Slashdot Mirror
Software Sorts Electronic Evidence
securitas writes: "The New York Times has a very interesting article about the legal industry using new search software to sort through electronic evidence such as e-mail, documents and recovered files, and the process that they go through to make the evidence usable. It has spawned an industry."
Q: What is this all about?
Despite the fact that the Slashdot FAQ claims the editors "never" delete comments, proof exists that they have deleted comments on occasion:
Notice the first comment in the cached version of the story is an ASCII graphic, which had been modded up to +1 at the last minute before the story was archived. That comment is now gone. As you can see, the comment was posted by this user. Notice the user info page now says the account has posted zero comments. All comments posted by that account, regardless of moderation score, have been wiped.
Q: Didn't the comment just get modded down?
No, the comment is gone. It is nowhere to be found in the current version of the story. One must go to the Google cache to view it.
Q: Maybe it got modded down just before the story was archived, and is now gone because comments at 0 and below don't get archived?
No, the story had already been frozen into Slashdot's static HTML archive. Look at that Google cached copy again. It clearly says:
That also means no more moderation could take place. The comment did not get modded down, it was deleted.
Q: So? It's their site, they can delete comments if they want to!
True. But it's also true that I can criticize them for being liars. Here is what the Slashdot FAQ says about the deletion of comments:
As you can see from the Google cache, the comment displayed just fine in a standard browser. It was not deleted because it contained malformed HTML. It was deleted for no reason, save that they didn't like it. That is in direct conflict with the statements in the FAQ.
Q: Yeah well, that comment was an ASCII representation of goatse.cx, which is disgusting. I'm glad it's gone.
Odd that you find the human body "disgusting". Do you take showers with your eyes closed so you won't have to look at it?
Q: Look, that comment was posted by a troll; it was modded up by trolls, and therefore it was invalid!
I once again redirect your attention to the Slashdot FAQ. Slashdot brags about being user-moderated. The comment was posted and moderated up by users. How is that invalid?
Q: Because! I said it's a troll! Didn't you hear me?!
Whatever.
Q: Well, why are you posting this? What do you want them to do about it? What are you trying to prove?
The point of all this is that Slashdot's model of anonymous posting, never deleting comments, and purely user-based moderation doesn't work. They are, in fact, aware of this -- hence the deletion of comments (not to mention the vast number of comments modded down by editors rather than users).
There is nothing wrong with the administrator of a message board taking steps, even ruthless ones, to eliminate crap. In fact, most successful message boards on the web are run in this manner. However, since the Slashdot editors refuse to acknowledge this, and still publicly maintain their fantasy of a working user-regulated system, I think it's pretty funny to go around pointing out their hypocrisy and dishonesty.
Q: Don't you have better things to do?
Yeah, but I'm not doing them right now, am I?
Note: This FAQ is public domain. Copy-and-paste it to your heart's content. It is not released under the GPL.
First post?
Two million some odd post, mutha fucka!
rar..!! cmdrTaco can suck my ass!
"If you vote, it only encourages them."
Running daily stories from the NYT only encourages them to continue the stupid registration thing.
Instead, ignore them until they *get real* and find a way to support their online endeavors without it.
When their advertisers realize that it's an impediment, they'll demand that it be removed.
They'll just ban your IP/account for three days. They lied for the longest time and claimed they were 24 hour bans, but they actually lasted three days and their message has just been changed, I believe, to reflect the three days. I haven't seen even the most frequent troll accounts recently get bitchslapped, but maybe I haven't been watching closely enough. Anyways, just thought I'd let you know.
-- evil_spork
You're a fucking idiot. You should be grateful that you get all of their content for free anyway. They don't have to give it away to freeloaders like you if they don't want to.
Stop bitching and grow up.
-sting3r
This is the worst possible way to hurt the trolls. An IP ban if you've been moderated down 5 times in 24 hours? Most trolls are already -1, so they don't get moderated down. Yet another folly of the moderation system.
try fdisk/mbr. If that doesn't work, try finding a low-level format program for your hard drive.
You never seen such a den of trolls geeks and lamers.
He shouldn't have to low level format anything. If fdisk/mbr isn't the problem, he could just re-run the BSD partitioning and create a FAT partition or whatever. I've used BSD to fix partition problems, I've never had BSD *cause* a partition problem.
Is driving me crazy. I am really getting hungry I haven't had any lunch today.
of the troll side
will be crushed and the trollinator will be ours.
OpenBSD fdisk -i /dev/rwd0a didn't help.
Archive the story after a random number of days between n and 2*n. This will help a lot, because right now trolls track stories that will get archived soon, ordinary people don't have the patience for such things.
Actually, I'd like to see the -1 comments archived as well (separately of course). I'd be curious to compare today's troll with what they looked like last year. But right now I can't! This is because CmdrTaco wants future historians to think that Slashdot has always been a clean place where smart people discussed intelligently the topic at hand.
VA Linux just hit an all time low of 1.26!!
Oh yeah baby!
Future historians will puzzle over why, since /. was such a bastion of erudition in the past, that it's backslid into such a cesspit of trollocity today. This will lead to several very interesting (although flawed) theories.