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SUNDAY, JUNE 5, 2011

WEINER'S TALE UNRAVELING

The Daily learns tweet originated from app that pol used the night pic was posted

BY DANIEL LIBIT

As the world has attempted to make sense of Rep. Anthony Weiner’s claim that his Twitter account was hacked, a key clue has been missing: exactly how the notorious groin pic was posted online.

But according to data provided exclusively to The Daily from TweetCongress.org, a nonprofit website that captures each member of Congress’s Twitter feeds in real time, the shot seen round the world was transmitted using TweetDeck — a popular Adobe desktop application that links up with social networking sites. A review of Weiner’s Twitter stream from May 27, the day of the crotch pic, shows that Weiner had been posting only from TweetDeck — one of many ways to post messages to Twitter — that entire night.

Chet Wisniewski, a senior security adviser at security software company SophosLabs, said the TweetDeck stamp “does make it more plausible that it did come from him.”

Weiner used TweetDeck frequently, but he often also posted from the Web directly or from his BlackBerry. A widely circulated explanation for how Weiner’s Twitter account could have been hacked by email would also seem to be incompatible with the fact that the message in question originated on TweetDeck. If email had been used, the message probably would have originated via the photosharing site Yfrog, where the infamous picture was posted.

However, this information doesn’t rule out the possibility that the congressman’s Twitter account was infiltrated — as Weiner has publicly suggested. But experts say it adds another hurdle for an alibi that has come under increasing fire.

“The complexity goes up,” said Chris McCroskey, the Texas software developer who founded TweetCongress.org. The site, which has advocated the increased participation from congressmen on Twitter, aggregates and archives all the feeds of the 112th Congress from Twitter’s application programming interface. It is the only known database to do this other than the Library of Congress, which does not publicly share its data.

Robert Stribley, a senior information architect at Razorfish, a social media strategy agency, reasoned that if Weiner used the TweetDeck app, “it would probably make it less likely his account was hacked.”

When reached by The Daily, TweetDeck’s community manager, Richard Barley, declined to comment.

Experts caution that there are several scenarios in which the congressman’s Twitter account could have been compromised. Wisniewski cautioned that a savvy hacker may have intentionally noted Weiner’s posting platform the night of the offending tweet, and intentionally matched it.

“If I had his password, I could add his account into my TweetDeck and start sending tweets, and it would all say ‘TweetDeck,’” Wisniewski explained.

On the other hand, Matthew Green, chief technology officer at Independent Security Evaluators, said that if the offensive tweet had been transmitted through something other than TweetDeck that night, it might have gone a long way to exonerate Weiner.

“You have to keep in mind that if the person’s goal was really to frame this guy and really embarrass him … they know all the previous posts,” Green said. “They’re going out of their way to make sure it looks like it came from him.”

TweetDeck is not hacker-proof, said Jason Falls, and there still is the possibility that someone with authorized access to his Twitter account intentionally or inadvertently logged onto Weiner’s account and sent the picture.

In a case that has grabbed headlines recently, a woman who worked for the Red Cross accidentally tweeted about getting drunk on the organization’s Twitter account, thinking that she had posted it on her personal one.

As for Weiner, the TweetDeck stamp won’t solve the case itself. But McCroskey knows what can.

“Here’s the thing that solves it all,” said McCroskey, “for him to call for a criminal investigation. All they have to do is look at his TweetDeck and see if it came from there, see what IP address [it had]. The local police department or Capitol Police could probably figure this out in 15 minutes.”

— With Ashley Kindergan and Karen Keller

COINCIDENCE? Identical twins die same day of same cause.

HIGH STYLE: medical rebranding and high end points of sale try to remake marijuana’s image.

Serious play

Cory Arcangel’s first solo show at the Whitney Museum is a different kind of gaming

BY ZACH BARON

A few weeks ago, the artist Cory Arcangel celebrated his 33rd birthday on the fourth floor of Manhattan’s Whitney Museum, surrounded by critics, museum VIPs and assorted gallery representatives and publicists. His first solo show at the museum, “Pro Tools,” was set to open the next day. This was the press preview. As people crowded around the artist to congratulate him, a man approached a nearby artwork, “Masters” (2011), a golf video game modified so that no matter how the user swings the provided club, the ball refuses to go in the hole. The man picked up the putter, took a swing, and watched on a monitor as the ball veered sharply to the right of its intended target. As the game reset, so did he, carefully lining up his putt — only to see the ball miss again. In consternation, he looked up. “What’s wrong with this thing?”

