Slashdot Mirror
Accidental Privacy Spills
ahem writes "A journalist attends the World Economic forum, and writes an email to a few friends. It's a chatty, casual conference report. The conference is a gathering of the 5,000 most powerful people in the world. The report gives a breezy insight into how stuff gets done at that level, and what the concerns are that keep the world's leaders up at night. That email was intended only for the journalist's friends. That email winds up getting plastered all over the net. Here is a very interesting discussion of the implications of this "privacy spill." Make sure you read down to the Epilogue. Here is the email itself." The Lawmeme discussion is quite thoughtful and in-depth, very good reading.
When will people get that email is not secure. Its the digital equivalent of a postcard, but idiots still email credit card numbers and worse.
gathering of [...] most powerful people in the world
Well why the hell wasnt I invited???
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
The only way to have anything not exposed would be to of encrypted the messages for each person.
The next step? Go the Microsoft way and have either a timed encrypted message or some way to have a message self-delete after so much time. Both are possible but either add it's own complexities or possiblities of comprimise. (ie. the timed message abitliy is out there but basically you view a message which exists on an external server and is displayed on your machine via a doc.write comand. Not the best way.
Patrick Havens (Mr. 573333 to you.) Graphic Artist / Coder / Father / Journeler
This e-mail was intended to be "leaked" so that it gets more attention. Its called constructive journalism. The journalist intended for it to be public, why else would she have written such a lengthy piece?
The solution is simple don't send anything to anybody that you don't want them to spread around.
Technology gives us more speed and a larger play field but gossip is gossip and it will spread via word of mouth over the backyard fence or on somebody's blog. There is nothing new here except the speed and scope.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
How the hell do all these people know I have a small penis?
... that when you pass "personal" notes in the classroom, the teacher might just be paying attention and decide to read it to the rest of the class. This is not a violation of privacy, but rather a misunderstanding of the rules.
This is a symptom of what has become all too common in todays email society - the trivialization of communication.
The "forward" has become a replacement for an actual composed email message. Its easier to maintain the illusion of staying in touch by forwarding some insipid crap rather than taking the time to actually *gasp* drop someone a personal note.
As a result, most email is not private, or more importantly, personal. I can easily imagine what went through the recipients mind - "wow, this is cool, let me forward it to ____". Why wouldn't he ? After all, we foward crap to each other all the time, why should this very interesting email be any different ?
You get something that looks interesting, you forward it. It couldn't POSSIBLY have been intended for ONLY you.
I would bet that had this letter been handwritten, the recipients would not have shown it around.
Welcome to the global communication era.
There is a liberal bastion that opposes the way not because of the people, but because there investments will get screwed.
Power is sexy
Swiss is a hick way of saying "expensive"
Al Qaeda's threat is mostly done with...
Nope... No major news here... Move along... nothing to see.
I would expect that a journalist of sufficient importance to be offered a pass such as 'Laurie' received, would know better than to use 'who' when she should have used 'whom'. More than a typo, I think...
Redistributing is an even bigger no-no. . .:)P
You are not the customer.
Word is bad about saving info. You with find previously deleted text, revisions, computer names, account names, sometime passwords embedded into the document. I would have to say that Word is one of the most insecure formats in which to deliver a message.
BTW - this same way has gotten me past passwords more then once.
Patrick Havens (Mr. 573333 to you.) Graphic Artist / Coder / Father / Journeler
Let's compare it to a real letter, or better yet, a company memo (in dead-tree form), since real letters typically only have one recipient. Let's say a memo gets sent to all 5 members of the HR department of a company. That memo warns that there will be no holiday bonuses this year. It goes on to say that the employees will be informed of this later, but HR is getting a heads-up in advance. Now, one of the HR employees, pissed off about this, decides to scan it, and post it on the company web site. Is he wrong to do this? Most people would say he is, I'll bet.
Now, the question is, why is it so different with e-mail? If I send a printed letter to a friend, I have the expectation that it will not be plastered on bulletin boards around town. If I send an e-mail, people would argue that I can't expect it to remain private. Why? I think the answer is because it's so easy to distribute an e-mail. Clicking the forward button is trivial.
