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Mike Wesch

The Boxxy Story - 0 views

  • Accusations began to fire. Just who would want to try and throw people off the trail and confuse them, and who would have a new, large photo of her? Boxxy herself, or a close accomplice was the consensus. They must have caught wind of her full name being found, and merely be attempting to mitigate the damage by stirring the pot with false leads. 
  • It sounded semi-plausible, but, unbeknownst to the vast majority of /b/ at that moment, the CBRC had long since uncovered a photobucket account which was later seen to contain the same photos, so the implication is obvious, members of the CBRC were trolling /b/ with the photos in a attempt to throw them off, as they themselves were close to breaking into her accounts and did not want Anonymous to do it first.
  • We have no way of verifying if they were telling the truth, or if any of the claimed locations were in any way accurate but the mere possibility of this is shocking indeed. Thankfully, these were almost certainly fake - one of the addresses was a mall, one of the phone numbers was for a chiropractor.
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  • Within a couple of hours, CBRC had breached her Youtube account, via successfully guessing the secret answer for her email account, deduced from the stack of information they uncovered.
  • Or phishing her with a fake email, depending on who you listen to.
  • They then made her videos private, uploading a video warning her to never post another video again. This attracted 1000 comments within an hour and became the most commented video of the day on Youtube. So that brought it to an end, in theory. They had removed the ‘cancer’.
  • So after all that, was the ‘chemo’ even effective? No, not really. A look at /b/ will reveal Boxxy threads are still being posted. By essentially martyring the Boxxy meme, CBRC have simply created a new groundswell of people willing to troll with her image, as well as genuine resentment at their actions. 
  • Now she has her name, age, dozens of photos, school, internet accounts, alleged phone numbers, and alleged location available online, along with the details of several uninvolved friends. Nobody could have predicted she would create so much chaos, not least Boxxy herself. She had no idea what she was getting herself into by posting a response video.
  • This entire debacle ultimately stems from those who spammed /b/ with her image and pissed off so many people.
  • The lesson for all of us here, obvious as it is, is to think about what you divulge online. Is your Myspace secure? Is your Facebook account private? What forum accounts contain your details, and can they be traced and linked to each other? Everything you write online can potentially be linked, as if it were a jigsaw, and a profile of your life built up. I know plenty of people who have publicly viewable Facebook accounts containing their D.O.B, phone numbers, emails, addresses, places they work, go to college and so on. This is lunacy. This is asking for trouble. Boxxy didn’t do this, yet was still tracked down. 
  • “First, we, CBCR, pretty much made all the breakthroughs in the investigation. I don't care if it sounds arrogant, but if you look through our now-leaked dox, you can see that everything that was found on 4chan was found by us beforehand.”
  • Give people anonymity, and they become de-individuated, whether it be on an image board or in a rioting mob.
  • he same internet machine that could propel you to the top of the Youtube charts and hand you online fame will happily chew you up and spit you back out just as quickly, with zero remorse or consideration for the consequences. This is the reality of the internet today, this case is not the first, and surely not the last.
  • A few examples of fakes:www.youtube.com/user/boxxiebabee  www.youtube.com/user/therealboxxybabee www.youtube.com/user/boxxxxybabeee www.youtube.com/user/boxxyfriendsonly www.youtube.com/user/B0xxxybabee www.youtube.com/user/boxxybaabee www.youtube.com/user/boxxybabee2 www.youtube.com/user/thenewboxxybabee
  • And of course:www.youtube.com/user/Boxxyakamoldybread 
  • P.P.S Some distasteful and blatantly fake photoshopped news items are being posted on /b/ claiming Boxxy is dead. The fakes are very poorly written and contain numerous flaws. Again, don’t be fooled.
  • It's Friday January 16th. On Youtube, the user 'boxxybabee', has 21,800 subscribers, 1.4 million video views and over 38,000 comments on her videos and channel, yet she only signed up 8 days ago, and has only 3 videos. Many people were, and are confused. How did this happen? By documenting what I personally saw, I will show you.
  • The story essentially begins back in April 2006 when 'Boxxy' joined the anime forum/game based site Gaia Online under the username 'M o l d yLunchboxx'. It appears Boxxy returned from a Gaia hiatus at the very end of 2007, and embarked on a posting spree which lasted a week. It was during this first week of January 2008 that she made two Youtube videos for two fellow Gaia users, '4DM1RALAWESOME' and another referred to simply as 'Ant'.
  • Boxxy's last login to Youtube was February 2008, and for Gaia Online, April 2008.
