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For many people the sight of Russian tanks streaming across a border in August has uncanny echoes of Prague 1968. That cold war reflex is natural enough, but it is misleading. Not every development in the former Soviet Union is a replay of Soviet history. It is crudely simplistic to cast Russia as the sole villain in the clashes over South Ossetia.
digg story

If you check out the Digg comments following the link above, there’s clearly a bunch of PUPTs in the comments. Some people’s bad English and outright bashing of Georgia is a clear indication of paid provocateurs. Some more clues - calling Georgia a US’s puppet, mentioning outrageous but unconfirmed casualties in 1500s or even 2000s as a proven fact (even though no pictures of video footage exist to support this), calling Saakashvili a mini-Hitler, and proclaiming Russia as a protector of it own citizens. In general, the situation itself has many common traits with Germany annexing Sudetes before World War II. Same type of claims, same passports distribution beforehand, same go-get attitude from the aggressor.

Again, I am trying to keep this blog as far from politics as possible, so take this as another look at the cyberwar (or information war).

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While everybody is watching Olympics in China, there are couple of wars going on. There’s a war in Georgia where russian tanks and bombers are leveling off residential buildings. This blog, however, is not about the politics, so I will talk about another war, the information war. While most of what I will be writing below pertains russian-language blogs, I am sure most other communities have similar trends.

When checking a reaction to any event in popular blogs it is always interesting to separate comments into different categories. There are people who agree or disagree to the author’s point of view, there are people who just dropping their 2 cents and there are people who just want to “chime in”, so that their user name and web site show up. In blog communities, namely LiveJournal, that’s very popular among Russian-speaking crowd, things go a little different, especially for a political event. Once something major breaks in - and by major I understand something attracting hundreds and hundreds of comments - a very special kinds of trolls crawl from under the bridges. Some of them are, indeed, creatures of their own low self-esteem. Others, however, appear to be on government’s payroll. Given the ultra-patriotism that Russian government under Putin was imposing it was both amazing and scary to watch the proliferation of “paid ultra-patriotic trolls” (PUPTs, which sounds close enough to “puppets”) throughout the Russian-speaking web.

These creatures don’t allow anyone to bash or even question the righteousness of Russian government, anyone who does it is being bashed, accused of being pro-American, jewish, stupid or just one who “doesn’t love his country” (everything mentioned is considered to be very bad by common folk in Russia). Given that most of UPTs are being paid for what other people do at their leisure time, the strength of trolls’ attacks supercedes any and all counter-measures one can take. Obviously, when some on-the-fence bystander watches the crowd bashing a single unknown user he is happy to join in and support the crowd or at least is being smart enough not to oppose the crowd. The fact that the “crowd” may consist of a very few government paid employees using multiple online identities sort of escapes the moment.

For a person, who is not constantly bombarded with propaganda news from Russian TV, radio and newspapers it is easy enough to tell the PUPT from regular troll from someone who was just sucked into discussion. Paid UPTs are usually either very aggressive or very thorough. Pretty much everything - from language patterns, to responses to other non-paid UPTs and to other members of discussion - can give them away. It’s somewhat hard to tell the UPT in a separate blog, but in a community similar to LiveJournal it’s quite easy. PUPT’s own journal (blog) is either empty, filled with crossposts from another blogs (usually automatic) or reposts from news sites. Very rarely one can find a regular personal blog that belongs to UPT, usually this indicates the main account for “troll master” or, if I can put it this way, the puppeteer. His role is usually to oversee the big picture and engage large targets. This figure usually less aggressive, poses as some authoritative resource, citing documents, providing links (mostly to other propaganda sources or selected specifically to represent certain propagandistic point of view) and so on. Beating one usually requires a lot of knowledge, ability to support own point of view with quickly found links, materials and evidence as well as at least partial support of community.

Technically speaking, there’s nothing new in these techniques of political trolling. Sure thing they date back as long as politics themselves. With proliferation of the internet, even though crowds are twisted more towards the entertainment, governments eventually realize the full power of online communities. Given the resources available to (any) government it is very easy to predict what will happen next. Of course some communities will survive the PUPTs infiltration. Even omniscient and omnipotent KGB did not twart dissidents of Soviet Union - mostly because they were harmless, but also because it very hard to chase down every single person who allows himself to think differently. However, as to Russian-speaking resources, it won’t be long before any reasonable discussion will be shut down one way or another due to the presense of vast army of PUPTs. Russia has only one prime channel that is controlled by the government (all major channels are, but 1st Channel is broadcast all over Russia), most of translations of foreign newspapers available from single web site that provides propaganda-tweaked translations of news (I personally saw a few articles from NYTimes translated in such a way that the whole meaning of the article was reversed) and most newspapers are lean to publishing articles about celebrities and aliens. It’s much like the Chine’s Great Firewall, only much more subtle and powerful.

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Due to some personal commitments (read: being engaged to a wonderful beautiful woman) I spend quite some time in a Starbucks near 7th Ave South and East 11th Street, New York, NY, waiting to pick her up after work. Regular visitors and staff already know me well enough to stop making passes on me, as well as learning that whatever I order is “to stay” and not “to go”. So, this post isn’t about them.

Before the ill-known Wi-Fi take-over by AT&T this Starbucks’s connection never had an issue. I come here with either one of my three laptops (my personal favorite T60p, smaller X61s or horrible company issued HP Compaq 6710b). None of them had any troubles connecting to T-Mobile’s Wi-Fi. Not until some time after AT&T took over.

Now, I am not trying to bash AT&T altogether. I am happily using their 3G with either BlackJack or Tilt (sometimes with my laptop tethered) while my fiancee’s second most loved thing on Earth is her iPhone (I hope I still hold the first place). What I was expecting to see from this clash of providers is that at the converted locations customers would experience intermittent outages while on T-Mobile hookup. You know - login process times out on you couple of times. Then some of your web sites are so slow that you can’t really so anything. Then the connection is dropped for no apparent reason. And that is just what I have been fed up with for previous two weeks. So much so that I had changed my weekly routine that I only have to spend one day of the week at that location.

A ticket submitted to T-Mobile customer support two weeks ago finally got answered today. In brief it says: “Yes, it’s a converted location, if you have any problems - call this number or that number”. Surely, just a template, with some name attached to it. Two weeks to send a canned reply - something tells me it isn’t a company that cares about me being their client. After all, if I decide to go with AT&T for Starbucks’ Wi-Fi, it’s going to cost me two times less money. Once the takeover by AT&T is complete, there would be not much incentive to keep T-Mobile, right?

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