I chose to focus on how skeptics need to cultivate specialized skills and learn new tools in our battle against irrationality on the world wide web. I decided to use the concept of a ninja as my metaphor. The video has already been posted and you can watch below.

After the jump you can see the slides that I presented and a list of links to tools and websites that I mentioned in the talk.

Slides

Here are the slides I presented, you can follow along with the video or go through them separately.

Links

My projects outside this blog:

• What’s the Harm?
• Today in Skeptic History for iPhone/iPad
• Skepticality podcast
• Virtual Skeptics webcast

Funding examples:

• The NCSE vs. creationism group numbers were directly gathered from Charity Navigator
• The Secular.org number comes from a March 9 email, the opposing figure from the Pew study “Lobbying for the Faithful“
• Unstoppable Secular Students by Liz Lyddell is the source of the Secular Students vs CRU numbers

Spirit and Unarmed:

• Yossi Sherrif quote is from here
• HootSuite is the tool I used to pre-schedule social media. Other tools exist such as SocialOomph

Curation:

• SkepTV curates skeptic and science videos
• RBUTR lets you curate rebuttals and debunks
• Skepticism conferences are listed in my guide at Lanyrd. Skep-Tech itself has a page there too.

Arming yourself:

• Unsourced finds the paper behind the story
• FourMatch can quickly validate if a photo has not been tampered with
• Pundit Tracker records the prediction track record for talking heads on the news
• Reality Drop gamifies the task spreading true climate science and debunking denialism
• Hypothes.is released an alpha version just after my talk
• Also browse the articles about tools here on this blog.

iPhone apps put skeptical experts in your pocket for those debates in the bar:

• Creationist Claims – creationism vs. evolution
• Skeptical Science – climate change denial (also for Android)
• Skeptics Dictionary – general skeptic topics

Other tools:

• See my articles here on Wikipedia and Susan Gerbic’s Guerrilla Skeptics project
• Skeptic Stack Exchange is where I answered the L.Ron question

SEO and Meta-data:

• Google’s SEO Starter Guide is all you need for SEO
• If your theme/template doesn’t do it for you already, help is available on adding Twitter cards to WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr. Be sure to test them here.
• If your theme/template doesn’t do it for you already, there’s help with Facebook Open Graph for WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr
• Google Authorship intructions
• Set the map location for a YouTube in Info & Settings > Advanced Settings. It is called Video Location

Espionage:

• NSLOOKUP is a program on your computer to look up web addresses. Here’s a smarter online version.
• WHOIS also may be on your computer, but also has an online version
• What Is My IP Address and IP2Location will show you where an IP address is in the world
• Google Image Search and TinEye let you upload an image to search for. Alan Rice documented how he outed fake psychics using it.

For more ideas of things you can do, watch my talk from TAM last year.

Useful links from the workshop were previously posted.

You can also watch and read my plenary address (which covers some closely related topics) here on the blog. Other posts about TAM2012 are here as well.

Thank you to Derek Colanduno of Skepticality and Shane Greenup of RBUTR, both of whom you will see here presenting sections of the workshop.

This year’s Amazing Meeting 2013 will be held July 11 – 14, 2013 in Las Vegas.

I wasn’t totally idle during the last two months.  Not only did the Mabus story leap back into the headlines, but I was still doing Virtual Skeptics and some other stuff.  So here’s a rundown of what I did post or create during my so-called sabbatical.

Below are links to the content I’ve been involved with in the last month. It includes this blog as well as the material I post on other blogs, my podcasting activities, my best posts on Twitter as well as key shout-outs or mentions elsewhere.

In an effort to practice what I preach, I also document on a monthly basis what my contributions are to several skeptic-relevant crowdsourcing projects.

Read on to see what you might have missed…

Blogging & other Writing

Here were my blog posts this month.

• November 1 – 9: Skeptools: 3 editions of Morning Toolbox
• November 20: Skeptools: Mabus Redux: Operation Archangel Gets Dennis Markuze Arrested
• November 25: Skeptical Inquirer: Skeptic Trumps: A Satirical Skeptic Card Game (from Volume 36 Issue 5, Sept/Oct 2012)

Mentions and links elsewhere:

• November 19: Montreal Gazette: Man charged with threatening people using social media — again – I’m quoted in this story about Markuze
• November 19: CCLA Rights Watch: Cyber troll “Mabus” faces new charges for social media threats – Another Mabus story
• November 19: Doubtful News: Dennis Markuze (aka David Mabus) arrested again (Updated)
• November 20: Great Plains Skeptic: What exactly is the harm? An interview with Tim Farley of WhatsTheHarm.net
• November 30: Agence Science Presse: Menacés de mort parce qu’ils défendent la science - Markuze follow-up in French. (In English here via Google)
• December 9: Skep-Tech announced they had invited me as a guest.
• December 15: The Next Web: Fake Twitter followers: An easy game, but not worth the risk – I’m quoted as an expert (see also Virtual Skeptics #3 and #13 and of course Doubtful News)

Podcasting & Video

I contributed segments to these episodes of Skepticality and Virtual Skeptics:

• November 7: Virtual Skeptics Episode #13 – I talked about Balancer and Pundit Tracker.
• November 13: Skepticality #195: Fake Science 101 – Fishbarrel, PunditTracker & TruthMarket
• November 14: Virtual Skeptics Episode #14 – I talked about my skeptic sabbatical.
• November 21: Virtual Skeptics Episode #15 – The second arrest of David Mabus.
• December 5: Virtual Skeptics Episode #17 – Using Lanyrd to find skeptic events in 2013.
• December 12: Virtual Skeptics Episode #18 – Dead people are liking things on Facebook.
• December 19: Virtual Skeptics Episode #19 – AVN must change it’s name, Skepticamps in 2013.

Mentions on other podcasts and webcasts:

• December 29: Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe #389: Year in Review – Very flattered to be named one of the best skeptics of 2012 by the panel.

Social Media

I posted on Twitter:

• 230 regular tweets, including:
  • 8 “What’s the harm in…?” stories
  • 62 daily skeptic history facts
  • 61 retweets of other people
• Plus 107 replies to other Twitter posts for a total of 337 tweets

Here are highlights, the tweets that were retweeted and favorited the most.

New #MABUS account to block is @oper443 Might as well do it now.—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) November 01, 2012

(9 retweets, 1 favorite)

UFO enthusiasts begin to come to the realization – the truth may NOT be out there after all. bit.ly/SlClnu via @4tis—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) November 04, 2012

(9 retweets, 4 favorites)

What's the harm in skipping a pertussis vaccination? 10 babies have died in UK. bit.ly/U6xs1m #vaxfax—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) November 06, 2012

(9 retweets)

I don’t do political comments, but on US Election Night I couldn’t resist this:

I've seen tons of science denial, but Karl Rove delved into MATH denial tonight on Fox News. #SilverBayes2016—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) November 07, 2012

(16 retweets, 1 favorites)

This one got the Penn Jillette boost:

You can see Amazing (James) Randi talk with @pennjillette on Penn's Sunday School right now here: bit.ly/SOfZvs—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) November 11, 2012

(16 retweets, 12 favorites)

"Watson, I believe we will find a traumatized nerd nearby!" "What led you to that, Holmes?" http://t.co/tQc8OikR—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) November 19, 2012

(8 retweets, 3 favorites)

A notable moment in November:

@SPVM Thank you for all your efforts! They are much appreciated. #MABUS—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) November 19, 2012

Many more details about the #MABUS case in my latest skeptools blog post here: bit.ly/MabusRedux—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) November 20, 2012

(13 retweets, 3 favorites)

Skeptic History: Charles Darwin's opus "On the Origin of Species" was published Nov. 24, 1859. bit.ly/7vR5c5—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) November 24, 2012

(15 retweets, 2 favorites)

Skeptic History: John Edward was declared "Biggest Douche in the Universe" by South Park on Nov. 27, 2002. bit.ly/54Wsx—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) November 27, 2012

(16 retweets, 1 favorite)

Skeptic History: Uri Geller's lawsuit against James Randi & CSICOP ended Dec. 9, 1994. Geller lost. bit.ly/HJmHvl—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) December 09, 2012

(8 retweets, 2 favorites)

Alt-medder on Facebook says she can tell my liver is "not functioning very well" from my "look". She's looking at my cartoon avatar. #DERP—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) December 10, 2012

(5 retweets, 6 favorites)

Skeptic History: On Dec 24, 1994 the Xenu story from Scientology was first made public on the Internet. bit.ly/6XT2RH—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) December 24, 2012

(8 retweets, 2 favorites)

This one didn’t make the normal required 9 clicks but it made me happy:

Many thanks to the @SkepticsGuide rogues for listing me as a top skeptic of 2012 this week: bit.ly/ViO6x0 (54 min in)—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) December 30, 2012

(5 retweets, 1 favorite)

You know you are a skeptic when you write "pareidolia", check the spelling, and realize you got it right the first time.—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) January 06, 2013

(9 retweets, 5 favorites)

James Randi has something important to tell you about cancer. Check out this video: youtu.be/WCnX4aqZTV0 #burzynski—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) January 11, 2013

(7 retweets, 2 favorites)

To get these as I post them, you should follow me on Twitter here.

