupted by a viral message that was then spread further by students. An anonymous 

    hoaxer emailed students in the guise of an administration official, calling off school for the next day. Students further circulated 

    the message on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and electronic mail.

Roeper, Richard. Urban Legends: The Truth Behind All Those Deliciously Entertaining
    Myths That Are Absolutely, Positively, 100% Not True. Franklin Lakes, NJ: Career,
    1999. NetLibrary. Web. 7 Feb. 2010.

        This source details a cautionary viral message, and which will be used as an example of the type.

Strachey, Lytton. Eminent Victorians. New York: Penguin, 1986. Print.

        This source details two of the earliest historical viral messages, a chain letter and a message mangled in transmission. This source 

    will be used to provide historical context and demonstrate the increasingly complicated web of senders and receivers.

United States. Agency Group 09. "EMAIL HOAX FLOUTS POLICY." Washington:
    FDCH, 1999. EBSCO. 7 Feb. 2010.

        This press release which was written on behalf of the United States Marine Corps, details their policy on electronic media and discusses 

    some of the problems that organization has had with viral message traffic. This will be used as an example of how large organizations deal 

    with this problem, and will be used to asess the effectiveness of various strategies.

Watzlawick, Paul. How Real is Real? New York: Vintage, 1976. Print.

        This source discusses communication in the context of philosophy, and in how human beings perceive the world around them. This source 

    will be used to provide detail on mistranslation, which is what happens when a message is garbled or otherwise modified beyond what the original 

    communication intended. It discusses several incidents of mass hysteria which are comparable to present day viral messages and the public reactions 

    to those messages. It also provides insight into why many senders who are otherwise not credulous in their daily lives may be fooled by electronic mail 

    or social media posting.

Some Minor Kvetching, and More on the Facebook Automation Labs Hoax

Okay, so I just had my first American National Government class. I'm not so sure that went well for me. It is a subject I'm interested in, I'm very familiar with the material, the teacher is personable. However, I have serious Gordon rule problems (this is why this is on topic) - the only time I pick up a pen is to sign my name. There is a great reason for this. My handwriting looks like something that would be written on the side of a flying saucer in a "B" movie. This is not something I can readily change - my hands are agile, but very weak. I've been typing since I was about five or six years old. So yes, I do get the same muscle-brain stimulation that someone writing notes by hand gets when they put pen to paper, like I said this is what I grew up doing.

My notes for each test in government are to be handwritten and turned in for credit towards the Gordon rule. Because my letters (even in lower case) are quite large, I take up more page real estate (even when concentrating, and taking my dear, sweet time forming the letters), thus I get less words. On top of that when writing at speed, I'm still about three times slower than everybody else. I'm not worried about the tests, I'll ace those handily - I'm concerned about getting my Gordon rule credit. I stressed this multiple times. I'm not asking to use Google on my tests, but even being able to PRINT my notes would be nice. Maybe I could actually read them. I'm also a touch irked at being forced to do things like everybody else when I have a documented problem in that area.

I will now cease ranting.

Let's talk MLA instead. You'd think I would be ranting here, but I think MLA has improved dramatically since I last used it in Comp I. I don't think it is there yet, but it at least looks like they're starting to treat electronically formatted documents as real documents. I applaud the removal of the url from web cites. This is awesome - it was a cause of major formatting woes on my papers in Comp I.

Now I want to talk about what they could do to make things even better. They need to tighten up some of their citing formats - I'll use the email interview cite from number five on our MLA exercise:

An e-mail interview you conducted with Nora James on November 1, 2008.

This is how I cited it, and I believe it to be correct using the current MLA format:

James, Nora. No Subject. Email to Nora James. 1 Nov. 2008. Email.

This is how another student cited it:

Student Name Redacted -Ed., and Nora James. "Interview." Message to the author. 1 Nov. 2008. Web.