  • The story now takes a leap forward to December 27th, 2008, when, according to Encyclopedia Dramatica, the video 'FOAR 4DD1 FRUM BOXXY' was posted on i-am-bored.com. This was spotted by someone at 7chan, who embedded the video at the top of the random '/b/' board. 
  • This writer first saw FOAR 4DD1 on January 3rd, 2009, when the video was posted as a 'you rage you lose thread' on the /b/ board at 4chan, with the 'Expert' level afforded to those who would withstand the entire video without wanting to tear out their hair or hurt small animals. /b/tards saw what has been labelled 'the most insane display we've ever seen on youtube' and 'the cutest girl you've ever seen'. This was the true start of the Boxxy phenomenon.
  • Over the next couple of days, interest grew, and Boxxy threads began to populate /b/. Why have her videos lain virtually unviewed and untouched for 51 weeks only to be brought up now. Who was this girl? What was the cause of her unique behaviour - her vivacious mannerisms, head bobbing, jaw grinding, random accents and rambling? Was she really 21 as her profile stated? Speculation began. Some pulled out their wikiPHD and speculated, tourettes? ADHD? Drug abuse - cocaine, ecstacy, meth? No, just too much coffee, according to others, or simple acting up to the camera. Comparisons to Zed from Police Academy and Heath Ledger's Joker were immediate.
  • Regardless, a split already began to emerge at /b/. Half of /b/ appeared smitten, captivated by this pretty, wacky girl drenched in eyeliner, but the rest were having their patience tested. Whilst a group of /b/tards declared 'Operation Valkyrie' on Boxxy - intending to find, raid and destroy as much as possible - youtube, myspace, facebook, photobuckets, etc in search of an identity and the 'upper boob' sign mentioned in 41DD, others simply sat and dismayed at the whole effort. Why try and raid the accounts of someone who hasn't logged into any known accounts for almost a year? Many /b/tards resented the obsession with someone who was not only inactive, but a Gaiafag, emo and a camwhore to boot. As one naysayer put it, it was: 'proof that /b/ is full of 13 y.o boys'.
  • The known accounts, Youtube and Gaia, were quickly spammed with the Operation Valkyrie tag. Via analysis of so called 'Gaiafaggotry' forum posts, /b/tards extracted two pictures of Boxxy from her Gaia friends photobucket accounts, and threw out possible names.
  • On January 6th, someone claiming to be Boxxy posted two previously unseen photos on /b/. A troll, surely? The same day, her Youtube account disappeared and her Gaia account became inaccessible to the public. Was this the real Boxxy intervening, or simply trolls posting photos from photobucket under her guise, and hacking into her accounts and shutting them down? It was also on the 6th that a clearly fake Youtube account was created - 'Boxxyakamoldybread'. Even though the videos are clearly of lower resolution than the originals, some were fooled by this, and some probably still are.
  • The 'boxxy lovers' of 4chan were by now declaring her the 'Queen of /b/' and a instant new meme. The haters labelled this as a perfect example of a forced meme. To them, she was the epitome of the 'cancer killing /b/'. Battle lines were being drawn.
  • On the 9th, Boxxy delivered. She addressed 'recent events', said she was in fact free of drugs and personality disorders, and proved it actually was her posting her photos on /b/. Whilst /b/tards were scrambling to find her identity and spamming her accounts, she was there, watching.
  • his interest generated over 70,000 views within 12 hours, pushing the video onto the first page for most viewed of the day on Youtube.
  • Identical chaos was occurring at 7chan, with the /b/ first page 100% filled with Boxxy at some points. On the 10th, with Boxxy now approaching 400,000 views and 10,000 subscribers, Operation Clampdown was declared. If Moot did not ban the users spamming boxxy threads on the 4chan /b/, the site would be brought down via a DDOS. 
  • On the 12th, Youtube 'celeb' Sxephil included Boxxy in the intro for his new video, and used her face as the thumbnail. Personally, I found it extremely cynical of Phil, a Youtube partner who makes money from views, to advertise his extremely boring video about Joe the Plumber with Boxxy's face. What a dick. Worse still, the exposure to his 310,000 subscribers sent several thousand more people to the Boxxy videos.
  • There are many patently absurd theories about Boxxy. If you listen to the drooling idiocy leaking through the interweb, you'll be told she is in fact an actress hired by Gaia Online to promote their product (that's why she says she moved on to bigger and better things, huh, morons?), the whole thing is a giant trolling exercise meticulously planned by her and accomplices, the entire thing was perpertrated by 7chan users attempting to cripple 4chan, she's a paid actress akin to lonelygirl15, or most bizarrely of all, a claim has been put forward that she is a fraud mocking the mannerisms of a 15 year old girl who lives in Chicago, orchestrated by said girl's obsessed crush who is angry at his unrequited love. Some people actually believe this.Well, there you have it. That's pretty much what happened.
Trapper Callender