So what's the solution? Disclaimers and confidentiality statements like some companies have on their e-mail? Doubtful. Even if they would hold up in court, who's willing to fight it? How about some sort of flag that specifices whether a message can be forwarded? That smacks of DRM, and no one's going to like that, nor will every client implement it. PGP? Well, that's nice, but once the recipient decrypts it, it's plain text, which can be forwarded. As much as it sucks, we may just have to rely on personal judgement.
So was the person who forwarded her e-mail a jerk? Probably. Should he have asked permission of the author? Definitely. Is there anything that can be done about it? Nope.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
This is an excellent illustration of being extremely careful with the information you posess. And, as the subject indicates, who your friends are. If she considered the information to be somewhat sensitive in nature, then she could have easily: (1) kept it to herself for a future article or (2) maybe make it clear in the email to not redistribute. She obviously chose to do neither, which sort of opened the doors. Unfortunate that someone on her "distribution list" felt that everyone needed to know what went on at the World Economic Forum based on Laurie's experiences. From reading the email it really doesn't look like she has divulged any really serious world secrets. Another prime example of how to learn from one's mistakes.
-- Rick
From the original email: "...various insundry countries...".
S/he's a reporter but thinks "insundry" is a word? The phrase is "...and sundry".
But wait, it gets funnier, I googled (tm) for "insundry" and got more than 100 hits. I guess a lot of people hear "and sundry" as "insundry". Is there a word for that? It's like a meme, but it's something you've heard. A heme! Oh, wait. Taken. A misspelleme?
// todo: implement sig
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This article brings up a number of interesting concerns, including changing views of privacy in the digital environment, the public sphere and how this sphere is affected by new technologies. One subject that I find particularly fascinating is the new interactions between groups that have never been directly concerned with on another. Taken from the text:
---
[Garrett] "Do you imagine for a moment that the participants in the WEF--whether they be the CEOs of Amoco an IBM of the leaders of Amnesty International and OXFAM--waste their time with Internet chat rooms and discussions such as this? Do you actually believe, as you type your random thoughts in such Internet settings, that you are participating in Civilization? In Democracy? In changing your world?:
Whereas rcade says:
"The world doesn't need to wait around for professional journalists to carefully predigest the news for us any more. We're capable of collecting and analyzing information from a thousand different sources and directions, even an injudicious e-mail by a chatty Pulitzer Prize winner to at least one loose-lipped friend."
To these two feuding flamers and their dueling versions of democratic discussion, it seems to me, the only sensible response is "Do we have to choose?"
[...]
Remember how everyone keeps saying that distance is irrelevant on the Internet? Well, this is what happens when distance disappears. You wind up right next to the damndest people.
---
So, Slashdot- are you participating? Are you participating in a political or democratic process? And if so, what is it that you are participating in?
The metafilter thread can be found here.
The first thing I looked at and read was the e-mail. Was it made up? was it real? who cares. The point is that we are curious by nature. We look at things we know we shouldn't. Sometimes it's just curiosity, sometimes it's an invasion of privacy.
my cube has a window...
Not so much the length, but the elegance of her writing is way above what I'd think most people would send in an email like that. Not that you'd expect a journalist to comment: "a/s/l j00 3 me" though from reading her work it seems a little too convenient that this was leaked.
:)
Conspiracy? Sure. Would you listen to Bill Gates if he publicly came out against the war or would you rather get an insight in a sneaky and naughty way?
Sincerely,
-Matt
--- Need web hosting?
This article (and the term 'privacy spill') seems to rightly point out that the propagation of information well beyond it's intended use lies somewhere between an incovenience and a hazard. There's some justified screaming when e-mails slip beyond their intended recipients, especially when they're subjected to scrutiny by the no-life pedantic dinks that comprise some of the Internet population.
But there's also justified screaming when we read stories about Microsoft researching how to extend DRM all the way through the Windows asset model, from Word docs to e-mail.
