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ONES + ZEROS 021811: The Government's 'Sockpuppet' Army

h4. "Ones and Zeros":http://motherboard.tv/profiles/ones_and_zeros/posts is Motherboard's daily investigation into the particle accelerator that is the internet. Ones, you’ll come to expect, represent what’s “good” and zeros, what’s “bad.” Get more...

Ones and Zeros is Motherboard’s daily investigation into the particle accelerator that is the internet. Ones, you'll come to expect, represent what's "good" and zeros, what's "bad." Get more through our Facebook and Twitter.

1. Win for net neutrality?

Google, Best Buy, and Sony are teaming up against Big Cable, a welcome announcement considering the slow start Google TV has made and a win for content against the infrastructure giants in the continued battle for equilibrium.

You know there’s going to be a showdown over some communications technology issue when Google, Best Buy, Mitsubishi, Sony, TiVo and two other big companies start a new group with the word “alliance” in it. Sure enough, the septet has announced that they’ve united to defend the Federal Communications Commission’s new proposal for an “AllVid” standard that would make it easier for consumers to watch both pay television and the video they get from their home broadband network on the same screen.

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via Ars Technica

1. Live action Mario Kart

Freddie Wong has been upping his game, most recently with his Call of Duty spoof. His new one based on Mario doesn’t disappoint. Life as a YouTube filmmaker seems to be going swimmingly for the man with an iron hold on the nerdy parody genre. How soon before we have must-see YouTube fiction flicks of pertinent depth?

0. A Dangerous Army of Sockpuppets

Yet again, the leaked HB Gary e-mails are giving an insider look at how the government navigates manipulation in an Internet connected world. Some choice e-mails reveal a nefarious government batallion of “sockpuppets.”

As I also mentioned yesterday, in some of the emails, HB Gary people are talking about creating “personas”, what we would call sockpuppets. This is not new. PR firms have been using fake “people” to promote products and other things for a while now, both online and even in bars and coffee houses. But for a defense contractor with ties to the federal government, Hunton & Williams, DOD, NSA, and the CIA – whose enemies are labor unions, progressive organizations, journalists, and progressive bloggers, a persona apparently goes far beyond creating a mere sockpuppet. According to an embedded MS Word document found in one of the HB Gary emails, it involves creating an army of sockpuppets, with sophisticated “persona management” software that allows a small team of only a few people to appear to be many, while keeping the personas from accidentally cross-contaminating each other. Then, to top it off, the team can actually automate some functions so one persona can appear to be an entire Brooks Brothers riot online.

With Watson getting all good at Jeopardy, this is very disconcerting.

via Daily Kos