Man-Computer Symbiosis - 2 views

  • In short, it seems worthwhile to avoid argument with (other) enthusiasts for artificial intelligence by conceding dominance in the distant future of cerebration to machines alone.
  • There will nevertheless be a fairly long interim during which the main intellectual advances will be made by men and computers working together in intimate association. A multidisciplinary study group, examining future research and development problems of the Air Force, estimated that it would be 1980 before developments in artificial intelligence make it possible for machines alone to do much thinking or problem solving of military significance. That would leave, say, five years to develop man-computer symbiosis and 15 years to use it. The 15 may be 10 or 500, but those years should be intellectually the most creative and exciting in the history of mankind.
  • It is often said that programming for a computing machine forces one to think clearly, that it disciplines the thought process. If the user can think his problem through in advance, symbiotic association with a computing machine is not necessary.
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  • They would be easier to solve, and they could be solved faster, through an intuitively guided trial-and-error procedure in which the computer cooperated, turning up flaws in the reasoning or revealing unexpected turns in the solution.
  • Poincare anticipated the frustration of an important group of would-be computer users when he said, "The question is not, 'What is the answer?' The question is, 'What is the question?'" One of the main aims of man-computer symbiosis is to bring the computing machine effectively into the formulative parts of technical problems.
  • It is to bring computing machines effectively into processes of thinking that must go on in "real time," time that moves too fast to permit using computers in conventional ways.
  • To think in interaction with a computer in the same way that you think with a colleague whose competence supplements your own will require much tighter coupling between man and machine than is suggested by the example and than is possible today.
  • Throughout the period I examined, in short, my "thinking" time was devoted mainly to activities that were essentially clerical or mechanical: searching, calculating, plotting, transforming, determining the logical or dynamic consequences of a set of assumptions or hypotheses, preparing the way for a decision or an insight. Moreover, my choices of what to attempt and what not to attempt were determined to an embarrassingly great extent by considerations of clerical feasibility, not intellectual capability.
  • the operations that fill most of the time allegedly devoted to technical thinking are operations that can be performed more effectively by machines than by men.
  • If those problems can be solved in such a way as to create a symbiotic relation between a man and a fast information-retrieval and data-processing machine, however, it seems evident that the cooperative interaction would greatly improve the thinking process.
  • Computing machines can do readily, well, and rapidly many things that are difficult or impossible for man, and men can do readily and well, though not rapidly, many things that are difficult or impossible for computers. That suggests that a symbiotic cooperation, if successful in integrating the positive characteristics of men and computers, would be of great value. The differences in speed and in language, of course, pose difficulties that must be overcome.
  • Men will fill in the gaps, either in the problem solution or in the computer program, when the computer has no mode or routine that is applicable in a particular circumstance.
  • Clearly, for the sake of efficiency and economy, the computer must divide its time among many users. Timesharing systems are currently under active development. There are even arrangements to keep users from "clobbering" anything but their own personal programs.
  • It seems reasonable to envision, for a time 10 or 15 years hence, a "thinking center" that will incorporate the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval and the symbiotic functions suggested earlier in this paper. The picture readily enlarges itself into a network of such centers, connected to one another by wide-band communication lines and to individual users by leased-wire services. In such a system, the speed of the computers would be balanced, and the cost of the gigantic memories and the sophisticated programs would be divided by the number of users.
  • The first thing to face is that we shall not store all the technical and scientific papers in computer memory. We may store the parts that can be summarized most succinctly-the quantitative parts and the reference citations-but not the whole. Books are among the most beautifully engineered, and human-engineered, components in existence, and they will continue to be functionally important within the context of man-computer symbiosis. (Hopefully, the computer will expedite the finding, delivering, and returning of books.)
  • The second point is that a very important section of memory will be permanent: part indelible memory and part published memory. The computer will be able to write once into indelible memory, and then read back indefinitely, but the computer will not be able to erase indelible memory. (It may also over-write, turning all the 0's into l's, as though marking over what was written earlier.) Published memory will be "read-only" memory. It will be introduced into the computer already structured. The computer will be able to refer to it repeatedly, but not to change it.