I think his method is more correct than the current MLA standard. I might even go so far as to put it: Interviewer Name (last, first). Interview with Interviewee Name. Interview Date. Email or Web. Most mail is "web mail" - very few people use an email client like I do so I feel "Web" is a valid medium. I could see some quibble room there though. Why does the interviewers name come first? Because the interviewer typically controls the interview. Interviewers write the questions, ad-lib follow up questions as needed, comment on interviewees responses. They typically have a point that they want to lead up to when interviewing someone, that is they are interviewing a person for a reason.

I could see reasonable arguments for making the citation more like a cite for a message board post. While only Google currently is using "threaded email conversations" as a model, you can see how they got there even in the traditional multi-level quoting system used by most mail clients. I think Google's model is a step forward and that eventually it will become the standard - just as most other email providers stepped up the amount of mail you could store in response to Gmail. But the key word there is "threaded" - just like a message board thread and the original post/responses on it. Just like Angel's message board system. There are more similarity's in the medium than differences, thus this is a reasonable way to handle cites where email is the medium.

The real solution to this problem is larger in scale. MLA, APA, and the administrators of the other systems need to sit down, take their hats in their hands and admit that they don't "get" the internet. That's okay, no shame in it. It isn't their job to figure out the internet. It is the World Wide Web Consortium's(W3C) job and when they are done with that moment of self confession, they should go have a friendly chat with them.

Sooner or later, this needs to happen and I can explain why. I've lived on both sides of this fence - my Dad had a typewriter shop when I was young, I learned to type at age six and I got good at touch typing when I was eleven. While I've been using a computer continuously since then, I used typewriters in the early days as much as I did my C64. Word processing on a computer hadn't quite arrived yet, though I had the means to do it, it was very expensive. So I learned about things like picas, that nobody in their right minds uses anymore. That's one of the things they need to discuss with the W3C - standards and measures.

On an MLA formatted paper you need one inch margins, double spacing, a header with your last name and page number. None of this works all that well on the web, and yeah we aren't doing papers here yet (PDF doesn't count), but I guarantee you that my youngest classmate's children will at the very least. Why not prepare for that day now and do it right, rather than trying to hash it out when it's needed? Specifically the reason it doesn't work on the web deals with "scaling" - good web pages do. MySPC and Angel designers please note this, this is what SPC's own web development curriculum has taught me this. It is also a W3C standard. What that means is that no matter how large your browser window is, the page's proportions adjust to fit it properly. The Firefox window on my iMac's viewing area measures: Viewport width: 1827px Viewport height: 968px. I run my browser very large. Because my Macbook's screen is smaller, the measurement in pixels (px) will be smaller even though the window takes up the same percentage of the screen. Designers typically test pages at 1024px wide by 768px tall and sometimes at 800px wide by 600px tall.

Things like margins and indents are possible, but things like non-breaking spaces in tables (you would likely use a table for citations for example) can cause issues in some browsers. Cough. Internet. Cough. Explorer. Cough. Excuse me, too many cigarettes, I need to quit. Just like people need to quit using IE until they commit to making it into a real browser. Sorry, mandatory cheap shot.

Arguing about browsers aside, if the MLA and the W3C got together and discussed standards, perhaps we could find a better way to render this stuff. Using tables, divs or non-breaking spaces is a very clumsy approach. I feel I am pretty good designer and I don't know how consistent my results would be creating papers for use on the web. New elements could be added or existing elements could be modified to suit academic uses. This would be a great thing.

The question I haven't answered above is "why" - why should the MLA bother with all this? Why can't they keep doing business as usual and ignore the web? Because nobody can. I don't care if you're Ted Kaczynski. If you are going to communicate with people, to share information, you cannot ignore this medium. The MLA's job is essentially organizing information, they especially cannot afford to ignore it. There are a number of positive benefits too. Coauthoring and peer reviewing become a great deal easier when you have a tool like Google Docs, or perhaps Google Wave in the future. I might even revise my stance on group work (hate it more than death) if it were done under a system like that - because you can see exactly who is contributing and who is not. Everybody wins when you can share information with more people - it's just that simple.

