I just met one of the Internet's most mysterious people: Christopher Poole, the founder of the site 4chan. Online he goes by "moot."

Poole's image-board site, which he started at age 15, is known as one of the seedier dens of the Internet. Many posts on 4chan are pornographic. All are anonymous. And his 7-million-person community, which he called a "meme factory," has been blamed (or credited, depending on your perspective) for starting the LOLcats and Rickrolling crazes, rallying 7,000 people to protest Scientology, spreading child pornography and taking down social networking pages with floods of hateful comments.

"The site has gotten kind of notorious over the years for being a hotbed for memes and viral kind of activity - and exploits and whatnot," he said.

According to Poole, it's also becoming endangered, like a dinosaur of the Web.

Its predator? The Facebooks and Googles of the world, which are pushing people to reveal more about their real identities online.

"At this point, I really do stand behind anonymous communities," Poole said in an interview after a speech here at the TED Conference in Long Beach, California.

"I think they are certainly endangered because we've just moved more and more towards persistent user identity. Your online identity lives in like all of like one or three places now. You've got a Twitter, you've got a Facebook. I guess you used to have a MySpace, So people are just putting loads of information about themselves in these places and we're becoming very comfortable with sharing very intimate details about our life. It's just everything."

That scares Poole, who is now 22 and a college student in New York - although he wouldn’t say where. He is a private person who says he mostly spends his free time online on 4chan and on news sites.

"If someone called you up on the phone and asked you all of these things [people post online] you'd say 'hell no' and hang up," he said. "But now we're flooding the Internet with information about ourselves and I think that's scary. So I would like to see people push back."

Poole fell into anonymous posting somewhat out of necessity. When he founded 4chan, he was younger than 18, and he didn't want to get in trouble for spreading pornography, which he wouldn't legally be allowed to access.

Over time he's become a sort of advocate for anonymous speech, even though he's been outed in the media (He said his dad didn’t know what he was doing with all of the time he was spending on 4chan until reporters called to talk to him about the site in 2008; his parents still don't really get it, he said).

Despite the filth that's somewhat prevalent on his site, Poole maintains anonymous speech promotes rational discourse that's more thoughtful than speech that's attached to a name.

"When you've got a community with identity, the discussion is mostly revolving around who is saying what and not what they're saying. And so those discussions become a criticizing thing. They become a bandwagon sort of thing," he said.

"And with the anonymous system you've got a place where people are uninhibited … You're getting very truthful conversation. And you judge somebody by the content of what they're saying and not their username, not their registration date."

Posted by: John D. Sutter -- CNN.com writer/producer
Filed under: 4chan • memes • TED2010

In the face of constant news about how the Internet connects people and empowers them, Sam Harris provided an interesting and contrarian perspective here at the brainy TED Conference in Long Beach, California.

The eternal skeptic and author of "The End of Faith" responded in this way when I asked him what the most destructive technology on the planet is:

"Increasingly the Internet itself, given our reliance on it, is a source of destructive technology. I think we really have to worry about cyber terrorism and cyber crime increasingly. But there's obviously nuclear proliferation and bio-weapons and chemical weapons."

But the Web isn't completely bad, he said:

"I think it's had two diametrically opposed effects. One effect has been really good. It's created transformation and empowered people and allowed us to debunk bad ideas in a very ... decisive way. It's almost created a cognitive immune system for the planet."

He continued: "It's also empowered pranks and pseudoscience and bad information because every person on the Internet can sort of find the people like them and everyone can find an audience so there are certain forms of ignorance that would more or less be unthinkable without the Internet. Global jihad has been massively empowered by the Internet. Even things like the 911 truth conspiracy. That, to my mind, is an Internet phenomenon. No one would publish those books. This is something that is born of Web sites and Internet commentary."

It's yet to be seen whether technology's overall effect on humanity has been good or bad, he said.

"The final chapter is not written on that. It's made it much better and yet it's given us the power to make it worse. It's conceivable that if we fail to build a truly viable global civilization we could use technology to immiserate ourselves more deeply than we would have had we not invented the technology."

Posted by: John D. Sutter -- CNN.com writer/producer
Filed under: Internet • technology • TED2010

People today are addictively entertained by video games.

Jane McGonigal says that's a good thing.

McGonigal, a game designer with the Institute for the Future, and a speaker at this year's TED Conference here in Long Beach, California, says people today spend a collective 3 billion hours per week playing online games. She wants us to play more. To solve all of the world's problems, she says, we must spend seven times that much time with games - a whopping 21 billion hours per week among us all.

And, no, she's not joking. By playing online games like World of Warcraft, gamers build up "superpowers" that will help them solve real world problems, McGonigal says.

