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EFF Guide To Blogging Anonymously
jacksonwest writes "Annalee Newitz and Kurt Opsahl just published a great how-to on blogging anonymously. How To Blog Safely About Work (Or Anything Else), covering both the legal and technical aspects of blogging about your job and staying truly anonymous. A must read for those blogging from or about their office."
that this person didn't see this article earlier
Most useful in Iran, China and may be in USA
Quote: California has a law protecting employees from "demotion, suspension, or discharge from employment for lawful conduct occurring during nonworking hours away from the employer's premises.
Posting pictures of yourself isn't illegal, but it didn't help the Queen of the Air...
is to bash on a co-worker and then send the link to everyone at the office
Pubcrawler.ca
.
We always 'google' our perspective new-hires. People have been not hired because of the content discovered.
Just be careful in what you do, and it should be good.
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
Do as I do, post as an AC on slashdot, no one will know who is posting illegal info *your under arrest for viola(*&^*%^(&&^(*&^ no carrier
If free speech is to mean anything, it must be done with a name and responsibility attached. Anonymous speech is really worthless, consider the quality and substance of AC posts on this site.
If you have something to say about your company, then say it. Have some balls and do what it takes to make change. Unless you're willing to put your name and reputation on the line, why should anyone take your speech seriously?
So you have a choice, skulk around in the shadows like you are some kind of lowly criminal looking to the world like you're trying to get away with something, or stand up and post proudly and make a big noise. If you want to be treated like a criminal, then act like one. The EFF has just posted your guidelines. If you want to be treated like a human being with something important to say, then post without fear.
Applies to restrictions on speech by the government. It does not mean your employer has to allow you to say anything you want about them and still retain your job. Speech can still have real consequences.
I do most of the things mentioned in the article in my unnamed blog. For one, I wrote my backend to let me mark certain posts as "restricted" only to certain users, so the public can't even read most of them anyway.
And two, the evil woman I work with is referred to as "The Demon" in big red letters instead of by her real name. Pseudonyms do indeed rock.
Don't do it!
It's way too easy for your employer to get any network traffic. My employer had a keylogger installed on one cow-irker's computer. Well, I suppose you could get away with it as long as you only speak in glowing terms about your employer.
We had a case recently where a bunch of stock brokers were fired (and sued as I recall) because the sms messages they thought were safe; weren't!
If someone spends a lot of time online under a certain pseudonym, to such an extent that he (and it's always a "he") earns a reputation and is known as a certain persona under that "fake" name, how is that any different than from posting under his real name?
On the internet, no one knows you're a dog. Just because someone's posting under what appears to be their real name, there is no guarantee either way. The pseudonym is just as good, if not better than the "real" name. It, at least, doesn't try to fool you into thinking that the poster is someone else.
I don't see how you can stay anonymous and say anything really interesting about your office. Of course you can say "my office has cubes" and nobody will smell you out, but if you say "I know all about the shape of the new iMac" there are only a few people that could have known that, and they will figure you out. Certainly there are variations within those two extremes, but the more unique and valuable your knowledge, the more likely they are to nail you.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Not sure if I2P has been mentioned in any of the slashdot headlines yet.. most likely in a month or two after the UDP transport has been implemented and most of the bugs ironed out.
I2P is basically the network layer anonymized, apps like apache/jabber/irc/etc work fine over it with sometimes only minor mods (to ensure anonymity is preserved.) And no, it's not freenet replacement as some have thought.. different beasts they are.
I'd plug my own eepsite but that would defeat the purpose of using i2p wouldn't it....
Don't use your real name? Don't mention the name of the place at which you work? Wow! I should be writing all of this down, right next to my "How Not To Drown While Doing Dishes" instructional.
-
Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
Frame someone else. Set up a proxy server on a cow-orkers computer, and use THAT to blog about your employer, who you can name. Include personal details -- theirs. Bad mouth anyone you want. But be sure and not do it while the cow-orker is not at work, and make sure you have a way of removing the proxy (passively would be best) if someone might be catching on.
Because, you know, sexist insults are so funny.
Next up on Slashdot, some pundit telling others not to be lazy Mexicans. Wonder why that is...