So let's talk about Facebook and the automation hoax. There are still some great questions left here: What's unique about this situation? Why did the message move to email as a medium? Why are so many commenters unwilling to believe this is a hoax?

Let's look at the current status of the posting first. Some stats: 1,280 likes (I put a like on it for ease of tracking so it displays as 1281), 395 comments since Wednesday. I'm seeing comments in multiple languages, the hoax has definitely spread in French and some are citing this as the origin of the hoax. I am not seeing any direct evidence of this, though French speaking users do seem active in propagating it. Greek and Turkish language speakers are also propagating it. The likes seem about the same as when I last viewed it late Friday night, there are about 45 additional comments.

Here we need to discuss the concept of "Opt In" which is kind of complicated. Let's watch a video that discusses how opt in impacts communications and I'll explain how it relates. The relevant part of the video is about five minutes in, but I'd like to encourage you to view the entire program. It's a great presentation.

So what does this have to do with viral communications (email forwards, facebook statuses, retweets)? All viral communications are an opt-in process with very few options. Forward that email, forward it with an addendum or don't forward it at all. So in economic terms, we can say each message has a "cost" though it may not be an easily measurable cost in financial terms. In terms of viral communications this is a sliding scale from the high end such as the Craig Shergold emails that ask the recipient to take action in the real world down to Facebook statuses that require a very small investment of time or effort.

As Dr. Ariely points out cost is not the only factor, nor is it the primary factor in a user's decision to believe in the Automation Labs hoax. In my opinion several other factors converged to make it possible: 1) Users unfamiliar with the way Facebook operates. Arthur C. Clarke said "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." That is the average user's view of how the internet works - ask a non-technical person how he thinks his computer connects to the internet sometime, I guarantee you the results will be fascinating. In this case our user not only failed to understand how suggestive search operates, but how Facebook accounts work though they use both daily. 2) Facebook's response.

Facebook's response is notable as this is a somewhat unique situation. Facebook is a very closed system, in that all the content is focused on their site, even if you're bringing in content from a site that participates in Facebook Connect. As such they can moderate content when they choose to and have a mechanism in place to do just that.

Additionally there are other parts of Facebook security that are partially crowd sourced. If enough people report a status, comment or link as breaking the terms of service, someone will investigate it. As you might imagine these are very busy people.

Compare this to 1989. In 1989 chain letters were typically sent by email, occasionally you'd see one on USENET. Both of these are radically decentralized. While it was possible to report a sender to his ISP, it was never a given that anything would really be done about it. At the core, there really wasn't anyone in charge or a moderator in most cases. America Online was a new service at the time, and had an internal component which you could compare to Facebook as well as a gateway to the internet. Chain letters inside their system or through the gateway to the internet email system were not typically with the same zeal as other termination of service offenses.

Because of this closed system, where all roads lead to Facebook, they were in a unique position to try to cut the chain. While I'm not specifically versed on the inner workings of Facebook, but I can make an educated guess on how they did this from a technical perspective. They wrote a script which looked for certain word combinations in a status - it does not seem to apply to comments, and if the test is true then you block the user from posting the message and return a message saying why you're blocking it. One problem with this approach that we've already seen is that they did not write a script for every language used on Facebook. French, Greek and Turkish posters could continue to post this to their statuses.

Next, Facebook security linked to a debunking of the hoax. That link is in my last post, but you can also see it here. Unfortunately, someone or more likely several someones reported the link as "abusive." This prevented users from visiting it and seeing the debunking information. This caused further speculation and rumor mongering.

I'm not convinced that the debunking would have really had any effect, most people who already believed the hoax would continue to believe it in spite of the evidence. This is because these stories tend to not be a matter of "correct" or "incorrect," but a signifier - either of group membership, individual prejudices or a combination of the two. This is what my preliminary research has shown, but more on that later.

