One of the victims of the Libyan embassy riots was an IT manager who was chatting online with a friend shortly before the incident and expressed concerns that he might die that night.
Sean Smith was a foreign service information management officer and avid online gamer who had been chatting with a fellow player a short time before he was killed.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton identified Smith as one of the dead in a statement on Wednesday, and said he was a father of two, a ten-year veteran of the department, and "one of our best." She added, "Prior to arriving in Benghazi, he served in Baghdad, Pretoria, Montreal, and most recently The Hague."
Smith went by the handle "Vile Rat" in the game EVE Online, according to a blog post by a friend on Wednesday. The friend signs himself as The_Mittani; Wired Magazine identifies him as Alex Gianturco.
Just before being killed, Vile Rat messaged his friend: "assuming we don't die tonight. We saw one of our 'police' that guard the compound taking pictures."
Says Gianturco:
We knew that Vile Rat was in Benghazi; he told us. He commented on how they use guns to celebrate weddings and how there was a constant susurrus of weaponry in the background. He was in situ to provide IT services for the consulate, which meant he was on the net all the time, hanging out with us on Jabber as usual and talking about internet spaceship games.
Smith had been posted in Baghdad in 2007 or 2008, writes Gianturco. "He would be on jabber, then say something like 'incoming' and vanish for a while as the Kayatushas came down from Sadr City." Gianturco says he had been hoping to visit Smith at one of his postings.
He continues: "If you play this stupid game, you may not realize it, but you play in a galaxy created in large part by Vile Rat's talent as a diplomat. No one focused as relentlessly on using diplomacy as a strategic tool as VR."
Vile Rat was on Jabber when Tuesday night's embassy attack hit, Gianturco says. "In Baghdad the same kind of thing happened - incoming sirens, he'd vanish, we'd freak out and he'd come back ok after a bit." This time, Vile Rat sent an expletive, followed by the word "GUNFIRE," "and then disconnected and never returned," writes The_Mittani.
I'm clearly in shock as I write this as everything is buzzing around my head funnily and I feel kind of dead inside. I'm not sure if this is how I'm supposed to react to my friend being killed by a mob in a post-revolutionary Libya, but it's pretty awful and Sean was a great guy and he was a goddamned master at this game we all play, even though a lot of people may not realize how significant an influence he had. It seems kind of trivial to praise a husband, father, and overall badass for his skills in an internet spaceship game but that's how most of us know him, so there you go.
That is true, Mitch. It is clearly demonstrating the power of the visual image, which seems to make things come more real and vivid, for good and bad. Adding to that the power of the broadcasting capabilities of the internet and you have a powerful tool.
It occurs to me that twice this month we've seen viral video having profound real-world consequences: This incident, and the Romney 47% video, which initially ran as an embedded video on YouTube.
Poignant thoughts, Mitch, and a sobering reminder that all humans have value, not just the "titled" ones.
"I find it troubling that some of the news reports and statements by public officials say that one American was killed, referring to the American ambassador. He certainly was a great American, living a life of service not just to his nation but to the world. But other Americans were killed that day too."
Life is too fragile to try and create hierarchies. The IT Manager sounds like he made a significant contribution in this world as well.
Mitch I totally agree with you.People are people in the first place. I don't think that an ambassador is better than a janitor, who is working in the Embassy. But journalists often increase the value of life of someone by emphasizing the social or family statuse of a person, though how can we judge?
Wagner James Au, an occasional contributor here, reports on a memorial to Smith in EVE Online, the game he loved.
MSNBC has a report as well, actually rather moving. As the newsreader notes: Smith was someone who loved his job so much that when he got home, on his own time, he booted up his computer and did it all over again in a fictional online world.
I find it troubling that some of the news reports and statements by public officials say that one American was killed, referring to the American ambassador. He certainly was a great American, living a life of service not just to his nation but to the world. But other Americans were killed that day too.
I was working in the big GE Building at 30 Rock on 9/11. When I showed up that morning, it had been evacuated, and there was no getting in. Had no idea why, until looking down the length of 5th Avenue (I think), I saw what appeared to be a WTC tower on fire.
Discovered later that 30 Rock is considered to be one of the top four or five target buidlings in the city, after the Empire State, the Chrysler...
It was some weeks later, I think, that we had the fun of the anthrax scare.
I worked for this company then. Our publication's main office was on Long Island, and of course we had a lot of staff there, and they had friends and family they were terribly concerned about. I remember what I had planned on doing that day, and I remember that several colleagues were in Atlanta for the Networld + Interop conference.
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Facebook and Twitter are great for posting cat pictures. But are people really using social media for life-changing communications? Like, if a hurricane comes by and blows down their house?
In a standout presentation at the Jefferies 2013 Global Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in New York this week, the UK government talked about becoming a "very intelligent client."
A consumer business would have to be crazy or desperate to change call-center software in December, the peak of the holiday season. But that was exactly Positec's position.
To help enterprises deploy software faster for mobile, social, big-data, and cloud applications, IBM this week acquired development tools vendor UrbanCode.
Internet Explorer seems like a relic of the 90s, like parachute pants and Friends. But that's just me. I'm a Chrome guy, and before that I used Firefox.
Sean Smith, a US Foreign Service IT manager, gave his life in service of his country and the world. His life and death are a humbling example for all of us who work in IT.
US counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke, who came to prominence with his prescient warnings before the 9/11 attacks, tells Smithsonian Magazine the US was responsible for the Stuxnet supersmart worm that attacked parts of nuclear reactors in Iran – and in the process, has given away one of the world's most sophisticated cyberweapons.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
Many enterprises view high-speed broadband connections as ubiquitous. Yet in about 20 percent of the country, businesses and their employees do not have access to even DSL connections. This shortcoming diminishes enterprises' ability to support their employees.
The new Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) initiative of operators is being run out of Europe's ETSI and not here in the United States, even though the issues have been here for five years. The US needs to step up; otherwise, it's surrendering leadership.
Healthcare providers have been moving to telemedicine treatments, where the patient and doctor can meet online, but insurance carriers are not required to pay for such treatments. This may change, though, as Maryland recently passed a law mandating that insurers pay up.
Jane Williams, technology training manager for Multnomah County, says the ability to share resources is just one of the coming benefits of moving the county's intranet to a Drupal Commons platform hosted in the cloud.
The world’s most powerful supercomputer now resides in Japan, but the US would like to reclaim the lead. The Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee, which is part of the US Department of Energy, is building a supercomputer that will be used for such tasks as simulating nuclear explosions.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
Subsidized handsets, rather than locked handsets, should be the focus of regulators. We're not getting good deals, not fostering innovation, and weakening our power as buyers.
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