'Game of Thrones' Cast Signs for Season 7 with Big Raises (Exclusive)

HBO has renegotiated the stars' contracts using a tiered system to factor in a potential seventh season

HBO has locked up its Game of Thrones stars for a potential seventh season of the hit drama.

The principal Thrones actors, who were signed only through six seasons of the show, have completed an extensive renegotiation of their contracts that includes an option for season seven, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.

In exchange for the option, HBO has ponied up huge raises for seasons five, six and the potential season seven that will make the castmembers among the highest-paid actors on cable TV. An HBO rep declined to comment on the renegotiation or the season seven options.

Game of Thrones, based on the best-selling books by George R.R. Martin, was renewed in April for two additional seasons, taking it through season six. A seventh season has not been greenlighted but is considered highly likely given Thrones' status as a ratings smash and awards favorite.

With one of the largest and most diverse ensemble casts on TV, Thrones employs a tiered system to compensate its stars, according to sources. The "A" tier — which includes actors Kit Harington (Jon Snow), Peter Dinklage (Tyrion Lannister), Lena Headey (Cersei Lannister), Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen) and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister) — is paid at the highest level. The "A" tier actors are said to have renegotiated their deals in concert.

The lower-salaried "B" tier — which is said to include co-stars Natalie Dormer (Margaery Tyrell), Sophie Turner (Sansa Stark), Maisie Williams (Arya Stark) and others — is said to be scoring raises as well in exchange for season seven options. A still-lower tier of regular actors will receive much smaller pay increases, according to sources.

Renegotiations are common on hit shows, and Thrones is the biggest show on HBO, with its fourth-season finale drawing 7.1 million total viewers. Last season, Thrones topped The Sopranos as HBO's most watched series of all-time in terms of average gross viewership. The series draws a massive 18.6 million viewers across multiple platforms and views. Its viewership overseas is similarly strong.
In addition, the series most recently led the Emmy nominations with 19 total mentions, including best drama series and best drama writing, and supporting drama actor and actress for Dinklage and Headey, respectively. Thrones also has helped its cast land high-profile film projects.

Of course, when an actor signs on for seven seasons of Game of Thrones it doesn't mean his or her character will live that long. Thrones is notorious for killing off characters, and Martin is still finishing the book series on which the show is based, which means the stars could lose their jobs — and their new paychecks — before a seventh season.

Of the "A" tier stars, Harington is repped in the U.S. by CAA, Parseghian Planco and attorney Karl Austen; Dinklage is repped by CAA, Insight and Austen; Headey is repped by CAA, TMT and attorney Roger Haber; Clarke is repped by CAA; and Coster-Waldau is repped by WME, Impression and Lindberg Management.

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Somebody’s Already Using Verizon’s ID to Track Users

Twitter is using a newly discovered hidden code that the telecom carriers are adding to every page you visit – and it’s very hard to opt out.

Twitter's mobile advertising arm enables its clients to use a hidden, undeletable tracking number created by Verizon to track user behavior on smartphones and tablets.

Wired and Forbes reported earlier this week that the two largest cellphone carriers in the United States, Verizon and AT&T, are adding the tracking number to their subscribers' Internet activity, even when users opt out.

The data can be used by any site – even those with no relationship to the telecoms -- to build a dossier about a person's behavior on mobile devices – including which apps they use, what sites they visit and for how long.

MoPub, acquired by Twitter in 2013, bills itself as the "world's largest mobile ad exchange." It uses Verizon's tag to track and target cellphone users for ads, according to instructions for software developers posted on its website.

Twitter declined to comment.

AT&T said that its actions are part of a test. Verizon says it doesn't sell information about the demographics of people who have opted out.

This controversial type of tracking, known in industry jargon as header enrichment, is the latest step in the mobile industry's quest to track users on their devices. Google has proposed a new standard for Internet services that, among other things, would prevent header enrichment.

People using apps on tablets and smartphones present a challenge for companies that want to track behavior so they can target ads. Unlike on desktop computers, where users tend to connect to sites using a single Web browser that can be easily tracked by "cookies," users on smartphones and tablets use many different apps that do not share information with each other.

For a while, ad trackers solved this problem by using a number that was build into each smartphone by Apple and Google. But under pressure from privacy critics, both companies took steps to secure these Device IDs, and began allowing their users to delete them, in the same way they could delete cookies in their desktop Web browser.

So the search for a better way to track mobile users continued. In 2010, two European telecom engineers proposed an Internet standard for telecom companies to track their users with a new kind of unique identifier. The proposal was eventually adopted as a standard by an industry group called the Open Mobile Alliance.
Telecoms began racing to find ways to use the new identifier. Telecom equipment makers such as Cisco and Juniper began offering systems that allow the identifiers to be injected into mobile traffic.
In the spring of 2012, AT&T applied for a patent for a method of inserting a "shortlived subscriber identifier" into Web traffic of its mobile subscribers and Verizon applied for a patent for inserting a "unique identification header" into its subscriber's traffic.  The Verizon patent claims this header is specifically meant to "provide content that is targeted to a subscriber."
Inserting the identifiers requires the telecom carrier to modify the information that flows out of a user's phone. AT&T's patent acknowledges that it would be impossible to insert the identifier into web traffic if it were encrypted using HTTPS, but offers an easy solution – to instruct web servers to force phones to use an unencrypted connection.

In the fall of 2012, Verizon notified users that it would begin selling "aggregating customer data that has already been de-identified" -- such as Web-browsing history and location -- and offered users an opt-out. In 2013, AT&T launched its version -- a plan to offer "anonymous AT&T data" to allow advertiser to "deliver the most relevant messages to consumers." The company also updated its privacy policy to offer an opt-out.

AT&T's program eventually shut down. Company spokesman Mark Siegel said that AT&T is currently inserting the identifiers as part of a "test" for a possible future "relevant advertising" service. "We are considering such a program, and any program we would offer would maintain our fundamental commitment to customer privacy," he said. He added that the identifier changes every 24 hours.
It's not clear how much of a hurdle changing the identifier would present to a targeting company that was assembling a dossier of a user's behavior.

