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How to Become a Supervillain 102

Posted by michael from the step-two:-email dept.
plasmastate writes "Learn German. Proceed to SuPerVillainizer. Launch the SuPer Villainizer Conspiracy Client V 0.9 Beta. Join selected conspiracy. Proceed to Terrorism Information Awareness. Savor sweet, sweet irony." Send us a postcard from Guantanamo Bay.
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How to Become a Supervillain More

How to Become a Supervillain

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  • Supervillan Training (Score:4, Funny)

    by Associate ( 317603 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @07:14PM (#6166075) Homepage
    I thought the quickest way to become a supervillan was to send out SPAM.
  • 2 comments posted and already dead.
  • Why would learning german be a prerequisite (or even something helpful) for becoming a supervillain?
    • Why would learning german be a prerequisite (or even something helpful) for becoming a supervillain?

      Because, obviously, french wouldn't do. I mean, yeah, being French gives you a certain notoriety nowadays, but honestly, can you picture a supervillain ordering a 'croissant' and a copy of 'Le Monde' for breakfast? On the other hand, ordering 'bratwurst' and reading 'Allgemeine Zeitung' does give you some crediblity.
    • Have you ever heard German? It sounds evil.
      • Hmmm. I've heard german quite a few times actually, but never got that impression.
      • Have you ever heard German? It sounds evil.

        I do speak German, and you're absolutely right. Well, there's this proverb (sort of) that just nails it down:

        Germans, of course, have no love life. They can't, since whispering "I love you" to your sweetie sounds just the same as telling her that you wish to eviscerate her corpse and place the head on a spear in the front yard as a warning to others.
      • Have you ever heard German? It sounds evil.

        Perhaps, but I find women speaking english with a German accent more sexy than evil.

  • ...most recent Flash Player is needed to view this site...

    Flash! Could there be greater proof of their villainy?

    Seriously, though, while I'm skeptical of many of the actions taken in pursuit of national security, and critical of quite a few of them, bragging about "ridiculing the notions of "the enemy" or the "bad guy"" comes across to me as evidence of utter stupidity on the part of the Villainizer guys.

    Obviously, there's tremendous subjectivity about right and wrong, but smirking about your contempt anyo

    • > Flash! Could there be greater proof of their villainy?

      Oh yeah: "Client-side Java"

      *shudder*
      • Hey, it's no surprise you and I are on the same wavelength -- we seem to have registered for our accounts here on the same day! ;-)
        • > we seem to have registered for our accounts here on the same day! ;-)

          Coolio. I remember being annoyed at all the anonymous coward "first post" nonsense, and decided to go ahead and register to get rid of them once Slashdot implemented the scoring system. Until then, I didn't see a need to bother. Now, of course, I realize I could've had a 3 digit user ID if I'd done it at the get-go. *shrug* Oh well, no biggie. Reading at +3 helps cut down on that a _lot_. :)

  • About the project. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @07:31PM (#6166230)
    The following is from http://www.supervillainizer.ch/index.php?theory=1
    -----
    About the Project

    Since and even well before the 11th of September laws have been passed in the United States and in Europe, that permit certain nations to keep all e-mail traffic under close surveillance. This has also happened in Switzerland. For more than a year now, Swiss providers have been required by law to retain telecommunications data for six months and if required by a judge to arrange the real-time interception of the email communication of their customers. It is the consequence of these advanced surveillance practices that the question is no longer: Who? Where? What? But: What not? Fears are being fueled and "enemy" profiles established.

    SuPerVillainizer is an interactive web project aimed against the establishment of these enemy profiles that these data retention surveillance scenarios are based on. Through the generating of artificial villains, SuPerVillainizer ist questioning the prevalent notion of "friend" and "enemy: SuPerVillainizer is about creating profiles of villains, rogues, bad guys, and scapegoats, equipping them with real email accounts at a Swiss provider, uniting them into conspiracies, and then watching as the villains start to automatically communicate with each other using SuPerVillainizer-generated conspiracy content, infiltrating the carefully planned surveillance system with more and more disinfoming mails every day. This conspiracy mail content can be influenced, the conspiracy language chosen.

    Because real email accounts at a real Swiss provider are being generated, and real mails are being sent using several SMTP-servers, the game is taking place in reality . This opens up the possiblility of real consequences should the authorities fall for the fictional content or the real conspiratorial connections between the accounts. Moreover, this conspiratorial email traffic is not to be limited to Switzerland only: concerned email-users can "donate" the email accounts they do not want to use (anymore). The accounts are integrated into the conspiracies and should be set to "AutoReply" if possible, so that an automated dialogue between the conspiring villains and the donated account evolves.

    It is the goal of the project to render the aforementioned enemy profiles obsolete. The world does not consist only of good and evil like we some people would like us to believe (example: "War on Terrorism"). SuPerVillainizer calls concerned people to act against this inadequate personalization (friend/enemy) and against the predominant black-and-white-thinking: many "enemy"-profiles coexist in the SuPerVillainizer environment: everyone can potentially become a villain: Bush conspires with Osama Binladen a member of the Swiss federal council plots to contaminate water supplies together with Saddam Hussein. Everyone can declare themselves "SuPerVillains" and join a conspiracy. Here, the surveillance-system is being rendered absurd because it actually assumes that everybody is a potential criminal.

