Forcing others to suffer for your art

The other night we watched Irreversible and Funny Games, two films that deliberately target our vulnerability to manipulation through our trust of the art object, or any structure for that matter. This has led to us to ideas of manipulating our audience in various ways - through disruption, playing with the theatrical 'fourth wall', toying with narrative flow, injecting 'twists' along the way, inflicting mild (and hopefully harmless) forms of torture, delaying or denying gratification, et al.

Irreversible played with this obviously through its structure (told backwards, so that your point of view towards the situations and your sense of empathy towards the characters need continual readjustment) but also through more insiduous means - the first 30 minutes, for instance, feature a sub-sonic tone imperceptable by the ear but felt strongly in the body, creating a very tangible sense of unrest, whereas the final 10 minutes feature very strong strobe lighting that could potentially trigger seizures in those suffering from photosensitive epilepsy (I think there's a warning to this effect on the DVD cover).

Whilst I have great empathy for people with epilepsy (my father being a sufferer) and would therefore never condone this, I nonetheless wonder if the following scenario taken from today's paper could be interesting to us from the 'disruption' point of view.


Hackers' posts designed to cause epileptic fits
Computer attacks typically do not inflict physical pain on their victims.

But in a rare example of an attack apparently motivated by malice rather than money, hackers recently bombarded the Epilepsy Foundation's website with hundreds of pictures and links to pages with rapidly flashing images.

The breach triggered severe migraines and near-seizure reactions in some site visitors who viewed the images. People with photosensitive epilepsy can get seizures when they're exposed to flickering images, a response also caused by some video games and cartoons.

The attack happened when hackers exploited a security hole in the foundation's publishing software that allowed them to quickly make numerous posts and overwhelm the site's support forums.

Within the hackers' posts were small flashing pictures and links - masquerading as helpful - to pages that exploded with kaleidoscopic images pulsating with different colors.
"They were out to create seizures," said Ken Lowenberg, senior director of Web and print publishing for the foundation, which is based in Landover, Maryland.

He said legitimate users are no longer able to post animated images to the support forum or create direct links to other sites, and it is now moderated around the clock. He said the FBI is investigating the breach.

Security experts said the attack highlights the dangers of websites giving visitors great freedom to post content to different parts of the site.

In another recent attack, hackers exploited a simple coding vulnerability in Senator Barack Obama's website to redirect users visiting the community blogs section to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's official campaign site.

The hackers who infiltrated the Epilepsy Foundation's site did not appear to care about profit. The harmful pages did not appear to try to push down code that would allow the hacker to gain control of the victims' computers, for instance.

"I count this in the same category of teenagers who think it's funny to put a cat in a bag and throw it over a clothesline - they don't realize how cruel it is," said Paul Ferguson, a security researcher at antivirus software maker Trend Micro Inc. "It was an opportunity waiting to happen for some mean-spirited kid."

In a similar attack this year, a piece of malicious code was released that disabled software that reads text aloud from a computer screen for blind and visually impaired people. That attack appeared to have been designed to cripple the computers of people using illegal copies of the software, researchers said.

May 8, 2008 - 1:41PM
AP