THE GIRL WHO HACKED LIBERTY VALANCE: THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY
Although this story has taken a lighthearted and at times humorous approach to the subject, cyberstalking and cyberbullying can be devastating to the victim.
On September 22, 2010, Tyler Clementi, a nineteen-year-old college student, jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge.
On January 14, 2010, fifteen-year-old Phoebe Prince hanged herself.
Rebecca Ann Sedwick, twelve, jumped to her death on September 12, 2013.
In the United States, cyberbullying had been defined as including cruel or malicious text messages or e-mails, rumors sent by e-mail or posted on social networking sites, and embarrassing or compromising pictures, videos, websites, or fake profiles. A Pew Research Center survey conducted between 2007 and 2010 showed that 43 percent of teens aged thirteen to seventeen had been victimized by some form of cyberbullying during the previous year, and 88 percent admitted to having witnessed such acts being committed against another. It is not confined to children and adolescents alone. There is a growing problem with workplace cyberbullying and extortion, not to mention spurned lovers who use social media to exact vengeance.
Laws protecting victims of cyberbullying and — stalking are either woefully inadequate or are not enforced. In the case of Rebecca Ann Sedwick’s death, no charges were brought against the two girls who initiated the messages. One even admitted on national television she felt she had done nothing wrong. Hopefully you’re not on her friend list.
It is the Wild West nature of the Internet and the chaos and damage predators and miscreants can cause that reminded me of one of my favorite Westerns, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. It is the story of people who, in the absence of law and order, did what was necessary to do more than simply survive, by taking matters into their own hands. While I am not an advocate of vigilante justice, I do believe there are times when people must stand up and protect themselves and those they care for when no one else is willing or able to do so.
HAROLD COYLE
THE GIRL WHO HACKED LIBERTY VALANCE: THE TECHNOLOGY BEHIND THE STORY
This story actually came about after watching the film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance the day after reading a news story about how one online victim, with a very technically competent friend, was able to track down his anonymous attacker within a few short months, following nearly three years of foul abuse on Twitter and his blog. If you want to read the real story that inspired us, search for Leo Traynor online. What he and his friend did, and how he dealt with the troll when he eventually uncovered him, is impressive.
However, having devious and paranoid minds, we wondered how someone could do the same if the attacker was using a proxy service (an online service that basically hides your real IP address from the destination sites you visit), but more important, how someone could do it legally. The answer was cookies.
Cookies are simple little text files that are stored in your browser and are generally pretty useful. They make sure you don’t lose track of what’s in your basket on shopping sites and remember flight details when you try to book a vacation online. However, all cookies are not created equal. There are cookies, super cookies, tracking cookies, third-party tracking cookies, and even zombie cookies (ones that come back from the dead even after you delete them). The information they can collect about who you are, what you like, and where you’ve been is scary. This is why laws in Europe were put in place making it compulsory to get the visitor’s agreement to the use of cookies. However, as long as the site owner does that (or even posts a notice saying that by continuing you are considered to have agreed to cookies being put on your machine), they are legally covered to collect a treasure trove of data about you, and if they want to, sell it to advertisers. If you want to worry yourself, we suggest you learn how to view the list of cookies currently stored by your browser. And if you’ve never looked before, be prepared for a shock.
JENNIFER ELLIS
REFLECTIONS
1
With a touch of dry humor, when pressed for an explanation he could not provide, Andy Webb attributed quirks — behavior of a system that mysteriously occurred then disappeared or odd results that programs sometimes coughed up — to some offense he’d committed against the Greek god Hermes, who, among other things, was the patron of machines and inventions.
Tommy, ever the determined tinker, pinned such flukes and failures squarely on malfunctioning hardware, the sort of thing to be expected from machines assembled by less-than-perfect human beings or equipment that was well past its prime. From time to time, when he was in a mood to do so, he even made a great show of acting as if he was spooked by something a computer did by attributing its unpredictable behavior to a ghost in the machine.
Karen Spencer rejected both theories put forth by her coworkers. In her world there were no such things as problems that could not be analyzed and explained, or chance occurrences caused by ethereal phenomena. There were patterns, routines, and from time to time, random bifurcations caused when a system’s ability to keep track of numbers to the right of a decimal point had reached its limits, leaving the system no other choice than to decide pretty much on its own whether the offending number needed to be added or dropped. So when she suddenly realized the manner in which the miscreant she and Pamela Dutton had dubbed Liberty Valance had gone about selecting his screen names using anagrams of the word ninja, she came to a full dead stop right in the middle of typing a detailed account of his activities and how she and Pamela had ended his cyberstalking.
After easing back in her seat, Spence carefully studied the list of screen names she’d just typed, wondering where she’d seen mention of that sort of behavior before. In the off chance it had been written about in a piece in British Computer Society’s quarterly magazine, Spence made her way past Andy’s desk to a bookshelf where he kept old copies of the magazine, numerous manuals, and reference books on various computer software packages and operating systems side by side with a copy of Lewis and Short’s Latin dictionary and Legionary: The Roman Soldier’s (Unofficial) Manual.
Peeking up from the motherboard he’d scavenged from an old system, Tommy watched as Spence flipped through a copy of one of the magazines. “You’ll not find anything of use in any of those. Experience and poking about these things is the only way you figure them out,” he admonished as he was tapping the edge of the board he was working on with the tip of his tweezers.
“Unfortunately, not everyone is blessed with the memory, not to mention the constitution, of an elephant,” Spence muttered without looking up from the magazine she was leafing through.
Taken aback by her quick response, Tommy glanced over at Andy, who was doing his best to ignore the two. “I think I’ve just been insulted,” Tommy quipped.
“Not an insult,” Spence muttered as she carefully replaced one magazine exactly where she’d found it before taking another off the shelf. “Just a statement of fact.”
Before Tommy could retort, Andy looked over his shoulder at Spence, then at Tommy. “Now, now children. Do try to behave.”