Two important events were also occurring in the background while this took place. The first is Facebook's change in look and feel. I suspect many found this unsettling - it really is a large and sweeping change. Many commenters in the thread about the Automation Labs hoax made noted very negative feelings towards the new look. Also, there is the continuing debate about privacy on Facebook. Recently the CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg declared privacy "No longer a social norm." While I do not think the average transmitter was aware of the statement, I don't think it is impossible that it plays some role in these events.

A little more on the Automation Labs hoax

It has been suggested by the editor of All Facebook that the Automation Labs hoax may be a viral marketing campaign.

I think this is unlikely. First, Automation Labs produces a software robot (called a "bot") for the very popular Facebook game Farmville, developed by Zynga. Bots play a game or take in game actions on behalf of the player when he is not present at the computer. I'm not by any means recommending the game (and certainly not the bot) - I feel Zynga does business with some very shady people (see this Tech Crunch series and this Consumerist article.) However I might feel about them as a company, Automation Labs product violates their terms of service, players that use this software are likely to be actioned (banned, warned or some other punitive measure taken against them). This is particularly relevant in the aftermath of Blizzard Entertainment vs. Glider, a software bot formerly used in the popular MMO World of Warcraft.

In essence, the court found that the developers of the Glider bot violated Blizzard's copyrights, particularly in reference to their game client (the software players use to access the game.) Since then, while bot makers are still active, they are leary of litigation as this case is a possible precedent in future actions. Looking at the WHOIS lookup for automationlabs.org, the address in the administrative information section leads to a mail center in Brea, CA and their telephone contact is an unpublished number in Los Angeles, CA. This may mean they have some assets within the U.S. and could be reached by the U.S. legal system. Many bot makers exist in countries with poor records when it comes to IP protection such as China or India. If they are located within the U.S., then putting themselves on the radar like this would make no sense.

Also, this hoax uses their company name in a fairly negative light (and in most gaming communities botting software is already considered in a very negative way), making those that searched for the term less likely to buy their product. Are you eager to buy a legally questionable product from someone being accused of hacking by one or more of your friends? That's what I thought.

I concede the possibility that this may have been started by a competitor, but I would think that Automation Labs would have to be seen as a leader in the field. Their website does not lead me to believe this is the case, and a Google search for Farmville bots (no, I am not clicking those links even with my shields up) has Automation Labs product ranked fifteenth - below the fold (on the second page of results) for most people searching Google. I would expect a serious competitor would rank in the top five.

Additionally, bot software developers tend to avoid the light of day and this has shined a spotlight upon their community in Farmville. When awareness of botting goes up, so do user reports and game company enforcement efforts. I noticed this during my time in World of Warcraft. There is no positive evidence that this was a viral marketing campaign either by Automation Labs or one of their competitors.

Another possible scenario: Users who utilize bot software tend not to be the most security conscious people around. Because people want this software and it is not socially acceptable, it often comes with a little something extra. Malware. Key-loggers, root kits, worms, etc. I'm not specifically accusing Automation Labs of dispensing malware, but this was often a source of infection in WoW community. So our user downloads something with malware in it and panics - he starts checking all his online accounts, changing up his passwords and secret questions. He checks his block list on facebook, and he types in the name of the company he thinks infected him - and a whole list of people pop up because of Facebook's suggestive search. He gets the totally wrong impression that these people have access to his account and after blocking them, posts a status about it. And so it goes.

This seems plausible based on user behavior I've seen in the past, I cheerfully admit to having no evidence whatsoever as to its validity. Just musing while I wait to see if netLibrary is going to cooperate with me.

Research Paper Citation Reminder

Happy Friday! Upon returning to the homestead I've found an interesting bit of data for my research paper and I just wanted to make a note of it here.