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Googling someone does not a background check make. If you googled my name you might get the impression that I'm an Irish athlete and mountain climber. Not so.
Forget google.
You need to do a background investigation on your hires - criminal and civil - check job history, references, and do a skills assessment.
I don't care if someone mouthed off on Slashdot, Boing Boing, The Well, or wherever. I care about whether or not I can trust them to do the job and play well with others. Googling someone won't tell you these things.
How about a guide to using some common sense?
I blog my ass off, but I sure as shit don't mention anything I shouldn't. I know the limits of the law in my area and what I could potentially get in the shit over. Occasionally I tread a pretty fine line between kosher and not-so-kosher (a recent issue over feral animals comes to mind), but I know where the line is that you just shouldn't step over.
What's so hard about just not being a dumb-ass these days? If you want to keep your job, don't blog about work. Simple.
Just tick "Post Anonymously"
Does it depress you that you have to sacrifice your principles in order to make your living?
As for anonymous speech leading to revolutions, remember that it is always real people who shed their blood on the front lines of these revolutions. It is not the anonymous blowhards that risk it all, but rather the ones who put everything at stake for their principles.
How on earth do you mod this funny? It is not only a serious point, but in no way is it funny. Mod must be smoking dank. Too right wing to be smoking swag.
Your ignorance is infinitely greater than you realize.
But there are many ways to write a negative web log that still tries to be completely fair and see things from the other person's point of view. I read a number of these (I actually started reading their logs for some tech project they were on but kept on after finding out that they have lives that don't revolve around first person shooters). They seem to write out of a need to get some sort of honesty about what's going on.
One fellow in particular that I enjoy reading writes about his boss, problem clients, assertive sex partners, and demanding family members. He's fun to read because he's figured out that in most cases he is the "problem" rather than all of these people he writes about. He is, after all, the only common link between all of these problematic things. When he writes about a stressful change at work he's not bitching about "the worst decision his boss ever made" but rather "a change his boss made that eluded his understanding".
If I were a future employer and came across his blog, the level of maturity he displayed would go a lot further than whether he mentioned someone by name. Not everyone's that way, but jeez, if you are completely anonymous writing stuff seems like a waste of time.
If you want to leak a secret wrongdoing, send it to a reporter's email address. If you want to write about your stresses and successes, do so in a mature way. If you want to bitch and moan and try to assasinate someone's integrity, be prepared to take the consequences for your juvenile tantrums.
While there are some good tips in EFF's suggestions, the guide is alarming in its willingness to chill free speech.
By the time you finish following all the guidelines, there would be little point in writing at all.
The best advice surely is to consider that you may lose your job for voicing your opinion -- and that as the EFF points out, a little bit of vagueness will generally not be enough to hide your identity.
Beyond that, weigh seriously the importance of your job versus the importance of publishing your thoughts.
Take it further. Commander is a fairly significant rank. So, you could say he's the biggest around Slashdot.
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I was leaning more towards the tradeoff between something like whistleblowing vs. doing something illegal/immoral in regards to your company. If you were working for a medical device company and new that the reported failure rate of a certain life-critical device was much lower than the actual rate, would you (having already exhausted all other options) stand up and report it to the press or would you shut up and collect your paycheck at the end of the week?
Libel is so much more fun.
I assume that most people who don't want to get caught for their work related blogging are writing something questionable, if not downright illegal.
Trade secrets, rumors, lies... it's easy to forget that most of the things you think about your boss isn't true and that the company isn't really going under (like you wish). Not that being anonymous is equal to lying. I see your points but the statement "If you want to be treated like a criminal, then act like one" always scares me. Often I hear this argument applied to the way people dress, you know?
But, any advice for bloggers who are not worried about their employer but their federal governement?
Get your Unix fortune now!
Advice to Chinese dissidents: If you are going to be anonymous, use a pseudonym and digitally sign your stuff .. so that others know it's actually you and/or your dissident group .. that way you can build credibility with a reduced chance of being screwed.
Being totally anonymous isn't very effective, unless what you are saying can really stand on it's own (that is, it's stating provable logic rather than facts/events).