Meanwhile, Verizon's service – Precision Market Insights – has become popular among ad tracking companies that specialize in building profiles' of user behavior and creating customized ads for those users. Companies that buy the Verizon service can ask Verizon for additional information about the people whose unique identifiers they observe.

"What we're excited about is the carrier level ID, a higher-level recognition point that lets us track with certainty when a user, who is connected to a given carrier, moves from an app to a mobile Web landing page," an executive from an ad tracking company Run told an industry trade publication.
And in a promotional video for Verizon's service, ad executive Chris Smith at Turn, touted "the accuracy of the data," that the company receives from Verizon.

But advertisers who don't pay Verizon for additional information still receive the identifier. A Verizon spokeswoman said, "We do not provide any data related to the [unique identifier] without customer consent and we change the [unique identifier] on a regular basis to prevent third parties from building profiles against it." She declined to say how often Verizon changes the identifier.

The use of carrier-level identifiers appears to be becoming standard. Vodafone, a British telecom, says it inserts a similar identifier into some mobile traffic. A Vodafone spokesman said "Header enrichment is not our default operation and we do not routinely share information with the websites our customers visit."

However, ProPublica found a handful of Vodafone identifiers in its logs of website visitors. That review also showed more than two thirds of AT&T and Verizon visitors to ProPublica's website contained mobile identifiers.

And there appears to be no way to opt out. Last week, security engineer Kenn White noticed an Ad Age news article about Verizon's mobile marketing program and set up a test server to see if he was being tracked.  He had opted out years ago, but he noticed a strange identifier in the web traffic from his phone.

His tweets sparked a flurry of discussion of Verizon's actions on the Hacker News discussion board, and articles in the technology press.

Software engineer Dan Schmads, an AT&T user, also tried to opt out. He found that he needed to visit four different webpages to opt out, including one web page not even on AT&T's domain: http://205.234.28.93/mobileoptout/. But he continues to see the AT&T identifier in his mobile traffic.
AT&T's Siegel told ProPublica that he appreciated the feedback on the difficulty of opting out and that the company plans to streamline the process before launching its service.

"Before we do any new program, we'll give customers the opportunity to reset their mobile ID at any time," he said. "It would be like clearing cookies."

Google has proposed a new Internet protocol called SPDY that would prevent these types of header injections – much to the dismay of many telecom companies who are lobbying against it. In May, a Verizon executive made a presentation describing how Google's proposal could "limit value-add services that are based on access to header" information.

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Thomas M. Menino, Boston’s longest serving mayor, dies at 71

Thomas Michael Menino, who insisted a mayor doesn’t need a grand vision to lead, then went on to shepherd Boston’s economy and shape the skyline and the very identity of the city he loved through an unprecedented five consecutive terms in City Hall, died Thursday. He was 71 and was diagnosed with advanced cancer not long after leaving office at the beginning of this year.

“Visionaries don’t get things done,” he once said, crisply separating himself from politicians who gaze at distant horizons and imagine what might be. Leaving to others the lofty rhetoric of Boston as the Athens of America, he took a decidedly ground-level view of the city on a hill, earning himself a nickname for his intense focus on the nuts and bolts of everyday life: the urban mechanic.

An old-school politician whose smarts owed more to the streets than the college classroom, Mr. Menino nonetheless helped turn Boston into a hub of 21st-century innovation, recruiting high-tech companies to the sprawling South Boston waterfront one minute, then cutting the ribbon at a neighborhood burrito shop the next.

“No man possessed a greater love for our city, and his dedicated life in service to Boston and her people changed the face of the city,” said his successor, Mayor Martin J. Walsh.

“With sheer determination and unmatched work ethic,” Walsh said, Mr. Menino “put us on the world stage as a national leader in health care, education, innovation, and the nitty-gritty of executing basic city services.”

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Former Navy SEAL Team Member Investigated for Bin Laden Disclosures

A former member of the Navy SEALs who wrote a best seller about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden is under criminal investigation for possibly disclosing classified material, according to federal officials and his lawyer.

The lawyer for the former SEALs member, Matt Bissonnette, said the investigation was focused on whether Mr. Bissonnette had disclosed classified information in the book “No Easy Day,” published under a pseudonym in 2012. But other people familiar with the inquiry said investigators seemed more interested in paid speeches that Mr. Bissonnette, who says he was one of the members of the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 who shot Bin Laden, gave at corporate events.

They include at least one talk last year, at a golf club in Atlanta, in which audience members were asked to turn in their cellphones before he spoke so that nothing could be recorded, according to people who attended the event.

Mr. Bissonnette has apologized for failing to have the book vetted through the Pentagon’s required security review process.

But rather than approve the deal, the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation in May or June, and federal agents have since interviewed Mr. Bissonnette and others, Mr. Luskin said.

Mr. Bissonnette plans to publish a second book, “No Hero: The Evolution of a Navy SEAL,” under his pen name, Mark Owen, on Nov. 10. Mr. Luskin said Mr. Bissonnette had submitted the manuscript, as well as slides that he prepared for his corporate speeches, for Pentagon review. He said he knew of nothing improper about the speeches and expected the criminal investigation to be “resolved favorably.”

Mr. Bissonnette’s disclosures have been denounced by some other members of the elite SEAL team, who have watched as numerous former teammates have rushed into print with tales of their exploits. But Mr. Bissonnette questions why the Justice Department is singling him out when White House and military officials provided similar details for other books and a Hollywood film, Mr. Luskin said.

“Matt is not complaining about the fact that he was required to follow the rules,” Mr. Luskin said. “His beef is that others were not, and that they were leaking prodigiously for their own purposes.”

Brian Fallon, a Justice Department spokesman, said that he could neither confirm nor deny the investigation, but that it was well established that a federal employee who failed to clear a book could “be prevented from profiting” from its publication.