    SuPerVillainizer is a webtool like its predecessor TraceNoizer - Disinformation on Demand (http://www.tracenoizer.org. TraceNoizer permits the clouding of one's own identity on the net and therefore provides the individual with an individual strategy against electronic surveillance. SuPerVillainizer on the other hand is a tool for collective use à a collective strategy in dealing with electronic surveillance: all information is freely accessible (no passwords), all villain profiles ever entered are re-useable and a database of keywords and sentences (so-called "Trigger Words") are compiled collectively which are then integrated into the emails sent by SuPerVillainizer to divert and confuse Echelon & Co.

    Design
    SuPerVillainizer is designed to resemble an email client such as Microsoft Outlook, Eudora, Netscape, which most computer users have installed on their machine to send and receive emails.
    Emailing is an every-day task for most Europeans, used

    • Re:About the project. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by nomel ( 244635 ) <turd&inorbit,com> on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @07:38PM (#6166270) Homepage Journal
      I think this is funny...but is it really a good idea.

      Cause seriously, it will take time away from tracking the real bad guy's...which could lead to disaster. I would hate to know that I was involved in making a terrorist not be stopped, possibly causing people to be killed.

      There possibly are advantages for real bad guys. Once they were in this system, they would probably be ignored after they figured out that it was just the supervillainizer...letting the bad guy eventually do real bad things...doubt it.
      • I would hate to know that I was involved in making a terrorist not be stopped, possibly causing people to be killed

        You are assuming that the best way to locate terrorist cells is to troll millions of emails looking for keywords.

        I doubt very much that many terrorists are located that way. Which is why (to me at least) that systems like Echelon are really intended for this purpose. Real time trolling for emails seems to have a more nefarious purpose.

        In this instance they are talking about Swiss ISPs bei

    • Re:About the project. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by chthon ( 580889 )

      Hmm, if all e-mail is monitored then maybe terrorists and villains will go back to snail mail, contacts in dark corners, exchanging of notes through papers, and so on...

      The current problem in U.S. and European legislations about these things is that these people do not seem to understand that setting up a conspiration does not need any high-tech or computer related technology. This means that once these measures are in effect, conspirators (?) can use all of the above techniques, which means that old trie

  • That's nice, but... (Score:3, Informative)

    by gmaestro ( 316742 ) <jason.guidry@gmai[ ]om ['l.c' in gap]> on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @07:50PM (#6166390)

    ...everything I learned about being a supervillain I learned from this book [computergear.com].

  • So I guess the only "evil doers" out there are German or Russian? Oh but I guess in about ten years we'll see Arabic ones too? By the way, I'm German (remember that country that was against starting that war that ended up being groundless.. yeah)

    • Re:German? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by GypC ( 7592 )

      Groundless? Get your head out of your ass!

      I think Robert Kagan said it best:

      ...if Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair are lying, they're not alone. They're part of a vast conspiratorial network of liars that includes U.N. weapons inspectors and reputable arms control experts both inside and outside government, both Republicans and Democrats.

      Maybe former CIA director John Deutch was lying when he testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Sept. 19, 1996, that "we believe that [Hussei

      • Ofcourse Iraq has weapons that they shouldn't, I mean the US did sell them a good bit in the Iran/Iraq war. Im also sure that there are many other countries out there just as horrible. But the rush to war was not called for, the diplomacy before may have been weak, but that seems like no reason to rush to war.

        • Who [mac.com] sold them their weapons?

          Diplomacy failed with Iraq. They were given every opportunity. Now, after decades of state sponsored rape and torture, children imprisoned and buried alive, whole villages nerve gassed, etc., etc., ad nauseum; someone finally says "enough" and does something about it (thank you U.K., Australia, Poland, and the rest). And the socialist asshats all over the world spring to the defense of poor old Saddam, citing such luminary and level-headed allies as France and Russia as the "Vo

          • Who sold them their Weapons of Mass Destruction?

            And who has just overthrown a secular government, thus liberating a bunch of Muslim Fundamentalists already killing Americans as a thankful gesture - based on the claim that when Bin Laden calls you an infidel, it obviously means you are giving him WMD?

          • But we damn sure ain't gonna stand around while innocents get slaughtered and call it peace.

            Good thing that Iraq is the only place in the world that innocents were being slaughtered. Yup, that has not happened anywhere else since GWB put himself in charge. Certainly not in the Congo for example. Of course the Congo does not have significant oil reserves, nor would it be a strategic location for permanent US military bases.

            Apparently, as with the genocide in Rawanda, the lives of the people in the Cong

            • It's kind of hard to pick sides in tribal warfare with each side doing unto each other over the years. A brutal dictator on the other hand...

              So that's your argument? "We didn't liberate France right away." Yes, of course, you're right. America is the Great Satan and just wants to rule the world with an iron fist. How could I have been so blind? Thank you, moonbat.