Apparently Facebook's "suggest" script is spooking a lot of non-technical users, and as a result a chain status is circulating on Facebook. More information here. This is a "fear of the unknown" sort of thing - I also want to quote the chain status as it was appearing on Wed 2/3/10:

All FB friends. This is important. Do this asap! Go to settings. Click on privacy settings. Click on block users. in the name box enter 'automation labs'. A list of approx 20 people you dont even know will come up. Block each one individually. These people have access to your facebook account/profile and spy on what You do!

Sophos webpage's quoting of FB users on the hoax, as linked above.

There's a huge string of comments on the article on Facebook Security's organization page. Apparently the viral post was either originally in French or has been translated into French (an example of the status in French was provided in the comments - it was very close to the above.) It appears that Facebook's own system for limiting the spread of such misinformation is causing a great deal of suspicion. "They're blocking it the spread of this status, it must be true!" seems to be a common narrative, as is a bit of head scratching about about the link to the debunking article (liked above) being reported as "abusive." As a result, it is impossible to jump to it directly from Facebook.

According to Snopes.com, this chain has also been spread in a slightly different format (a particular name is associated with Automation Labs and is put forward as the "hacker's" identity) via email. It is interesting to note this misinformation is being spread by traditional channels (email forward) as well as newer social media channels. Twitter, however, seems largely immune to the misinformation as of this date - all message I've found in a search for "Automation Labs" are messages reporting it as a hoax - with one exception: a retweet, which I've screenshotted so I can track it backwards to the original senders.

The actual company, Automation Labs, which produces a software bot for Farmville also references the hoax. While I don't believe they are up to anything dodgey on Facebook, I'm not going to link to them here directly - I'll store the link in my notes though.

I think the fact that Facebook has changed their "look & feel" in the past several days has contributed to the sense of unease that their users feel. Several posts in the comment thread reference it and even try to tie it into the "hack."

I'm very tired, so I'll finish chasing this one down tomorrow. I suspect that this hoax will be very short lived, possibly playing itself out by Friday of next week at worst. We'll see if my guess is correct.

Who Owns Your Names?

You do, right? It's only common sense. But are you sure? How sure? I know there at least two or three people (probably a lot more, those are only the ones who've done something that was indexed by Google) that share my first and last name. Probably at least a few share my middle name, once we look at the actual number of people with my legal name, rather than the subset that Google displays. At least one of them is older than I am. Can he claim that I'm infringing upon his trademarks or copyrights (should he register our name)? Can he claim my writing or other work as his own? Can he take my deeded real property? After all, that's his name on that deed as much as it is mine and he has an earlier claim than I do - he was born first.

Does that make identity theft an IP violation? If someone steals my identity and creates a successful artistic work using my name, can I claim his work as mine? If he has children and gives them my surname, is that a derivative work based on my name? Can I gain custody? If he's married under my name, do I have to assume his marriage contract?

Of course, all this seems absurd now, but one day sooner than you might think these issues will be paraded before a judge's bench. This is where our current IP laws are leading us - maybe it would be better to pull back and think it over before we reach the abyss?

Should the Middle Be Excluded?

I've been watching Seth Godin's Linchpin from pre-launch promotion in January till now, and at the same time watching the topic approvals forum.

One thing Mr. Godin did for the promotion of his book really stuck with me, it was a video in which a lot of odd questions were asked. You can view below if you like.

Riddles for linchpins from Seth Godin on Vimeo.

One thing that struck me (I hope nobody takes offense at this - you know, if anybody is actually reading) is that nobody really seemed to be asking questions. I'm not necessarily excluding myself, though my approval pitch had a couple of implied questions - I'm not sure that's really good enough. Of course, it was approved, and I'm very happy about that. I suspect that the beginning of a research paper is probably a very appropriate place to ask a lot of questions - and if they are either very good questions or profoundly dumb questions, you're doing it right.