I hope that at the very least this blurs the black-and-white approach many people have allowed themselves to take on this. DRM can be more than useful than making somebody pay for the new power ballad from the latest band you're exploiting. It can suck when it keeps me from transferring tunes more than three times to my mini-disc. It can be okay when it keeps people from stealing music from some musical artists that are just squeking by to begin with. But it can be very useful in making sure that (for example) some correspondence don't accidentally leave a designated group of recipients. If we're talking, for instance, about distributing documents to doctors, or investors, that might contain sensitive information, then there are some benefits.
So I think this is at least a step towards realizing that we might be able to have it both ways, that there are real benefits for real people to an encryption system suited to offering content to an audience that is larger than might be easy with pgp, but smaller than cc:world
The only acceptable defense of scientific results is to say that they were the product of the Scientific Method.
But just so you know, I too later discover grammar errors in my writing, and I too use my writing skills professionally. My most common mistake is to use "to" where "two" or "too" belongs.
You might want to check for other common mistakes in your rightings.
Sorry. I had to.
Wow check out what he said
[original message]
This is a symptom of what has become all too common in todays email society - the trivialization of communication.
The "forward" has become a replacement for an actual composed email message. Its easier to maintain the illusion of staying in touch by forwarding some insipid crap rather than taking the time to actually *gasp* drop someone a personal note.
As a result, most email is not private, or more importantly, personal. I can easily imagine what went through the recipients mind - "wow, this is cool, let me forward it to ____". Why wouldn't he ? After all, we foward crap to each other all the time, why should this very interesting email be any different ?
You get something that looks interesting, you forward it. It couldn't POSSIBLY have been intended for ONLY you.
I would bet that had this letter been handwritten, the recipients would not have shown it around.
Welcome to the global communication era.
Except that in the case of email, you can't. Repeat after me, kids:
All you can do is make it difficult or illegal. But give me the most-secure email system, and I can probably do any of these:
But by all means, if someone wants to develop a huge expensive system that "guarantees" uncopyable email, be my guest. It'll be good for laughs.
I'm a bloodsucking fiend! Look at my outfit!
And yet the first posts were done within minutes of the article.
A very fascinating talk about privacy, copyright, and the failures of both. Betrayed by friends.
And of course, the assholes that chat online (blog? what a stupid word).
But it comes down to one small point- a single failure allowed that message to get out. Who's to blame? The guy forwarding it to the mass list? Did he know *everyone* on that list? Probably not. So therefore I'm saying the fault lies there. In every other case, the people that forwarded knew the others, no more than if a simple discussion was being undertaken among friends. I might not know joe and amy, but sue does, and she might mention how I had a good success at work. I wouldn't have told them, but that knowledge propogated without my help.
However, if Sue then posted on some forumn about my work success, then she'd be crossing the line. So I say, that is where the line in the sand is....and you crossed it. And Laurie is the one that pays for your broken implicit promise.
I've just skimmed the article (which seems quite good) and read the letter. I can think of a number of reasons the author wouldn't want an e-mail to slip out, but now that it has, I have to say:
:)
That was a damn fine read.
Sure, it could use some editing, but it's not that bad. It's easy to find worse in the print press, let alone on the internet. Besides, that's just form and style... content is what really matters.
And in content, it is actually very interesting and eye-opening. I would be delighted if the author were to write a more lengthy and involved piece on WEF in Davos that actually *is* intended for publication. After this little debacle, it's sure to get a lot of exposure, and I bet she's got a lot more she could say on the subject.
(And sure, the fuss may have all been a marketing gimmick for a forthcoming article. I don't really care, because if so it was really well done!
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
Does anyone else suspect this "e-mail" was put together by a clever bored Sinophile?
Read the email - its a gal, not a guy.
My mom never taught me to sign.