Mr. Luskin said Mr. Bissonnette had decided to write “No Easy Day” after Leon E. Panetta, then the C.I.A. director, urged some of the members of SEAL Team 6 to cooperate with the producers of the film “Zero Dark Thirty.” The filmmakers benefited from extensive assistance from the C.I.A. and the Pentagon.

“Matt’s view was: ‘Wait a minute. This is our story, not their story,’ ” Mr. Luskin said. “And why should that story be told through the mouths of others?”

Mr. Panetta could not be reached for comment.

Many longtime SEAL members dismissed Mr. Bissonnette’s concerns, saying that he was bound by oath to keep the raid secret and that the disclosures in his book and in an interview on “60 Minutes” in 2012 could have endangered SEAL units.

“It was ingrained in us to be ‘silent professionals,’ ” a retired SEAL Team 6 operator said. “Guys getting out and writing books, going on TV or doing other things this public flies against that core value.”

Mr. Bissonnette also arranged for SEAL Team 6 members to work on promotional films for a video game, Medal of Honor: Warfighter, and 11 SEAL members were disciplined in late 2012 for releasing tactical information.

Jerry Hendrix, a retired Navy captain and a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, agreed that when operators “come out and write a book, whether you mean to or not, you’re going to reveal tactics, techniques and procedures.”

When high-level officials talk about operations, they usually “talk about policy, decisions and strategy” and “are not revealing the mechanism,” Mr. Hendrix said. “They are at 30,000 feet. The mechanism is at ground zero.”

Mr. Hendrix also said that if Mr. Bissonnette and others ignored their pledges to safeguard secrets, others would feel less compelled to remain silent. “You don’t want to be the chump, the last guy standing, the Dudley Do-Right,” he said.

Rick Nelson, a former Joint Special Operations Command official who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Mr. Panetta’s encouraging operators to talk to screenwriters was not an excuse. “That in no way provides justification for writing your own book,” he said. “If you think what you’re being asked is improper, you can go up the chain of command or call the inspector general. Two wrongs don’t make it right.”

Mr. Luskin countered that many details similar to Mr. Bissonnette’s about how the raid unfolded were included in a New Yorker article in August 2011; in “The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden,” published by Mark Bowden in October 2012; and in “Zero Dark Thirty,” which premiered in December 2012.

“Given the movie, the Bowden book and the New Yorker piece, it’s very clear that a lot of people who had access to classified information talked in great detail about the raid,” he said.

Still, Mr. Luskin said Mr. Bissonnette, who rushed to release his book before Mr. Bowden’s, had apologized to officials for not letting the Pentagon vet his book, which would have delayed its publication. He said Mr. Bissonnette had received bad advice from another lawyer that he did not need to do so, and added that a negotiated settlement was still likely instead of charges.

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Pirate Bay Founder Convicted on Hacking Charges

Gottfrid Svartholm

The founder of the file-sharing site Pirate Bay was found guilty today in Denmark on hacking charges unrelated to the web site.

Swedish national Gottfrid Svartholm was found guilty of hacking into servers belonging to the U.S. technology firm CSC after being partially acquitted of other hacking charges in Sweden.
In the Danish case, Svartholm and a 21-year-old Danish accomplice were accused of hacking CSC’s servers in April 2012 and remaining inside for four months, stealing and altering data during the breach, according to prosecutors.

As evidence, authorities offered documents belonging to CSC that were found on Svartholm’s computer as well as IRC logs between two parties using the handles “Advanced Persistent Terrorist Threat” and “My Evil Twin” discussing the security of CSC’s systems. Prosecutors asserted that “My Evil Twin” was Svartholm and his Danish accomplice was the other party.

But the Danish defendant, who has not been identified and has refused to cooperate with authorities by giving them the encryption key for his computer, testified that he had met “My Evil Twin” in person and it was not Svartholm.

The defense team argued that Svartholm was framed. They said he did not commit the crimes, but that his computer had been hijacked by someone who used it as a proxy to break into CSC’s servers.
Prosecutors argued this was impossible.

Noted Tor developer and security expert Jacob Appelbaum testified on behalf of the defense that it was possibile, and Svartholm’s legal team produced an antivirus scan of his computer showing that 545 threats had been found on it, some of which were capable of providing a hacker with remote control of the computer.

At least two jurors determined that the remote hacking defense couldn’t be ruled out, so voted to acquit Svartholm, according to TorrentFreak.

“There were so many leads pointing toward the fact that my client’s computer was in fact remotely controlled,” Svartholm’s attorney Luise Høj, told WIRED. “That was a point that the court accepted.”
She says he was convicted because authorities claimed that in an encrypted partition they found on his computer that contained the stolen CSC files “there was also personal information about my client, and due to that argument and a couple of other arguments prosecutors said even thought it was likely the computer was remotely controlled, there was other information that pointed toward my client.”

Asked what evidence she provided, beyond the antivirus scan, that someone actually had hijacked Svartholm’s computer to use it to hack CSC, Høj told WIRED that she provided none.

“I only needed to reach the point where there was reasonable doubt about it,” she says. “It wasn’t in my interest to find out if it was in fact remotely controlled or not. I just have to prove to the court that it was in fact a possibility. Because the police so categorically said this is not a possibility, it actually made my argument a bit easier [because] then I could say to the jury for sure that’s not true.”

Svartholm was previously convicted in 2009 on separate charges for operating the illicit file-sharing service where pirated movies and other material was traded. He was sentenced to one year in prison in that case.

With regard to the separate case in Sweden, Svartholm was charged with hacking into Nordea Bank to siphon money and into an IT company called Logica, a contractor for the Swedish tax authority. He was found guilty of hacking Logica, but was acquitted on the bank hacking charges. He was sentenced to two years in prison on that case, while an accomplice was given probation.
Svartholm is scheduled to be sentenced on the Denmark case tomorrow.

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Google ordered to pay a woman $2,250 for Street View image showing cleavage

Although her face was blurred out, image had “part of her breast exposed.”

