gohda would be proud
When I saw the story about the Digg Fraud Campaign, which saw a handful of users game the Digg system to create hype for the Zune, I immediately thought of Kazundo Gouda. It sounds exactly like something he would be behind.
Murphey maintains an array of anonymous blogs that all spread false information and cloaked FUD attacks by serving up rabid attacks on everything Apple, while sometimes also pretending to be an Apple fan site. Murphey works as a pay for say ‘professional blogger’ who advertises his ability to push any propaganda through Digg for a fee.Gouda used the same method, albeit on a much larger scale, to push his sinister agenda (not what that is yet!). He would plant bits of information in strategic places, information that once found would would trigger events, e.g. evidence at the scene of a crime, stories in the media, the Individual Eleven easays, and manipulte them as they unfold.Digg users have been eating up everything Murphey throws out.
For example, Murphey has been working to create rumors of an imminently available new “video iPod,” apparently in an effort to try to get iPod buyers to hold off on their purchases and perhaps consider the Zune.
Murphey has more alter ego aliases on Digg than he has website domain names. At one point he could claim whitebreadmike, MrsMurphy, themurph2099, and several others that have since all been banned for fraud use. His accomplices also hide behind fake names, including carapi, monkeybutler, and lackawak, who was also banned by Digg for fraud. He quickly turned up again as lackawack2, 3, and is now somewhere around 6.
I’ve never really paid any attention to digg so I’m not too sure how it work. It does however seem to be vulnerable to manipulation. There was talk a while ago about digg being better than slashdot, most of it came from the digg users themselves. I don’t think so at all, slashdot is a much more mature and robust site.
That said, digg - the whole web 2.0 phenomena actualy - highlights an important shift in the internet’s information landscape. Information aggregators make it easier to track news, trends, hot topics, etc, and they leverage the network effect to do so. It’s the whole “harnessing collective intelligence” thing. How that ‘intellegence’ gets used and what it gets used for remains to be seen. This fraud campaign is example of what is already possible. The campaign is also a small scale example of much bigger practise, net war.
The information revolution is leading to the rise of network forms of organization, with unusual implications for how societies are organized and conflicts are conducted. “Netwar” is an emerging consequence. The term refers to societal conflict and crime, short of war, in which the antagonists are organized more as sprawling “leaderless” networks than as tight-knit hierarchies. Many terrorists, criminals, fundamentalists, and ethno-nationalists are developing netwar capabilities. A new generation of revolutionaries and militant radicals is also emerging, with new doctrines, strategies, and technologies that support their reliance on network forms of organization. Netwar may be the dominant mode of societal conflict in the 21st century. These conclusions are implied by the evolution of societies, according to a framework presented in this RAND study.Traditional notions of war and low-intensity conflict as a sequential process based on massing, maneuvering, and fighting will likely prove inadequate to cope with nonlinear, swarm-like, information-age conflicts in which societal and military elements are closely intermingled.No suprise then that the Pentagon now sports it’s own ‘media war’ unit:
The newly-established unit would use “new media” channels to push its message and “set the record straight”, Pentagon press secretary Eric Ruff said. “We’re looking at being quicker to respond to breaking news,” he said. “Being quicker to respond, frankly, to inaccurate statements.”Like William Gibson says, ‘the future is already here’, net war is upon us! Oh, and do yourself a favour, watch Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, especially the 2nd GigA Pentagon memo seen by the Associated Press news agency said the new unit would “develop messages” for the 24-hour news cycle and aim to “correct the record”. The unit would reportedly monitor media such as weblogs and would also employ “surrogates”, or top politicians or lobbyists who could be interviewed on TV and radio shows.
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