huskeraddict
All-Conference
Majoring in Cyberheckling
by Rick Reilly
You call yourself a sports fan? Then why don't you help your team? Screaming at opponents, "You shoot worse than d!(k Cheney!" is not enough. Wearing your Duck Fuke! hat is not enough. It's time to put the madness in March. It's time to cyberheckle. They're doing it on campuses all over the country. At Colorado, for instance, a pack of enterprising student hoop fans finds the Facebook pages of the opponents' star athletes and picks out juicy facts. Say a player's favorite movie is Dirty Dancing, and his girlfriend's name is Muffy, and his favorite food is doughnuts. Next thing you know, they're at games yelling, "I just saw Muffy eating Patrick Swayze's cruller!" Earlier this season the merry band of pranksters found a Facebook picture of a Colorado State hoops player bathing as a toddler with his brother. They blew it up and made a huge sign that read "Brothers with Benefits". "I don't feel bad," says Colorado senior Jason Weiss, one of the leaders of the Buffaloes' pack. "It's not like we have to dig hard for this information. It's right there on their pages!" The groups finest moment came during last year's basketball season, when it concocted a fake Facebook page for an amorous and beautiful coed named "Jeanne," then had Jeanne begin cyberflirting with KSU star forward Cartier Martin through his Facebook page. Martin, quite naturally, e-mailed her back saying that'd he be in Boulder in two weeks and why didn't she call him on his cell and they'd get together? Next thing Martin knew, CU fans were tormenting him with calls to his cellphone. When it was game time in Boulder, they chanted, "Jeanne! Jeanne!," and shouted out his cell number as he shot free throws. The Buffs beat the Wildcats 79-75. On Facebook one student can "poke" another student without limits The pokee gets a notice on his page saying, "You've been poked by Sam So-and so from Faraway U." If the pokee doesn't want to poke back, he must manually delete the message. SI found 24 schools with groups dedicated to poking the opposing team's quarterback. The Tennessee group has 697 members available for perpetual poking. That's more pokes than you'll see in a Three Stooges marathon. Nebraska QB Zac Taylor was so poked out last season that he disabled the poking option on his page, "but then they just started friend-requesting me and sending me messages," says Taylor, who hopes to be picked in the NFL draft in April. "Do you know what a pain it is to delete 500 messages a day?" If a player doesn't have a Facebook or a MySpace page, then the cyberhecklers just make up pages for them anyway. For instance, there are 391 MySpace profiles for Tiger Woods. So that's what he does with all that time between tournaments. I even found a fake one for myself. It was pretty accurate, except for the part about me being a gay, 25 year-old woman living in Seattle. Potentially more damaging is the phony info put on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that users can edit. Golfer Fuzzy Zoeller is irate over a Wikipedia posting contains false information in his biography; it said that he drank a fifth of booze while also taking Vicodin and beat members of his family. Zoeller's lawyer tracked the posting to a Miami consulting firm and last month filed suit damages. Then there's the spam bomb. First you create e-mail accounts at any of the free sites such as Yahoo or Hotmail. Then you forward all the spam you receive to one account. Finally, you forward all the spam you've accumulated to the poor, unsuspecting victim. "I get spammed through the roof," Mavericks owner Mark Cuban told me in an e-mail. "Spurs, Suns, and Heat fans are brutal. They will spam bomb you in every which way on a daily basis...The good news is, it's pretty easy to set a spam filter." For sheer guerrilla cyberheckling, though, nobody beats SEC football fans. One of them posted a fake news story under a Birmingham News byline, quoting new Alabama head coach Nick Saban as saying that Mississippi State was funding scholarships "by collecting pop bottles and aluminum cans along the highways," and that "we will go to Louisiana and take each and every player we want. LSU will not, nor can not stop me." A lot of people believed it, including Opelousas, La., Daily World sports editor Tom Dodge, who wrote a column ripping Saban, for which he was then fired. The moral of all this? Stay off the internet, cancel your newspaper subscription and stick with the trustworthy magazine guys. See you at the Young Seattle Lesbians meeting.
