Search Results for: Internet

The Human Centipede; Or, How to Move to New York

Longreads Pick

A depressed writer sends a letter to a popular advice columnist:

“I couldn’t seem to go above the Twelfth Street location of my class, not to Central Park or the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the New York Public Library. I had no interest in going below Twelfth Street, either. I definitely couldn’t go to the youthful hub Williamsburg, specifically to the newly opened McCarren Park Pool, at any time of day, for any reason, ever; all the people my age made me feel old. I put on makeup in the morning and washed it off before bed, having never gone outside. The idea of “making it” was everywhere, and I needed to avoid it. I’d moved to the supposed greatest city in the world in order to spend seventy-two hours at a time insulated and solitary, developing an allergy to people and a near-romantic attachment to Netflix. Like a crazy hermit in the cave on the hill—my hill being Brooklyn Heights—I watched movies like The Human Centipede and wrote to a popular online advice columnist about my thoughts of jumping out of a window because I couldn’t do what I’d moved to New York to do. I was full of the vulnerability that drives people toward the Internet.

“Writing a letter to ‘Dear Sugar,’ the advice column of TheRumpus.net, was a last resort: it felt just short of running into the street, dropping to my knees, and begging no one, desperately, for help.”

Published: Nov 1, 2012
Length: 7 minutes (1,907 words)

A woman reflects on the virtues and limits of online dating:

I went on a date with a classical composer who invited me to a John Cage concert at Juilliard. After the concert we looked for the bust of Béla Bartók on 57th Street. We couldn’t find it, but he told me how Bartók had died there of leukaemia. I wanted to like this man, who was excellent on paper, but I didn’t. I gave it another go. We went out for a second time to eat ramen in the East Village. I ended the night early. He next invited me to a concert at Columbia and then to dinner at his house. I said yes but I cancelled at the last minute, claiming illness and adding that I thought our dating had run its course. I was in fact sick, but he was angry with me. My cancellation, he wrote, had cost him a ‘ton of time shopping, cleaning and cooking that I didn’t really have to spare in the first place a few days before a deadline …’ He punctuated almost exclusively with Pynchonian ellipses.

I apologised, then stopped responding. In the months that followed he continued to write, long emails with updates of his life, and I continued not responding until it came to seem as if he was lobbing his sadness into a black hole, where I absorbed it into my own sadness.

“Diary: Internet Dating.” — Emily Witt, London Review of Books

More from the London Review of Books

Meeting the man behind Violentacrez, the Reddit persona responsible for forums filled with racist and pornographic content like “Creepshots” and “Jailbait”:

When I called Brutsch that Wednesday afternoon and told him I knew who he was, I was a little taken aback by how calm he remained during our intense but civil hour-long conversation. I had figured that a man whose hobby was saying horrible shit just to screw with people online would rise to some new horrible level when conditions on the ground actually called for it. Instead he pleaded with me in an affectless monotone not to reveal his name.

‘My wife is disabled. I got a home and a mortgage, and if this hits the fan, I believe this will affect negatively on my employment,’ he said. ‘I do my job, go home watch TV, and go on the internet. I just like riling people up in my spare time.’

“Unmasking The Biggest Troll on the Web.” — Adrian Chen, Gawker

More by Chen

Unmasking The Biggest Troll on the Web

Longreads Pick

Meeting the man behind Violentacrez, the Reddit persona responsible for forums filled with racist and pornographic content like “Creepshots” and “Jailbait”:

“When I called Brutsch that Wednesday afternoon and told him I knew who he was, I was a little taken aback by how calm he remained during our intense but civil hour-long conversation. I had figured that a man whose hobby was saying horrible shit just to screw with people online would rise to some new horrible level when conditions on the ground actually called for it. Instead he pleaded with me in an affectless monotone not to reveal his name.

“‘My wife is disabled. I got a home and a mortgage, and if this hits the fan, I believe this will affect negatively on my employment,’ he said. ‘I do my job, go home watch TV, and go on the internet. I just like riling people up in my spare time.'”