Earlier this month, a Quebecois court in Montreal decided that Google owed a woman $2,250 for picturing her with “part of her breast exposed” in a Street View image. The woman was sitting in front of her house, and although her face was blurred out, she was still identifiable by her coworkers, especially as her car was parked in the driveway without the license plate blurred out.
As GigaOm writes, “Maria Pia Grillo suffered shock and embarrassment when she looked up her house using Google Maps’ Street View feature in 2009 and discovered an image that shows her leaning forward and exposing cleavage.” Grillo complained to Canadian authorites and Google, but when she had no response from Google after several weeks, she wrote a letter to the company saying:

I have informed myself as to my rights concerning this situation through the office of the privacy commissionars of Canada. Under the law my lisence plate should not appear. Moreover, from a safety and security standpoint, the information shown constitutes a total violation. This puts me, my house, my vehicule and my family members that I live with at the mercy of potential predators. I feel very vulnerable knowing that the information is available to anyone with internet access. The damage has been done.

Google never responded—it later told the court that it never received the letter and could not find it in a search. Grillo filed a complaint in 2011 asking Google to blur out more of the image, including most of her body and her license plate. She also asked that Google pay her CAD $45,000 for the depression she suffered when her coworkers “at a well-known bank” found the image and mocked her for it. According to Canadian tabloid Journal de Montreal, Grillo eventually quit her job.

In the same week Google Earth got into hot water for showing off a British …

Google agreed to blur out the photo when the lawsuit was filed, but it refused to pay Grillo compensation on the grounds that she was in a public place when the photo was taken, and that Google was not responsible for any emotional harm Grillo may have incurred. Grillo later agreed to reduce her claims to CAD $7,000.
The presiding judge only awarded Grillo a portion of that, but he did decide that some monetary compensation was appropriate. “In addition to malicious comments and humiliation she suffered at work, the plaintiff, in particular, has experienced a significant loss of personal modesty and dignity, two values that she held and are eminently respectable,” the judge wrote in his ruling.
”Mme. Grillo explains that the house where she lives is in a residential neighborhood that isn't too busy, a 'private area,' as she describes it,” the judge's ruling read.
Still, the judge said that Google was not responsible for the malicious comments made to Grillo, but he did rule that “people do not forfeit their privacy rights simply by being in a location others can see them,” according to GigaOm.
Google declined to comment for this story.

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The Birth of the Internet Troll

By Ashley Feinberg

Trolls are shitting all over our internet. You can hardly search for something as innocuous as "dog" on Google without coming across inflammatory attacks on every possible dog-related opinion under the sun. All horrible things have to crawl before they can walk/crush spirits, though. Even trolls.

And while the term "troll" has become wildly muddied, it did have to come from somewhere. We decided to try and find out just where that dark, acerbic origin story began.

In the Beginning

There were bulletin board systems. And Usenet. And newsgroups. And people just starting to realize the massive potential trembling beneath their fingertips. Anything was possible! Which, as it turns out, is not always a good thing.

Flame Wars

In the early 90s, trolls had yet to come into mainstream public consciousness, at least according to the 1993 Big Dummy's Guide to the Internet. Flame wars, on the other hand, were already an online staple.

Whether or not you're familiar with the term, you do know what flaming is. You've seen it under horrible political opinions on Facebook. You've seen it choking your Twitter stream. And you've seen it in every other comment in the vast wasteland that is YouTube. Put simply, a flame is a vicious, personal attack on someone made simply because you disagree with them.

Of course, humans have always had this potential for the irrationally vindictive, but the advent of the internet finally allowed it to thrive. Because as soon as you stuck someone behind a computer, a dangerously insular shield of anonymity came down and, for those inclined, happily took over. In discussing the sort of negotiation tactics that precede a flame war, Norman Johnson, an Associate Professor at Bauer College at the University of Houston explains:

The literature suggests that, compared to face-to-face, the increased incidence of flaming when using computer-mediated communication is due to reductions in the transfer of social cues, which decrease individuals' concern for social evaluation and fear of social sanctions or reprisals. When social identity and ingroup status are salient, computer mediation can decrease flaming because individuals focus their attention on the social context (and associated norms) rather than themselves.

The introduction of anonymity not only made users feel free from the repercussions that might otherwise give them pause, but it also dehumanized potential targets. In other words, the internet gave all our worst impulses just what they needed to thrive.

Because if someone disagreed with you in the real, live social realm, you might feel frustrated, sure, but you'll also see that person's as another human with human emotions—not just a jumble of inflammatory words for you to destroy. You'll take time to reflect, because you'll realize there are consequences to your actions. Whereas on the internet, a clean slate is a mere username change away.

Some of the earliest flame wars went down on Usenet, which unbeknownst to these earlier warriors, was building a model for all the trolls to eventually come in its wake. According to Gaffin:

Periodically, an exchange of flames erupts into a flame war that begin to take up all the space in a given newsgroup (and sometimes several; flamers like cross-posting to let the world know how they feel). These can go on for weeks (sometimes they go on for years, in which case they become "holy wars,'' usually on such topics as the relative merits of Macintoshes and IBMs). Often, just when they're dying down, somebody new to the flame war reads all the messages, gets upset and issues an urgent plea that the flame war be taken to e-mail so everybody else can get back to whatever the newsgroup's business is.

So presumably, these troll/flame wars all started earnestly. But watching two groups of people attempt to lambast each other in increasingly epic proportions is—as we all know and hate to admit—wildly entertaining. And once the war of words would simmer down, it's not at all surprising that someone might start (forcefully, sensationalistically) poking and prodding the more tender of egos. All in hopes of revisiting that awful sort of thrill that comes in watching another human push the very boundaries of sanity, by freaking the fuck out.

Net.Weenies

The earliest documented form of internet troll was something called a net.weenie, who did what s/he does " just for the hell of it." In early internet usenet forums, they were the people being assholes simply for the sheer joy of being an asshole. According to the Guide:

These are the kind of people who enjoy Insulting others, the kind of people who post nasty messages in a sewing newsgroup.