Do you imagine for a moment that the participants in the WEF--whether they be the CEOs of Amoco an IBM of the leaders of Amnesty International and OXFAM--waste their time with Internet chat rooms and discussions such as this? Do you actually believe, as you type your random thoughts in such Internet settings, that you are participating in Civilization? In Democracy? In changing your world? I beg of all of you--the Internet addicts of the world--to turn off your TVs and computers now and then and engage the world. Go have actual eye-to-eye conversations with your family, friends and neighbors. Read a great book. Argue politics over dinner with friends. Go to City Council meeting. Raise money for your local public library. Teach your 12-year-old algebra.
Laurie - can I call you Laurie? - fuck you. Are you so proud that you could hobnob with "cute" Vicente Fox and "huggable" David Stern that you don't see the value of other people's opinions? People who might in fact be active doing things in the real world, in addition to taking advantage of online sites like slashdot, MeFi, etc. for debate, education, info relevant to work, and (though it must not be as "fascinating and fun" as "a day spent with Bill Gates", or as "hilarious" as "the CEO of Heinekin" (sic)) fun.
Do not begin to impugn our work in the real world, just because we don't have the direct access to oil-company executives and NGO bosses that you seem to enjoy so much. We do quite well without it, thanks.
sulli
RTFJ.
Society and politics aren't changing as fast as technology. They can't possibly handle all the implications of each new invention.
Privacy may be an outdated idea. People want it to hide what may embarrass them. But their embarrassment really is the problem.
If something would embarrass them, either they are too weak to stand up for who they are, or they are doing something they know to be bad, and against their own stated principles.
We need to be more forgiving of people for their weaknesses, and be more careful about our own. If loss of privacy would help these two statements, then what is the problem?
-------
Incite and flee.
It's much better than it used to be. Years ago, I used the "strings blah.doc" trick on a Word file an office mate had sent me. What I found was that in addition to the text he intended, a bunch of his email headers were included! He of course blamed Eudora, because Microsoft certainly wouldn't be at fault.
It turns out that Windows didn't use to bother zeroing out RAM when it handed it over to an application, so I guess at times you could call malloc() and get random junk from other running applications. And Office of course doesn't actually write files out in a known format, it pretty much just dumps memory out intact (which is why it's such a pain to reverse engineer the file format). The combination of the OS not clearing RAM and Office writing out memory which it had allocated but never bothered using resulted in email headers in Word documents. This was fixed years ago, of course. I kinda missed it, though. I still routinely run strings on Office docs to see what shows up.
Her name is Laurie Garrett she works for Newsday, she's a well known journalist/writer.
At its peak, about once every few days (slower since the dot-bust), I'd get a message directed to an address that bounces into my postmaster recycle bin containing all sorts of wonderfully cool private information: business plans, financial spreadsheets, customer contact lists, credit reports. Obviously, this was intended for the identical address at the VC firm, but the sender (wrongly) presumed that they could shorten that to just stonehenge.com.
What's odd is that nearly every time I responded with my curt message of "hey, you shouldn't be sending private info with big financial impact without either verifying the recipient or encrypting the data", they would come back at me, like it was my fault! Weirder, they'd ask me what the proper email address was, like I knew (or cared).
I spent about 20 minutes one day talking with the IT director at the VC company. I tried to make him understand that ultimately, it was his company that might be held liable for not making their email address clear to the clients they were dealing with. But he seemed to think that all I needed to do was agree to forward the misdirected email. We never did agree on that.
I still get misdirected emails for a video production house in Canada as well.
Why don't people understand that every character in an email address matters?
Lots of people use email as a replacement for mail. Lots of people forget that email is not much like mail at all.
Mail (in it's traditional form) is slow, hard to copy, and difficult to compose. Email is fast, easy to copy and easy to compose. Neither are very secure. Combining composability with easy copying gives you forwarding.
With forwarding being so easy, people do it as second nature to share interesting/relevant information. It would not surprise me for a minute to see something I didn't want passed around forwarded because the recipiant didn't realise it was confidential, mostly due to not taking the time to rub two brain cells together. Nevermind the technolgical security issues, which make me place email as being way less secure than calling someone on my phone.
