Confirming what the world suspected, McAfee recently released the findings of their SPAM (Spammed Persistently All Month) Experiment: spam and cybercrime are linked.

50 people from around the world surfed the Web unprotected for 30 days. By taking part in the experiment, participants were given permission to go where most Internet users would not dare, in order to discover how much spam they would attract and what the effects would be. Having studied the daily blogs and analyzed the spam itself, McAfee® researchers confirm that spammers are as active as ever; they are increasingly using psychological tricks to lure Internet users to part with their contact details, identity information and cash. The experiment clearly shows that spam continues to evolve, utilizing more local languages and cultural nuances, as well as becoming much more targeted in a bid to avoid detection.

In the first experiment of its kind, the participants from 10 countries received more than 104,000 spam e-mails throughout the course of the experiment. That’s 2,096 messages each - the equivalent of approximately 70 messages a day.

One of McAfee’s goals was to highlight that, contrary to what people might think, spam is not only a nuisance but it also poses a very real threat and is showing no sign of slowing down. For anyone that has ever wanted to ‘click’ and find out if an offer really is “too good to be true,” the McAfee S.P.A.M. Experiment satisfies that curiosity, without any of the risks.

The full report is available as a PDF, and the participants’ blogs are well worth scrolling through. Those poor bastards took it all in their stride.

I’m twenty minutes late by the British clock but Happy Birthday Nelson Mandela, you terrorist, ex-terrorist, you.

New Sciences of Protection on The Terrors of Design:

In ‘Dissimulation and Terrorism’ Benjamin Bratton interrogated the interrelations between terrorism and the architectures of safe living. Today architects are literally being asked to ‘design out terrorism’. Yet the contemporary relationship between design, architecture and terrorism is a more intimate one. Terrorism makes use of existing architectures of safe living; it uses the concreteness of these architectures to inscribe itself on to the world. The act of terrorism also has a projective architecture of its own, whose conditions of existence of course include the removal of existing architecture. Terrorism is an exceptional violence wrought on an existing architecture and also, a posited counter-architecture itself. Bratton’s key manoeuvre was to demonstrate how the exceptional violence of terrorism solicits an exceptional response, with the consequence that responses to contemporary terrorism also adopt a terroristic form. Exceptional architectures of safe living are constructed in response to the threat of terrorism, constantly uprooting existing architectures of living in the process. Counter-terrorist design comes to validate and normalize the state of emergency brought about by terror and continually concretizes it in its (exceptional) designs for safe living. Terrorism has ceased to become simply a threat to the architecture of the social, but productive of the social architecture itself. In response to this Bratton urges that it must be ensured that this war on terror is only fought, if it must be fought at all, as a provisional moment. It is imperative that the normalization of terror through the architectures of counter-terror design be resisted. Without this resistance there is no telling that this terror will pass and a very real danger that we will dress our cities in its hysterical fashion.

This is a very important thesis. Sociologist Frank Furedi has consistently warned that contemporary political discourse risks normalising fear/terrorism as a default state. Are we to let urban planners and designers normalise our kinetic experiences and design interactions as responses to the perception of terrorism as a an ever-present and existential threat? This is a point Bryan Finoki has written on brilliantly in his comments on the fossilization of the GWOT.

The primary reference for TTOD’s post seems to be a session from a conference at Lancaster University last week on New Sciences of Protection: Designing Safe Living. I notice that one of the speakers was Dan Lockton, whose Architectures of Control blog - subtitled, Design with Intent - has been grappling with these problems for years.

[cross-posted to Complex Terrain Lab]

In an extraordinary and unprecedented move the International Criminal Court today issued a statement confirming what has been in the pipeline for a while, i.e. that Sudanese President Hassan Ahmad al Bashir can be held responsible for genocide and other crimes in Darfur.

ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo has presented evidence today showing that Sudanese President, Omar Hassan Ahmad AL BASHIR committed the crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Darfur.

Three years after the Security Council requested him to investigate in Darfur, and based on the evidence collected, the Prosecutor has concluded there are reasonable grounds to believe that Omar Hassan Ahmad AL BASHIR bears criminal responsibility in relation to 10 counts of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

The Prosecution evidence shows that Al Bashir masterminded and implemented a plan to destroy in substantial part the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa groups, on account of their ethnicity. Members of the three groups, historically influential in Darfur, were challenging the marginalization of the province; they engaged in a rebellion. AL BASHIR failed to defeat the armed movements, so he went after the people. “His motives were largely political. His alibi was a ‘counterinsurgency.’ His intent was genocide ”, the Prosecutor said.

Read the rest of the press release here. The ICC has applied for an arrest warrant [PDF here].