Snap back into reality and you realize that almost nobody is capable of making a decent living and maintain 100% of their principles. The society we live in generates the opposite.
It isn't human nature. It is the system we live in. Until that system might change you will always have the problem where your reputation in the business world changes significantly simply because you stand behind what is right. You see, there are too many potential haters out there which have the power to (and will!) ring your neck on a whim simply because they are religiously or politically against your ideas. The repurcussions(sp?) are limitless.
Your ignorance is infinitely greater than you realize.
hah, I didn't get it for a second, then I went, "oh, hey . . ."
Some say this is off-topic, but it's actually quite related, albeit in a disguised way (though I suppose here, off-topic covers anything not absolutely on topic, things aren't allowed to be merely related, oh well).
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
Ben Franklin used the pseudonym "Silence Dogood" when he was young and writing to newspapers. He pretended he was an old lady, and actually got marriage proposals too.
You can't lawfully do that. If someone found out, they could sue you and whoever posted the information for defimation. It is the reason why former employers never can say anything bad about a former employees.
Likewise, my personal opinions have nothing to do with my ability to do a job. Googeling to find out what political party a person belongs to, their world views, and the like is a bad practice. I know of a guy who sued a company because they asked for his social security number on an application, then did not offer him work. According to state law, that is illegal. The only reason to ask for a social security number is to pay taxes, and an employer that asks for it is implying they have offered you a job. Same thing goes for asking about marital status, or age.
People should know thier rights and sue when violated. Otherwise corporations will keep crapping on people, paying less money, forcing people to get work as contractors, hiring temps, and the like. It all means the death of good paying jobs with health care and job security.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
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How do you know the search results pertain to your prospective employee? Both of the search results I get when I search for my name in quotes are about someone else with the same name as me. I believe he also happens to live pretty close to me.
The point is that anyone can eventually find your blog if your real identity is tied to it in some way. And there may be consequences. Family members may be shocked or upset when they read your uncensored thoughts. A potential boss may think twice about hiring you. But these concerns shouldn't stop you from writing. Instead, they should inspire you to keep your blog private, or accessible only to certain trusted people.
What tripe. What complete unadulterated tripe. Breeding a group of people who are convinced they're doing their thing for the world, yet who write anonymously behind the safety of a pseudonym or "Anonymous Coward" moniker?
Get some integrity people, and write with your real names. Stand up for what you believe in and put your name next to your thoughts.
Or are they not really thoughts worth standing up for?
RST
Let me be the first to say that I, and many others, within the information gathering business use blogs including slashdot to collect information about our competitors. Competitors can be from business to government agencies.
Passive information gathering from open sources goes on all the time especially here on slashdot where certain people give away pretty useful information about the current state of where they work including technical and operational matters.
Some of this information might seem innocuous to many of you but for us 'in the know' we realise that some of you posters provide us with a goldmine of competitive intelligence because we recognize its context. It's basically reverse social engineering in action and it works because humans are social beings who want to 'connect' with their online social peers. We don't even have to resort to using 'recruitable weaknesses' like ideology, money or sex. Some of you people just blurt it out just because you want to be accepted.
Here this bloggers who work in sensitive environment: Awareness of your surroundings can be a wonderful thing.
Is there a program that enables a person to read and post pseudonymous blogs on anonymous networks? That is, napster or p2p style?
So, I don't have to worry about accidently signing on with a bunch of humorless assholes!
And with the patriot act, the technology available to the NSA, and the laws regulating ISP's, they know you much better than you think. You can use your proxy, you can try and use a public computer, but they can find you. You are leaving evidence behind. It is like a guy who wears gloves while breaking into a house. But he does not stop to think about picking up a single hair fiber that falls off his head. Or an eyelash. Or the single carpet fiber that is statically clinging to his jeans. There is always something.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Given the situation you've described above (and I certainly empathize, I have three children of my own), I think we must ask ourselves, how free is our speech? For many of us who live paycheck-to-paycheck, getting fired is as grave a threat as jail time. Is our speech free while our employer is permitted to exercise such authority, even while that same authority is denied to elected officials?