Crowdsourcing Contributions

Here were my contributions to various projects in November and December:

I contributed 6 edits to Wikipedia.

I rated 3 sites on Web of Trust but left no new site scorecard comments.

I made 6 edits to the Skeptic History database. It now has 1,432 items in it.

I added no new rebuttals to RBUTR.

I made over 1,300 edits on Lanyrd - my guide to skeptic conferences (link in the sidebar at right) now contains 92 events, 24 coming up this year and 68 past events.  (The past events help complete speaker’s profiles with their past appearances, videos and so on).

And so begins 2013…

For quite some time the most read item on this blog has been the lengthy history of a character named David Mabus (in real life a troubled man named Dennis Markuze of Montreal, Canada). It tells the story of how skeptics, atheists and science writers organized on Twitter to pressure the Montreal police department to take legal action against him, after he made repeated violent threats over many years. It took many cooperating people, several police reports, a Change.org petition, numerous phone calls and faxes and much other work to make that happen.

This post is a continuation of that story.

In recent months, skeptics and atheists started to notice a series of eerily familiar posts posted under various names including “Operation Archangel”. They once again mentioned Nostradamus, James Randi and atheism. They began on YouTube, spread to forums and blogs, and finally arrived on email and Twitter by the fall.

Those of us who followed the case closely knew that Mr. Markuze had pled guilty to eight counts of making threats on May 22. We suspected immediately that it was him again. Others were not so sure. There’s much nonsense on the Internet, and some insisted this must be a copycat or troll, perhaps trying to rile atheists with the spectre of Mr. Markuze.

This post is the story of how those posts once again led to Markuze’s arrest by the Montreal Police. As in 2011 it took quite a bit of work to make this happen. Tedious, painstaking, often thankless work.  But this is the type of work skeptic activists need to be ready to do in order to get results.

You will also learn how the Canadian court system, at least in Montreal, appears to be less than optimal when it comes to finding a positive outcome for cases like Markuze’s.

Table of Contents

Like the earlier post on how we tracked down Mabus, this one is pretty long, covering more than a year of this case. Apologies in advance, but I wanted to get across how much work it took to collect the requisite information and convince the authorities to do something. I hope others tracking down serial spammers or trolls or engaging in other activism involving the police or courts might learn something here.

For easy access, here are links to each section

• Markuze Post Arrest – August/September 2011
• The First Posts Appear – December 2011
• YouTube – March to May 2012
• Markuze Pleads Guilty on May 22, 2012
• The Posts Accelerate – June and July
• Contacting the Prosecutor – June
• Expanding Venues – July
• Verisimilitude – But Could This Be A Copycat?
• Why I Was Convinced This Was Markuze
• Convincing the Police of the Judge’s Order
• Emails Resume in September
• Twitter Resumes
• The End – Markuze is Arrested
• Conclusion and Thanks

Markuze Post Arrest – August/September 2011

When Markuze was investigated and arrested in August 2011, there was a flurry of interest in the case in the Canadian press, both in English and in French. Even the New York Times wrote about Markuze, quoting extensively from my blog account, and one writer analyzed the legal ramifications of the case.  Many more articles appeared which are no longer available online.

His initial appearance in court was on August 19, 2011 at which time it was ordered that he undergo a psychiatric evaluation at the Philippe Pinel Institute. But until that evaluation could be done, further action was postponed to September 19, 2011. As often happens in cases like these, the press lost interest and moved on to other things.

In the time leading up to his arrest, I had worked closely with the police to gather evidence of his threats including screen shots, network and email addresses used and so on. I also connected other targets of threats with the police detective to get their name on the list of victims.  I probably spoke on the phone with the detective six to ten separate times during that week.

But after that, those of us who came forward to file complaints heard little or nothing further about the case. And because the press had lost interest, we had no idea what was going on – whether Markuze was going to be released, whether a “do not contact” court order would be put in place, and so on. I would regularly get queries on Twitter and via Email about the status of the case, but I had little or no information to relay.

We only discovered what happened at the September hearing because one Montreal crime beat reporter tweeted about it twice.  The only narrative account of that hearing was the one written by me at the James Randi Educational Foundation’s blog.  What we found out was that Markuze had been diagnosed as having a bipolar disorder, exacerbated by a substance abuse. He was referred for substance abuse treatment and another hearing was scheduled.

Then nothing was heard in the case for months. Until…

The First Posts Appear – December 2011

In December 2011 there were some signs of activity. Karl Mamer reported that he had seen indications that one of Markuze’s many Gmail accounts was logged into in mid December.  (You can see when your Google contacts log in through the Google Chat functionality).  And Nicholas Gunther Schaefer and some others noticed that this May 2010 thread on an obscure philosophy forum showed some new activity from the same account which was posting Markuze’s rants earlier.

The posts were under the handle atheistwar3 and an avatar picture of Magneto from the X-Men.  At first glance, that might not seem like Markuze.

But anyone who has seen more than one of Markuze’s email posts in the last few years will immediately recognize the style: a long series of links to blog posts and YouTube videos, interspersed with brash statements about atheism, James Randi, Michael Shermer, Richard Dawkins and so on.  It even includes this sentence which describes Markuze’s activities to a tee: “Just wanted to let you know I have posted this on every forum on the internet.”

Because he was repeatedly banned from blogs and forums all around the Internet, Markuze would have to choose new names upon his return. So he might use the familiar “David Mabus” the first time he logged on to a given website, but on his second and subsequent visits  he’d need to pick a different name.

During his Twitter campaign in 2011 (which led to his arrest), he went through hundreds of account names with such variations as @orobotsx, @drmabusa1999, @mabusemperor, @warofthemabus, @kingmabus300103, @mabusjudges, @xmabuswar, @judgeday77, @xjusticez2, @zjusticex24553 and so on and so forth.

And as you can see in the threatening Tweets at right (from June 21, 2011, two months before his arrest) he sometimes used the same artwork as his avatar then.

That Dissident Philosophy thread went idle for some months in mid 2011 (while Markuze was largely busy with Twitter), but the posts resume on December 17, 2011. This is during the period when Markuze was supposed to be in treatment.

Because of the lack of communication from the police and prosecutor as well as the lack of media coverage, we had no idea whether this posting (if it was in fact Markuze) violated any sort of restriction placed upon him.  We didn’t know if he was posting from inside the treatment facility, or perhaps he had given his password to someone else to post on his behalf.

I did email the police on December 17, 2011 informing them of this post. I was told the original detective was on leave, and that someone might get back to me.  But nothing came of it.  I also attempted to interest some members of the Montreal press in this development, but it was too little for them to do anything with, especially since the new posts were not threatening.

A few skeptics kept an eye on that thread for the next few months, and noticed that “atheistwar3″ continued to post. It was slow at first – once in December, once in January, three times in March. Then the posts began to accelerate in April. Often when a new one appeared, I would get emails from several skeptics around the web, alerting me to it.

YouTube – March to May 2012

On March 28, 2012 a new video was posted in the YouTube account named “xviolatex” (also called “Dave Mabus”). This is the same account where the famous Depeche Mode video had been posted that was spammed so many times during 2011.  Here is a screen shot, click it to see the actual video (if it is still available):

The screen shot is really all you need to get the gist of this video – the image never changes. It was created by photographing the screen of some word processor.  The titles on the 2011 Depeche Mode video was also created by screen-capturing a different word processor.