Source: Gawker
Published: Oct 12, 2012
Length: 18 minutes (4,746 words)

My Life as a Replacement Ref: Three Unlikely Months Inside the NFL

Longreads Pick

[Not single-page] An interview with Jerry Frump, who left his job as a Division I college football referee to work as a replacement official in the NFL during a labor dispute between the NFL and the NFL Referees Association.

“What was the most surreal moment in this whole experience?

“I suppose it was – not when it happened, but afterwards – there’s been a number of pictures that have appeared in the newspaper and the Internet and so forth, but I think the one that seems to be most popular is me signaling intentional grounding on Ben Roethlisberger and him with his hands on his hips looking down on me. You know, he’s a very big man. I’m only about 5’9” or 5’10”. So it was – I had to look at it with some amusement myself.

“And was that the right call?

“Yes, I actually got the correct call on it.

“Was there a low moment?

“I suppose you really felt bad for your colleagues when they blew a call, or there was one that was getting a lot of negative media attention. Again, everybody goes out there and they work hard, and we kind of stand side by side. When somebody makes a call, obviously, the microscope is very big at this level. I think the NFL in one of our conference calls indicated that ‘there will probably be no one in history has gone through such a high level of scrutiny, and the microscope has never been as big as it is on you guys at this time.'”

Source: Time Magazine
Published: Sep 28, 2012
Length: 26 minutes (6,563 words)

Educators at Stanford University are paving the way for the future of online learning by providing free lectures on the Internet, but the idea of a prestigious college providing mass online education for free remains the subject of intense debate:

Within days of going online with little fanfare, the three free courses attracted 350,000 registrants from 190 countries—mostly computer and software industry professionals looking to sharpen their skills. ‘To put that in context,’ Ng says, ‘in order to reach a comparably sized audience on campus I would have to teach my normal Stanford course for 250 years.’

The stories behind those numbers were compelling. One person who completed Ng’s machine learning course was an engineer at Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant. Another was a 54-year-old Romanian engineer named Octavian Manescu. He wrote that his job had been on the line, but after following Ng’s course ‘with great pleasure and enthusiasm,’ he asked his CTO if he could use machine learning to monitor the complex telecommunications systems in his company. ‘At first my idea was received with disbelief,’ he wrote, but he finally gained approval to conduct some tests, with results ‘so convincing that my proposal became a part of a major project. Currently I’m working on its implementation.’

“Stanford for All.” — Theresa Johnston, Stanford magazine

More from Stanford Magazine

Stanford for All

Longreads Pick

Educators at Stanford University are paving the way for the future of online learning by providing free lectures on the Internet, but the idea of a prestigious college providing mass online education for free remains the subject of intense debate:

“Within days of going online with little fanfare, the three free courses attracted 350,000 registrants from 190 countries—mostly computer and software industry professionals looking to sharpen their skills. ‘To put that in context,’ Ng says, ‘in order to reach a comparably sized audience on campus I would have to teach my normal Stanford course for 250 years.’

“The stories behind those numbers were compelling. One person who completed Ng’s machine learning course was an engineer at Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant. Another was a 54-year-old Romanian engineer named Octavian Manescu. He wrote that his job had been on the line, but after following Ng’s course ‘with great pleasure and enthusiasm,’ he asked his CTO if he could use machine learning to monitor the complex telecommunications systems in his company. ‘At first my idea was received with disbelief,’ he wrote, but he finally gained approval to conduct some tests, with results ‘so convincing that my proposal became a part of a major project. Currently I’m working on its implementation.'”

Published: Sep 1, 2012
Length: 13 minutes (3,254 words)

A look at the women who work as “Internet cam girls,” and the criminal activity that may be occurring behind some of the cam networks:

‘Cam sites are ideal for laundering. The studios are being used to have girls online accepting a financed hand that uses ‘dirty’ money to buy the private time. The studio gets paid for the private session, the girl gets her (very small) part and so the money comes back clean,’ Mila says. As a result, ‘most Russian and Romanian studios are Mafia owned,’ a claim she extends to the wider developing world. The picture becomes clearer when you remember how scattered and obfuscated these networks’ financial structures are—it’d be easier to confusingly launder money through a company that’s somehow simultaneously based in both Hungary and Portugal.