The International Crisis Group broadly welcomes the statement but warns of potential pitfalls in pursuing this action. ICG spin-off Enough also comments on the ICC decision and reminds us of al Bashir’s track record in human rights.

Speaking as someone who holds down violent urges at the mention of ’synergy’, I appreciate Pat Porter’s new post at Kings of War on Doctrine and Jargon:

Brian Linn argues in his excellent new study of American strategic culture that while we lack a coherent concept of the nature of the current war, we are left with technocratic gibberish, the Pentagon-speak of ‘capabilities organised cross-enterprise, adapting dynamically to uncertainty and turbulence in a multi-dimensional, nonlinear, competitive environment.’

Given that military doctrine is simply the principles that guide action, it should be clear and quickly understood. Once it becomes too elaborate by trying to replicate the complexity of the world, once it uses language that makes it too indigestible, then it stops being doctrine.

Read more wise words here. I’m curious what debate it’ll generate from KoW’s practitioner and academic readership.

This is genuinely exciting news. I’ve spent much of the last couple of weeks lamenting the lack of a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the academic study of virtual worlds, and now we have one.

The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research fills a lacuna in the literature and sets out its focus and scope as follows:

The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research is an online, open access academic journal that adheres to the highest standards of peer review and engages established and emerging scholars from anywhere in the world. The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research is a transdisciplinary journal that engages a wide spectrum of scholarship and welcomes contributions from the many disciplines and approaches that intersect virtual worlds research.

The field of virtual worlds research is a continually evolving area of study that spans across many disciplines and the JVWR editorial team looks forward to engaging a wide range of creative and scholarly work.

What are virtual worlds and what is virtual worlds research, within the context of this journal? These are evolving questions that we hope the formation of a community of scholarship will explore and expand. However, to provide a base to build upon, we consider virtual worlds to be computer-based simulated environment where users interact with other users through graphic or textual representations of themselves utilizing textual chat, voice, video or other forms of communication. The term virtual worlds includes, is similar to, or is synonymous (with extensive qualifications) to the terms of virtual reality, virtual space, datascape, metaverse, virtual environment, massively multiplayer online games (MMOs or MMOGs), massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs), multi-user dungeon, domain or dimension (MUDs), MUD object oriented (MOOs), multi-user shared hack, habitat, holodeck, or hallucination (MUSHs), massively-multiuser online graphical environments, collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) or multi-user virtual environments (MUVES), and immersive virtual environments (IVEs).

We see the current predominance of the virtual worlds of Second Life and its competitors as the most recent iteration of a long lineage of developments in virtual reality and gaming both in terms of technologies and conceptualization. Finally, we do not pretend to be a gaming journal, and hope that through this forum we are contributing to the development of specific space within the scholarly and creative communities for discourse on the wide variety of topic areas that are involved in virtual worlds research, including history of virtual worlds, cultural and social theory, quantitative research, qualitative research, virtual ethnographies, pedagogy, education and virtual worlds, development, experimentation, ideas and the intersection of virtual worlds and society.

Of particular interest to me in the first issue:

Cityspace, Cyberspace, and the Spatiology of Information, Michael L. Benedikt [PDF]

Help - Somebody Robbed My Second Life Avatar!, James Elliott & S.E. Kruck [PDF]

A Typology of Virtual Worlds: Historical Overview and Future Directions, Paul R. Messinger, Eleni Stroulia & Kelly Lyons [PDF]

Avatars Are For Real: Virtual Communities and Public Spheres, Eiko Ikegami & Piet Hut [PDF]

How Open Source Software Will Affect Virtual Worlds, Francis X. Taney, Jr. [PDF]

Toward a Definition of “Virtual Worlds”, Mark W. Bell [PDF]

Defining Virtual Worlds and Virtual Environments,Ralph Schroeder [PDF]

This is very significant news for all of us researching virtual worlds and finally provides the sort of forum and resource the field has been sorely missing.

It pains me to say this but Robert Fox has actually come up with a decent article at The Guardian, Virtually combating real terror. It’s essentially off the back of Daniel Kimmage’s work at RFE/RL [e.g. PDF] and his recent op-ed in the International Herald Tribune (and prior to that at the New York Times, Robert), but I’ve got no problem with bringing Daniel’s basic hypothesis to a new audience. Fox:

With their relentless message of blood and hate al-Qaida are not keen on getting back chat. Socratic dialogue is not their thing, and nor are laughs, apparently. In the more open channels and forums like YouTube images of Bin laden and al-Zawahiri get reactions from approval to explicit and virulent condemnation.

