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*                                                            * 
*                         CYBERSPACE                         * 
*         A biweekly column on net culture appearing         * 
*                in the Toronto Sunday Sun                   * 
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* Copyright 1999 Karl Mamer                                  * 
* Free for online distribution                               * 
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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.

    Source: geocities.com/lapetitelesson/cs/text

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