by Rick Reilly
You call yourself a sports fan? Then why don't you help your team? Screaming at opponents, "You shoot worse than d!(k Cheney!" is not enough. Wearing your Duck Fuke! hat is not enough. It's time to put the madness in March. It's time to cyberheckle. They're doing it on campuses all over the country. At Colorado, for instance, a pack of enterprising student hoop fans finds the Facebook pages of the opponents' star athletes and picks out juicy facts. Say a player's favorite movie is Dirty Dancing, and his girlfriend's name is Muffy, and his favorite food is doughnuts. Next thing you know, they're at games yelling, "I just saw Muffy eating Patrick Swayze's cruller!" Earlier this season the merry band of pranksters found a Facebook picture of a Colorado State hoops player bathing as a toddler with his brother. They blew it up and made a huge sign that read "Brothers with Benefits". "I don't feel bad," says Colorado senior Jason Weiss, one of the leaders of the Buffaloes' pack. "It's not like we have to dig hard for this information. It's right there on their pages!" The groups finest moment came during last year's basketball season, when it concocted a fake Facebook page for an amorous and beautiful coed named "Jeanne," then had Jeanne begin cyberflirting with KSU star forward Cartier Martin through his Facebook page. Martin, quite naturally, e-mailed her back saying that'd he be in Boulder in two weeks and why didn't she call him on his cell and they'd get together? Next thing Martin knew, CU fans were tormenting him with calls to his cellphone. When it was game time in Boulder, they chanted, "Jeanne! Jeanne!," and shouted out his cell number as he shot free throws. The Buffs beat the Wildcats 79-75. On Facebook one student can "poke" another student without limits The pokee gets a notice on his page saying, "You've been poked by Sam So-and so from Faraway U." If the pokee doesn't want to poke back, he must manually delete the message. SI found 24 schools with groups dedicated to poking the opposing team's quarterback. The Tennessee group has 697 members available for perpetual poking. That's more pokes than you'll see in a Three Stooges marathon. Nebraska QB Zac Taylor was so poked out last season that he disabled the poking option on his page, "but then they just started friend-requesting me and sending me messages," says Taylor, who hopes to be picked in the NFL draft in April. "Do you know what a pain it is to delete 500 messages a day?" If a player doesn't have a Facebook or a MySpace page, then the cyberhecklers just make up pages for them anyway. For instance, there are 391 MySpace profiles for Tiger Woods. So that's what he does with all that time between tournaments. I even found a fake one for myself. It was pretty accurate, except for the part about me being a gay, 25 year-old woman living in Seattle. Potentially more damaging is the phony info put on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that users can edit. Golfer Fuzzy Zoeller is irate over a Wikipedia posting contains false information in his biography; it said that he drank a fifth of booze while also taking Vicodin and beat members of his family. Zoeller's lawyer tracked the posting to a Miami consulting firm and last month filed suit damages. Then there's the spam bomb. First you create e-mail accounts at any of the free sites such as Yahoo or Hotmail. Then you forward all the spam you receive to one account. Finally, you forward all the spam you've accumulated to the poor, unsuspecting victim. "I get spammed through the roof," Mavericks owner Mark Cuban told me in an e-mail. "Spurs, Suns, and Heat fans are brutal. They will spam bomb you in every which way on a daily basis...The good news is, it's pretty easy to set a spam filter." For sheer guerrilla cyberheckling, though, nobody beats SEC football fans. One of them posted a fake news story under a Birmingham News byline, quoting new Alabama head coach Nick Saban as saying that Mississippi State was funding scholarships "by collecting pop bottles and aluminum cans along the highways," and that "we will go to Louisiana and take each and every player we want. LSU will not, nor can not stop me." A lot of people believed it, including Opelousas, La., Daily World sports editor Tom Dodge, who wrote a column ripping Saban, for which he was then fired. The moral of all this? Stay off the internet, cancel your newspaper subscription and stick with the trustworthy magazine guys. See you at the Young Seattle Lesbians meeting.