Attempts to run their own dialogues through their chosen media, like al-Sahab, have not been that successful, either. Last December Ayman al-Zawahiri asked for questions online. The questions weren’t produced until last [sic] April “due to security problems” according to bin Laden’s counsellor and guide. The dullness of the material suggests a different story.

Web 2.0-style social networking through the internet is now taking off in the Arabic world, Iran, and further east into southwest Asia. Even the wild lands of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier province are getting increasingly online (new mobile phone acquisition there is currently running at 170% per month). The social networking phenomenon is still frowned on by the most conservative states, however. Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria try to block them, and internet traffic is held under tight intelligence surveillance in Libya and Yemen. Now here’s a coincidence: according to repeated US military surveys of origins of foreign jihadi fighters in Iraq most come from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen [see CTC Sinjar report - PDF].

It seems simplistic to say the answer to the preachers of international terror lies in YouTube. But empowering the right of reply would be a good beginning. It would be a salutary experience, too, for the lords of cyber terror and their closet patrons and sponsors in the conservative Arab world and the darker reaches of Pakistan’s military oligarchy.

I’m really not going to pick holes in Fox’s piece. I’m even going to give him the benefit of the doubt for using the phrase ‘Web 2.0-style‘ and take it that he dislikes the 2.0 tag as much as I do. This piece mainly preaches to the choir, but for anyone else it’s worth reading for a lowdown on Kimmage’s research.

I’ve gibbered about Kimmage’s ideas before:

Daniel Kimmage at the ICSR [CTLab]

Daniel Kimmage at the ICSR [Ubiwar, see comments too]

Wise words from the mighty Stewart Brand of the Long Now Foundation at The Edge:

Digital humanity apparently crossed from one watershed to another over the last few years. Now we are noticing. Noticing usually helps. We’ll converge on one or two names for the new watershed and watch what induction tells us about how it works and what it’s good for.

Dry as ever. Read this and plenty of other responses to Chris Anderson’s article The End of Theory: Will the Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete?

Public diplomacy blog Intermap has officially been relaunched after a four-month absence. Here’s the blurb from Craig Hayden and Shawn Powers:

The Intermap website and blog presents news, opinions, and research on issues related to communication-centric foreign policy, public diplomacy, global media and news flows. More broadly, this site aims to investigate the intersections between communication, media studies and international relations scholarship that deal directly with how global controversies and politics are carried and sustained through media. We call this media argument: where media outlets, technologies, and tactics represent the symbolic and visual space for the contest of ideas between nations, citizens, non-state actors.

Our focus here on media argument presents a number of avenues for critical inquiry and discussion - from institutional and political constraints shaping international broadcasting policies, to the analysis of news media framing, to investigating ecological transformations introduced by networking technologies. Analysis is warranted, because our understanding of persuasion, identification, and information diffusion is changed in the increasingly crowded global media environment. Therefore, we aim to inform, synthesize, and add to contemporary debates on the use of global media to cultivate attitudes and to be the proxy space of international conflict.

The website joins the growing community of weblogs that already deal with public diplomacy, international broadcasting, and the broader conceptual issues of strategic communication and new media proliferation. This website hopes to add to the conversation, with an emphasis on the contributions of related (but often disconnected) strands of research in mass communication, rhetoric & argument studies, international politics, and media studies. These contributions can ideally provide a research-oriented context for the rapid pace of news and information pertinent to the study of international communication and public diplomacy. Much like the excellent COMOPS Journal, critical attention to these topics is not redundant, but valuable contributions to public discussion.

The previous incarnation of Intermap was a product of a research program looking at Arab media as a space for controversy about the United States. While that project has concluded, Intermap will continue to be a venue for posting information about related research projects, events, and proposals by the authors and the broader community of readers.

Good stuff. Slots right in next to Abu Aardvark, COMOPS Journal and MountainRunner on my reading list.

[Cross-posted to Complex Terrain Lab Review]

The new issue of Strategic Insights from the Center for Contemporary Conflict contains an article by Kathleen Meilahn, The Strategic Landscape: Avoiding Future Generations of Violent Extremists:

Psycho-social and political factors play an important role in radicalization. Where Islamist Violent Extremist Organizations (VEO) are concerned, these factors play a significant role in recruitment—versus just theology. However, once recruited, theology becomes the justification for violent actions. In the initial stages of al-Qaeda’s ascendancy, theological values that became politically radicalized were a driving factor motivating the core actors. As al-Qaeda (AQ) and other VEOs aim to increase in size, their recruitment process has become more oriented toward—or broadened to include—political issues, and those foot soldiers who volunteer are often psycho-socially motivated. Yet, in effect, AQ is “engaged in an unprecedented exercise of corrupting, misinterpreting and misrepresenting the word of God to generate support for their political mission.” [PDF]