If I'm going to send anything at all that that I don't want forwarded, I'll make it painfully obvious with 'DO NOT FORWARD, PRIVATE, FOR YOUR EYES ONLY' etc. Of course, even with that, I still would not forward anything other than the lowest of privacy concern on my part, since email is so insecure.
If I want to keep it secret, the most secure form is to tell no one. If I'm going to tell someone, at the highest security level, it would be in person where I have the least chance of being overheard. Email is LAST method on the list, used only for trivial secrets.
W9x:Thanks for the make-work project Bill.
The World Economic Forum wasn't mentioned in the mainstream press?
Really?
Yes, it's a blog. Sorry if that offends you.
There are two mistakes in the first two paragraphs alone: "truely" and "insundry").
Uhm, no, you are mistaken in your understanding of malloc. This is the standard for malloc:
Taken from malloc (1).
It is not the operating systems responsibility to clear the memory of something recently allocated, and it is good programming practice to set the bits to 0 after a malloc unless you know for a damn well certainty that you will fill the entire segment.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
I'm thinking it's a hoax due to this line:
"I learned from American security and military speakers that, "We need
to attack Iraq not to punish it for what it might have, but
preemptively, as part of a global war. Iraq is just one piece of a
campaign that will last years, taking out states, cleansing the planet."
Straight up, that may BE their initiative, but they would never SAY it. Christ. Especially to a group of other world leaders, not all of whom agree.
Neural Nets in Python
Any time we release a document to any other group of people, inside work or out, we are 'encouraged' to copy all, paste into a new document. That document is then password protected from editing (weak, I know, but it shows diligence). Only then is it to be sent out.
:)
Of course, following all of that is a royal pain in the arse, so it only gets done on vendor communications and whatnot, and typically it's iffy then. But it is funny to see a template that had gotten hit by a virus from my boss once- I called him up and had him panic about having another bug on his box
Since the writer went to the conference as a journalist, she was expected to publish something. With a bit of cleanup, she could have published that as a column. Nobody in Europe would be upset.
The US media is very gentle on the Administration. You don't see publicly in the US media that, to most of the world's elites, Bush and his cronies are viewed as inept and dangerous. "Jesus freaks with nuclear weapons" is a bit harsh, but it's mainstream British opinion.
On the economic front, everybody who can read the numbers knows it's going to be at least a few years before things get better. Whole countries are going bankrupt. IMF policy doesn't work. The bubble in the US still hasn't fully deflated. Japan has been in the tank for a decade, and nobody knows how to fix it.
Again, none of this should surprise anyone other than heavy TV viewers.
Your problem is that you aren't reading the right mainstream press. Information about the World Economic Forum was there to be found if you wanted to read about it. Just a guess, but I suspect that a lot of slashdotters did in fact see articles about the WEF, but didn't bother to read them. It's much more enticing when you read about it in the form of a leaked e-mail, than to go and bother to read the business section on CNN.com or to bother to pick up an issue of the Economist. I know it was in the mainstream press because I read about it in the mainstream press.
The World Economic Forum is not secret--hundreds of journalists are there covering it every year. It's not a secret society, it's just a bunch of the world's movers and shakers getting together to discuss the economy and global politics. They even have a website that, among other things, details the discussions in every meeting www.weforum.org.
One other thing. That journalist was obviously trying to make herself sound more important, as though she was one of a select few to get the kind of access she got. In reality, according to the WEF website, all journalists who are selected to attend get the same participation rights as everyone else.
Eagles may soar, but weasles don't get sucked into jet engines...
I took it all as perfectly correct reporting, without even being run through a 'should I actually publish this' filter. In some ways I'd call that MORE accurate and correct than a more carefully worded story.
Being alarmed about war planning myself, and also very skeptical of the prospects of economic wellness from uncontrolled laissez-faire globalization, I found it incredibly encouraging to learn that yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as Reality.
