Deception Links #3

Some of the following links are new, some are from the last few months, given that I haven’t updated in a while.

NY Times has a short article on the Sniper tactics used in the MV Maersk Alabama-Somali Pirate incident. There is a good quote that highlights the need for patience in the acquisition of power: 

“For all three of them to fire those shots at the same time and take those guys out, it was quite a feat,” said Don Shipley, a former member of the Seals who now runs a private Seal training school in Chesapeake, Va. “They showed the patience the sniper has, which is looking through the scope for hours to get that perfect shot.”

The Mittani, the head of Goonswarm’s Intelligence Agency in EVE Online, now has a blog. He has some excellent blog entries that cover intelligence gathering, deception, propaganda, and strategy in online gaming. As online gaming is essentially a competitive adaptive process, the concepts from his blog could be applied in a lot of other places. I’m going to comment more on his actually blog entries in the future. I’m not an EVE Online player, but the Machiavellian brilliance of some of their feats really drags me in. I recommend reading his ‘The necessity of espionage‘ entry.

Ryan Sager’s excellent new blog Neuroworld has a post on ‘The Neuroscience of Pathological Lying‘. 

The Keyboard detective has a two part series on ‘How to detect deception’. Part one here, part two here (Sources and Methods has the same links on front page at the moment. Though I found these links through delicious).

NY Times reports that a front page news story in the LA Times was actually an ad. Quote:

The idea for the imitation article came from The Los Angeles Times’s advertising department, said Adam Stotsky, the president of entertainment marketing for NBC.

“What was great about this ad unit is it gave us a quote-unquote ‘editorial voice,’ ” Mr. Stotsky said in an interview. “The more relevant you can make your advertising, the more contextualized you can make your advertising, we find the more engagement can be created, and ultimately the more effective your marketing can be,” he said.

Youtube video on farmers disguising themselves to hunt rabbits (via Sources and Methods).

Fake £1 coins in Britain surge.

A blog on ‘repugnant markets‘ (another term for illicit markets, via Marginal Revolution).

A new book on the history of deception.

/. discussion on Amazon calling their delisting of books a ‘glitch’.

Tim Stevens at Ubiwar has a link to a paper on countering terrorism through memetic engineering, which semi-ties in with topics in this blog like Rumor Psychology and Rhetoric.

Shlok Vaidya has a very interesting post on deceptive illicit markets. He calls it a “layer: a parasitic website that is underpinned entirely by another, that allows functionality that is not in the host.” Similar to some of the stuff on Freenet, but useable on the open net. There was a program like this in the late 90s that offered interaction between the website you were on, but completely separate from the site itself. Alas, I can’t remember the name, and I think it went the way of the dodo.

STOA POIKILE has a blog entry on Heroic Virtues in the Homeric World. Here is the part on metis:

 Nevertheless when force and/or speech cannot obtain success the Homeric hero has to count on the absolute and most sophisticated virtue – Μῆτις(metis): a multifaceted and articulated ability implying wit, inventiveness, audacity and shrewdness, whose master of course is Odysseus. IN fact not only a mortal: king Nestor, who knowledgeably lectures his son Antilochus on how to win the cart race:

“The horses of the others are swifter, but the men know not how to devise more cunning counsel than thine own self. Wherefore come, dear son, lay thou up in thy mind cunning of every sort, to the end that the prizes escape thee not. By cunning, thou knowest, is a woodman far better than by might; by cunning too doth a helmsman on the wine-dark deep guide aright a swift ship that is buffeted by winds; and by cunning doth charioteer prove better than charioteer. ”

notwithstanding his own old age, intelligence and experience, confesses Ulysses’ artful deceptiveness superiority; but even the goddess Athena, almost proudly and appreciatively, admits Odysseus’ insuperable foxiness in conceiving and fulfilling ingenious plans”

~ by D on April 15, 2009.