There are a few other things worth noting here. It mentions the very same Dissident Philosophy thread on screen and in the text description. Again we see mentions of Nostradamus, James Randi and Markuze himself in the title, as well as an interest in the destruction of the “international atheist movement.”

A second video was posted to the same YouTube channel on May 17 at which time Naomi Baker and others alerted me.  I immediately contacted the Montreal police again, letting them know that it appeared Markuze was using the Internet.

The original detective was still on leave, but her replacement did say that according to his information Markuze was told to “abstain from using the internet or having in his possession a computer or other device for accessing the internet.” He said he would put my new report into the file but that the Montreal police had many higher priority issues on their plate. Indeed, this was the same time as massive student protests in Montreal, some of which became violent.

Around this same time, at least two other new YouTube channels were created.  One is named Dave Johnson and the other Atheistz Hotelz. Each video in them is merely copied from content elsewhere on YouTube, with the titles mentioning various previous targets of Markuze’s ire.  The description below the video always contains a link to the Dissident Philosophy thread. These would be a portent of things soon to come.

Markuze Pleads Guilty on May 22, 2012

Because of the sparse communication from Montreal, we had no idea that these YouTube posts in May were coming just days before Markuze was scheduled to appear in court on Tuesday, May 22, 2012.  And again we heard nothing about that until an article appeared in the Montreal Gazette on Friday, June 1st titled “St. Laurent man pleads guilty to issuing threats.”  I’d link to the article, but it is no longer available online. (Yet another reason newspapers continue to get trounced by new media – they keep trashing or paywalling content like this that could be bringing people to their site).

The gist was that Markuze pled guilty to eight counts of “uttering threats,” and was given a suspended 18-month sentence as a result. He was ordered to “abstain from particpating in a social network, blog and discussion forum” as part of the sentence.

Some interesting details emerged about Markuze that we hadn’t heard before. For instance, his age (40). Also the history of his substance abuse was detailed:

According to documents filed in the case, Markuze resided at Freedom House, a rehabilitation centre, to deal with problems he had with drugs and alcohol, before he entered his guilty plea. According to the documents, he began consuming marijuana at age 15 and cocaine at age 23. At 25, he started drinking heavily, according to an assessment filed in his case in March. He attributed the drug problem to feeling alienated after his family moved to Montreal, from England, when he was 11.

If Markuze is 40, he would have been 23 in 1995 and 25 in 1997. That corresponds well with what we know about the history of David Mabus.

One potentially alarming thing from this article is the singular focus on substance abuse.  In September 2011 we had been given information that Markuze was diagnosed as bipolar, exacerbated by substance abuse. Where was the indication that he would be getting treatment for the bipolar disorder?

During the hearing Waxman and Nault made no mention of a recommendation made, in Proulx’s assessment, that Markuze be examined by a psychiatrist.

“Since the therapy team at (Freedom House) does not have the competence necessary to make a psychiatric diagnosis, it seems to us that (Markuze) absolutely needs a follow up after he leaves the centre,” Proulx wrote.

“He sometimes makes remarks that leave us perplexed.”

That last line is particularly telling – perplexed is a very appropriate word.  (Suzanne Nault was the prosecutor, Leonard Waxman was the defense attorney, Clement Proulx was Markuze’s counsellor at Freedom House).

Needless to say, many of us were disappointed in this outcome, and particularly that we had to learn about it from the newspaper.  We wanted to ensure that Markuze would get good treatment and supervision, which he clearly needs. This report doesn’t give one confidence that was going to happen.

Both William Raillant-Clark and I were contacted by Paul Cherry of the Montreal Gazette for comments.  William was quoted in the modified article as follows: “I’m extremely annoyed and insulted by this.”

Again because of the lack of communication from the prosecutor, we had to ask Cherry who the victims were in the eight counts of threats. No one had ever told us. He told me it was one count each of threatening the following people:

• William Raillant-Clark (the Montrealer who made the crucial local complaint)
• Tim Farley (me)
• Kyle VanderBeek (who created the Change.org petition regarding Markuze)
• James Randi (of the James Randi Educational Foundation, Markuze’s earliest target)
• Jonathan Abrams (formerly of Ottawa Skeptics, now living in California)
• Heather Henderson (of No God Band and the Ardent Atheist and Skeptically Yours podcasts)
• Steve Thoms (of Skeptic North and Some Canadian Skeptic blogs)
• David Almandsmith (of the National Center for Science Education)

Other than Raillant-Clark and David Almandsmith, each of these people had been personally referred to the detective by me back in August 2011.

You may recall that Markuze was originally charged with 16 counts, I asked Cherry about this. He said it was originally two counts for each of the eight victims, one of uttering threats and the other of harassment. The harassment charges were dropped somewhere along the way.

After getting our comments, Cherry reposted the Gazette article as “Montrealer Dennis Markuze pleads guilty to issuing Internet threats” on June 4, but that version is also no longer available.  But it ends with this text, referring to the forum and YouTube posts I describe above:

Raillant-Clark and Tim Farley, a resident of Atlanta who was threatened for Markuze “for three or four years” said they believe Markuze resumed his anti-atheist postings even before he was sentenced. Waxman said on Friday that he asked Markuze about the allegation and said his client denied it.

“He said he only uses a computer for work,” Waxman said.

The Posts Accelerate – June and July

After Markuze was released, we noticed the YouTube posts continued and accelerated. All through June and July a long series of new YouTube channels appeared, with names like Michel Nostradamus, Michael de Nostradamus and Michael Nostredame. (All variations of the name of Markuze’s hero Nostradamus, of course).

The videos in these channels are copies of content found elsewhere on YouTube.  They have titles like “Flush Atheism!”, “The End of Atheism,” “Dangerous Atheist Frauds” and so on, all very familiar themes.  Some of them were tagged with twenty or more names of skeptics and atheists.

I suspected that if it was Markuze, he was attempting to obey the letter of the court order against the use of “social network, blog and discussion forum”, while still posting things where they could be seen. After all, YouTube is not a social network nor a blog nor discussion forum, so it must be fair game, right?  (Frankly, most experts consider YouTube to be a social media site).

There was another clever aspect of what he was doing. By posting many different videos in many different YouTube accounts, he was effectively spamming the YouTube search results for many atheist and skeptic keywords, especially people’s names.  For instance, when The Amazing Meeting 2012 was being held last July, searching for information about the event on YouTube would usually lead you to one of the spammed videos. That’s an indirect way of getting attention for his posts, without actually sending anything directly to anyone. He was mildly successful for a while, as some of the videos have several hundred views. (Later, when he started posting on blogs, occasionally he would post something to the effect of: “search for your name on YouTube”)

A few of the videos were threatening in nature.  ”Explosive Demolition- 2012 – The END OF ATHEISM” (posted June 16) shows buildings being demolished. The implication is clear. The tags have been removed by YouTube due to the spamming, but originally this video had my name and the name of many other skeptics in the “tags” section below the description.

Another scary one is this, titled “the UNIVERSE vs the JREF – THE AMAZING MEETING LAS VEGAS TAM 10 X X X 2012”  It appears to be security camera footage of some people brawling in the street.  The caption below tells an interesting story:

On the evening of the 4th of March 2006 a group of ’9/11 Truthseekers’ ambushed some JREF’rs as they walked home from a TAM event. The Truthers gave the JREF’rs a pasting they will never forget. JREF tried in vain to have this footage confiscated. Here, for the first time, is CCTV footage of a fascinating brawl between good and evil.

The problem here is this is complete fiction. There was no JREF “TAM event” on March 4, 2006 and there was certainly no brawl. But again the implication is clear – skeptics are going to be beat up at their events. As a Research Fellow for JREF, I took this one personally.  (If anyone can identify the original source of that security camera footage, I’d be very curious to know. I assume it is somewhere on YouTube but my Google Fu wasn’t with me).

Contacting the Prosecutor – June

On June 20 I decided to take another tack. I called the prosecutor of the case at her office, and left a voice mail. Since she had requested the restrictions from the judge, I figured she might be interested in whether they were being enforced. I encouraged the other people listed in the 8 counts of threats to do the same – at least two did.  We got no reply.