For all those who are going to jump on me, I'm not talking about blogging WHILE at work-your employer has a right to expect that you are working while they are paying you. What I dispute that they have is a right to expect that you will live by their rules for your entire life, even while "off" of work. If that is the case, they should be paying you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year-otherwise, once they stop deciding that your time is worth their pay, they have also decided to relinquish any form of control.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
Blog anonymously
1. Use anonymouser.com web proxy
2. don't use real names, places, dates, that can be tied to a particular individual, company, project
Seriously, that lady is just so cool. I have yet to read one of her opinion pieces with which I disagree with her perspective. A woman can be forgiven so many faults with so much going on between her ears.
i versary_03/ci mg0171sized.jpg
Mom, Dad - this is my girlfriend:
http://joi.typepad.com/photos/cc_ann
That's her first google hit under the images tab. Classic.
I typed my name in Google one afternoon out of boredom and I actually found reference on some website with a email address I had back in 97.
It also found links to my SETI@HOME profile and links to sites with post from the KDE newsletter when I was getting help with some thing.
So seriously, be careful what you put in blogs. If there where a all knowing god in cyberspace, google would be it.
How do you know they aren't run by the CIA?
give a fuck about maturity.
Bit surprised nobody has mentioned Tor.[0] Tor is a way for individuals, groups to source and share information but avoid some of the pitfalls. Tor is a useful tool for making your data (somewhat more) anonymous. Tor allows users to better hide the source or destination of their activities on-line. Tor unlike conventional encryption focuses on the header component of TCP packets so it makes it harder to determine the source or destination of your packets and ultimately your data. You can read more about how it works [1] and the Tor Protocol Specification here [2] and how it works here [3]. Tor should be another essential tool in your security kit.
Reference
[0] Tor, EFF Overview: http://tor.eff.org/overview.html
[1] Tor, How it works: http://tor.eff.org/howitworks.html
[2] Tor Protocol Specification: http://tor.eff.org/cvs/tor/doc/tor-spec.txt
[3] Tor: How it Works: http://tor.eff.org/howitworks.html
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
I was curious as to what Slashdot's IP logging policy is, particularly for AC posts. From the faq, fyi:
We log the usual stuff (IP, page, time, user, page views, moderation, and comment posting, mainly). A few other odds and ends too, but mostly the data is used to make moderation possible. We keep the logs for 48 hours.
"Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." --Eric Blair
Wow, today my friend got fired for blogging about the Nintendo DS. He was working for Guillemot in NYC and didn't say anything that hadn't already been made public by Nintendo, and Guillemot OK'd that he could blog about it so long as he didn't reveal anything proprietary or whatever, but then after some DS hacking site linked to his blog as a source of "insider information" (their words), Nintendo caught wind and sent a notice to Guillemot about it, and they considered it a breach of contract (after they'd already said the blog posts were okay), and had to fire him. Oh well, he hated the job anyway.
I'm on a road shaped like a figure eight; I'm going nowhere but I'm guaranteed to be late.
So those rebels who founded the United States, and wrote scathing political letters published anonymously, they were a bunch of pussies?
Ben Franklin -- a pussy.
James Madison -- definitely a pussy.
Alexander Hamilton -- what a pussy.
John Jay -- total pussy.
As you say, such men obviously have no balls to do what it takes to make change. Why would anyone take their speech seriously? They skulked around in the shadows like some lowly criminals. I, for one, will not treat these pussies like human beings with something important to say.
He said the software industry, not the litigation industry. SCO moved on from software long ago - they're on to bigger and... well, bigger things.
Who the hell doesn't think Velma's hot?
Buncha fuckin' Fredmos in here.
See the post linked to in the GP post.
"What is a buffer overflow?"
Priceless...
IIRC, it wasn't down as anything against the contract terms of employment. Just a vague "bring the comany name into disrepute".
Dude...
The reason people do well or don't do well in a job has nothing to do with their hacker skills, it has to do with whether people are assholes or not.
What I mean is, a guy can be the greatest coder in the world, but if he's constantly whining, or complains about how unfair stuff is, or doesn't have a sense of humor, then he won't be good for the team.