Even the Electronic Frontier Foundation—formed in 1990—was aware of (and acknowledged) net.weenies prevalence among the more public internet groups. In the group's early internet guide to mailing lists, one of the main benefits of such a system was that "a mailing list can offer a degree of freedom to speak one's mind (or not worry about net.weenies) that is not necessarily possible on Usenet." This was, of course, before the sorts of emails in which an undead child's wrath and/or Nigerian prince's livelihood rested on the click of our mouse.

And net.weenies sound obnoxious, sure, but the term still didn't carry the sort of malevolence we now associate with modern trolling. In fact, quite the contrary—some of their games were absolutely incredible.

Warlording

Warlording was a very specific, beautiful type of early trolling performed by these net.weenies, particularly in the alt.fan.warlord newsgroup in Usenet (a sort of subreddit of early internet days). Considering the limitations of early 90s bandwidth and forums' general readability issues, Usenet etiquette—netiquette, if you will—asked users to keep their signatures under four lines. This was dubbed the McQuary limit and was not a hard and fast rule. At least in the way that there weren't actually any real character limits.

This rule was partially necessary due to new users' predilections for employing what was called BUAGs (Big Ugly ASCII Graphics) and BUAFs (Big Ugly ASCII Fonts). So to both mock this habit and be the biggest assholes they could be (always reach for the stars, kids), net.weenies tore this rule apart in a game called warlording.

The term came from the user Death Star, War Lord of the West, "who featured in his sig[nature] a particularly large and obnoxious ASCII graphic resembling the sword of Conan the Barbarian in the 1981 John Milius movie." Which, presumably, looked something like this:

The newgroup alt.fan.warlord was created as a sort of sarcastic tribute to the offending sigs, and the jokes spiraled from there. One particularly notable case of warlording was that of James Parry's signature (better know by the username Kibo) below. Bear in mind, this is all one, single sig.

Although every part of this signature is brilliant and deserving of our appreciation and awe, I do have a few favorite sections. Namely, this absurd and not at all remotely helpful Twin Peaks chart:

And then this.

Because if anything has ever been worthy of being called art, it is the beautiful, intricate, wholly insincere mess.

The Birth of the Troll

In the late 80s and early 90s there certainly did exist this notion of an internet user who merely enjoyed stirring up trouble—but then that person has for as long as humans themselves have existed. As Whitney Phillips, a media studies scholar and communication lecturer at Humboldt State University (who has a book on trolls forthcoming with MIT press) explained to us over email:

[Organized, willful trolling did exist before 4chan and Anonymous came around], though at the time it wouldn't (necessarily) have been called that. This was a point of fascination to many of the trolls I interviewed; while they engaged in similar behaviors in the pre-4chan years, they didn't refer to their behaviors as trolling and in fact couldn't remember what they called it, if they called it anything. They've since some to use the term retroactively, but at the time the subcultural definition of the term hadn't yet taken hold, and so they didn't think of themselves as trolls.

Purportedly, the actual use of the term "troll" dates back to the 80s, but according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first instance of the term "troll" being used in an online capacity happened on December 14th, 1992 in the usenet group alt.folklore.urban, when someone wrote "Maybe after I post it, we could go trolling some more and see what happens."

Usenet Royalty

Interestingly enough, it's around the time that the actual term "trolling" started gaining steam in the mid 90s that the act itself began to evolve from causing annoyance as a result of your beliefs to simply believing in causing annoyance. And, of course, that's just a single flavor of trolling—almost as soon as the term came into use, it started morphing into a blanket term of unwieldy proportions.

For instance, at least in retrospect, Brice Wellington was one of the more notorious troll incarnations. He spent much of his time "in alt.atheism, talk.origins, alt.christnet, and other newsgroups that he [would] troll and spam on a daily basis." Now, whether his brand of trolling was sincere or satiric becomes a little more difficult to suss out. Usenet users at the time seemed certain that Brice was the "real deal," so to speak, but in looking at some of his more insane rantings, it's hard to see him as seeking anything more than what would soon be termed "the lulz."

Here we have Brice on the French:

Expand

Brice on racial nuance:

Expand

And Brice on slippery slopes:

Expand

While Brice may have started blurring the line between being infuriating by nature and being infuriating by sheer force of well, alt.tasteless stepped firmly into the latter territory.

In a 1994 article with Wired, Usenet user Trashcan Man gave one of the first real insights into the prototypical troll mindset by describing alt.tasteless' flamewar with the unsuspecting rec.pets.cats, a sort of haven for cat fanciers. In other words, prime bait.

Because for all intents and purposes, alt.tasteless was simply an early version of 4chan's now-notorious /b/. As Wired explains:

Alt.tasteless was created in the autumn of 1990 "as a place to keep the sick people away from rec.humor and other forums," according to Steven Snedker, a Danish journalist for Denmark's largest computer magazine. "Alt.tastelessers see this as an important turn in Usenet history, on a par with the creation of alt.sex. Both alt.tasteless and alt.sex are fine forums that serve their purpose to keep the other parts of Usenet clean, and to dig further into the stuff discussed."

Which is all good and great, but being positively revolting certainly loses some of its appeal when you take away any potential foil. Which is why when someone suggested that alt.tasteless descend upon another Usenet group to incite chaos, the alt.tasteless users were delighted and ultimately decided on the cat newsgroup as a prime target. And alt.tasteless' opening line was a doozy:

... I'm not what you would call a real studly type guy (although I have a lot of women friends), so when I date it's really important to me. Anyway, [my cat] Sooti goes into heat something fierce (sometimes it seems like it's two weeks on, two weeks off). I had a date a while back, when she was really bad. Yowling and presenting all the time - not the most auspicious setting for a date. While dinner was cooking, I tried to stimulate her vagina with a Q-tip because I had heard that one can induce ovulation that way. My date came into the bathroom while I was doing this, and needless to say I don't think she bought my explanation. The date was a very icy experience after that.

What should I do. I love my cats, so I don't want to get rid of them, but I can't go on like this any more. It's my love life, or them. Please help!!!

The earnest advice from rec.pets.cats was intermixed with decidedly more tasteless (naturally) advice from alt.tasteless including, but not limited to, providing "articles about topics such as vivisecting the cat and having sex with its innards."