This is a question you could ask about most of Arcangel’s work. Whether it is a series of bowling video games rigged to throw only gutter balls (“Various Self Playing Bowling Games,” 2011), a suite of “Seinfeld” episodes edited to show only scenes in which Kramer discusses his idea for a coffee table book about coffee tables (“There’s Always One at Every Party,” 2010), or a sculptural array of store display racks rigged to move in concert (“Research in Motion [Kinetic Sculpture #6],” 2011), Arcangel’s art is less a matter of making things than of intervening in things that are already made. “I’m someone who plays pranks,” he said.

Born in Buffalo, trained at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and deeply fluent in the various shorthand languages spoken online, on television and on the radio, Arcangel and his work crystallize his generation’s obsession with pop culture and the weird obsolete chunks — forgotten YouTube videos, outmoded consumer electronics — that culture quickly leaves behind.

The Daily spoke with the artist a few days after his show opened about his fascination with failed technologies, his love for the little-remembered Ralph Macchio film “Crossroads,” and why every game “Pro Tools” has to offer is rigged.

The History Page: Playing the hand dealt

Long an outlaw activity, poker gains a respectable reputation

BY GRAEME WOOD

The World Series of Poker is underway in Las Vegas, and a record number of fools will be lining up for the privilege of being parted from their money. The buy-in is a minimum of $1,000 and a maximum of $50,000. Around 75,000 players will enter, and the very best will walk away with millions in prize money, as well as a champion bracelet that will mark him (they’re all men, so far) as someone you should never, ever play cards with.

As recently as a few decades ago, playing poker was disreputable, and to find a serious game, one might have had to secure an invitation to the back room of an Italian restaurant or whisper a password through the peephole in the door of an unfamiliar apartment. With the World Series, now in its 41st year, the game evolved from one played on the sly, under the threat of a government raid, into one played on ESPN, with the same fatuous color commentary one might expect while watching a baseball game. The story of how poker was tamed is a sad one, not just for the 74,999 losers but also for anyone who gets his poker thrills from the feeling of transgression and danger. The old poker is dead, killed by the Internet, with the World Series a willing accomplice.

The story starts in 1946, when the city of Dallas elected a new sheriff, who forced many gamblers and other underworld types into an exodus. Among them was L.B. Benny Binion, a bootlegger, murderer and crime lord who had become a violent demigod of the Dallas mafia. Binion decamped for Las Vegas and opened a casino on Glitter Gulch in 1951. Binion’s Horseshoe was known for honoring any bet of any size, a policy that led to countless stories of maniacs who lost or doubled fortunes on the turn of a card or spin of a wheel.

By 1970, Binion had been in and out of prison and had won and lost his gambling license. He had, however, not lost his showmanship or his nostalgia for the old days in Dallas, playing stud against some of the shrewdest and most adept cheats and cardsharps in the business. He hit upon the idea of an exhibition match with seven of the best players, after which they would vote on who was the best. The first round of voting was reportedly a seven-way tie, with no one willing to concede superiority even in a closed ballot. When Binion asked each player to nominate a runner-up, they selected Jimmy Moss, a Texas big-money player who usually played with a revolver in his jacket and a double-barreled shotgun in the back seat of his car.

The other players were equally colorful. Thomas Austin “Amarillo Slim” Preston Jr. claimed to have beaten pool-hall hustler Minnesota Fats at billiards using a broomstick as a cue, and to have beaten Evel Knievel at golf using a hammer for a club. Slim also befriended Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar and pleaded guilty to indecency with a child. Both Slim and fellow Texan Doyle Brunson, also among the original poker players, have been repeatedly assaulted and thrashed while collecting money, and Brunson has claimed he once sat beside a player who was shot in the head in the middle of a hand.

Of course, what started off as a bunch of crooked old cowboys playing cards could not stay private for long. By 1972, they had done away with voting and made the World Series a freeze-out tournament, so the winner was the one with all the remaining chips. That year they instituted a $5,000 buy-in and welcomed eight entrants, including the original seven. Moss won again, and until 1978, when 28-year-old Bobby Baldwin won from a field of 42 entrants, the original seven were the only ones who walked away with the championship.

Then, in 1979, a nobody named Hal Fowler showed up and won — the first amateur to do so. The gates to greatness seemed to open a crack. Poker is, after all, largely a game of luck, so it was just a matter of time before talented amateurs started to occasionally win, inspiring each other to believe that ridiculous odds might someday favor them, too. CBS and ESPN started broadcasting, and by 1982, the field had swelled to 104 entrants. Few of these newcomers were the sort to pack heat, but they shared many of the vices of recklessness (drugs, booze) that go with willingness to wager absurd sums against dangerous men in cowboy hats.

