The Bush administration seems to think that Osama Bin Laden is in Pakistan. They are wrong. He is cowering behind the auction house in Orgrimmar. From there he leads a vast terror network stretching from Kalimdor to the Eastern Kingdom and even into Outland. When he and his followers aren't plotting the downfall of the West they are raiding Molten Core. As ridiculous as all of this sounds, that is what the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity group, a US government funded program, has come to believe.

The Washington Post did a story on the initiative back in February and Wired had a followup today on their Threat Level blog.

The gist of the report, which can be read here, is that Big Brother needs to infiltrate online games so that he can keep his vigilant eyes out for terrorists using them to recruit for or organize attacks. The report names several systems to look at, most notably, World of Warcraft and Second Life. While the report stresses the possibility of cyberterrorism, it leaves the door open for any sort of attack.

While no specific action was asked for, except to conduct more research, one could easily draw this sort of thinking out to its obnoxious conclusions.

Should IARPA seek to mine the chat logs of MMOs they are in for a truly monumental task. Sad news being that most of the chats sent are authored by bots and sound something like: "WTS Epic Lootz!1!1!!!" And most of the rest involved arcane dialects unique to each game: "Prots pls!1!1! Kthx." I can't help but thinking that there isn't much useful intelligence relating to national security to be gleaned from this sort of banter.

Players spreading the infamous World of Warcraft plague could easily be considered terrorists since what they did was, in effect, suicide attacks using biological agents. Would the government put them in Gitmo for that? Probably not. But they would likely have an awkward time next time they flew in the US.

Apparently we do good enough work here at the Kansan since several people want to pay $25 for a copy on Ebay.

I would like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that, though the Kansan may be worth every penny of that $25, we are selling copies for 25 cents. Come in and get one. The first one is free with a KU ID so bring it along, unless you are Mario Chalmers.

Anyone who hasn't been living under a rock for the last six months is undoubtedly familiar with the rick-roll or the rick roll or the rickroll (AP still doesn't have an official style for the term, but expect one soon). The phenomenon has popped up on our beloved Free for All as well as a particularly funny April fools joke by Youtube. They replaced all of the normal front page links with rick-roll links. I discovered this wonderful rick-roll video via digg and I just had to share it.