Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

The Web drove a bad story: on that Florida magic firing

The web helps speed false stories around the world: such is the theme of this Tampa story.  It's an old meme, made more popular in recent years with public battles over Web 2.0.  To its credit, the article notes that mas media (TV, print newspapers) then ran with the story.  But the main driver is clearly bloggers.

It's interesting to see how powerful bloggers are in this view.  Mainstream media follow them along, almost sheepishly, without internal fact-checkers.  Public relations on the part of the school board doesn't seem to have been in play, nor is it criticized.

Also absent from that story is the fact that people will believe any madness coming from Florida.

(thanks Steve Burnett!)

Deleting older folks' accounts to prevent online child abuse

One social networking site has started cutting accounts belonging to users over 36 years of age... in order to protect younger users from sexual abuse.

In the last 2 months, Faceparty has been deleting a lot of profiles from the website...
We understand that only a minority of older users are sex offenders, but you must understand that we cannot tell which - we can only delete all to make the site safe and we apologise for that. However, we are following the law and you cannot think we are wrong for doing that.

This policy makes for a nice mirror image to complement various drives to block minors from the social web.

Faceparty does have a fun Terms of Service.

(via Techmeme)

Four feet and counting

Remember that story about severed feet washing up upon Canada's west coast?  More have arrived, bringing the total foot count to four.

A human foot encased in a shoe was found by a boater on Kirkland Island in Richmond just before noon Thursday, confirmed Richmond RCMP.

"All we got is it's a foot in a shoe," said Cpl. Nycki Basra.

She cannot confirm whether it is a left or right foot, the gender or race of its owner, or the type of shoe it was found in.

My vote is for the art project theory.

(thanks to Steve B)

It's the Smiley Face Killers

"The Smiley Face Killer(s)" seems to have become the monicker of choice for describing that hypothetical gang of American murderers. CNN uses the term. My daughter's social studies teacher used it.

More fine sf aural podcast delights from Starship Sofa

Starship Sofa keeps offering fine sf podcasts.  Case in point: this one (mp3; why no links to a post?), which leads off with a funny Kage Baker story, then a wrenching Peter Watts flash fiction, followed by a poem with a grand title.

Updates in Russian horror

Monstrous things loom in Russian cities.  For example, giant, worn-out metal insects crawling out of a river, like The Host:

That's historical horror, leftover pop Soviet Gothic, presumably aimed at scarring entertaining children.

There's also contemporary horror in public spaces, such as this creepy complaint about the Russian bus system.

Russian Gothic has a long tradition.  This public space surreal horror is but the latest twist.

Beaten to the desired grave: a dead doppelganger in Ohio

More Ohio Gothic: a man examining his intended burial site found it already occupied by a dead body.  Which is a fine idea for a scary story, the reverse of fears about missing bodies.

The story also has fine doppelganger and Oedipal themes:

David L. Bingham says someone who shares his name has taken over his would-be final resting place. He says he hadn't visited his mother's grave since 2005 and was surprised to find someone had been buried next to her in 2006.

(thanks to dark-eyed Barbara Sawhill!)

Charges filed in MySpace suicide manipulation case

After months of legal exploration and widespread disgust, the state of Missouri filed criminal charges against Lori Drew.  Drew led the creation of a fake MySpace identity, the actions of which drove a teenage neighbor to suicide.

Lori Drew of suburban St. Louis was charged with one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to obtain information to inflict emotional distress on the girl.

Unusual location for missing person

A missing Greek girl was located... inside her twin sister's stomach.  Today's Gothic-in-real-life story combines body horror, anxiety about dead bodies, and doppelgangers.

Doctors at Larissa General Hospital examined the girl and surgically removed a growth they later discovered was an embryo more than two inches long.
...
Andreas Markou, head of the hospital's pediatric department, said the embryo was a formed fetus with a head, hair and eyes, but no brain or umbilical cord.

(thanks to Neal Grigsby for reminding me)

The Times really stretches to find fearsome internet

A London-based girl gang apparently blew up a house by pouring a liquid explosive into its mail slot.  Which is Gothic enough, or at least pulp-ish.  But trust The Times to hunt for an internet connection, no matter how slight, or simply hypothetical.  Their report begins with this:

A gang of girls may have used the internet to make a bomb that killed a man and destroyed three homes in their feud with another teenager. [emphasis added]

Or maybe they didn't.  There's no proof, which doesn't stop anyone from lunging at cyberfear.

Put another way: "A gang of girls may have gone to the library to make a bomb."  Or "A gang of girls may have driven a car to get to a shop where they bought bomb supplies."  Doesn't have quite the same ring, eh? 

The article helpfully lists likely ingredients for such a liquid explosive, should the reader be so inclined.  And if you read that on the Web, then maybe you really have used teh internets to make the b0mb.

After those strong opening moves, the article, or the police officers it cites, reaches even further, stretching towards that classic internet-terrorism meme:

“We have seen with recent terrorism trials that there are plenty of things on the web but it would obviously be a disturbing development if a girl gang has decided to settle a dispute in such a dramatic and tragic way.”

(thanks to CoriS, via Twitter)