It's not just that these rich movers and shakers are 'just people'- it's that they're not in control, and that they are capable of recognizing when the policies of those like them lead to olgiarchy and the collapse of the worldwide economy. These aren't a bunch of Socialists but they're not having any of the economic social darwinist garbage- if holding to parody-Libertarian dogma means the poor get poorer and it affects THEIR PROFITS, they'll recognise that relatively quickly and they will do something else! I like that these are pragmatic people. They'll go with what works...
I think that was worth dismaying a journalist, I really do. I think the truth is much more important than her feelings of chagrin at being mocked for spelling mistakes or whatever- some people don't seem to 'get' that her ability to REPORT was terrific and plainly on display, and the news was desperately important.
it is a trust problem.
Somebody she trusted, violated that trust.
If I tell you a secret, and you just start telling people it, it is not the peoples fault, it is the person who violated that trust.
Of course, peple with 2 or more brain cells will usually indicated it is not for the public. Like "please don't spread this information".
Once it is out, it is out. Personally, I think she should of encrypted it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Not really in the personal privacy sphere but I once saw a DEA document that they published in PDF with the name of their agents blacked out. in Acrobat the names were actually blacked out but in OS X preview app you could see them.
I know absolutely nothing about PDF but I assume they have layers.
Ironically it was a report about some Israelis trying to gather information on DEA agents and there they had all their names and addresses published in the internet.
The issue of e-mail privacy is a modestly serious one. I was stung by this in a bad way two months ago. I sent an angry personal e-mail to the president of a fundamentalist Christian 'family rights group,' who in turn took the verbatim contents of that e-mail and published them in a press release from his organization (because I'm the editor of a small but well-known newspaper).
Suddenly my personal e-mail to him was circulating in the inboxes of thousands of the group's members, and I started getting calls from the media, family rights groups, etc. Several other 'family rights' groups published the story on their websites; it went national rather quickly. I later apologized for the e-mail, but the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth. The issue is likely to haunt me for a while, even though the hubbub from it has died down now.
Now, it's quite true that I should have known full well that if I send something out in e-mail, it could get re-distributed; it's the nature of the beast. So I'm not really too upset at anybody but myself. Even so, the flippancy of people in dealing with personal e-mail is quite striking. You also see this when people CC or BCC to people other than the primary recipient.
I feel sorry for the journalist (although her e-mail was fascinating to read!). There ought to be a higher level of trust allowed in e-mail, but since there isn't, we ought to watch what we write.
Read Kevin Phillips' Wealth and Democracy. It is subtitled "A Political History of America's Rich," but it is really an economic history of the U.S.
Well, it seems the Slashdot crowd has plenty of book smarts, but no street smarts. Where I come from, we call leaked letters like this "propaganda". Nobody writes to their "friends" in this style. This was written for dissemination worldwide, and a "leak" cover story invented to make it seem more credible - to make it seem less like this "journalist" just made a bunch of stuff up.
Lots of journalists attend the WEF, yet this is the only "letter" we've seen like this. Why is that? Because it's not real, that's why.
Privacy concerns are moot when you're talking about hoaxes, propaganda, and articles intended for public consumption from the start. You're all missing the point here.
Just think about the privacy implication of such cross-application leaks on a multi-user system. Rather than relying on a broken word processor, an attacker could write a program that intentionnally malloc'ed large chunks of memory, and then went searching through them for interesting data of his fellow users...
Oscar Wilde once wrote to a friend, "I am sorry to write you such a long letter. I don't have time to write a short one."
the author hadn't flattened the layers. it got noticed I think by a reporter using a slower computer than many used at the time so they saw the names appear then get blanked over where-as for most people that happened too quick to see. it was reported here on Slashdot
> Who writes such long casual emails (without
> spelling mistakes and grammatical errors) ?
The fact that you can't spell or write doesn't mean nobody else can.
And bear in mind that the writer is supposedly a professional journalist, who may be assumed to *like* writing.
Instead of ranting at the bloggers and posters, Mrs. Garrett should simply have said something along the lines:
"That email was private and intended for a only a few friends. I am sorry it has been exposed to the world, it was never meant as perfectly accurate, peer-reviewed report of the Davos forum, but rather my quick impressions. Please take it as such, and do not base any business or investment decisions on it. Ciao."