              • It's kind of hard to pick sides in tribal warfare with each side doing unto each other over the years. A brutal dictator on the other hand...

                So much for not standing by and letting innocent people get slaughtered...

                BTW in the 80's, when Rumsfeld was selling Iraq chemical and biological weapons for use against Iran, Saddam was a trusted ALLY. Isn't it funny how circumstances change, especially since he was just as brutal a dictator then as he was a few months ago...

                I suspect that if you check a repu

                • You know what? All of that oil money is going to go to the Iraqi people, and then you're going to find something else to moan about.

                  What does a bloodthirsty tyrant have to do nowadays to earn the hatred of the Lefties? Vote Republican?

                  • You know what? All of that oil money is going to go to the Iraqi people

                    Not necessarily. IIRC, Haliburton (you know, the company Cheney used to be the VP of) has received untendered contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq worth a few billion dollars. Sure, the oil "belongs" to the Iraqi people, but the money from selling that oil will be leaving the country and it appears that a fair bit of it is destined for GWB's cronies...

                    Coincidence?
          • I have spent a lot of time in Europe, Europeans don't hate Americans, but you sure as hell hate them.

            We want peace. But we damn sure ain't gonna stand around while innocents get slaughtered and call it peace.

            Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity


      • I thought you were serious until I got the the argument that Clinton would have to be a liar before your opponent could be correct.

      • I think Robert Kagan said it best:

        Who is Robert Kagan and why should his opinion matter?

        To paraphrase Carl Sagan, there are no authorities, at best there may be experts. The "experts" were unable to find any WMD in Iraq. As Hans Blix has suggested, perhaps the Iraquis were telling the truth, despite their many flaws and shortcomings.

        Groundless? Get your head out of your ass!

        You know, you toss up a bunch of quotes, but at the end of the day, the US and UK have had unrestricted access to all of Ira

    • German, as in Swiss, 'coz the site is a .ch one. Nothing against you guys per se.


    • > By the way, I'm German (remember that country that was against starting that war that ended up being groundless.. yeah)

      Ah, but W has assured us that the evidence will eventually turn up.

    • I guess that evil-doers include Korean speakers, and for quite some time, arabs are REALLY evil for tracing system. Or maybe even spanish, for their druglords in Colombia and other spanish speaking countries.
      But we can't deny that russian speaking villain had their charm on the 70's. ;-)

  • The descritption sounds a little odd (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Deagol ( 323173 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @09:25PM (#6167101) Homepage
    But I think that the underlying principle is sound.

    I wish I could link to another /. post of mine, but I can't find it. I ranted a while back about wanting to start "Project White Noise" after yet another article about how Bush-n-Ashcroft were wiping thier asses with the US's constitution.

    It's inspired by the old USENET "spook fodder" method. Fill the 'net with suspicious-looking traffic for the sake of decreasing the S/N ratio of various 3-letter agencies' snooping efforts.

    The first and obvious protocol would be email. My goal would be to have email accounts in every country both sending & receiving messages to & from every other country (anyone want to calculate the permutation on that?).

    Message payloads would include: legit messages, automated gibberish messages (fortune, spam generator, eliza bot, etc.), and purely random data. Each of these types could be sent: plaintext, public-key encrypted, symetricly encrypted, and encrypted with a one-time-pad (generated on the fly then tossed when sent, rendering the data non-recoverable).

    Ideally, each white noise client would get a list of participating email addresses from a source (P2P network, perhaps) and send the messages at random intervals in the background whenever connected to the 'net.

    I haven't solved the problem yet of routing truly legit mail through all of this. I guess the ultimate goal of this would be a distributed, peer-to-peer version of the Mixmaster network on steroids.

    Then there's all sorts of fun you can have with other protocols and subliminal channels. There's a Phrack article on sending covert data in the payload of ICMP ping packets. I've often thought of using plain old HTTP. You send a line of ASCII-encoded (possible even encrypted) data file to a remote server in a GET line. The remote user massages the lines of data from the log files to reconstruct the data sent (works through corporate firewalls that allow web surfing!).

    I'm all for catching bad guys, but I draw the line at wholesale monitoring of citizens. As I stated in a post long ago, I would rather risk dying in another random act of violence (of the 9/11 caliber) than be forced to live in a police state. I'm sure those who lost loved ones in the attacks wouldn't likely share my view, but what makes our country truly great is the freedom its citizens have, and eroding those freedoms cheapens the value of those lives lost on 9/11.

  • This website came just in time.

    I've just drawn up plans to blow up the moon,..

    bwa-ha

    baw-ha-ha

    BWA-HA_HA_HA!

  • ..and bandwith!

    Want to protest snooping? Install PGP (or open src equivalent) and encrypt every email you send.

    Write a simple installer so that my mum can install it easily as well and I'll tell her to use it too.

    There. It is now "somewhat difficult" for the authorities to randomly snoop on every email. Of course, with the appropriate search warrants they can make you give up the keys, but that is another issue.
  • this is obviousely a trap by the NSA or GCHQ or perhaps even.....the INGUISITION!!!

    be afraid be very afraid!!!

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