h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

(This will inevitably turn into another one of my endless journal conversations such as 'Zaphod' or 'Facepalm').

When an attack such as the recent ones in Paris happens, one of the things people say is that we mustn't give in to the terrorists. We mustn't live in fear or change our ways because that would be giving in to them and/or the terrorists will have won.

Terrorists such as those are most definitely real and most definitely scary and they most definitely kill people.

Internet trolls, on the other hand, are sad, irritating, silly people; cowards who hide behind the (sometimes) anonymity of a screen name and who sit the comfort of their own home, spouting their bile from the safety of their own keyboard. They do what they do because it's so easy, but the idea of actually following through with any kind of action will be the last thing on their mind.

So why are their impotent threats given such credence, thereby giving the trolls power? Why are they taken so much more seriously, in some ways, than the people (ISIS, Boko Haram, Al Qaeda) who we *really* should be scared of and do something about? After all, their death threats are the ones that really are carried out. Not so with internet trolls.

I've been wondering this for some time, but this story brought it to the forefront of my thoughts today http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/bbc-sends-security-guard-to-protect-journalist-who-received-abuse-on-twitter-after-she-said-she-a6748156.html

Twitter trolls are about as frightening as a feather duster (yes, I know some people have a feather phobia). Have we forgotten the old chatroom/bulletin board/forum adage 'Don't feed the troll'? Ignore them and they will go away. They really will. But giving in to them in ways we refuse to give in to the real trolls (terrorists) seems arse-about-face to me.

I guess it's just a matter of percentages. I'm sure 99% of those trolls are just that. But maybe some fraction of that remaining 1% is off their medication and unsupervised and may actually do some harm to her. These trolls typically "dox" people they target, publishing addresses and workplaces of the target and the target's family quite often which may enable the true nutter. The internet can be a truly nasty place and sometimes, maybe not often, but sometimes it spills over into the real world.


I did read an article not long ago about a woman who sought out and met one of her trolls. It was pretty interesting how he reacted once he met his target in person. And you're right. He really didn't feel that antagonistic toward her, he just "got off" to the trolling. He reconsidered his life choices after that. It was an interesting article.

Interesting comparison!

As you say about the trolls, they do it because it's easy, you can just fire off a diatribe without any of the trouble it would take to do ISIS-style acts, and maybe that's it?

Maybe we go after them because it's easy, and we know what to do: find out who they are and tell the police. Or just report it to the police and let them do it all.

Isis on the other hand, we quite simply haven't got a baldy notion, so we shrug it off and say "carry on as normal". Because realistically, what else can you do?

Traveller in Time also in a comprehension loss
"As far as I understand terrorists seed terror, by doing acts out of any scale for us normal people. The fear they try to seed is their (only) basis of power.

Trolls on the other hand are probably only attention seekers. Their only power is in the conversation topic they hijack with their actions.
(left out are ideology advertisers)

Common aspect would be that they disrupt a normal situation. Both groups should know there is not such thing as real anonymity. They also could know any thinking person would be rejected by their methods instead of attracted into following them.

Both groups should perhaps follow a course in advertisement instead.


I can not even find any fitting smilies to insert into the dry text. "

It's not just ISIS KB. We used to say the same thing - don't let them win by changing our ways - during the Troubles when the IRA were in the thick of their bombing campaign. And then there's 'Keep calm and Carry On'. But in the face of trolls, who are almost entirely impotent, people lose all sense of perspective and treat them as a far greater threat. I think maybe this is one for Shankar Vedantam http://www.vedantam.com/ He loves all things counter-intuitive.

Oh, I know it's not, I was just using that as an example. The same applies, though: I think we react to trolls but not terrorists because, well, it's not a great effort to do so. Whereas ending any kind of conflict is a long and tricky thing. So we try to carry on as normal, but console ourselves for our powerlessness by saying "this will defeat them".

As for why we overreact to trolls - I was thinking about something not quite the same, but similar, the other day. The concept of "zero tolerance". All too often it seems, "zero tolerance for _____" seems to be another way of saying you go after piffling little petty offenders and give them a disproportionate penalty because they are easily caught and prosecuted: in other words, it often just means over-reacting to the small stuff while the big stuff goes on as ever.

You might have something there.

I'm all agog to know what TiT/CoG has to say in that post.

I understand what you're saying, TiT, but what bewilders me and what brought this up is the disproportionate reaction of people to the seemingly impotent trolls compared to the unspeakable and real acts of the terrorists. The woman in that news story wouldn't have got a security guard if the Paris attacks had happened in London, but a few attention-seeking people post comments online and she does. I don't get it.

The latest internet craze is, apparently, the condom challenge http://www.independent.co.uk/extras/indybest/gadgets-tech/condomchallenge-people-drop-water-filled-condoms-on-their-heads-in-new-viral-craze-a6748691.html

I don't get it. No, not that teenagers are doing stupid things - I have a great deal of experience in that respect What I don't get is exactly what's happening. If the opening of the condom is at the top when it's dropped, how does it make the fish bowl? If the opening is at the bottom how come the water doesn't just all fall out?

My guess is that it is filled, tied at the top, and forms the 'fish bowl' by the weight of the water pulling the condom down over the head. This is probably why the tension is so high that it 'bursts when touched'. But...naw, I don't get it.

Ah, I get it now... I think. That's why the people in those videos don't look like their face is covered with water

Or rather, immersed in water. Because it isn't

It's nearly as confusing as the Klein Bottle

I don't believe the condom is tied off. I think what's happening is that the condom is prevented from completely inverting by the "ring" at the base of the rubber. It doesn't stretch as much as the rest of the condom and gets caught on top of the head creating something like a toroid (doughnut shape) around the face.