Which, of course, brings us to 4chan.

Here Comes 4chan

For better or worse, in 2003, 4chan entered the public consciousness and with it brought what Phillips refers to as "a very specific understanding of the term 'troll,'" explaining in a Daily Dot article that "trolling was something that one actively chose to do. More importantly, a troll was something one chose to be."

4chan's /b/ board in particular, being the spiritual successor to alt.tasteless, fostered this toxic mentality that if you don't actually believe in the horrible things you're saying that it magically becomes justified. As Phillips explained over email:

Granted, the trolls might not really mean what they say. But who cares, they are not, and should not be regarded, as the ultimate arbiters of meaning. In other words, what these "trolls" think about what they do is irrelevant; even if they say they're "just trolling," their actions can have serious real-world consequences for the people they target.

So, say, when 4chan users found an 11-year-old girl's address and phone number in 2010 and proceeded to call her home making death threats, it didn't matter that they were "just doing it for the lulz." Both that classic, deflective refrain and the term troll itself have succeeded in creating a potentially dangerous emotional distance from the actual consequences words can have—whether it's trolls self-identifying as such or a media-assigned label. According to Phillips:

I don't accept the idea that assholes get to be assholes with impunity, as if we live exclusively in their world and there's nothing we can do about it because "boys will be boys."

Rather than defer blindly to the term "trolling," I like to label behaviors based on what they do in the world. So, if someone is engaging in misogynist behavior, even if they believe they're "just trolling" (whatever dude), that's misogyny. And if that person doesn't like the word misogynist, if that label makes them cry hot tears and feel bad about themselves, then how about not behaving like a misogynist.

Because even though the term may have gained notoriety on 4chan, the concept—however you may choose to define it—of "trolling" is more mainstream today than it has ever been.

A Long Way to Go

A War of (Misdirected) Words

Search "trolls" on Google and you'll be hit with a deluge of articles defining the term in any number of ways. Whether it's being defined as someone who believes what they're saying in earnest, just wants to stir the pot, or is merely hopping on board a rage bandwagon—any rage bandwagon!—the only common thread is malicious intent. Which, according to Phillips, presents a major problem:

Calling behaviors designed to threaten, intimidate, and silence "trolling" (so, lumping ALL aggressive online behavior under the same umbrella term) risks minimizing the emotional impact of the most extreme behaviors, particularly when those behaviors are piled on as viciously and relentlessly as they have been throughout Gamergate.

Will We Ever Be Troll-Free?

Clearly, for as long as the internet has been around, trolls have existed in some form—whether they were called that or not. There will always be agitators. There will always be people who want upset others. That's not going to change.

What we can change, though, is how we approach these situations in all their varied forms. Which, according to Phillips, "depends on whose voices platform administrators, advertisers, and other people on the business end choose to privilege—the targets of abusive, intimidating behaviors or those who are doing the intimidating."

It's not an issue of "feeding the trolls" (a problematic phrase in its own right), but rather whether or not we're going to stop giving a platform to the trolls, the aggressors, and the antagonizers. Whether it be by not validating their behavior with concessions or dropping the catch-all term "troll" in favor of more accurate terminology—be it misogynist, sociopath, or straight-up dick.

So yes, assholes have and will always be around, as will their unfortunate victims. It's just a matter of who we let hold the megaphone.

Illustration by Jim Cooke

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Why Middle-Class Americans Can't Afford to Live in Liberal Cities

Blue America has a problem: Even after adjusting for income, left-leaning metros tend to have worse income inequality and less affordable housing.

By Derek Thompson

On April 2, 2014, a protester in Oakland, California, mounted a Yahoo bus, climbed to the front of the roof, and vomited onto the top of the windshield.

If not the year's most persuasive act of dissent, it was certainly one of the most memorable demonstrations in the Bay Area, where residents have marched, blockaded, and retched in protest of San Francisco's economic inequality and unaffordable housing. The city's gaps—between rich and poor, between housing need and housing supply—have been duly catalogued. Even among American tech hubs, San Francisco stands alone with both the most expensive real estate and the fewest new construction permits per unit since 1990.

But San Francisco's problem is bigger than San Francisco. Across the country, rich, dense cities are struggling with affordable housing, to the considerable anguish of their middle class families.
Among the 100 largest U.S. metros, 63 percent of homes are "within reach" for a middle-class family, according to Trulia. But among the 20 richest U.S. metros, just 47 percent of homes are affordable, including a national low of 14 percent in San Francisco. The firm defined "within reach" as a for-sale home with a total monthly payment (including mortgage and taxes) less than 31 percent of the metro's median household income.

If you line up the country's 100 richest metros from 1 to 100, household affordability falls as household income rises, even after you consider that middle class families in richer cities have more income. [The graph below considers only the 25 richest US metros to keep city names moderately legible within the computer screen.]

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Rich Households = Unaffordable Houses?

Trulia

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The line isn't smooth—and there are exceptions—but the relationship is clear: In general, richer cities have less affordable housing.

But there's a second reason why San Francisco's problem is emblematic of a national story. Liberal cities seem to have the worst affordability crises, according to Trulia chief economist Jed Kolko.

In a recent article, Kolko divided the largest cities into 32 “red" metros where Romney got more votes than Obama in 2012 (e.g. Houston), 40 “light-blue” markets where Obama won by fewer than 20 points (e.g. Austin), and 28 “dark-blue” metros where Obama won by more than 20 points (e.g. L.A., SF, NYC). Although all three housing groups faced similar declines in the recession and similar bounce-backs in the recovery, affordability remains a bigger problem in the bluest cities.

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Super-Liberal Cities, Super-Unaffordable Houses

Trulia

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"Even after adjusting for differences of income, liberal markets tend to have higher income inequality and worse affordability,” Kolko said.

Kolko's theory isn't an outlier. There is a deep literature tying liberal residents to illiberal housing policies that create affordability crunches for the middle class. In 2010, UCLA economist Matthew Kahn published a study of California cities, which found that liberal metros issued fewer new housing permits. The correlation held over time: As California cities became more liberal, he said, they built fewer homes.

