************************************************************** * * * CYBERSPACE * * A biweekly column on net culture appearing * * in the Toronto Sunday Sun * * * * Copyright 1999 Karl Mamer * * Free for online distribution * * All Rights Reserved * * Direct comments and questions to: * * * * * ************************************************************** TROLLIN' keeps those Newbies Rollin' The USENET news system has produced a phenomenon known as trolling. Trolling on USENET is roughly the equivalent of its rod-and-reel namesake. You tease your prey (unsuspecting readers of a newsgroup) with a fake post, and delight when they take the bait. Outrage is invariably what the troller seeks from his prey, yet outrage is not the bait. Subtlety is the key. Subtlety transmogrifies trolling from being a waste of bandwidth to a clever art form. Bad trolls are either incredibly easy to detect (e.g., messages like "I'm the Devil!!!" on alt.christnet) or are simply indistinguishable from any other rant. That kind of trolling is a waste. A lot of bad trolls come out of university .edu accounts. Sometimes a student will forget to log out of a terminal in the computing centre and some joker will jump on the terminal and cross-post an insulting message to the four corners of the net under the less-than-vigilant student's account name. A good troll mimics the form and style of an intellectual affront, yet provides one or more sly tip offs of its bogus nature. Those who are paying attention and find these "escape hatches" are rewarded with the same sense of intellectual superiority one gets by completing a crossword puzzle not published in a TV guide. Occasionally a good troll will generate a particularly hilarious bit of user outrage. Kook hunters who roam USENET keep an eye open for nominees for what is known on alt.usenet.kooks as the Hook, Line, and Sinker Award. The latest catch can be viewed at www.wetware.com/mlegare/winnersh.html. For obvious reasons, April 1 is prime troll season. A fantastic archive of hoax posts, some dating back to the mid-'80s, can be found at http://sunsite.unc.edu/dbarberi/april-fools.html/. I occasionally try my hand at trolling in alt.conspiracy. A couple of mine, "Flying Truck Tires of Death" and "The Toronto Cabal FAQ" can be found at www.interlog.com/eye/Misc/Cabal/. Even better, Val "val@io.org" Dodge's must-read, cabal-busting masterpiece can be found at the very same site. Trolls can backfire, however. Once, to mock the tobacco industry, I claimed to be the president of a pro-smoking lobby group called Child Puffing Rights (I thought the acronym CPR was an obvious escape hatch). After a few ungracious emails from people who saw no humor in my jest, I quietly withdrew my membership, so to speak. A nudge down on the tasteless scale, a B.C. fellow by the name of Robert Trent once claimed in rec.pets.cats to have killed his girlfriend's cat. If the alt.bigfoot FAQ (www.io.com/~wilf/bigfoot/) is to be believed, a distraught American user of rec.pets.cats actually called long distance to report the fellow to the RCMP and even couriered print outs. Soon after, a Mountie contacted Trent and determined not only was there no cat but, as one might have suspected, there was no girlfriend. Just one weird little guy with a sick sense of humor. Be careful what you troll for. It might bite back.