I think that statements, including this one, are very seductive in an unhealthy way. They give us the impression we know far more than we actually do. Maybe even that we know everything. I suspect you can easily fall into the habit of skipping the awkward questioning phase, if you think you already know everything. What if your questions are wrong? What if you don't answer your questions correctly? Why is being wrong "bad"? What are the consequences of being wrong in this specific instance? What if someone thinks they're stupid? Is questioning your topic or project too big a risk? If you're questioning it, might someone else suspect that you aren't confident in your work? Would that matter? What if you were "too big to fail?" or this paper would result in an "A" no matter what you did? Would you do anything differently? How and why?

I wonder if we aren't heading towards the world portrayed in Jonathan Lethem's Gun with Occasional Music? In the book, asking questions is a crime. You can see how it progressed from being impolite, to the current state of affairs. Only people with in the state police (called "inquisitors") or those who have a private inquisitors license can ask questions.

I want to look at a couple of places where I could have done better on my pitch.

I will also attempt to interview some of the principals involved in the Craig Shergold incident - Atlanta postal officials, and officers of the Make-A-Wish foundation.

This is from bullet point two of my research methodology. These are the questions I should have provided some kind of answer to or at least acknowledged:

• Why are these interviews important?
• What do you expect they'll be able to tell you that you cannot source on the web or from print sources?

Also:

I believe the average transmitter is male, between thirty-five and fifty-five years of age, has a bachelors degree and is employed in an office environment.

I wonder why I believe that when my anecdotal experience is the opposite? Most of the pieces I've received were from female senders, younger than thirty-five (typically late twenties) and had a high school diploma, or very little college.

I think I know the answer to that last question, but I want to stew on all of them for a bit. So I'll be talking about this more in a future posting. One of my goals in future postings is to practice asking really good and really stupid questions - hopefully avoiding questions that are in the middle of those two goal posts.

Is Flossing the Answer?

So I'm marking time while I wait for my topic approval, I thought I'd talk about why I picked my topic. And some other stuff.

Okay, apparently while I was lollygagging, it was approved. Here's the text of my sales pitch:

Topic: Misinformation in complex systems.

Focus: Pre-web forwarded email urban legends on the internet and their web 2.0 equivalents.

Major: Undecided. I'm having a bit of trouble with this at the moment, but I am most interested in computer science/software engineering, communications theory and marketing.

Why have I chosen this topic:

I believe it is under investigated. People have this nasty habit of believing that there is a solid barrier between life online and the real world. That things which occur in one, do not effect the other. One of my primary examples in this paper will be Craig Shergold, the subject of an email forward campaign that got out of hand during the early days of the internet. The email asked the recipient to send post cards to a sick child in Britain in an attempt to set a Guiness world record and to forward the email on to their friends. The email continued to spread long after Mr. Shergold set his record and recovered from his illness. As a consequence of this the British postal system has spent millions of dollars creating a special zip code just for him, as well as sorting more than a million post cards per year. Later the letter mutated and asked the recipient to send a post or business card to the Make-A-Wish foundation. They received so much mail that they actually were forced to move their home office. The Atlanta post office still has to receive and store letters sent to him. As you can see, a lot of unconnected persons sending an innocent email about helping a sick child have cost governments on two continents millions of dollars and has done substantial damage to a very worthy charity.

What interests me about it?

I'm interested from two perspectives. First, as a student of human nature, I find people's beliefs - especially erroneous beliefs - fascinating. We learn primarily from our own failures, and the failures of others. I also have far more experience with email forwards than I would care to. I seem to be a magnet for email forwards, and copy/pasted Facebook statuses. I've never forwarded them on, but I've always been very curious about the motivations of the people who did. In many cases, the story contains elements that are demonstrably false based on simple common sense, a very small amount of research should be enough to seal the story's fate. Yet the person who forwarded it will often consider it true, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary.

Additionally, there often does not seem to be clear motive to why these messages were sent in the first place. They are not scams, like the 419 scam - which is a mutation of the Spanish Prisoner, a con game so old that it goes back to before the colonization of America. They are not hoaxes for publicity's sake like the boy in the balloon. They typically bear a stronger resemblance to the pull can tabs for medical treatment legend that was prevalent in offices from the nineteen seventies onward. The original sender is seldom identified, and all traces of his identity often vanish from the medium within a few iterations of the message.