"My goal for the next decade is to try to make it as easy to save the world in real life as it is to save the world in online games," she said in a presentation here.

Think about that for a minute. Can searching for troll spells and conquering digital alien worlds really help us combat climate change, end poverty and reduce global conflict? Yes, McGonigal says, because in online games people tend to behave better than in the real world. In the digital space, people tend to collaborate to help each other solve problems. They don’t give up as easily. And they almost always feel they have a chance of winning. Their skills are well matched to the challenges set out before them.

Such situations have developed gamers as "super-empowered, hopeful individuals," she said. She sees it as a new branch of human evolution.

"Gamers are willing to work hard all the time if they're given the right work," she said.

But how does this translate to change in the real world? Well, McGonigal builds social online games that straddle the virtual and real worlds. One of her projects, called World Without Oil, put gamers in a scenario where they had to come up with inventive ways to exist on a planet that had run out of fossil fuels. Players had to make changes to their real lives and then post about them online to advance in the game. Most of the 1,700 people who participated in that game have kept up with the changes they've made to their lives since the game was launched in 2007, she said.

Her next project, called "Evoke: a crash course in changing the world," which debuted here at TED on Thursday and will kick off on March 3, is produced by the World Bank Institute. It pairs up mentors in the developed world with players in Africa. The goal: inspire a generation of young, African entrepreneurs to chase their dreams - by making them think they're playing a game that's fun and collaborative, and where the chance of success is realistic.

"We can make any future we imagine and we can play any games we want," she said. "So I say let the world-changing games begin."

Posted by: John D. Sutter -- CNN.com writer/producer
Filed under: Gaming • TED2010

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Sometimes simple and cheap technologies are best.

That was my take-away from a chat with Tero Ojanpera, a senior vice-president at Nokia. I caught up with him on Wednesday evening at the TED Conference here in Long Beach, California.

Ojanpera does a lot of work these days with mobile phones in the developing world. In places like rural India or sub-Saharan Africa, phones that cost $20 are better than those that cost $200. That's partly because they're more affordable, but it's also because mobile phone developers in those places there don't create complicated, high-power smartphone apps. They make applications with what they've got: text messages.

Those text messages are able to do some pretty amazing things.

With cheap mobile phone, farmers in Africa can get crop prices, so they don't get ripped off when middlmen buyers come to their villages and offer low rates for their goods. Kids in India can learn English through text-message-based applications. People and rural places can communicate with doctors in bigger cities. They can access info about diseases through text message apps, too.

Mobile phones are connecting some villages to the outside world for the first time, Ojanpera said. Landline phones and the Internet require more infrastructure and haven't made it everywhere.

In bigger cities, mobile phones are being employed for new kinds of storytelling. Ojanpera said Nokia is collaborating on a new show with Tim Kring, the creator of the TV series "Heroes." The new show won't be on TV - it will be played out in the real world. People will use their phones to take pictures of posters or other branded objects. Then video clips will play for them. Sounds funky, and I'm a bit hazy on the details. He wouldn't say what the name of the program would be or when exactly it would debut. But it sounds like it could be part of a techie shift for the TV industry.

"It's completely new," he said. "It's going to blow your mind."

Posted by: John D. Sutter -- CNN.com writer/producer
Filed under: cell phones • TED2010

Hi there from the TED Conference in Long Beach, California. This is one of the brainiest and most eclectic gatherings around - a chance for the world's big thinkers to swap ideas about how to make all of our lives better.

The conference format is simple: 30 or so people give presentations, each only 18 minutes long. Then those talks - which are far better than most corporate PowerPoints - are posted online at TED's Web site.

Outside the main stage, about a half-dozen conference sponsors have set up exhibits. I took a quick tour on Wednesday, the first day of the conference. Here's my take on some of the best ideas I heard floating around the halls here:

Data makes you healthy: It's no secret that many of us are collecting unprecedented amounts of digital data about our lives. We post to social networks, track our finances and, increasingly, upload information about where we are and what we're doing.

That data has the power to improve our health, said Paul Tarini, of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a non-profit supporting digital health initiatives.

Tarini said acts as simple as stepping on the scale each morning and recording the results can help people better understand their health and wellbeing. He said such data knowledge is only in the "first generation" for now, but he expects health data collection to become standardized. And we'll likely share all of our vital signs with doctors, so we can spot problems before they start nagging at our health.

Two sites he said are worth checking out: Patients Like Me and dLife. Let me know what you think of those.

Entrepreneurs will rebuild Haiti: Carl Schramm, CEO of the Kauffman Foundation, said the best way for the West to help rebuild Haiti is to encourage Haitian entrepreneurship.

Haitian people need to realize their own potential to start and own businesses, he said, in order to rebound from the earthquake and build a more stable nation.

