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Flash Mob Gang Warfare
TexasDex writes "You've all heard of flash mobs and Flash Mob Computing. Now here's a new twist on the flash mob phenomenon: Almost 3 dozen people were arrested for a March 3 street fight. 'What makes this case unusual is how the clash was arranged: via a profanity-laced Internet chat room.' Apparently two Dallas gangs, after trading insults in a chat room, traded their keyboards for fists and baseball bats and arranged a time to meet and duke it out in real life. The gang members were later identified and arrested with the aid of a digital video tape of the brawl. According to one officer, 'Some of them actually signed in with their true names, so that helped us identify people.'"
Sorry, but has already been done ages ago in the Netherlands.
This time it was a major battle between Ajax and Feyenoord (football clubs from Amsterdam and Rotterdam respectively) supporters, to quote:
"In March 1997 an Ajax fan died after an organised fight between hundreds of Feyenoord and Ajax hooligans in a meadow near Beverwijk."
This lead to the death of one Ajax supporter Cario Picornie.
They organised this fight using cellulars.
Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai
Actually I believe its "I'm not quite sure about the former" or something like that.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
This is not really news at all. English football (Soccer for you yanks) hooligans have been pre-arranging fights for years. From what I hear from friends involved in that scene it's all very polite too. People meet in pubs before the game and exchange phone numbers. After the match teams of scouts seek out a suitably sized area away from the massive police presence the big "Category A" games attract and report their findings. The bosses phone each other and meet up for a big fight.
These meetings have adjusted to bring in new technology, many 'firms', as these groups call themselves, now have their own bulletin board with bosses exchanging URLS over SMS before the match in order to orgainse the fight online.
Admittedly these things don't break out from a flame war, these are far more premeditiated, but using the 'net to organise a fight is old news.
Oh, the best thing about these boards was how the members would list their "Battle honours" after each post.
Milwall '87
Cardiff '92
etc.
This is hilarious. Myself and my friends around Dallas had been talking about this fight all week, about how dumb it was in general, how stupid people were to let someone videotape it (that's how they identified the participants), and how surprised we were at the lack of knives and guns, and that most of the fights were one-on-one instead of the normal "gang up on one person" kind of fight you see around here. There has been a lot of video of the fight on local TV as well. It is amazing to see it show up on the Slashdot homepage, world colliding kind of strange.
And no, these kids were not "computer nerds". In fact, that part of Garland is considered a low-wealth, blue collar area; these are just punk kids who happen to use computers.
Classic prisoners' dillema. As soon as you agree to limit what kind of weapons to bring the person bringing the next level up wins easily. No one should ever agree to a limit and if they do don't trust them to stick to it.