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William Shakespeare/Image from Macworld.comInternet users who want to add to the political discourse this campaign season by slinging mud while being civil have plenty of options with their computers, smartphones and other gadgets.

Peppering the insult landscape with jibes from William Shakespeare is the ticket, and the GOP candidates, themselves, could learn a thing or two from the "Bard of Avon."

For candidates who like to gamble -- Mitt Romney, for instance -- there are random Shakespeare insult generators. They randomly display revilements from Stratford's famous son collected and stored in a database or generated from words in those insults.

Chris Seidel has created such a generator. It has a nice clean Google search-type interface. Jibes are generated by clicking an "insult me again" button.

Think how much a candidate could raise the level of a debate, yet maintain his negative zest by looking his opponent -- say a Newt Gringrich -- in the eye and declaring, "Thy sin's not accidental, but a trade." (Measure for Measure) Or if Rick Santorum turned on the GOP field and spat, "There's no more faith in thee than in a stewed prune." (Henry V).

Seidel's generator mixes both insults quoted directly from Shakespeare's plays with barbs composed of randomly chosen words. The word cooker at William-shakespeare.org follows only the random route.

Results such as "Thou unwholesome sheep-biting worms-meat!," "Thou abominable half-faced codpiece!" and " Thou obscene beef-witted hag-seed!" lack the poetry of the Bard, but can still be effective.

Mitt RomneyIf a candidate wants to avoid leaving his insults to chance, he can go to the Shakespeare Insult Kit. The kit consists of three columns of words. By taking a word from each column and putting "thou" in front of them, ersatz slams can be brewed. "Thou puking knotty-pated measle," for example, or "Thou mewling fen-sucked canker-blossom."

Candidates, or their handlers, who have a favorite play by the Bard may want to milk it for prickers for their opponents. That's easily done at Insult.net, which has sorted Shakespeare's insults by play title.

Finally, candidates who prefer to defer to authority in the matter of Shakespeare dress-downs may want to restrict their digs of opponents to one found on any of several "top" lists on the Internet, like "20 Epic Shakespeare Insults Every Drama Geek Should Know."

Link:
Internet Abounds with Insult Generators That Let You 'Go Negative' With Civility

Last month I mentioned essays by Dave Winer, John Battelle, and Keith Woolcock on why the growth of "social media" threatened the survival of the original social/individual/international medium known as the Internet. Short version of net history, as they present it:

-Back in the AOL era, people did their communicating within separate, proprietary "walled gardens" of the cybersphere -- AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, etc.

-During the Google era, they did business across proprietary boundaries (though sometimes within national boundaries, as under China's closed system) via the open Internet.

-In the emerging Facebook era, their growth and activity is channeled back into proprietary spheres.

The argument did not contend that Google was less profit-minded than any of the others. The point was that its model for profit-maximization (usefully) involved maximizing openness and connections on the Internet. Whereas the Facebook model, like the AOL model long before it, maximized separateness in proprietary spheres.

A new essay today, by Tristan Louis at his site, extends the logic. It begins thus: The essay connects individual user behavior, click-by-click, with the larger trends in the Internet's growth. Worth reading and reflecting on.

More From The Atlantic

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'I Killed the Internet': Click by Click, the Internet Grows, or Dies

Enlarge Uwe Meinhold/AFP/Getty Images

Ramona Markstein and her cat Fritz wearing a mini-camera around his neck sit in front of a laptop where pictures taken by Fritz are displayed on Jan. 21, 2008 in Hartenstein, eastern Germany. Cats have long been popular on the internet.

Ramona Markstein and her cat Fritz wearing a mini-camera around his neck sit in front of a laptop where pictures taken by Fritz are displayed on Jan. 21, 2008 in Hartenstein, eastern Germany. Cats have long been popular on the internet.

Perry Stein is an intern at The New Republic.

Cats may not be man's best friend, but they're arguably something even better: man's key to instant Internet pageviews. It's a long-established fact that Internet content whether it's a cutesy video, a photoshopped inside joke, or a longform public health article has a better chance of achieving coveted "viral" status if it somehow evokes the sound of purring.

But if we've come to accept that cats play an outsized role on the World Wide Web, our understanding of why that's the case still lags. Most of us would simply plead that we happen to think of cats, and their various digital reproductions, as "cute," but the sheer magnitude of their popularity suggests that there's something more than a purely subjective phenomenon at work. Fortunately, natural and social scientists have managed to shed some light on the mystery.

The first thing to acknowledge is that there was a deep interest in cats long before there was an Internet. Miles Orvell, a cultural historian at Temple University who specializes in visual culture, said that what the Internet has done is leverage a preexisting fascination. "There's a contagious effect of the Internet where something that is there as a latent possibility can emerge at large in society," Orvell said. "It's not so much creating this interest in cats, it's more exploiting this interest that was already there."

Orvell pointed out that Western culture's interest in cats extends as far back as the ninth century, when an Irish monk wrote a poem about his cat called "Pangur Ban." It would prove a lasting trope. Nine-hundred years later, Christopher Smart would write the poem "For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry;" in the 1930s T.S. Eliot wrote his famed Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, which later became the basis for the musical CATS. Outside of literature, cats became a staple of American popular imagery in the twentieth century, from television advertisements to Tom and Jerry. Cat videos on the Internet that garner millions of hits, Orvell says, should be thought of as an animated extension of the cat calendars of yesteryear.