The fact is, she was naive and unthinking to fail to realize the possibility that one of her friends may forward it, and that the email would get out. Yes, she should have a right to privacy, but the possibilty certainly exists, and instead of relying upon a nebulous "right", she should have taken steps to minimize or eradicate that possibility instead. Both she and her friend made a mistake, and the email got out into the news-hungry metanet where it snowballed. But ranting at random people for that only made matters worse. Something for us all to keep in mind.
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
Is her complaint really about privacy or is it about the heat she may be taking for having an off-the-cuff report of the WEF spread around that perhaps is not congruent with the way the rest of the media wants such things reported - i.e., edited by editors with political axes of their own to grind?
Did she write an "official" report on the WEF - and if so, how does it square with her "unofficial" one?
Otherwise, the analysis makes no sense. Intellectual property is what's in your head. Once it's outside your head and outside your direct control (i.e., encrypted on your hard drive), it is no longer property and no longer yours. You can use encryption - which works only if the decryptor agrees to maintain the encryption. Or you can use a non-disclosure contract - which works only as long as the second party does not breach the contract and also imposes the same contract on anyone to whom they are allowed to forward. These things are merely delaying tactics.
Once one of these events occurs, do you then go back and complain about the whole history of technology that you didn't use a quill pen and the Pony Express?
And if you react irrationally and decide to forego the Net, is that supposed to alter the technological and economic impact of the Net such that we should be worried about it?
None of that makes any sense...
I think Garrett's complaint stems not so much from the privacy issue but from her concern over her public, social, and professional status as a result of off-the-cuff remarks. And this is not an issue anyone should be concerned with.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
The writer of the Feature on Accidential Privacy Spills goes on about P3P, encryption, copyright, ... but he seemingly simply forgot one point. The netiquette clearly states:
E-mail is not to be published.
The guy to blame is also clear: Adam Davis posted the e-mail to a mailing list, which is publication. (And some other guy called 'beagle' seemingly published two other e-mails of Laurie Garrett).
All this endless talk on how publishing e-mails degrades (or improves) information of the masses in a democracy, all this speculative writings on possible technologies to prevent it. This all is completely pointless. The question is how to make everyone aware and understand the netiquette and why it is necessary. The author of the feature implicitely gives some pretty compelling reasons for the why but also clearly shows he hasn't understand the netiquette since he (mockingly) proposes to Cease-and-Desist the e-mail out of publicity.
There is no need for C&D. Netiquette has been breached and any webmaster who really deserves that name should be extremly willing to remove the e-mail from any website/archive he is responsible for simply on request.
Social pressure is it. Or maybe was it. We shouldn't have let in all those AOLers a few years ago .
This long, rambling, long, LawMeme article spends a lot of time huffing and puffing about nothing important. News flash to the writer: "information wants to be free" (a property or quality of information actually).
;-)
The article isn't really worth reading because it's a long, drawn out self-debate about whether people are going to stop using email because there's a chance it'll escape. To most people, nothing they write about is important enough to really make this a serious problem. People like Laurie should be more careful.
There's no great lesson here. But it's obviously a fascinating leaked email
simon
home page
On their website, they've got video/audio, and transcripts of the more important speakers. The C. Powell one is pretty decent.
there is no thing
what else could you want?
The days when there was a standoff between the USA and the USSR, so that neither got to "take out" as many countries as they wanted, look pretty attractive in hindsight.
As a Hungarian, I can assure you that the Cold War era was in no way attractive relative to the current international situation. Furthermore as a "resident of the planet" myself, I also do not wax nostalgic over the threat of the planet being "cleansed" by an all-out nuclear war between two superpowers.
Although things could certainly be better right now (you American's voting out that clown Bush in 2004 would be great start), at least in my country, things are much better than they were only twenty-odd years ago.