"All homeowners have an incentive to stop new housing," Kahn told me, "because if developers build too many homes, prices fall, and housing is many families' main asset. But in cities with many Democrats and Green Party members, environmental concerns might also be a factor. The movement might be too eager to preserve the past."

The deeper you look, the more complex the relationship between blue cities and unaffordable housing becomes. In 2008, economist Albert Saiz used satellite-generated maps to show that the most regulated housing markets tend to have geographical constraints—that is, they are built along sloping mountains, in narrow peninsulas, and against nature's least developable real estate: the ocean. (By comparison, many conservative cities, particularly in Texas, are surrounded by flatter land.)

"Democratic, high-tax metropolitan areas... tend to constrain new development more," Saiz concluded, and "historic areas seem to be more regulated." He also found that cities with high home values tend to have more restrictive development policies.

One could attempt tying this together into a pat story—Rich liberals prefer to cluster near historic coastal communities with high home values, where they support high taxes, rent control, and a maze of housing regulations to protect both their investment and the region's "character", altogether discouraging new housing development that’s already naturally constrained by geography...—but even that interpretation elides the colorful local history that often shapes housing politics.

I asked Kahn if he had a pet theory for why liberals, who tend to be vocal about income inequality, would be more averse to new housing development, which would help lower-income families. He suggested that it could be the result of good intentions gone bad.

"Developers pursue their own self-interest," Kahn said. "If a developer has an acre, and he thinks it should be a shopping mall, he won't think about neighborhood charm, or historic continuity. Liberals might say that the developer acting in his own self-interest ignores certain externalities, and they'll apply restrictions. But these restrictions [e.g. historic preservation, environmental preservation, and height ceilings] add up, across a city, even if they’re well-intentioned. The affordability issue will rear its head."

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The Horrible No Good Apple Pay War No One Signed Up For

By Brian Barrett

Earlier this week, we walked you through the stridently awful Apple Pay alternative being cooked up by Walmart, CVS, Best Buy, and more. It is dumb and bad, but as a recent New York Times report indicates, it's also not going anywhere any time soon. But not because anyone necessarily wants it.

It's probably helpful to do a quick overview, both because the proceedings are slightly complicated and because sometimes you can end a great dumbness just by talking about it over and over again until everyone realizes just how dumb it is. So! Let's keep talking.

In this corner you have wireless payments, powered by NFC technology, championed by Apple Pay because previous versions (helloooooo Google Wallet) never took off. These are Virtuous and Good and make your life easier. In the opposite corner, you have something called CurrentC, a meaningless (on multiple levels) name given to a horrific payments system developed by a consortium of major retailers like Walmart, Best Buy, Target, and CVS. It is Greedy and Dumb and relies on QR codes, which should tell you most of what you need to know.

Big corporate entities fighting! Boring, right? But here's where you come in.

So long, choice

The band of big box brothers pushing CurrentC is known as MCX, and has been around for years now. In fact, while CurrentC won't be implemented until next year, it's been a known quantity for at least the last few months. Nobody paid it any mind, though, because there was no need to, because there are sacks of potatoes with a more compelling narrative.

And then Apple Pay happened! Apple Pay, which put wireless payment powers in millions and millions of phones all at once. While Google Wallet and Softcard had given plenty of Android owners mobile wallets already, it was the critical mass of iPhone 6 and 6 Pluses marching into McDonald's that caused a minor panic among the MCX multitudes.

In the face of a widely adopted payment platform that would make it easier for their customers to give them money in exchange for goods and services, CVS and Rite Aid opted to pull the plug on NFC payments in their stores altogether. No more paying with your phone, at all, until CurrentC shows up sometime next year.

For the visual learners, that means that instead of this:

You will be stuck with this:

This would be bad enough if it were simply a matter of limiting your choices out of self-interest. But what makes it unconscionable is that CurrentC is objectively terrible. Don't believe me? Here are the steps you'll need to complete a CurrentC purchase:

1. Download CurrentC.
2. Give CurrentC your bank account information. (No seriously).
3. Hand the cashier the items you want to purchase.
4. Open up your CurrentC app.
5. Open the QR code scanner on your CurrentC app
6. Point your phone at the cashier's screen.
7. Scan the QR code.
8. If the QR code doesn't work, enter a numeric code by hand.
9. Just pay with your credit card next time because honestly.

It would be easier to pay for everything by counting out nickels and lining them all on the counter face-up.

Hello, greed

So why, you might wonder, would a retailer like Target or Rite Aid or any of them opt for such an anti-consumer product? To make it more difficult for people to pay, instead of easier? Because money!

While CurrentC will be terrible for you—or much more likely, just another thing to ignore at the checkout counter, like Almond M&Ms or Modern Quilting magazine—it is in theory amazing for the stores behind it. Not only do they get direct access to your bank information, they get to push you towards using their own store cards, and away from the credit card companies that skim a few percentage points off of every transaction they're a part of. It's a chance for them to push "marketing communications" to you (opt-out only) and track your location (likewise).

CurrentC makes at least a little more sense when you remember that it's been in the works for years, before Apple Pay was even a glimmer in a rumor site's eye. At the time, Google Wallet was languishing. The mobile payments market was wide open. And the retailers themselves weren't yet associated with some of the biggest financial info breaches of all time. 

But Apple Pay is here now. As is the rightful distrust of the MCX coalition's ability to keep your info safe (in fact, it just came out that CurrentC has already been hacked). If nothing else, at this point there's been enough backlash against CurrentC that you'd think at least some of the companies involved would have turned tail by now. But last night's NY Times report indicates why they're still standing strong in the face of ugh; if they leave MCX, they'll face fines hefty enough that it's not worth just letting Apple Pay into their hearts. Not yet, anyway.

In a statement released this morning, MCX denied that fines were involved for leaving MCX. But stalwart NYT reporter Mike Isaac stands by his report. And there must be at least some disincentive that would make companies like CVS suffer though such a clusternut; possibly that if you stay with MCX and use Apple Pay anyway you'll take a hit? It's murky in the way that PR scrambling always is.