So I tried again to get journalists interested in writing about this story. My contact Paul Cherry was on summer vacation, so I exchanged email with some of his cohorts at the Gazette. They seemed dubious that these posts came from Markuze, but did give it a look.

On July 1st I again contacted the police, and was told to file a new complaint with my local police. Frankly, I didn’t want to go through that again simply to get an existing court order enforced.

I also contacted a Quebec agency called CAVAC, which is focused on assisting crime victims. I had a nice conversation with one of their counselors, and he said he would try to contact Markuze’s probation officer for me.

Not much happened, though, so these seemed like dead ends at the time.

Expanding Venues – July

Just after The Amazing Meeting in July, some Mabus posts began appearing on discussion forum sites. Many skeptics contacted me to point this out. Forums were a favorite posting location for Mabus in the past, as they permit very long posts. Many such sites have very tolerant posting policies, allowing any sort of thing to be posted in the spirit of free speech.

Switching to forums would turn out to be a key mistake. Unlike major sites like Gmail, Twitter and YouTube, most forums are administered by unpaid individuals. To get a source internet protocol (IP) address and other contact info from a commercial site like YouTube, you must at least present a subpoena if not a court order. But these forum administrators were aware of Mabus’ past and the fact that I had tracked him down the first time. When I made the rounds and asked for help tracking Mabus down again, they were more than willing to help.

It took many steps, but they were straightforward. The Mabus’ modus operandi is to cut-and-paste the same post into as many places as possible, as quickly as possible.  Thus once I had seen one of his posts, I had key phrases I could put in a search engine to find other posts. (The phrase in July was the same as in the video: “how the divine pen of Michel Nostradamus crushed the international atheist movement”, though it changed later).

I found many forums he had reached, including skepticfriends.org, project-reason.org, evcforum.net, australasianskeptics.info, rantsnraves.org, rationalresponders.com and secularcafe.org.  (Many of these threads have since been deleted or marked private). Most of these are familiar venues for Mabus, and the regulars on these sites immediately recognized his style.

I must admit I was not even aware of a few of these sites prior to this – I had to create accounts for myself on some of them in order to contact the system operators. I contacted as many as I could to get source information for the posts.

And just a week or so later, I started receiving reports from bloggers that the same posts were being made on their systems as blog comments.  Again, since these are run by individuals the forensic information is easier to obtain. Here is a typical screen shot, this one was sent to me by Hemant Mehta on July 26:

The blurred parts at right are the email address and internet protocol address used to make the post. When IP addresses can be traced to a location, that can be used as evidence. I’m not blurring them for Markuze’s benefit – but I don’t want to encourage any copycats or other foolishness.

As these reports came in, I assembled them into a spreadsheet.  A familiar pattern emerged of varying IP addresses all over Montreal being used along with throwaway email accounts.  It looked exactly like the Mabus evidence I had gathered before.

Verisimilitude – But Could This Be A Copycat?

So it sure looked like Mabus was back at this point. But the police and some of the Montreal press asked me how I knew this was him.  And as discussion mounted in the blogosphere about the return, some noticed differences in his posts this time.  Was it really Markuze posting?

For instance, other than the one Depeche Mode video, he had not shown such an interest in YouTube before.  And when he reappeared on Twitter (see below) and started fairly exclusively using the name “Operation Archangel”, that threw many people off who only knew him as David Mabus.

And finally, some noticed that there are a few posts in that Dissident Philosophy forum thread that appear to be other people expressing support for Markuze in his legal troubles. Could those allies be posting on Markuze’s behalf?

Along those same lines was the repeated use of “we” in his posts, as if it was a group posting.  And then there was  this exchange, which I believe originated in a thread at project-reason.org but was subsequently cut-and-pasted into some other posts:

tell me, krelnik

do you think you can threaten my right to FREE SPEECH?

what if I told you that I am not who you think I am….

Not Dennis Markuze – but a FAN!

Finally, there is quite a bit of trolling and other nonsense that has been going on in the atheist community in particular in the past year or so. (The details of that are not germane to the story here). Some thought that this might be another atheist troll merely trying to simulate Markuze’s return in order to create additional drama.

Why I Was Convinced This Was Markuze

I didn’t find any of the copycat arguments convincing.

He’s varied his strategies, venues, posting names and taglines many times before over the years. The YouTube focus is plausible as a misguided way to stay within the court order. Even the “we” part had precedents – among other things the apologies posted on August 11, 2011 just before his arrest were worded that way. The forum thread supporters appear to be classic sock puppet posts to me – I’ve never seen evidence that Markuze had any assistance.

And as for the “not Dennis Markuze but a fan” line – the police detective noticed that herself and actually laughed about that during one of our phone calls.

Of course, without corroborating evidence such as ISP logs, evidence from the suspect’s computer, or witnesses who personally saw him do it, you can never be 100% sure about posts on the Internet.  But there were several key aspects of this series of posts that convinced me this was Markuze:

1. The Obsessive Rate.  As in the original 2011 Twitter campaign, these posts often went on for hours each day, and into the wee hours of the morning. Now that we know more about his substance abuse, we can understand how Markuze kept this up. Such a posting rate might have been automated by a technically adept troll wanting to simulate Markuze’s behavior. However it would be difficult to simulate Markuze’s occasional typos and mid-rant diversions to converse with some people.  I catalogued many of these.
2. The Existing Accounts. In at least three places the posts were made using the very same accounts Markuze used prior to arrest, meaning whoever posted them had access to Markuze’s password:
   • “atheistwar3″ on dissidentphilosophy.lifediscussion.net (joined prior to May 2010)
   • “xviolatex” on YouTube.com (joined November 3, 2010)
   • “davidmabus2006″ on freethought-forum.com (joined May 2008)

   In some cases the same IP address was used to access a “Mabus” named account and a newer name like “Operation Archangel” or “XJustos” close to the same time.

3. The Montreal IP addresses. I was able to collect from the forum administrators almost a dozen different Internet Protocol source addresses that correspond to Montreal-area locations such as coffee shops. Roaming around and posting from different locations was a habit of Markuze’s for years – he had to do this to avoid having his home ISP service cut off due to complaints.  It would take a considerable amount of effort to simulate this if it was someone else – too much for your average troll. They would have to be based in Montreal.
4. The Occasional Use of a VPN/proxy. In those same forums, several sysops posted to the effect that they had tracked the post to Montreal and sometimes even publicly posted the IP address. Shortly after that, I noticed the Mabus-like posts were coming from the addresses of known proxies, indicating that the person posting was trying to hide their location. (I was even able to determine what the brand name of the proxy software being used, which I shared with the police).  Why start with uncloaked Montreal addresses but only later switch to a proxy? On a few occasions in October, the poster failed to activate the proxy software, once again revealing a Montreal IP address.
5. Other key forensic details. Other forensic information I’ve collected matched details of the previous Mabus campaign. For instance, the throwaway email addresses used to register on websites were at the same handful of obscure webmail providers that I’ve seen Markuze use many times before. I’ve never mentioned the names of these publicly.

On the whole, although it seemed like there was a small possibility that someone else was posting on Markuze’s behalf, the evidence definitely points to someone in Montreal, and further someone who is very obsessive, perhaps mentally ill.

Occam’s Razor tells us that it was Markuze.

Convincing the Police of the Judge’s Order

I had repeatedly asked both the police and prosecutor to take action based on the simple idea that it appeared Markuze was violating the judge’s order.  After all, what use is an order from a judge without enforcement behind it?

On July 31 I got a voice mail from the detective in the case. She said, in part:

I checked again – twice, three times. I have the probation order in front of me that was signed on May 22nd, and no – he can use a computer and unfortunately there’s nothing about about not talking to any victims.

I don’t understand why the judge ordered that, but he did and that’s the conclusion they came to.

To her credit, she seemed genuinely frustrated that the court seemingly had dropped the ball on restrictions. Back in August 2011, I had sent her many victims to have them listed in the court documents.  The idea was, whatever happened to Markuze, he would be barred from ever contacting us again. The court had somehow completely neglected to do that, so all that coordination was for nought.