I'd also like to see what could be done to prevent situations like the Craig Shergold incident. Short of removing the forward button from the email clients of the people who send these messages and gluing the senders to the floor. Obviously I cannot do that. No matter satisfying it might be to fantasize about that.

I intend to pursue my research using the following:

* I want to build a profile of the average misinformation transmitter. I will accomplish this via a survey about online habits.
* I will also attempt to interview some of the principals involved in the Craig Shergold incident - Atlanta postal officials, and officers of the Make-A-Wish foundation.
* I want to look at common elements in this kind of message and attempt to discover if any particular element makes a given message more likely to be sent on.
* I want to study how a message moves from peer group to peer group on the internet and compare the late 1980s to the present day.
* In addition to my required sources. They will reference specific incidents and communications theory dealing with misinformation as well as transmission errors.
* As extra credit, I want to create a simulated message and investigate (via the groups I've surveyed) whether it would be propagated, and attempt to make an estimate of how large an audience the message would reach. I will do a presentation on the results of this experiment.
* I also solemnly promise to refrain from using adhesives of any kind to attach anyone to the floor or any other surface for any reason during the course of my research or while authoring my paper. No matter how much it might improve my final product.

What information do you think you might find?

I believe the average transmitter is male, between thirty-five and fifty-five years of age, has a bachelors degree and is employed in an office environment.

I suspect the messages themselves are a kind of modern fairy tale, they are an emotional statement designed to evoke compassion (sick child needs object), fear (of strangers, the very poor, the very rich, the sick, people not like us, etc) and other strong reactions. The cues (strong emotive language) that produce these emotions are often accentuated as the message gets corrupted as it is passed from person to person. Messages that don't have these elements, or where the corruption downplays them, tend not to get forwarded and die soon after.

Where do you think you might end up with this research?

The thing I'm most sure of is that there is no easy solution to this problem. Short of gluing people to the floor, which I obviously cannot condone. I believe that I will discover that people have a deep need for these kinds of messages. Much as people in earlier ages needed to believe in Robin Hood or Prester John.

I know my traditional strategy of saying "you're wrong" and showing evidence to back my position is ineffective. I suspect that even emphasizing skepticism, critical thinking and research skills at a much earlier age than education traditionally does would prove only moderately effective.

Despite my low expectations of finding a real solution to this issue, I am eager to study this topic and hope to have the opportunity to write about it.

My biggest concern is how I will format my surveys, what elements to include and what to exclude. I know I'll want basic demographic information. But particularly as to email/tweeting/status behaviors, I'm not sure exactly how to ask those questions. I'll have to give it some thought.

I have another rationale behind why I really like this topic. Jean Shepherd divided the world into Day People and Night People. I think that's an interesting topology, mine would be Kooks and Normals - with maybe some wiggle room between the two categories. Most of these forwards, at least the ones that I've seen were sent by reasonably well educated people, many had a college degree. They worked a steady job, and everyday ate their breakfast. But they send these messages on. Most of them could do a better job writing or summarizing the message, again, educated. Most felt strongly about the virtue of originality, and would sermonize on the topic if you gave them the chance. Yet they were forwarding. They also worried about all sorts of things that I considered odd, but never considered that those emails they sent might have some sort of consequence - that somebody might act on them. They always told me "what's the harm? it's just an email!"

To me, it seems like shouting in an avalanche zone. None of them could ever give me a good account of why they forwarded the emails out. To me, it seems almost ritualistic. Surreal. Like watching a "bank" in a village of cargo cultists. The villagers file in. They exchange leaves with the "teller" and they file back out again. But it's a false comparison, because the villagers may not know what banking is, but they know why they're doing that - they want to bring the cargo to their village and they think this ritual is an efficient means of doing so.