Before we hire a guy, we all interview him/her, then sit around and talk about whether we *like* the person and if he/she's an asshole.
And if someone wrote something stupid online that would get the "asshole" moniker to stick, then we'll use that to base our opinion.
HR hasn't a clue what makes a good hire. And that's in *any* company.
If people decide to boycott, the company is completely free to *ask* them why, complain publicly. They are not OK to force them to buy stuff, though.
Think your analogies through a little better. They stink.
I forget the attribution: "Freedom without limits is just another word".
Ta.
First of all, I wouldn't hire a child molester if he was recommended by Jesus.
And you never *ever* commit stuff in writing (and email is "in writing"). You talk about this stuff in person, one-on-one with people so at best, there is a he-said/she-said thing going on.
But more importantly, I wouldn't give that as a reason. I would simply write in the interview form how this person wasn't as qualified as the person who got the job.
Simple.
If you can't come up with a legitimate reason for not hiring a child molester, then you're too stupid to work in the software industry.
" If free speech is to mean anything, it must be done with a name and responsibility attached"
No. If free speech means anything, then the right to do so anonymous is important.
If the government is engaged illegal and/or immoral activity, then speaking about it with a name attached is tantamount to commiting suicide.
You seem to be saying that unless you're willing to risk your job/family/life then you should keep your mouth shut.
Wow. Great thinking.
Sometimes. Sometimes, its enough to open the window shade. You don't need to be the hero with the name. Sometimes, just exposing the bugs to the light of day is service enough. Why should my 10 year old daughter be exposed to ridicule and hate, and possibly harm, just because daddy has to tell the world about something. *THAT* is irresponsible.
What you're saying is so clearly false, I can't believe anybody would think its insightful. Oh, maybe in some theoretical sense that if the world was fair, you would sign your name, people would thank you and you'd be a hero. But in the real world, the truth gets you harmed in some important way.
Without anonymity, there is no free speech.
Don't you understand what free speech is? Even under the most authoritarian regime, anyone can make an anonymous statement. All it takes is a can of spray paint, a wall, and about 5 seconds. That doesn't mean that the person has free speech. It just means that he has the ability to say something anonymously.
Free speech means that you can say what you want without government interference. Now you can argue whether or not that ideal exists anywhere in real life, but to say that free speech is dependent upon anonymous speech is to have the whole concept ass-backwards.
I suspect your company is not the only one that does that.
Anyway, I've decided that I'm going to change my same some time before I apply for a new job. It's not that I have anything to hide, but I feel that future employers and co-workers would know too much about me, even before I started working at a place. My name is not that common, so it would be easy to see who I am on and what my interests are, from the results that search-engines give.
Has anyone actually decided to change their name, because of the results on search-engines? It would be interesting to hear other people's stories.
Remember to encrypt your blog. Don't hand out the public key to anyone.
"As a side note, I've always wondered if someone with your name could sue you for defamation for doing dumb things under your own name online..."
Only in America...
I think from a companies perspective an anonymous know-it-all is more dangerous than an employee who blogs with a good sense of objectivity.
How would you feel if some John Doe is out there criticising the hell out of your business in the media?
Provided you aren't giving away trade secrets, company plans, or calling higher ranks names, most people will take some fair comment.
Anonymous opinions are worthless. Anonymous facts are not
Yeah, but think about the typical blog. They aren't giving out information about secret government conspiracies that involve selling Nebraska to the Albanians, but rather that a certain company sucks to work at and has bad management. Unless the reader *knows* which company is being referred to (and then knows to avoid working there), the blog is pretty useless. If I just want funny stories about poorly run companies, I can read "Dilbert" instead.
How do they know who a person is if they arent from their ISP or computer? What if you use wifi? what if its a college network? The NSA does not have unlimited tracking powers. They are good but lets be serious, there are ways to be annonymous online and offline. We all know the ways and we all know why its nearly impossible to stop.
There is no "theoretical world" where free speech is rewarded.
Free speech is hated.
Don't believe me? Ask anyone from Europe. They'll all tell you that speech can't really be free, because what if it "hurts" someone.