But I knew from Paul Cherry’s report of the hearing, that there were some restrictions put on Markuze.  It appeared that they hadn’t been communicated to the police!  I pointed that out to Cherry and he agreed with me.  But he was away from his notes.

On August 8 Cherry got back to the office, and dug up his courtroom voice recording. He wrote for me an exact transcript of what went on at the plea hearing on May 22. Here is what it said:

Judge Louise Bourdeau agreed to the sentence and set a standard set of conditions (for example that he keep the peace). The judge then asked the lawyers if they were any additional conditions beyond what is standard in such a case.

Prosecutor Nault: “Yes, a condition from abstaining from going to any network website and abstaining from going to any blog. That way he will be able to work with a computer.”

Defense (Waxman): “Can we say any social network?”

Nault: “Social network and abstaining from participating in any blog or discussion forum.”

Bourdeau: “All right do you understand that condition?”

Markuze: “Understood. I understand.”

The judge can be heard making sure that the court clerk was writing down the condition accurately.

The judge then warned Markuze: “If you don’t respect those conditions, the general ones or the specific one, you can be brought back before the court and a judge can impose the sentence that could have been imposed today.”

I quickly passed that back to the detective, asking why her paperwork didn’t reflect that.

Meanwhile, on my suggestion Cherry’s fellow Gazette reporter Marian Scott was working on a possible story about how this part of the case was being handled.  They asked me about what I had found so far, and they contacted the police as well.  I thought this might be a good step in pressuring the police or prosecutor to take action.  (Press attention had been key to Markuze’s arrest in 2011).

But then, another snag – Marian Scott told me the newspaper’s attorney was concerned that we had no proof that this was Markuze online. If the newspaper ran with the story, they might be guilty of libel under Canadian law.  She said she would try to rewrite the story to allow for the libel concern.  But apparently the lawyer won that argument, and the story never ran.

But this led to a breakthrough, of sorts. On August 16 I got word from Marian Scott that in response to her queries the police had gone back over the case materials, and found the restrictions from the hearing.  They admitted they had an error in their data up until that point.

Emails Resume in September

In September, the venues for the spam expanded to include email again, just as Mabus had done for years.

Although I heard some rumors of some Mabus emails being received in August, the first real evidence I saw was sent to me by Travis Roy on September 14.  Quickly I received reports from many skeptic and atheist bloggers that they were receiving these emails too.  I received one myself on September 18, and several more after that.

As before, the emails contain the same material as the forum posts, apparently cut-and-pasted from the most recent post.  They were carbon copied to many different atheists and skeptics, exactly in the manner that Mabus had done for more than a decade.

Because I was receiving many, many reports of these emails, at that time I wrote a blog post on how to report a suspicious email. (There are some tricks to preserve the forensic info that you should know).

I emailed the prosecutor and the police immediately to point out the violation, and the fact that the emails were now going to people listed in the eight counts (i.e. Mabus was mailing his victims).  The police detective called me September 19, reiterating the admission I had heard in August – that they had had the wrong paperwork but had now corrected that error.  But she said he still does not have a restriction against contacting his victims.  But she assured me she would now look into the case.

Twitter Resumes

On September 25, Mabus returned to Twitter.   This made it clearer than ever that if it was Markuze, he was flagrantly in violation of the judge’s order.  Nobody could argue that Twitter was not a social network.

One of the first accounts is still there, it is called @XJustos2. Those are classic Mabus-style posts, mentioning Nostradamus and atheism. As it happened in 2011, these Twitter accounts would send the same thing over and over, to hundreds of different people on Twitter. It was exactly the same pattern as before – going down someone’s Twitter feed and replying to every post, or searching for something (like “Mabus”) and replying to every resulting Tweet.

At some point the accounts started to be called Operation Archangel and featured one of several pictures of angels holding a trumpet as an avatar. Mabus had always had religious overtones in some of his posts, so this was not surprising to me.

Again, in the same style as Mabus in 2011 the posts would rotate their tagline and include a URL to one of various forums where a longer post could be seen. It started with “Nostradamus vs. Atheism”. Later it became “rich millionaires with their heads up the arses”.  Somewhere in there it was “5000 whining atheists vs the Great Prophet.” And around the time of CSICON it became “you have NOTHING TO DO WITH CRITICAL THINKING join the socialist faith”.  (I never could figure out that socialism bit).

Another account that is still live is @warchimps3.  This is a good example of how there would be a long series of identical posts broken up by conversational replies to other people. Such as this one (click graphic for the actual Tweet, if it is still available):

Some of them were fairly disturbing:

(Yes, that was his email address – the same one used for many the other posts).  Some were loud and rude:

But the vast majority were identical spams using a tagline.  Hundreds at a time.  His final account was created on November 1st and averaged almost 550 Tweets per day until he was arrested.  That’s some 8,700 Tweets – over half of what I’ve sent on my personal account in five in a half years.

In 2011 many of Mabus’ Twitter accounts would get disabled in mere minutes due to the spamming. Although that did occur a bit this time, often his accounts would last many days and he would get up to several thousand posts. Not sure why, it was perhaps because of changes in the way “Twitter jail” will pause your account for several hours if you tweet too much.

I continued to document what he was posting, advising everyone on Twitter of new account names to block (via the #MABUS hashtag) and keeping an eye out for any actionable threats.

Behind the scenes, I had regular contact with the police, who assured me that now that the issue of Markuze’s restrictions were cleared up, they were looking into what was going on.  Unfortunately, this type of work is fairly tedious and time consuming – issuing subpoenas to ISPs and waiting for them to reply, and so on – that it does take time. I tried my best to give them the best evidence I had collected to work with, and let them do their jobs.

But the SPVM was publicly admitting that an investigation was underway at this point, such as with this Tweet:

@bynkii Thanks. For your information, we are aware and an investigation is underway.—
Police Montréal (@SPVM) October 03, 2012

The End – Markuze is Arrested

On Wednesday evening November 14, I participated in our normal weekly skeptical panel webcast Virtual Skeptics. We hold this live on Google Hangouts on Air in part so others can ask us questions. So of course we promote it on Twitter using the #VirtualSkeptics hashtag.

That apparently got Operation Archangel’s attention, and a YouTube user “Justo XJustice” (with an archangel avatar) showed up and started making rude comments. We had seen what we thought was Mabus leave comments  before during previous episodes.  This time, this is what he said, these comments were interspersed with comments being made by others. The show runs 8pm to 9pm Eastern US time:

8:10pm: u r FINISHED, sh*theads
8:12pm: u r finished
8:15pm: we’re getting rid of all of you… you LOST THE WAR
8:19pm: farley u need a little dose of REALITY sh8thead
8:20pm: the police won’t save you
8:25pm: the land will be bled because of you sh*theads
8:33pm: you have been warned again and again… the LAND WILL BE BLED because of you sh*theads
8:49pm: little sh*ts who think they matter… good riddance JREF
8:52pm: miranda u little blaspheming bitch… feel safe?

(The self-editing to “sh*t” is not my doing – Mabus has done that repeatedly). These were a rare example of Operation Archangel getting into the threats that sounded like the ones Markuze was arrested for in 2011.  Of course, I immediately sent them to the detective in Montreal.

On Friday morning November 16, the latest Operation Archangel account (@Oper443) went silent.

That afternoon, I got a phone call from the SPVM about my report from Wednesday. The detective felt the threats would convince a judge, and needed a statement from me. She assured me that action would be taken within 48 hours, but did not say what.

There was blissful silence all weekend, and then on Monday this announcement from the police:

D.Markuze was arrested for social media harassment (breach of probation). Thanks to those who helped with the investigation #Mabus #SPVM—
Police Montréal (@SPVM) November 19, 2012

Around the same time I got a call from Paul Cherry, who told me that Markuze had been arrested on Friday November 16, 2012, arraigned on Saturday and released on Monday pending a hearing. You can read the rest of the details in his account in the Gazette.

There are other news accounts including Ars Technica, CTV News Montreal, Canadian Civil Liberties Association and of course Doubtful News.

On Tuesday morning I got a call from the detective. She thanked me for my help but apologized a bit for the court’s decision to release him.  She said, “I’m a little bit discouraged” by the court’s decision.  I hope this is not a sign we are headed down the same path again.