So, while I won't be using it on my actual paper, my real thesis is "Normal People: Weirder than Kooks." Because I study kooks too. I'll tell you that kooks tend to have a system, a set of rules and protocols for dealing with their beliefs, and the world that exists outside their skulls. Even if they don't believe in the reality of that world. They'll explain why they're wearing that tin foil hat or waving a pocket calculator over you or yelling at trees in baroque detail. Their answers may not make a great deal of sense, or even connect with reality at any point, but unlike my email forwarders, they have a reason behind their actions.

One piece of odd normal behavior I've seen, that I've never been able to understand is the fetishization of clothing. I'm not talking about whips and chains here, I'm talking about business clothing. There's a very weird set of rituals that have been built around button down shirts, slacks, and penny loafers. Ties. Shudder. I'll concede that I'm not a fan, but that's not why I think it's odd. Oddity: Nobody knows what "business casual" means, but whatever it is, it's different for men than for women.

Almost every job I've ever worked was business casual. Women at most of them wore T-shirts now and then - I'm not talking about casual Friday. In my early work experience that was an idea whose time had not yet come. Also, don't tell me they were wearing a "blouse" - I worked at HSN, and thus know more than I ever wanted to about woman's clothing. I spoke intelligently about bust measurements with women old enough to be my grandmother.

But let's look at what was in store for gents. Black pants, white colored button down shirt. A little color is okay if you want to occasionally wear a golf shirt - which is distinct from a t-shirt because it has a collar? Earth tones only though. Don't ask me. I can't explain it. Now, if you're over fifty, you can wear gray, and even have pinstripes.

Also, wearing inexpensive, durable, comfortable clothing on any day except for Friday brings down the company's stock prices. Even if we aren't publicly traded. Additionally, though we have gate, building and office security, a customer or investor might burst in like a ninja, rappelling down the side of the building, breaking open one of the bullet-proof, non-opening windows and catch us wearing something other than our salt and peppers.

If you allow casual clothing in your company, nobody can wear anything else. The idea that you might want to wear a "dressier" outfit apparently makes you overdressed. The penalties for being overdressed are apparently too horrible to imagine, because nobody would ever describe them to me. Additionally, if you don't have strict (but not so strict as to be an actual instruction, dress codes are supposed to be absorbed through osmosis) dress codes people will show up in their underwear or worse nude!

Besides, everyone knows you're more "professional" when you're dressed in at least business casual in the one hundred plus degree Florida sun. Nobody has ever cited evidence, but everybody knows. Nobody can describe what "professional" might mean in this context. Everyone knows. One intelligent co-worker of mine even suggested, of her own free will, that we be forced to wear uniforms! What could go wrong?

The most surreal interaction with dress codes I've ever had though was at my last real job. They pulled us from our desks in the middle of the shift to go hear this lady talk about how, though we had ritually practiced casual Friday for aeons untold, we would now have to wear a company button in order to wear jeans on Friday - and even that might be cut to once a month. There was also a great deal of singing, and some general praise about how generous our company was - there was even talk about "spirit". It was all very confusing.

I'll be honest, this spirit thing has always befuddled me. Back when I was in High School, I was told that I must have it and was forced to go to the gym to listen to vaguely rhythmic chants about it. They'd say "We have spirit, yes we do, we've got spirit how about you?" but all I could do was stare blankly, because I had no idea what they were talking about - just that I was forced to be there when I could have been planning that week's Gangbusters campaign or reading. It was even weirder in a professional context - it apparently isn't enough that I've taken your shilling, shown up most of the time, and turned in what you tell me is excellent work. I have to source a spirit and be thankful that you're letting me wear the clothing I prefer somewhat less often . . . if I wear your totem. A totem, that only my co-workers and supervisors will know about because I never see my customers?!?!

I'm not sure that I'm a kook, but I'm quite glad that I'm not normal. Those normal guys are really weird.