That's my educated guess anyway.

I'll tell you why I react to trolls (sometimes) is that if I dare make a statement, as a woman (I don't hide it) about, say, gendered toys sometimes the reaction is that I should die a horrible death and be dismembered, raped by a billion ISIS members etc etc.

And even if it is feeding them - what the heck provokes that kind of claptrap? women get it all the freaking time when they go on the internet and talk about anything other than fluffy kittens (I get it in football circles too sometimes...) and the answer offered by so many people is: stay off the internet then.

It's just too flipping much.

Traveller in Time after some distance
"Regarding Terrors and Trolls ;
Think there is a problem with scale

Though both hopefully not very near there still is some difference between the two. I have not heard from a troll to do any more harm then seeding frustration and perhaps fear (Worst case the forums are closed)

Think a better comparison would be rebellions and terrors or respectively a litterer and a troll.

I think I would be part of a serious (to my conviction) rebellion in the first case, where I would pick up the litter in the last case.

The threshold to interfere will probably have to do with not being the specialised officer to interfere with terrors.
Whereas anyone feeling a responsibility for the area could pick up some trash on the way out.

Regarding the bbc article (had to use other puter )

She was editor, employee in some kind. Protect your workers from occupational hazards. Apparently her job is to run the site in some ways. Not unlike a former h2g2 editor had/has. "

Yesterday I saw two posts on Twitter from people whose songs had been deleted by an iTunes (or possibly iOS) upgrade (both, coincidentally in Scotland, although I don't know if that had anything to do with it).

I really don't get a) why people still use iTunes given that this isn't the first time this has happened and that Apple has such a bad reputation these days for control of content, b) why people use cloud services in the first place and c) why people don't back up their data. External drives are unbelievably cheap these days. A one-terabyte drive can be had for very little money, and unless you have a huge collection will probably be big enough to hold all the images and mp3s that most people have. If not, a 2TB drive is hardly more expensive, and if that's still not big enough... buy two! The average computer these days has plenty of USB connections and you don't have to be a to set one up. No-one is going to control your files, no-one's going to track them, no-one's going to delete them, and the only possibility of loss is if the drive fails. If your songs and photos are that important, put them on two drives.

You may not have to be a genius, but it helps to be smarter than I am. Several years ago during a critical malfunction I had a computer shop back up my computer on an external drive, including my iTunes. Forever after that, any time I wanted to update my iPod I had to connect the drive and do it manually from the drive. I'm not sure I could even explain what the problem was. I re-installed iTunes and moved all my files to another computer (same model, tho). iTunes gave every appearance of being fine, but when I tried to play a song it would come up with file not found or something like that. So I had to download everything again. Then I had TWO copies of every track on my iTunes, but only half of them worked. And that half would only work if the external drive was connected.

iTunes would never acknowledge that I had ever bought a track from them, so I couldn't restore my purchases that way either.

Eventually I gave up, got a new computer, started over from scratch, and started getting everything from Amazon. (What a happy place that is!)

I really ought to get a new external drive and copy everything over. I'm sure it's as simple as you say, I'm just computer-stupid.

Meanwhile, Amazon Prime is the best thing to happen to music in decades! I don't have to worry about backing up *anything*.

Life was so much easier when all you did was go to the music shop and buy a record

I tried to suggest having a computer at work with iTunes on it that anyone could rip a CD or transfer their mp3s to, like we had at the Alamo, and have it on shuffle all the time, but half the people at work don't even have mp3s now - they all have Spotify or Pandora and have no need of any kind of music files, discs or vinyl

Now, I can see the advantages of that for film and video. If Netflix (or any video provider) had all the content I want to see, in high quality and at a reasonable monthly cost, I doubt I'd ever purchase another DVD. Well, except for one or two that I'm especially fond of.

It's different with music though, perhaps because I've grown up having to buy physical copies of what I want to listen to. But also because the quality of almost all music that you *don't* get as a physical copy - mp3s - whether streamed or purchased, isn't what I want to own. And I really don't understand that... well, I do. I was going to say that I don't understand why a relatively light-bandwidth medium like sound should (almost) only be available in a lossy, low-quality format (mp3), while it's possible to stream something that's factors of magnitude more bandwidth-heavy - a blu-ray film. But I suppose it's partly because mp3s came along when bandwidth and storage weren't as cheap or as available as they are now (a big issue I have with torrent sites who still insist on heavily compressed files) and so everyone's used to them and a huge industry has grown up around them, and also because we can see a poor quality files much more easily than we can hear one, and once you've seen hi-def TV it's very hard to go back to something that isn't.

Ooh, that's just reminded me of something. I've mentioned before that the former Mrs Gosho's dad laments the fact that because modern cars have computers, you can't tinker with them like you used to be able to, and in some case may actually be committing a crime by doing so because of proprietary information, or at the very least voiding your guarantee That really pisses me off.

The same goes for motorbikes, although less so. But last week I watched a documentary about the Indian-made Royal Enfield Bullet motorbike, which is still an old-school bike virtually unchanged since the heyday of the British motorbike industry, and therefore with nothing that a competent motorbike owner can't work on, as a number of owners pointed out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Enfield_Bullet

And then there's this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-JIhuxgK-s

But you meet the nicest people on a Honda.

http://youtu.be/hAjlV2DdC5o