On a positive note, she did say she had confiscated all his computers, and the Montreal police will be going over them for evidence of what he was up to and other victims.

In an unexpectedly creepy development, she also told me she found a paper letter Markuze had written to me at his house.  She couldn’t share the entire contents with me, but said it was written as if Markuze and I had corresponded more than once.  I’ve never contacted him, other than brief encounters online.  I’ve certainly never spoken with him. I have no idea why he was composing letters to me.

Conclusion and Thanks

As we learned in 2011, it can be difficult to get government agencies to act, even when their mandate seems clear. It is sad that we had to involve the police and the courts, when this appears to be a mentally ill man who needs professional help.  But what other avenues are open to anyone outside his family?

The time and effort it took to achieve a resolution should be a lesson.  As skeptical activists, we must be prepared to stick with it and do what is necessary to insure the right thing is done.  It is often incredibly tedious, repetitive work.  But that’s how you get results.

I’d like to thank the many people who provided important assistance at various phases of this story.  Some simply passed along a tidbit of info such as an IP address, or relayed my request to someone else. Some went out of their way to make sure something important got done. But each played a part in getting some action to occur.

Jonathan Abrams, David Almandsmith, Naomi Baker, Derek Bartholomaus, Ophelia Benson, Tim Binga, Bob Blaskiewicz, Glenn Branch, Nelson Brooke, Paul Cherry, Joe Cogan, Derek Colanduno, Greta Christina, Mike Cornwell, Sadie Crabtree, J.D. “Doctor X”, Barbara Drescher, Livius Drusus, ”MNMoose” Eckland, John Ellis, Mark Farrington, BlahBlah Ginger, Stephane Giroux, David Gluck, Craig Hansen, Heather Henderson, Matthijs Hilhorst, Sharon Hill, Zinnia Jones, Greg Laden, Mikael Lännqvist, Karl Mamer, James McGrath, Hemant Mehta, Ashley Miller, Rhys Morgan, Nhoj Morley, Orphia Nay, Jenny Paradis-Hagar, L. Petrich, Martin Pribble, William Raillant-Clark, The Radio Freethinker crew, James Randi, Brad Reddekopp, Travis Roy, Martin Rundkvist, Nicholas Gunther Schaefer, Tara C. Smith, Helen Sotiriadis, Steve Thoms, Kyle VanderBeek, Martin Wagner, Seanna Watson and Stephanie Zvan and of course the detectives and investigators of the SPVM who patiently read my emails and listened to my phone calls, even when they thought they had no avenues open to them.

Astute observers of the Mabus saga may notice the absence of a particular name here. While this person has blogged about Markuze many times over the years (even demanding action from the authorities in some posts) I found him to be astonishingly uncooperative during this investigation. With so many others volunteering to help, he stood out in his lack of assistance. Lesson learned – some bloggers are all talk and no action.

I’ve written about and talked about TruthMarket several times over the last few weeks, I think it could be cool skeptic tool. You should check it out. They just announced Chris Mooney has joined the Board of Advisors, joining other familiar faces like Shawn Otto and Michael Shermer.

Read on for more tools and ideas for skeptics working online…

Ever post a YouTube and end up with a really poor thumbnail? It can be annoying. YouTube now allows regular users to upload a custom thumbnail to work around this, and here’s a how-to that goes through it for you.

The US is breathing a bit of a sigh of relief now that the election is over – in part because of the divisiveness that is so common. Researchers studying Wikipedia found that problem does not extend to editors on the project.

I’ve written about how the newspaper industry seems interested in building tools that skeptics might like. That has continued since I wrote that. Here’s an interesting piece from Nieman Lab about what newspapers are doing to lure developers into the newsroom to build these tools.

Creative Commons is collecting Open Educational Resources (OER) policies from around the world into a catalog. Since skeptics are about educating the public about science, we should be aware of ways CC and OER policies can encourage adoption of resources.

Don’t forget you can vote in the Podcast Awards.  Vote for your skeptic favorites once per day – awards are very helpful for shows to promote themselves.

Follow me on Twitter at @krelnik.  You can submit stories there or via submit at whatstheharm.net.

Have to do some catch up today due to several missed toolboxes. (Things have been busy at my day job).

Simon Perry has updated the Fishbarrel plugin for Chrome.  This is a great skeptic tool for reporting online quackery. This fixes some bugs and adds support for some new forms, and it is now easily downloadable from the Chrome store. You should uninstall your existing copy first.

Read on for more tools and ideas for skeptics working online…

Popular Science profiles a climate change denier who long dominated the editing of the Wikipedia page for Hurricane Sandy. This is one of many great examples of why we need as many skeptic eyes as possible looking at Wikipedia. If you’d like to help, contact Susan Gerbic at her blog.

In other Sandy related coverage, The Atlantic recounted their experience debunking fake photos of the big storm.

Skeptic Magazine now makes itself available electronically, and it is far cheaper to subscribe this way. You can also buy back issues. There are apps for iOS and Android, Kindle Fire, Blackberry Playbook and PC/Mac desktops as well.

A Willamette professor investigated how Google keeps in you in bubble by discovering more about you. This phenomenon was the root cause of a very mistaken article by a chiropractor which I documented last year.

If you’re still worried about privacy on Facebook there’s yet another tool called MyPermissions you might want to try.  (I mentioned a similar tool PrivacyFix on Virtual Skeptics #9 last month).

The astronomy and space project site UwingU, which we mentioned on Virtual Skeptics in September, is now in beta test, so check it out.

Don’t forget you can vote in the Podcast Awards.  Vote for your skeptic favorites once per day – awards are very helpful for shows to promote themselves.

Follow me on Twitter at @krelnik.  You can submit stories there or via submit at whatstheharm.net.

I did miss out on two episodes of Virtual Skeptics, due to CSICON travel and other outside events. Rest assured, I will reappear!

So if you missed any of that action, here’s a way to catch up. Below are links to the content I’ve been involved with in the last month. It includes this blog as well as the material I post on other blogs, my podcasting activities, my best posts on Twitter as well as key shout-outs or mentions elsewhere.

In an effort to practice what I preach, I’m also trying to document on a monthly basis what my contributions are to several skeptic-relevant crowdsourcing projects.

Read on to see what you might have missed…

Blogging

Here were my blog posts this month.

• October 2 – 29: Skeptools: 20 editions of Morning Toolbox
• October 8: Skeptools: Social Media is a Gold Mine for Cold Readers

Podcasting & Video

I contributed segments to these episodes of Skepticality and Virtual Skeptics:

• October 3: Virtual Skeptics: Episode #8 – I talked about Balancer and Pundit Tracker.
• October 3: Skepticality #192: Sexual Brain Science – I talked about Unsourced.org, Balancer. SuperPAC App and Ad Hawk apps and Truth Market.
• October 10: Virtual Skeptics: Episode #9 – I talked about Facebook privacy issues and Privacy Fix plugin.
• October 16: Skepticality #193: A Threesome With Jesus – I talked about illusions in the past, and FourMatch, PunditTracker and Morning Toolbox in the future.
• October 17: Virtual Skeptics: Episode #10 – I talked about legal threats to skeptic bloggers.

Social Media

I posted on Twitter:

• 269 regular tweets, including:
  • 23 “What’s the harm in…?” stories
  • 31 daily skeptic history facts
  • 76 retweets of other people
• Plus 100 replies to other Twitter posts for a total of 369 tweets

Here are highlights, the tweets that were retweeted and favorited the most.

This cartoon is an excellent summary of what skeptics deal with all the time. Zebras aren't real! bit.ly/QG94qa via @rebeccawatson—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) October 03, 2012

(9 retweets, 3 favorites)

What's the harm in chiropractic? Man suffers stroke after neck manipulation. bit.ly/PhQAh1 via @Blue_Wode—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) October 10, 2012

(9 retweets, 1 favorites)

The #livejump video stream also set an Internet record for number of live viewers: over 7 million. on.mash.to/SXkT7B—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) October 14, 2012

(7 retweets, 3 favorites)

Pharma responds to @bengoldacre's book "Bad Pharma", badly. Ben smacks them back down. bit.ly/TD2Ep2—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) October 19, 2012

(17 retweets, 10 favorites)

Not all common-sense beliefs are false. But only the scientific method can weed out which ones are true & which are not. -Lilienfeld #csicon—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) October 28, 2012

(11 retweets, 1 favorite)

Web of Trust has been downloaded 50 million times! An awesome skeptic tool to warn the general public: bit.ly/Ritsuj—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) October 29, 2012

(7 retweets, 4 favorites)

What's the harm in homeopathy & herbs for a child? Washington parents face manslaughter charges. bit.ly/XLrFDR—
Tim Farley (@krelnik) October 30, 2012

(9 retweets, 2 favorites)

To get these as I post them, you should follow me on Twitter here.