The head of the UN IT (Chinese, shocker), says the Internet should be regulated because of speech issues.
When the government is committing illegal acts, they generally make it *treason* to speak out against it.
So back to the real world, if you know the government is taking people and giving them LSD illegally, if you speak up, you will just disappear. In the real world, that's what happens.
Invisiblog lets you post blog entries via the anonymous remailer network.
I2P along with Tor are both NSA developed. Now, as much as I like the NSA, I find it funny that they always develop the most "secure" software. SELinux for example.
close, its "repercussions"
I reason that as long as my employer isn't named, there's no real clue that identifies them in what I write, I can write as much as I want about what bugs me without it impacting on my employer or back on me. As my employer has a strict policy about public statements, it's also the case that pseudonymously or anonymously is about the only way I can comment about my life in general.
It's a straight choice - either speak without anyone realistically connecting events to my employer, or be fired. Some people, yourself, and a few opinionated but out-of-the-real-world F/OSS people, etc have recently suggested this is cowardly. You'll excuse me if I avoid taking advice from these groups as you have no idea of the precise circumstances I'm in.
I would agree it would show a lack of integrity if I published private information publically about my employer, attacking them, and ensuring everyone associated this private information with them (ie, if I worked for IBM, I wrote something like "My dumbass boss told me to cancel the XYZ project I've been working on which is going to totally fuck up our customers who were depending on this to deal with the bugs in XY. IBM sucks! Don't work here!"), then that'd show a lack of integrity. But writing generically, or commenting on what's public - stories in the news, etc - is hardly a sign of a lack of integrity.
What I will say is people who make sweeping attacks on entire groups of people without regard to their circumstances, ignoring the obvious, expecting people to value some third party's opinion about them more than their careers, has a seriously screwed set of values.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Sometimes you have to worry about more than just getting fired. This is fsck'ing 2005, and you still have to worry about redneck union hicks kicking your ass if you're not anonymous enough.
Couldn't people just change them to a time when they weren't at the office? Not that *I* do... ;)
VOTE!
See, the "you're the only link" guilt trip only applies when one really is the only link. I.e., when it's about people _you_ chose to interact with, and interactions _you_ had some control over. Simplifying the awfully complex graph of social and corporate interactions at work into "you're the only link" is an _awful_ over-simplification and just plain old false.
Example: a lot of the people you meet daily (including on the street, in the train, at the restaurant where you "did lunch" with a client, etc) are below average IQ. About half of them in fact. That's why it's an average. Does that make _you_ the only connection between stupid people?
I think you can see the problem by now.
Again, that kind of thing doesn't really apply for things that weren't under one's control to start with, and when indeed there was no other external common factor. E.g., if the 5th girlfriend just dumped you, yeah, you're the common link. E.g., if the 5th customer brought to you by the company's marketer is a clueless PHB, then chances are you're _not_ the common link. The common link is the marketter that brought them. E.g., if it's the 5th project which where you're asked to do overtime to implement changes, because the boss can't bring himself to tell the client "nope, we need more time to implement those", then you're _not_ the common link. The common link is the boss. Etc.
So just to clearly summarize it, in the case of an average employee:
- For the co-workers he's _not_ the "only common link". The real common link is the manager or HR person who hired them. Those decided the level of competence they wish to pay for, so, yeah, sometimes you're stuck working with incompetent or lazy people.
True story: I know of one department where they actually did a reverse auction for employees. No, it's not an urban legend. The ones who wanted the least money got hired, regardless of qualification or credentials. Needless to say, much to the existing workers' grief, their new coleagues were about as sharp as a bowling ball. Even if a really cheap bowling ball.
And methinks there it's a bit unfair to blame it on any team member as "you're the common link." No, the common link was the manager who had that stupid idea, in a misguided attempt to cut costs.
- For the clients, the real link is the marketting department that brought those.
- For the tools or technologies one has to use, or to support, again it's a tad unfair to blame the team member or tech support guy. He's not the one who chose them. The real common link is invariably a manager there.
Etc.
And in some cases the only honest thing to say is that someone is incompetent or lazy. It has nothing to do with "assassinating someone's integrity". Some people just do an awful job, and that's that.
