This week has seen so-called trolls causing all sorts of chaos, especially for Twitter and a handful of its users. There have been bomb threats, rape threats and all other kinds of nastiness that has forced the micro-blogging giant to add another reporting function to the site.

Trolls have been a scourge of the Internet for years though. Whether they’re doing it for the “lolz”, to express support for freedom of speech or because they genuinely dislike someone, they aren’t going to disappear any time soon.

Patent trolls are another issue altogether. They have been irritating a host of tech titans, from Rackspace to Google, picking up IP not to use in technology but only to make some money out of the courts.

Punishing the trolls

They don’t always get away with it, however. In response to this week’s harassment of various female users, arrests of young males have been made. And tech titans are joining forces to rid the world of patent trolls.

Things might get a lot trickier for trolls from now on, now that the police, who are already keen to clamp down on naughty social media users.

And if you’re going to fight the enemy, you should know them. So if you hate trolls as much as most people do, have a go at our quiz and then let’s go troll hunting!

Try the quiz!

And if you like it, try some of our others…

Thomas Brewster

Tom Brewster is TechWeek Europe's Security Correspondent. He has also been named BT Information Security Journalist of the Year in 2012 and 2013.

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