Crowdsourcing Contributions

Here were my contributions to various projects this month:

I contributed 21 edits to Wikipedia.

I rated 12 sites on Web of Trust but left no new site scorecard comments.

I made 7 edits to the Skeptic History database. It now has 1,431 items in it.

I added no new rebuttals to RBUTR (Sorry, Shane!).

I made over 103 edits on Lanyrd – mostly CSICON stuff.

And now for November…

Apologies for the recent missed toolboxes, been very busy this week with real life stuff and a shortage of links for you.  I may start doing these toolboxes on an as-needed basis, perhaps three times a week.  Let me know what you think.

First off, big congratulations to Web of Trust for reaching 50 million downloads!  I’ve blogged a bunch about Web of Trust and how it is a great tool for skeptics. Now you are reaching even more people with it.

Meanwhile Russian ISP mail.ru is expanding into other countries. Why do I mention that? This is the same ISP that recently started bundling Web of Trust for their customers.

Read on for more tools and ideas for skeptics working online…

As I mentioned last week when they teased it, PunditTracker has now announced the PT Challenge. By simply voting on whether you agree with predictions recorded on the site, you will be scored on whether you predict better than the experts. You can win a featured slot on their site!

Atlantic Wire has the interesting story of the “biggest Internet troll of all time” - a New York hedge fund manager who was anonymously spreading rumors about Hurricane Sandy, but was outed.

That wasn’t the only Sandy fakery, there were tons of photographic fakes circulated. They were debunked by Snopes, by The Atlantic and by the photo fakery experts at FourAndSix.

Don’t forget you can vote in the Stitcher Podcast Awards once per day until November 5th.  And today voting opened in another set of Podcast Awards as well!  Vote for your skeptic favorites once per day for both of those awards.

Follow me on Twitter at @krelnik.  You can submit stories there or via submit at whatstheharm.net.

Would you say skeptics are “outgunned by well-funded adversaries when trying to correct false claims”? I would. Well TruthMarket is starting an Affinity Program for such groups. They’ll support your efforts, do press for you, etc. while you use TruthMarket to challenge falsehoods. Check out this PDF document explaining the program, which runs from November 1 to December 31.

Read on for more tools and ideas for skeptics working online…

CSICON is over and those who are not stuck in airports due to Hurricane Sandy have the post-skeptic-con blues this Monday. You can see photos and read coverage of the event here on Lanyrd.  If you are stuck in Sandy, here’s a resource list of tools to cope.

The Internet Archive is has assembled 80 terabytes of crawl data from March through December 2011 and is offering it to others for study. Perhaps someone could do a project to study the prevalence of each pseudoscience?

Here’s a Q&A with Google’s Matt Cutts about how to best use their new link disavowal tool. If you are a skeptic webmaster who has gotten an “unnatural links” warning from Google and are using this to fix it, contact me. I’d like to hear about your experience.

Mashable reviewed a new app to measure your psychic power but says it is a total waste of time.

Don’t forget you can vote in the Stitcher Podcast Awards once per day until November 5th.  Voting in another set of Podcast Awards opens on November 1st, and there are a number of skeptic favorites nominated there too.

Let’s have a good week….

Follow me on Twitter at @krelnik.  You can submit stories there or via submit at whatstheharm.net.

I’m at CSICON this weekend, so this post is small and late again. Normal pace will resume on Monday.

Google Instant is that feature where it will suggest popular searches as you start to type in the search box. It appears they are now pulling this info not just from searches but from the content of web pages too. I wonder what skeptic content is getting pulled in here? Have you seen any?

PBS Frontline has posted its program on climate change denial online.

Rebecca Rosen has an interesting piece at Atlantic about how Wikipedia is nearing ‘completion’ and that actually poses a problem for it.

ReadWrite suggests that a good place to go for political fact checking is your local librarian.

Don’t forget you can vote in the Stitcher Podcast Awards once per day, give your favorite podcasts some love.

Another short toolbox, have a good weekend!

Follow me on Twitter at @krelnik.  You can submit stories there or via submit at whatstheharm.net.

I’m at CSICON this weekend, so my toolbox posts may be a little short and often late in the morning

Another day, another Chrome browser plugin it seems. This one is called Unpolitic.me and it removes politics-related posts from your Twitter and Facebook feeds. Could be handy if you are tired of that stuff by now.

Wikipedia reformats their pages for mobile devices like smartphones, which is very very useful. They recently redesigned their mobile formatting to make it more legible and easier to use.

I mentioned Blekko the other day, this is an alternative search engine that lets you customize the results in ways that are difficult to do in Google. Handy for skeptic-oriented searches, among other things. They have posted new tutorials, so go learn about this tool.

PunditTracker is teasing that they may add some sort of incentive program next week.

Don’t forget you can vote in the Stitcher Podcast Awards once per day, give your favorite podcasts some love.

Another short toolbox, have another good day!

Follow me on Twitter at @krelnik.  You can submit stories there or via submit at whatstheharm.net.

Not a ton going on today, it seems – everyone must be getting ready for CSICON this weekend.

But as they say, a picture paints a thousand words, so here’s a picture of some Wikipedia statistics:

I’ve pointed out before how Wikipedia gets huge traffic compared to skeptic web sites. You can see here Paul Kurtz’s bio on Wikipedia got almost 17,000 views in two days after news of his passing. Good thing Susan Gerbic and her team are keeping an eye on this, helping ensure vandals don’t take advantage of this (as I mentioned yesterday).

WordPress updated their iOS app yesterday. I’m finding it more and more useful with each update, especially for moderating comments as they come in.

Don’t forget you can vote in the Stitcher Podcast Awards once per day, give your favorite podcasts some love.

Another short toolbox, have another good day!

Follow me on Twitter at @krelnik.  You can submit stories there or via submit at whatstheharm.net.

Online awards may seem silly, but they can really help your favorite web sites and podcasts gain visibility, which is good for skepticism. Voting is open on the Stitcher Podcast Awards and many skeptic favorites like Skeptoid, Skeptic’s Guide and Geologic Podcast are nominated in various categories – along with other good podcasts like RadioLab, StarTalk and so on. You can vote once per day. It does require a Facebook “Like” from you, so you’ll need an account there, but they don’t spam you as far as I can tell.

CSICOP founder Paul Kurtz died over the weekend. When people are in the news or die, that is a key time that their Wikipedia articles get vandalized. Fear not, Susan Gerbic and her team leapt into action.

Remember how Google’s Knowledge Graph has given added visibility to skeptics in search results? Well now Google is adding “explanations” to the related people displayed below. It’s mostly actor and actress appearances now, but I’m wondering what the explanation for James Randi below Sylvia Browne will be?

Chrome browser plugins like Fishbarrel and RBUTR are key skeptic tools. If you’re switching to Chrome to take advantage, here are some tips to get the most out of Google’s browser.

A short toolbox, have a good day!

Follow me on Twitter at @krelnik.  You can submit stories there or via submit at whatstheharm.net.

Google has upgraded their Ngrams book search tool to 2.0. It now supports more languages, millions more books and several new advanced search options. (For instance, you can specify whether you are searching for a verb or a noun and so on). I’ve mentioned before it as a useful tool for skeptic research on historical trends.

Read on for more about online skeptic tools…

If you tether your Android phone to Windows to access the internet at conferences, PDAnet now supports Windows 8.

YouTube has added a new progress bar for non-profit channels to measure outreach campaign goals.

The search engine Blekko has added some SEO tools.

Here’s a nice overview of science research projects that have been crowdfunded and how well that is working.

The Internet Archive (which I’ve mentioned as a useful skeptic tool) is hitting 10 petabytes of data, and they are having a party this week to celebrate.