Sure, you can pretend to be in some Wonderland where everyone is competent, noone makes any mistakes, everyone gives 100%, and half the corporate decisions aren't an equal split between ass-covering, brown-nosing, ego trips, corruption and nepotism. Quite a happy wonderland is that.
Unfortunately the real world doesn't work that way.
No ammount of soul-searching, seeing the other's point of view, or "maybe I'm the link" guilt trips can really explain stuff like: Coworker A needed 3 years to write the same module that Coworker B wrote in 6 hours. And Coworker B's version had far less bugs (we only found 1 so far, and it was in a library he used, not in his code), and ran 50 times faster. Actually benchmarked on very large real-world data sets, so no micro-benchmarking effects apply.
There's also the fact that Coworker A doesn't even know the very basics of the language he's paid to program in. No, seriously. He hadn't even heard of "call by value", so I had to help him debug his trying to assign a value to a parameter in a method, to change the variable used as a parameter to the method. Also hadn't ever heard of "linked list", "hash table" or the other absolute basics of computer programming.
So please tell me: how should I see that situation. What point of view should I see for him, that makes that one a perfectly competent and productive co-worker? It's not even a flame. I'm genuinely curious by now.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
...so, for instance, don't anonymize the name "Annalee" by using the name "Leanne."
Of course not! Must be "Anal een"
(On a side note, in BareBones' BBEdit, if you ROT13 some text, it pops up a warning that "this operation can not be undone". Either some programmer is having fun, or someone doesn't quite understand the concept.)
I don't know if this has been said yet, but being forced to blog anonymously out of fear of backlash is EXACTLY what the Constitution was trying to protect. Granted, it could be argued this only applies to political speech, but the rest is basically implied, with the regular exceptions. If I can't get on my personal website, and blog about what I consider to be a bunch of idiots running the country, or that I make my own wine, or that I prefer certain sexual positions, where is my freedom? I do understand that there are consequences from shouting on the rooftops, but that doesn't make it right, and we shouldn't be forced into hiding simply because we don't want to shout generic half-truths to the world.
So therefore, there is no free speech unless it is anonymous.
To put it in code:
If Free Speech == Getting Killed
and
I == Don't want to be killed
but
I == want to let other people know about an injustice
Then
I must be anonymous to exercise free speech.
getting fired is as grave a threat as jail time
I would say getting fired could be a more grave threat. With jail, you are guaranteed a roof, food, and stylish clothes.
She might be cute....or not. Can't tell from that picture.
But hopefully, a girl who gives the finger like that will never use the phrase "go slow" in a sexual encounter.
Now *that* would make her rock.
"What about the rest of the time?"
Um...you tell her to get out and you'll see her tomorrow night and then you go out with your friends?
Just a guess.
My employer caught me reading this article on company time, and fired me! Thanks for nothing, you insensitive clods!
Look at all the people complaining about anonymous posters and bloggers. Ya gotta ask yourself why these holier-than-thou types get their panties into such a wad over comments made by people they'll never be able to track down and beat to death with a baseball bat.
Or not.
Don't like the idea of someone making fun of your tiny penis behind the shield of anonymity? Then move to a country which doesn't believe in free speech, and don't let the door hit your ass on th way out. Fuckwits.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
This is really too bad. You might thing employees activities outside of work wouldn't impact their work life, but alas... that isn't the case. If my company found out half the shit I did i'd probably get fired. Which would be hillarious because they keep promoting me because of the excellent job I do!
Being a whistleblower is fun... just have to be careful.
see sig. see sig run. run sig run.
With jail, you are guaranteed a roof, food, and stylish clothes.
And a lover named Bubba.
Knight37 - Once a Gamer, Always a Gamer
Get some integrity people, and write with your real names. Stand up for what you believe in and put your name next to your thoughts.
I'll use whatever name I damn well please thank you very much. Who died and made you God, to say what labels the rest of us have to always wear??
I'm the only one who shows up when googling for my real name (not disclosed here). So, I can't get away with saying "no, that was a different me!" if I want to disown something I've said or done online. Accountability sucks...