Manfred Kreuzwirth seems to be a busy man. Or perhaps just the opposite, a man with time on his hands, since he also seems to be quite the Renaissance Man – extremely multi-lingual and with interests in myriad fields. Or is he a CIA agent poking his nose into Arabic, Polish, Vietnamese, Serbian, Czech, etc. web sites, checking up on people who claim to be discussing home sales, gardening, P2P teaching, computer games, fishing, gig posters, Michael Jackson, football, tourism, Slobodan Milosevic, the comedy of Joe Frank, elves, African-American culture, the music of Chopin …? I’ve never met him, so how do I know this about him? I “googled” him.

Manfred Kreuzwirth showed up in my email inbox requesting membership in our discussion forums (http://www1.svt.ntnu.no/forum/easst/index.php). His name wasn’t on the EASST membership list, but we might have new members who aren’t listed there yet, so I googled him. I found over 60 pages of “hits” for his name – all of them memberships in discussion forums, all of them (that I checked and that showed dates) dated within 24 hours of signing up for EASST Discussion Forums, none of them showing any posts. One site based in Poland reports that “Manfred Kreuzwirth is an unknown quantity at this point.” That’s only because they didn’t google him. Manfred Kreuzwirth, or ManfredKreuzwirth, or Manfred _ Kreuzwirth is, of course, a non-human actor, a “bot.” So are JessiTomei, MashaOlssen, AliseCarter, JeremyMcBacter, CarrieRodriguez, CharlieRoberts, RachelSimpson, and Milena _ Mila. In fact, they may all be the same bot, programmed to generate new names from time to time, or to steal them from human actors. Rachel Simpson, for instance, appears also to be at least one human actor with an on-line presence. But “she”, or rather her “name-twin”, is also clearly a bot, hacking her way into various discussion forums.

Why are they seeking membership in EASST forums? I can’t say for sure; I don’t have the skills to counterhack them and analyze their codes. Some seem to be “selling” (probably just taking money and not delivering) cut-priced and/or limited access products such as drugs, CDs, videos, and porn. Some are probably planting malware, infiltrating computers to plant information-tapping devices or destructive “worms”, “trojans” and other types of “viruses”.

None of these bots have managed to get past our own forums’ last line of defence – me. Yet. They have, however, now found a way past the distorted-random-letters function, once thought to protect effectively against non-human actors. For a while, that function had stemmed the tide. Now I am again receiving 50 or more false sign-ups per day. I feel sure we don’t want these bots running freely on web sites where we might leave any personal information, like our email address, work affiliation, name, gender, age, or information on our academic and other interests. I feel sure that any of us who want to buy Viagra, Cialis, or the latest “cheap drugs” offering, Tamiflu, can find them from more reliable sources. Therefore new member sign-ups are kept on a waiting list as inactive. Several times a week I check the list. Once in a while there is an EASST member amongst them, so I take the time to read each username and check any that seem at all likely. Then I activate those that prove to be EASST members or other STSers and delete the rest. This is why I still request that members sign up using a recognizable version of their real-life name. Once your membership has been activated, you are welcome to change how your name will appear in discussions.

Of course, all this checking and deleting takes time – several hours per week now. The question becomes: Do we keep up the experiment in hopes that it will take off, in hopes that it will prove to be a first step on the road towards turning EASST Review into a fully refereed, perhaps open-refereed, on-line journal? Or … do we give up, leaving the cyberdiscussions field to commercial interests who can afford to pay for editorial and on-line security services? It’s up to you. So far our discussions forum has clearly not reached critical mass: We have twenty forum members and no responses to posts. But I’m willing to keep trying.

After all, it’s not that we have nothing to say to one another. We have lively discussions, academic and otherwise, when we meet at conferences. Perhaps we can also continue on-line between meetings. Perhaps we can even be sociable and analytical at the same time by having an informal discussion on how cybercrime affects cybercommunities and how we might go about researching that theme, or for that matter dealing with it. Must we bombproof our website by welding it shut like a Beirut trashbin, rendering it useless at the same time? Can we find more constructive solutions? Or are we just all too busy, busy, busy?

I wish you all a restful summer, but also a productive one. Here’s hoping that at least those of us researching various aspects of distanced and digital communications (see the workshop report that follows) are productive. Perhaps they can help us to achieve the promise of connectedness digital communications offer, yet avoid being invaded by the very monsters we create in the process.