But why have cats specifically been so successful at soliciting our attention? One hypothesis is that there is a fateful link between cats and human babies that explains their Internet stardom. According to Michael Newall, a philosopher of art at the University of Kent, our inordinate interest in cats may derive from their formal resemblance to our offspring their big eyes, smallish noses, and dome-shaped heads trigger the evolutionary nurturing instincts that we have evolved toward babies. There may even be a multiplying "superstimulus" effect at work: Newall posits that the exaggerated proportions of cats' baby-like features prompt an exaggeratedly intense, and involuntary, response in people.

But the reason that cats have catapulted to cyber-fame isn't purely biological: There are social factors at play as well. Steve Dale, a cat behavior consultant and pet journalist, told me that cat aficionados have been particularly drawn to the Internet because they lack other public safety valves where they can express their affection. "In the world of cats, there is no dog park," Dale says. "For cat owners, the dog park is the Internet."

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New Republic: Why Do Cats Run The Internet?

REYKJAVIK, ICELAND--(Marketwire -03/01/12)- Attendees of the upcoming Reykjavik Internet Marketing Conference (RIMC) will discover the 'darker side' of internet marketing during this year's unique 'dark sessions' -- a first for the conference.

The 'dark sessions' are set to explore the 'darker side' of internet marketing and how the internet is being used as a marketing tool not always for good. This session is useful for all those who want to understand the depths of internet marketing, the possibilities that it holds, how to stray away from mistakes, and also how to utilise the strengths.

This one-of-a-kind session will feature Ralph "Fantomeister" Tegtmeier, Pleromatrix; Peter van der Graaf, SearchSpecialist.nl; and Mikkel DeMib, DeMib.com.

The Reykjavik Internet Marketing Conference (RIMC) is an essential networking tool for marketing and advertising people, web editors, sales and marketing managers, as well as directors of small and large businesses. The event is the result of an ambitious partnership between Nordic eMarketing, MBL.is, and others.

Now in its 9th year, the 2012 internet marketing event will be focusing on two tracks, mixing various topics in internet communication and marketing, best practice tips, and Social Media over one day.

Past RIMC events have received overwhelmingly positive feedback, with an average of 250 attendees in attendance per event.

Speakers confirmed for RIMC 2012 include: Bill Hunt, Back Azimuth; Ben Chapman, BBC; Barbara Coll, WebMama; Charles Dowd, Facebook; Brent D. Payne, Tribune/BaldSEO; Motoko Hunt, Adobe; Phil Greenwood, Microsoft; Ludvik Hegh-Krohn, OMG; and Matt Neal, BrightSparx.

For further information regarding the 2012 Reykjavik Internet Marketing Conference, visit http://www.rimc.is/en.

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Reykjavik to Discover the 'Dark Side' at 2012 Internet Marketing Event

SAN FRANCISCO -- Internet voting systems are inherently insecure and should not be allowed in the upcoming general elections, a noted security researcher said at the RSA Conference 2012 being held here this week.

David Jefferson, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories and chairman of the election watchdog group Verified Voting, called on election officials around the country to drop plans to allow an estimated 3.5 million voters to cast their ballots over the Internet in this year's general elections.

In an interview with Computerworld on Wednesday, Jefferson warned that the systems that enable such voting are far too insecure to be trusted and should be jettisoned altogether.

Jefferson is scheduled to participate in a panel discussion on the topic at RSA on Thursday. Also on the panel are noted cryptographer and security guru Ron Rivest, who is the "R" in RSA, and Alex Halderman, an academic whose research on security vulnerabilities in e-voting systems prompted elections officials in Washington to drop plans to use an e-voting system in 2010.

"There's a wave of interest across the country, mostly among election officials and one agency of the [Department of Defense] to offer Internet voting," to overseas citizens and members of the military, Jefferson said. "From a security point of view, it is an insane thing to do."

A total of 33 states allow citizens to use the Internet to cast their ballots. In a majority of cases, those eligible to vote over the Internet receive their blank ballots over the Web, fill them in and submit their ballots via email as a PDF attachment. Some states, such as Arizona, have begun piloting projects that allow eligible voters to log into a web portal, authenticate themselves and submit their ballots via the portal.

The insecurity and the inability to audit such voting practices is unacceptable, Jefferson said.

Ballots sent via email for instance, are transmitted in the clear without encryption. That means any entity, such as an ISP or a malicious hacker that sits between the voter and the county where the vote is being cast, can view, filter, substitute or modify the ballot, he said.

Meanwhile, the e-voting Web portals that have been proposed for use in Arizona and are being tested in other states, are prone to all the security vulnerabilities and attacks that other sites face, he said.

As one example, he pointed to an attack crafted by Halderman , an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Michigan, in 2010 against a Digital Vote by Mail System that was proposed for use in Washington. The system was designed to be used by overseas voters and military personnel based in other countries.

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Internet voting systems too insecure, researcher warns