If you’re attending Science Writers 2012 next weekend, you’ll probably want to attend this session on Wikipedia. (I’ll be at CSICON).

Follow me on Twitter at @krelnik.  You can submit stories there or via submit at whatstheharm.net.

I’ve talked about fake online reviews on Virtual Skeptics once or twice. Yelp is trying to clamp down on this, they are putting red ‘consumer alert’ banners on businesses they detect doing it. Here’s a project for skeptics: scan the site for pseudoscience and paranormal businesses that have earned one of these.

Read on for more about online skeptic tools…

Twitter plans to drop support for accessing the service via RSS feeds, but until then they are still useful for certain things. Jo Brodie has some tips on what still works. She’s also got some advice if you need to see the tweets of someone who has blocked you on Twitter.

Illegal telemarketing “robocalls” continue to be a problem in the US, and are often the source of scams. The US FTC is offering $50,000 for someone to come up with a good solution to stop them.

Here’s some graphing tools skeptics will love – they create charts in the style of the often skeptical XKCD webcomic.

A few months back Mike Adams ranted about how Google had shut down the ad account of detox peddlers, I talked about it on the very first episode of Virtual Skeptics (around 49 minutes in). Google was only complying with FDA regulations, and was doing nothing unusual. Here’s an infographic about how Google keeps ads safe from bogus products (like detox).

Bad Astronomer has a plug for the crowdfunding site DonorsChoose.org and science education.

Follow me on Twitter at @krelnik.  You can submit stories there or via submit at whatstheharm.net.

I’ve got a small toolbox for you today.

Newspapers and magazines continue to have trouble: Newsweek announced it is ending its print edition as of early next year. Craig Silverman is curating reactions to this using Spundge.

Virtual Skeptics panelist Bob Blaskiewicz has an article on the JREF blog about using RBUTR as an educational tool in the classroom.

Not all skeptical tools succeed. An attempt to rate web site credibility called NewsCred was launched in 2008. The company had to pivot to a different business, providing licensed news feeds to other sites. I guess that went well, because now they’ve bought a competitor.

Just for fun, did you know that Google has had photos inside many public buildings and businesses integrated into Google Maps for some time? This month they decided to join in themselves and post detailed views of their North Carolina data center. If you virtually wander around in there you can find many Easter eggs including a rick roll and a stormtrooper.

Follow me on Twitter at @krelnik.  You can submit stories there or via submit at whatstheharm.net.

I’ve pointed out before that journalists seem to be building more tools than skeptics – there are many interesting skeptic-relevant projects coming out of journalism circles. So many, that Knight-Mozilla OpenNews has introduced Source, a hub for all that activity. Developers can share their work, collaborate and so on. I think skeptic developers would be wise to keep an eye on this.

Read on for more news of interest to skeptics working online…

Recent Google algorithm updates aimed at spam have raised the possibility that someone might be able to damage your site’s reputation by linking to you from “spammy” web sites. Given the recent battles over site reputation, this might frighten some skeptic webmasters. Google will send you a warning if they notice such activity, but if you didn’t create the links how do you respond? Now Google has introduced a link disavowal tool for this case. Lets hope we don’t need it.

Ever wonder how some web sites make their money? If you don’t know how, you might actually be the product. A new site helps you answer that question. Hope they cover more sites as time goes on.

Here’s a nice look behind the scenes at FactCheck.org and how the people there debunk incorrect information in the media. (No, I’m not related to the Robert Farley mentioned in the article).

Big news about Alpha Centauri yesterday. But earlier this week the first planet in a four-star solar system was discovered through the crowdsourcing project planethunters.org. What crowdsourcing projects do you work on?

If you want to do some data-driven skepticism, eventually you’ll need to present your results. Infogr.am is yet another site aimed at easy creation of infographics.

Here’s a review of a new transcription app called Transcribe Me.

Looks like Lanyrd has generally launched their meeting and introduction features, which they teased in a blog post last month. You can indicate on the site which speakers or attendees of events you’d like to meet, and the site provides some messaging capabilities around that. Looks handy, especially with CSICON coming up next week.

Follow me on Twitter at @krelnik.  You can submit stories there or via submit at whatstheharm.net.

In case you were under a rock last week and missed all the Reddit/Gawker/troll/anonymity drama, TechDirt summarizes the story pretty well with links to the main articles.

That story climaxed on Friday. On Sunday during the Red Bull Stratos skydive jump, another less obvious record set was the most simultaneous live video streams for any Internet event – over 8 million. I don’t think we’ll beat that number on Virtual Skeptics any time soon, but who knows?

Read on for more news of interest to skeptics working online…

Another horrible DMCA takedown story – in this one over 1.5 million blogs were taken down over one 300 word copyright violation. Just a few weeks back Google announced they will start demoting sites in search results based on successful DMCA complaints.  Scary stuff – be careful about what you claim is Fair Use!

An interesting new crowdsourced science project is documented over at Skepchick.

And Lifehacker has some good tips on dealing with the biggest morons of the Internet.

A new iPhone app called Circa displays breaking news stories in a whole new way.  This blog points out that it is a natural evolution of the phenomenon of liveblogging.

Follow me on Twitter at @krelnik.  You can submit stories there or via submit at whatstheharm.net.

Edzard Ernst is has studied alternative medicine intensively for years, and so his brand new blog should be a must-subscribe for most skeptics.

Read on for more news of interest to skeptics working online…

YouTube is now factoring in the amount of time watched on videos in how they rank in searches. That means videos people click on and then stop quickly should rank lower.  Better hold your viewer’s attention – maybe lay off those 2 minute title sequences.

The excellent legal blog Popehat has an interesting lesson about Twitter hashtags – remember you don’t own them and therefore can’t control what other people post.

Meanwhile Beevolve has a fascinating collection of statistics about Twitter users.

Here’s an interesting feature on Wikipedia’s dark side.  But on a more positive note, Wikipedia has made arrangements with mobile phone vendors so that browsing the site is now completely free of charge for 230 million mobile users.

If you’re trying to crowdfund something, but can’t conform to the rules of Kickstarter (or its competitors) for some reason – check out Selfstarter. It’s a kit for rolling your own custom crowdfunding web site.

I’ve blogged about options for Internet access at events including TAM and Dragon*Con Skeptrack. FreedomPop is another nearly free 4G service – here’s a review.

If you’re trying to find an event to go to, there are various skeptic calendars out there. One of the best ones is maintained by the Skepchicks on Google Calendar. That’s a great way to manage the data, because people can subscribe it into their own calendars or even onto their phone. Now they’ve started doing blog posts to call attention to those great events as well. You can submit your own events to events -at- skepchick.org.

Follow me on Twitter at @krelnik.  You can submit stories there or via submit at whatstheharm.net.

Google has long had two different tools that would let you measure the relative popularity of different topics over time, I’ve mentioned them before. Recently they merged two of them (Google Trends and Google Insights for Search) into a new Google Trends with an improved UI. This is a valuable tool for all skeptics – you can see which topics are more popular than others, as well as which are waxing or waning in popularity.  Read about more tools after the jump…

Getting on to the first page of Google search results can be critical to visibility of your content (as I have also mentioned many times).  It sometimes can be a little bit harder as some searches only return 7 results instead of the traditional 10.

EasyBib is a site that helps you create correct bibliographic citations for papers and other writing. They now have a new Chrome browser extension that can help you use the service. Of interest to skeptics is a feature that tells you whether a given web site is credible or not.  I tried it out, it finds CSICOP.org credible and NaturalNews.com “not credible”. Well played, EasyBib.

Ebay recently banned auctions of magic items and spells. These were often a source of skeptic amusement. A new site called Magickals.com has been created to “save the market from despair,” and presumably skeptics from a shortage of laughs.

In need of funds, Wikileaks has put up a paywall and Anonymous is not happy about it.

Here’s a lecture on social media use by scientists that looks interesting.

Skeptics often have to battle misinformation spreading virally. Studying this could be crucial. Here are some visualizations of how three photos shared by George Takei spread on Facebook. You may or may not learn anything, but at least they are beautiful.

Have a great Friday and a better weekend…

Follow me on Twitter at @krelnik.  You can submit stories there or via submit at whatstheharm.net.