Business development should be encouraged, and we shouldn't all expect magical results overnight, he said.

"The Ford Motor Company did not drop with 400,000 employees out of space," he said.

Pocket ultrasounds: Medical technology that once filled rooms at hospitals now can fit in a doctor's pocket, said Linda Boff, spokeswoman for GE. Her company is coming out with a smartphone-sized ultrasound device called V-Scan, which will be available within two weeks. She expects that device - and a forthcoming mobile EKG device - to change rural medicine in the U.S. and in developing countries.

She didn't offer details on the price of the V-Scan but said the ability to diagnose and treat illnesses at a remote clinic rather than only in major cities will save money.

$3 coffee: If people were willing to pay $3 for a cup of coffee instead of $2, coffee growers' lives in the developing world would be forever changed, said Doug Zell, CEO of Intelligentsia Coffee.

That may seem self-serving, but Zell said coffee consumers should ask questions about where their brew originates, and how much of their money is actually going back to the developing world.

He believes this kind of consumer consciousness - and our desire to root out coffee stories, from source to store - will help make the world a better place.

"I don't think a lot of people know where coffee comes from," he said.

Posted by: John D. Sutter -- CNN.com writer/producer
Filed under: health • TED2010

Getting laid out with the flu didn’t really fill me with a desire for gaming even though I had plenty of time off. However, there were moments of lucidity where I grabbed a controller just to see what was out there.

A demo released this past weekend for “Battlefield: Bad Company 2” gave me just enough adrenaline and held my interest long enough before the flu meds kicked in. It is a simple enough “sight target over weapon and shoot” game that was fun to try.

But the really cool element is the destructible environment that makes any cover you might find disappears under withering enemy fire. In the demo scenario, my team was tasked to destroy two objectives, but we were blocked by armored vehicles at a choke point in the road.

Armed with my rocket-propelled launcher, I rushed behind a cement barricade for cover and got off my first shot for a hit. Ducking down, I figured I had plenty of time to reload, but the tanks began hammering away at the barricade and destroyed it – leaving me completely in the open.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out in other scenarios, but it is a fun element for the game.

I also found out that there is a new Legos game on the horizon. “Lego Star Wars III: The Clone Wars” is centered around the animated series and will feature many of the same characters, but in typical blocky form. There will be some new features added to the game and the release is expected to follow the “Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4”, which is due out in May.

There is also word that Electronic Arts may be benching its college basketball game. When EA released its fiscal year 2011 schedule, there were some notable omissions including the lack of the NCAA Basketball series. There were also no Rock Band titles on the list, but “Green Day: Rock Band” was recently featured at the VGAs so it will be intriguing to see where this comes from.

Finally, did you see there was a video game commercial in the Super Bowl? “Dante’s Inferno” took the big commercial stage with a relatively tame (for a game that has gotten a lot of hype about nudity and violence) ad featuring the protagonist during a fall into Hell.

I can’t remember the last time a single video game got one of the coveted spots during the Super Bowl. A smart play or a Hail Mary pass?

Posted by: Larry Frum for CNN.com
Filed under: Games • Gaming • video games

I love moments when technology enables you to do something you couldn't otherwise.

I was reminded of this last week when Google's video chat helped me interview Ken Harrenstien, a Google software engineer who has been deaf since childhood.

I first met Ken at the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California. There, we talked through a sign interpreter, which was fine. But I found myself getting confused. Ken speaks clearly, so his words and the sign language translator's interpretations of them got jumbled up in my mind. They spoke in a sort of syncopation.

I found myself concentrating more on how things were being said - "Did they say that in the same way?" - than the substance of the interview. Plus, I always think questions make more sense if they come directly from their source, rather than passed through a translator.

Cue the video chat.

When I got back to Atlanta, I had several follow-up questions I wasn't able to get to in our face-to-face interview, so I contacted Ken through Google's chat program. He had told me that the text part of the Internet was very liberating for him. With e-mail and chat, he could communicate with anyone. No need for translation. That's primarily how he communicates with co-workers at Google, he said.

Ken  set up a Web cam so that I could see how he reacted to my questions. I tried to do the same, but had technical trouble that prevented my image from going through. I was worried about how things would go, but it turned out to be better than I could have expected. The video feed let me see Ken's face as he reacted to my questions. His face scrunched up in surprised, for instance, when I asked about how he became deaf, or whether he saw deafness as an empowering quality (he does). I could also hear him typing, so I knew not to keep pestering him with questions.

The format gave him time to think through his answers. And both of us were sure what the other had meant to say.

He told me that deafness acts as "social filter" at times. He appreciates it when people take the effort to learn sign language, or to communicate through writing.

The Internet just makes it easier for someone to make that effort.