  • The basic dissimilarity between human languages and computer languages may be the most serious obstacle to true symbiosis.
  • In short: instructions directed to computers specify courses; instructions-directed to human beings specify goals.
  • We may in due course see a serious effort to develop computer programs that can be connected together like the words and phrases of speech to do whatever computation or control is required at the moment. The consideration that holds back such an effort, apparently, is that the effort would produce nothing that would be of great value in the context of existing computers. It would be unrewarding to develop the language before there are any computing machines capable of responding meaningfully to it.
  • By and large, in generally available computers, however, there is almost no provision for any more effective, immediate man-machine communication than can be achieved with an electric typewriter.
  • Displays seem to be in a somewhat better state than controls. Many computers plot graphs on oscilloscope screens, and a few take advantage of the remarkable capabilities, graphical and symbolic, of the charactron display tube. Nowhere, to my knowledge, however, is there anything approaching the flexibility and convenience of the pencil and doodle pad or the chalk and blackboard used by men in technical discussion.
  • 2) Computer-Posted Wall Display: In some technological systems, several men share responsibility for controlling vehicles whose behaviors interact. Some information must be presented simultaneously to all the men, preferably on a common grid, to coordinate their actions. Other information is of relevance only to one or two operators. There would be only a confusion of uninterpretable clutter if all the information were presented on one display to all of them. The information must be posted by a computer, since manual plotting is too slow to keep it up to date.
  • Laboratory experiments have indicated repeatedly that informal, parallel arrangements of operators, coordinating their activities through reference to a large situation display, have important advantages over the arrangement, more widely used, that locates the operators at individual consoles and attempts to correlate their actions through the agency of a computer. This is one of several operator-team problems in need of careful study.
  • 3) Automatic Speech Production and Recognition: How desirable and how feasible is speech communication between human operators and computing machines?
  • Yet there is continuing interest in the idea of talking with computing machines.
  • In large part, the interest stems from realization that one can hardly take a military commander or a corporation president away from his work to teach him to type. If computing machines are ever to be used directly by top-level decision makers, it may be worthwhile to provide communication via the most natural means, even at considerable cost.
  • It seems reasonable, therefore, for computer specialists to be the ones who interact directly with computers in business offices.
  • Certainly, if the equipment were already developed, reliable, and available, it would be used.
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    Man-computer symbiosis is an expected development in cooperative interaction between men and electronic computers. It will involve very close coupling between the human and the electronic members of the partnership. The main aims are 1) to let computers facilitate formulative thinking as they now facilitate the solution of formulated problems, and 2) to enable men and computers to cooperate in making decisions and controlling complex situations without inflexible dependence on predetermined programs. In the anticipated symbiotic partnership, men will set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria, and perform the evaluations. Computing machines will do the routinizable work that must be done to prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking. Preliminary analyses indicate that the symbiotic partnership will perform intellectual operations much more effectively than man alone can perform them. Prerequisites for the achievement of the effective, cooperative association include developments in computer time sharing, in memory components, in memory organization, in programming languages, and in input and output equipment.
agencynbs

Lab-grown sperm makes healthy offspring - 0 views

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    BBC : February 26, 2016, Friday Sperm have been made in the laboratory and used to father healthy baby mice in a pioneering move that could lead to infertility treatments. The Chinese research took a stem cell, converted it into primitive sperm and fertilised an egg to produce healthy pups.
estellepipkin

Regenerative Medicine Portland - 0 views

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    Regenerative medicine is a branch of translational research in tissue engineering and molecular biology which deals with the "process of replacing, engineering or regenerating human cells, tissues or organs to restore or establish normal function.
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