The Eastern Bloc countries that so many cam girls call home are repeatedly mentioned in sex trafficking reports as both sources and conduits of illicit sex work—MyFreeCams has gone as far as banning all models from the Philippines, where conditions are said to be the most brutal.

The reasoning isn’t mentioned, but is easy to surmise. Moving the exploitation online, where girls are under ‘contract’ to stay in a room for half a day at a time with dubious legal recourse, makes criminal sense.

“Indentured Servitude, Money Laundering, and Piles of Money: The Crazy Secrets of Internet Cam Girls (NSFW).” — Sam Biddle, Gizmodo (with corrected link)

More from Gizmodo

A classic game is being undermined by technology, allowing players to come up with elaborate cheating schemes:

In the 2006 World Open in Philadelphia, the most moneyed tournament in the land — this year’s event, which concluded in July, had a kitty of $250,000 — tournament director Mike Atkins got bad feelings about a competitor named Steve Rosenberg, entered in the 2000-and-under division (a category for competent but non-master players). Rosenberg came into the tournament having won 18 matches in a row. Then Rosenberg kept his winning streak going against superior competition in the early rounds of the World Open, all the while wearing several layers of clothing in the heat of the Northeastern summer and playing each game with his hands cupped over his ears. Atkins eventually surmised the oddball get-up was part of a scheme, and that Rosenberg was somehow getting moves fed to him. With Rosenberg undefeated heading into the late rounds of the tournament and one win away from taking home the $18,000 first prize, Atkins confronted him about his suspicions, and during the interrogation a tiny electronic device was discovered in Rosenberg’s ear. The player claimed it was a hearing aid; Atkins hopped on his laptop and from Internet research quickly found that the gadget, called a Phonito, was in fact a radio receiver that could be used to relay information from a third party, and, in this case, was likely a third party accessing Fritz or some other chess engine. (The $270 Phonito was manufactured by Phonak, a Swiss electronics firm that at that time was in the news as the sponsor of Floyd Landis during his Tour de France cheating episode.) Rosenberg declined to answer Atkins’s questions; given what was at stake, the tournament director took the non-answers as a confession and booted him out of the tournament.

“Rooked.” — Dave McKenna, Grantland

More from Grantland

Rooked

Longreads Pick

A classic game is being undermined by technology, allowing players to come up with elaborate cheating schemes:

“In the 2006 World Open in Philadelphia, the most moneyed tournament in the land — this year’s event, which concluded in July, had a kitty of $250,000 — tournament director Mike Atkins got bad feelings about a competitor named Steve Rosenberg, entered in the 2000-and-under division (a category for competent but non-master players). Rosenberg came into the tournament having won 18 matches in a row. Then Rosenberg kept his winning streak going against superior competition in the early rounds of the World Open, all the while wearing several layers of clothing in the heat of the Northeastern summer and playing each game with his hands cupped over his ears. Atkins eventually surmised the oddball get-up was part of a scheme, and that Rosenberg was somehow getting moves fed to him. With Rosenberg undefeated heading into the late rounds of the tournament and one win away from taking home the $18,000 first prize, Atkins confronted him about his suspicions, and during the interrogation a tiny electronic device was discovered in Rosenberg’s ear. The player claimed it was a hearing aid; Atkins hopped on his laptop and from Internet research quickly found that the gadget, called a Phonito, was in fact a radio receiver that could be used to relay information from a third party, and, in this case, was likely a third party accessing Fritz or some other chess engine. (The $270 Phonito was manufactured by Phonak, a Swiss electronics firm that at that time was in the news as the sponsor of Floyd Landis during his Tour de France cheating episode.) Rosenberg declined to answer Atkins’s questions; given what was at stake, the tournament director took the non-answers as a confession and booted him out of the tournament.”

Source: Grantland
Published: Sep 12, 2012
Length: 17 minutes (4,281 words)