I don't have any problems with Laurie Garrett's original email or the second one. It's quite refreshing to get a sneak peak into that world. I have problems with how the issue was handled later on by turds like Matt Haughey and his lakeis. That also includes the writer of the LawMeme article. If you want to convince yourself of their duplicity, all you need is to read their last shit dropped on metatalk. The best part is what they write about Slashdot. People who spend all their day on a website called metafilter. Tee hee. No wonder Matt Haughey is so bitter. He is completely dead. His former company, Pyra just got bought up by Google so he has every reason to hate the world. February 28, 2003 Accidental Privacy Spills. (found via /.) In which are discussed the Laurie Garrett thread and its implications for privacy, correspondence, and the getting of life.
posted by brownpau to MetaFilter-related at 2:42 PM PST
That should be /. I know I tested that link. Gah.
posted by brownpau at 2:48 PM PST on February 28
Double post, I'm afraid.
Worth looking at again though.
posted by feelinglistless at 2:51 PM PST on February 28
Ah hell, sorry, everyone. That's what I get for not dropping by MeTa often enough.
posted by brownpau at 2:56 PM PST on February 28
Actually it's fun to read what the Slashdotters have to say. What a closed group self-righteous introverts, spending all day arguing on a website. They really need to get a life.
posted by Stan Chin at 3:18 PM PST on February 28
Actually, that would create a sparse file which ls(1) would report as having a size of "large" bytes, but du(1) would report as occuping zero blocks.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
maybe i should move to europe (it would be canada but i hear they're becoming mroe and more like us everyday hell they pay taxes to the riaa for cdrs for christ's sake)
they are jesus freaks with nukes, and bush is pushing a holy war
and ashcroft is a jack-booted goose stepping nazi and i'm glad to see the rest of world is leery of him too he alone has made me reconsider my citizenship more than once
i've been reading news.google.com caches the last few days basically saying that 2/3rd's of the english don't support their prime minister at all, i wonder what similar polls in teh US would (have?) reveal(ed) and even went so far as to say 1/3rd would not support a war even if a second resolutoin from teh UN said so.. they had a "revolt" in the house of lords over some war-related issue, it seems that bush isn't the only one with a dissenting public
if you disagree with me REPLY have the balls not to moderate
Am I the only one that can't stand it when people go over seas and snicker about how gauche America is and Americans are. I am British by birth, I lived in Canada and am now and forever more an American citizen and resident. Invariably, when I go overseas, especially Europe, people for some odd reason feel it fit to start in on how horrible America is. They start with a fairly inocuous, off the cuff criticism and look for the slightest support of their observations and if they find the support they are looking for, you have to spend the next 30 minutes listening to how America "just doesn't get it". What is worse is when the American joins in on anti-American tirade. I don't think for an instant the every foreign national should blindly follow the lead of the party in power. The people who do that are clearly partisans and are just the type of people who engage in this self-loathing anti-Americanism. A pragmatic person can see that life is extremely complex. Those that say they have the answers are almost invaribly those that do not even understand the question. Economics, foreign policy, politics ... are 99 parts art and 1 part science. The answer is ALWAYS contingent upon many unknown varibles. No one can, with any consistency, predict outcomes in these fields. Leaders of countries, especially true democracys (and republics) rarely make flip decisions. These elected officials futures depend upon their decisions today. So when people such as the author of the email in question express the views that she did, they are really just saying that they either don't understand the questions or just are just too bitter to be intellectually honest.
The reason that countries make these comments about other countries (especially America) is that they are trying to exert their influence over the foreign power itself. America engages in this as does every other country. It is just a game of politics.
BTW unilateral means one-sided. Multilateral means many-sided. Unilateral does not mean "without UN support." America is not acting unilaterally, it is acting multilaterally without UN support. The trick is to be intellectually honest and not fall prey to politics.
To keep this on-topic, it sucks that the author's email was forwarded and read in such a public forum. The moral is pick your friends wisely.
Google News is pretty good. It may link to some sugercoated sources, but it will also link to international ones, so it all evens out.
Understanding a Middle East story is only possible after having read both the Israeli and Arab takes on it.
May we never see th