Time has done little but punish these amateurs, first by taking their money, and second by giving it back in small but highly publicized doses. Those doses are sufficient to keep them coming back for more, usually inspired by success playing poker online. In 2005, an Australian chiropractor triumphed; one wonders how the killer Benny Binion, by then dead for 16 years, would have felt about that.

Binion’s Horseshoe had, in any case, been bought up in 2004 by Harrah’s, which meant it transformed rapidly from the casino with one of Vegas’s shadiest backstories to one with the corporate sterility for which the Vegas Strip is now famous. The old Binion casino, once smoky and seedy, is now owned by a big gaming conglomerate and is growing brighter and less distinctive. The championship where Moss and Amarillo Slim once triumphed takes place on the same grounds occupied by magicians Penn and Teller, as well as the Vegas franchise of the Chippendales male strip show.

As for the players themselves, they have talent, of course, and some of the faces are the same. (Doyle Brunson still plays.) But A. Alvarez, the English critic whose book, “The Biggest Game in Town,” is the best book about Vegas poker, and possibly the best book about Vegas, sounds a melancholy note when he sees the newest entrants, the “clean-living young people who watch their diet, work out in the gym, and never smoke.” The winner now walks away with around $5 million, which is more than the pistol-packing cheat Johnny Moss ever saw in one day. But it is a sad state of affairs when the players’ vice of second resort is overindulgence at the Carnival World Buffet.

Graeme Wood is a contributing editor at The Atlantic.

Movies based on board games

In today’s business section, The Daily looks at Hollywood’s push to fuel kid-friendly films with Monopoly, Candy Land and others. Take a look at some of the ideas we came up with:

Coquette opines on high school senior’s older (creepy) suitor

I’m a senior in high school, and last night I went out to dinner with a man 15 years my senior who isn’t a teacher per se but advises some activities at my school. He’s a guy I’ve really enjoyed spending time with and he’s moving away in a month which is why I was excited to have a friendly dinner with him. Which is why I was even more shocked and uncomfortable when….

Dear Coquette,

SUNDAY, JUNE 5, 2011

I am really in need of your help. I’m a senior in high school, and last night I went out to dinner with a man 15 years my senior who isn’t a teacher per se but advises some activities at my school. He’s a guy I’ve really enjoyed spending time with and he’s moving away in a month which is why I was excited to have a friendly dinner with him. Which is why I was even more shocked and uncomfortable when he started telling me how hard it was for him that I was 17 and that he connects with me better than he does with women his own age; that in a perfect world, we’d go on a road trip together and do comedy shows and “make love by a campfire.” He told me about how for the first time in his life he’s single and non-virginal and how that’s big for him. He didn’t try anything physical, but I am so beyond out of my mind uncomfortable and have no idea what to do, especially when I see him next. I’m planning on talking to his supervisor, but need some more broad ideas about how to deal with this on a personal level, i.e. the anxiety I feel when I see him, feeling slutty for whatever cleavage I’m showing, etc. Please help. Thank you.

Yikes. Sorry, kiddo. This dude is so gross. It sucks that you have to deal with this kind of skeezery in the last few weeks before you graduate high school.

First things first, don’t you dare for one second feel ashamed. You’ve done nothing wrong. I know it can be rough out there, but you’re not slutty just because you’ve got a pair of tits. This is a harsh lesson in the power of your nascent womanhood, but it doesn’t have to be a negative one. The silver lining here is that you can learn what it feels like to stand up for yourself in the face of inappropriate behavior.

Definitely talk to his supervisor, and if at all possible, refuse to be put in a position where you would have any further contact with this guy. It’s not that he’s necessarily unsafe. More than likely he’s just an emotionally stunted man-child with no clue how to relate to women. Still, what he did was wrong. A 30-something adult in a mentor role simply cannot be acting this way to a high school-aged student, and you don’t need to be dealing with his kind of creepiness. Let the supervisor and the school administration handle him.

On a personal level, don’t be surprised when your initial anxiety shifts into something more akin to anger. If you catch yourself getting a bit snippy with your friends and family, just take a deep breath and recognize what you’re really feeling. Don’t swallow your emotions. Allow yourself to feel them. That’s a big part of processing stuff like this. Eventually, that sick feeling you get in your stomach will mellow, and you’ll be left with little more than pity for this guy.

You’re gonna be fine. In fact, you’ll probably come out of this with a fresh chunk of emotional maturity you can take with you to college, and with any luck, this whole episode will lead to you developing a healthy aversion to dating actors.

The most fascinating one

is the religion segment, where “unaffiliated,” which has no representation in Congress, would be the third-largest slice of the pie in the reflective section. Why is atheism so verboten in Congress, anyway?