Posted by: John D. Sutter -- CNN.com writer/producer
Filed under: Uncategorized

I’ve rarely felt more confused than last night when I signed on Facebook and saw Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus and Heather Graham’s pictures on my News Feed.

It took me a minute to realize I hadn't suddenly become part of a celebrity social circle - my friends simply had changed their profile pictures to those of celebrities.

But I still didn't know exactly what was going on until I did some searching.

As it turns out, it's "Doppelganger Week," the latest cultural meme to take Facebook by storm, and it has a number of people switching their profile pictures to celebrity lookalikes. After climbing out of the metaphorical hole I had been hiding in the last few weeks, I realized the immeasurable extent of Doppelganger Week’s popularity.

Justin Smith, the editor of Inside Facebook, assured me I’m not alone in my delayed discovery.

“No official dates are associated with [Doppelganger Week], he said. “As more people discover it, it will continue to grow. There are 350 million people on Facbeook. It could be a while, not necessarily just a couple more days.”

This is by no means the first cultural trend on Facebook. Masses of women have posted the color of their bras on Facebook in honor of breast cancer awareness. And others have made status updates out of the Urban Dictionary definitions of their first names.

Smith said Doppelganger can make for some funny social interactions:

“There was one awkward interaction where someone commented, ‘Wow you’re looking great theses days,’ not knowing (the picture) was a celebrity. But this is to be expected. People are still discovering it,” he said.

Despite the trend’s many followers, CNET isn’t jumping on “Doppelganger Week” bandwagon. The site says the celebrity alter-ego photos could violate Facebook’s Terms of Service.

Facebook asks its users not to post photos they don't have the rights to.

In an e-mail to CNN.com, Facebook spokeswoman Kathleen Loughlin said the issue hasn't come up yet:

Users are responsible for the content they post, but as always, Facebook will respond to requests for removal that it receives from copyright holders. In this case, we have received no such requests.

Posted by: Stephanie Goldberg -- CNN Intern
Filed under: Facebook • technology

NASA released new photos today of everyone's favorite former planet: Pluto.

The space agency says the photos, which were taken in the early 2000s by the Hubble Space Telescope, are the "most detailed and dramatic images ever taken of the distant dwarf planet."

"The Hubble pictures confirm Pluto is a dynamic world that undergoes dramatic atmospheric changes not simply a ball of ice and rock," NASA says in a news release.

But the new glamour shots won't be enough to get Pluto registered again as a planet.

The pictures come just as Pluto is heading into a new phase of its 248-year orbit around the sun, NASA says:

Pluto is unlike Earth, where the planet's tilt alone drives seasons. Pluto's seasons are asymmetric because of its elliptical orbit. Spring transitions to polar summer quickly in the northern hemisphere, because Pluto is moving faster along its orbit when it is closer to the Sun.

Space.com says new colors and features of Pluto came to light in the photos:

The surface appears reddish, yellowish, grayish in places, with a mysterious bright spot that is particularly puzzling to scientists.

Some of the colors revealed in the new pictures of Pluto are thought to result from ultraviolet radiation from the sun interacting with methane in the tenuous atmosphere of the dwarf planet. The bright spot apparent near the equator has been found in other observations to be unusually rich in carbon monoxide frost.

Pluto lost its status as our solar system's ninth planet in 2006 when an international group of scientists decided that it was too small and too distant to be considered a member of the Earth's solar-system family.

More from the National Academies:

Pluto is considerably smaller and more distant than the other planets in our solar system. Two-thirds the size of Earth's moon, Pluto's classification as a planet came under scrutiny when many objects of similar size and distance were discovered in the Kuiper Belt in the 1990s.

Posted by: John D. Sutter -- CNN.com writer/producer
Filed under: NASA • Space

The Shorty Awards - the real-time Web's version of the Oscars - has released its list of finalists.

Check out the list here. You can vote on your favorites until Friday at noon ET. (More on how to do that).

Winners will be announced at a March 3 ceremony in New York City.

The awards are voted on through Twitter and are doled out to popular Twitter users in a number of categories, from tech and science tweets to literature and "customerservice" posts.

CNN anchor Rick Sanchez hosted the first Shorty Awards last year.

Below, I listed a few stand-outs from the 2010 Shorty finalists. Some made my list because they're cool, others because it seems odd they would have risen to such Twitter stardom. I'm a little surprised that the only Twitter user on the list that I currently follow is @NASA. But maybe I'm just that uncool?

Sesame Street (kids' show)

Stephen Fry (British actor)

Smashing Magazine (design)

Paula Poundstone (comedian)

Adam Savage (myth buster)

The Llama (bossy animal)

Posted by: John D. Sutter -- CNN.com writer/producer
Filed under: Shorty Awards