Either way, it's clear that this isn't a fight that MCX retailers signed up for so many years ago. And it's hard to imagine that many of them are excited to stay the course. The longer it takes for the retreat to start, though, the longer the future of payments will stay stalled out.

Or you could always just shop at Walgreens instead.

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Breaking Away

By David Gendelman

Meb Keflezighi nears victory at the Boston Marathon in April.

An elite marathon is a competition, but it is also a collaboration. For much of the race, the runners work together, drafting behind each other as they move through the streets as a pack. Eventually someone breaks away, but that usually doesn’t happen until the last quarter of the race. Those who try earlier tend to get swallowed up by the main pack, and are never heard from in the race again.
“It’s very, very, very, very difficult to lead point to point in a marathon,” Meb Keflezighi said recently over the phone from Mammoth Lakes, California, where he was concluding his preparation for this year’s New York City Marathon, which will take place on Sunday. “Ninety-nine per cent of the people that do point-to-point leading in any marathon usually they get caught, because the drafting of a group of people will eventually hunt you down.”


But occasionally the gamble pays off, as it did for Keflezighi this past spring, in the Boston Marathon. After about seven miles of the 26.2-mile race, he broke away from the lead pack. By the time Keflezighi entered the Newton hills, around mile sixteen, he led the pack by nearly a minute and a half, though that didn’t last. At mile twenty-four, Wilson Chebet, of Kenya, had closed to within eight seconds. But Keflezighi hung on to win by eleven seconds, in a personal-best time of 2:08:37.
Running Boston alone from the front had never been Keflezighi’s intention. But around mile five, he saw three Ethiopian runners go to the head of the lead pack and slow down the pace. “My goal was to win, to get on the podium, or run a personal best. And, if I’m going to do that, I’m going to contribute to the pace and push it hard, and may the best man win,” Keflezighi said. “I made a move and I said, ‘Come with me if you’re going to come.’ And this is what happened. That’s what racing is. … You have to assess the situation.”

The rest of the field does, too. An early move like Keflezighi’s forces the runners in the pack to make a decision: Do I go with him or do I sit back and risk losing contact, trusting that we will reel him in later? Despite Keflezighi’s silver medal at the 2004 Olympics, his victory at the 2009 New York City Marathon, and his fourth-place finish at the 2012 Olympics, fifteen other runners in Boston—including the defending champion, Lelisa Desisa, of Ethiopia, and Kenya’s Dennis Kimetto, who set the marathon world record last month, in Berlin—had personal-best times faster than his.

“The reason I think they let me go was because my last marathon was horrible,” Keflezighi said.

“They said, ‘He’s no good. He’s going to come back to us.’ ”

They also likely thought about the advantages gained by staying with the main pack, like protection from the wind provided by the runners in front. There’s also “a psychic edge,” Michael Joyner, a physiologist at the Mayo Clinic, said. “People get in a rhythm. You’re feeding off other people. All of the signals that the average person would describe as painful, the élite is using as a red line. They’re running right on the edge. When you’re with somebody else, your perception of the effort you require, your perception of fatigue, might be less. You might be able to stay in the zone longer.”
More often than not, the runner who attempts to break away will run out of energy. At last year’s New York City Marathon, the Ethiopian Bronx resident Buzunesh Deba entered with the hope of breaking the course record of 2:22:31. After the first two miles, Deba and her training partner at the time, Tigist Tufa, took off from the lead group. By the halfway point, the pair led by more than three minutes. Shortly after mile eighteen, Deba had lost Tufa and was on her own. “It was difficult to lead from the beginning,” Deba said from Albuquerque, where she was in training for this year’s New York race. “It was really windy. That’s why Jeptoo”—Priscah Jeptoo, of Kenya—“stayed behind. After eighteen miles, she came after me by herself, and she had full power.”
Deba didn’t. In Central Park, around mile twenty-four, Jeptoo caught Deba, and went on to win by nearly a minute, in 2:25:07. Deba held on for second.

While Deba fared far better than most who attempt this strategy, the approach is still widely considered a marathon misstep—some instances more obvious than others. At the 2011 New York City Marathon, the favorite, Mary Keitany, of Kenya, set out at world-record pace on what is arguably the most difficult course of any of the world’s major marathons. The move seemed brazen. The women’s world record, 2:15:25, set by Paula Radcliffe in 2003, is considered almost untouchable. But, if anyone is going to break it, Keitany, who is the second-fastest female marathoner ever, has the best chance. Yet even she knew she wasn’t capable of it that day in New York.

“My plan was completely different, but I made a big mistake,” she wrote in an e-mail. “I didn’t set my G.P.S. in miles.” The day before the marathon, Keitany and her trainer had worked out her splits based on a pace of 3:21 per kilometre. A few kilometres into the race, however, her G.P.S. lost its connection, forcing Keitany to rely on the mile clock. She tried to mentally convert the splits into kilometres, but got confused and, instead, she says, “had to follow my feeling.”

In a marathon, where the first half often feels run at the tempo of a tortoise, this can be dangerous. A marathon requires patience and restraint. “When I started to realize my mistake, it was too late to do any other action than try to run alone till the end, hoping that the [two-minute] gap I accumulated in the first half was enough to win the race,” she said.

It wasn’t. Keitany slowed from running just over five-minute miles at the start to running six-minute miles near the end, pedestrian by every élite standard, and shocking to see from one of the greatest distance runners of her generation. Yet her lead was so great that the eventual winner, Firehiwot Dado, of Ethiopia, and Deba didn’t catch her until mile twenty-five. Keitany hung on gamely until almost the very end, when the pair finally pulled ahead. Keitany finished third.

Despite their experience with front-running, or perhaps because of it, it is unlikely that Keflezighi, Deba, or Keitany will try to break away from the pack early in this year’s New York City Marathon. Speaking for herself, Keitany admitted as much: “I will not start too fast, like I did in 2011.” She’s been training with a G.P.S. set to miles ever since.

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