Slashdot Mirror
LinuxWorld Senior Editorial Staff Resigns
sachmet writes "In light of the interview with Fuat Kirccali, James Turner has announced on his blog the immediate resignation of the LinuxWorld senior editorial staff." From the post: "We regret that Sys-Con Media has
been unable to apply a standard of journalistic ethics that we can comfortably operate
under. We feel that recent articles published with the consent of Sys-Con Media fail to
meet minimum generally accepted journalistic codes, and because the management of
Sys-Con Media has failed to acknowledge that the articles are by all informed judgment
ethically unsupportable, we have decided we must find other avenues for our work."
It is nice to see some honesty and morals in the mess that journalism has become.
It is sad that it took this mess for it to be shown.
I wonder if slashdot might be hiring or its parent company might have a home for these people. Even if it is just for PR purposes.
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?" - Chris Knight (Val Kilmer)- Real Genius
I applaud the integrity of the LinuxWorld senior editorial staff and wish them the best. Hopefully they will be picked up by a publisher that does respect journalistic integrity and just plain human decency.
Is NOT having someone with our point of view in that position going to cause more problems than those that caused their resignations?
However, I applaud the editors for their integrity.GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware
These people who resigned because of their willingness to stand by their morals are welcome in my home any day.
If I owned a publishing house I would hire them immediately.
You need to do a little more research. Anyone can say anything negative about Pamela at any magazine. Publishing personal information for the sole purpose of inviting stalkers is not news or commentary, its predatory and unethical.
I don't always agree with Pamela's point of view, but I don't publish mom's address to invite harm to her.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
James Turner, Dee-Ann LeBlanc, Steve Suehring, I just wanted to express my sincere admiration for your fine example of journalistic integrity.
I want you to know that whatever publication snaps you up, I'm buying a subscription (or subscriptions)!
God is imaginary
I find it highly ironic that a company such as Sys-con denigrates blogs as "not real journalism" while posting a link to start a blog on their home page.
The proper way to respond is to vote with your dollars.
1 - If you currently subscribe to a Sys-Con publication, cancel the subscription. Don't do this via email or a web form. Do it via a published toll-free number (this drives their telco costs)
2 - Check the advertisers list. If you've got a receipt for a purchase from a competitor laying around, send the advertising department of the Sys-con advertiser a POLITE and business-like letter. In that letter state that the broad facts of the case and that due to their continued support of Sys-con you've decided to make your purchases elsewhere.
Avoid the temptation to threaten fire brimstone, retribution, or DoS attacks. Such tactics are not in the best interests of anyone concerned. The LW senior editorial staff left via the moral high-road. Please ensure that any community reaction joins them there.
Let me join the throngs congratulating you on your choice to distance yourselves from SYS-CON.
I read that interview last night, and came away very disappointed. This guy is so in love with the word media that the meaning of the word journalism simply is not grokked in his vocabulary. I even added to the blog entries there indicating that I still felt he owed PJ a very public apology.
But I fear 2 other things now. first, that he will find other people to fill the vacancies, and two, they will not be so dedicated to the truth.
I was even picking it up from the newstand occasionally, when I hit one in my travels that carried it, but that will be no more.
--
Cheers, Gene
1. "Free software terrorists"? You are calling people who write free software "terrorists" because a site got slashdotted?
2. "Stop it"? Where the heck do you get off patronising the readers of this site in this way?
If you wrote your comment seriously then you are both misled (there was no DDoS attack) and silly (using terms like "terrorist").
If you wrote your comment to astro-turf then you should be aware that the readers of this site, while often petty, react rather sharply to people who try to influence them.
And you just made my foe's list. Congratulations.
My blog
Well, we can have a debate about that, but what's not debatable was that the offending MoG article was totally over the line. It included spurious details about this woman's aged mother, and her religion, and calling her an "elusive harridan". What possible relevance do those things have to the content of Groklaw?
Female Prison Rape in NY
Name the company. You don't work there anymore, so spill it.
Why, pray tell, did the parent get modded up to +4 for this comment? They added absolutely nothing to the discussion, save the insinuation that the whole problem was due to the gender of the participants. The poster provided no evidence to back up this strange claim, save that they are both female.
I feel that there are far too many journalists in the media today. They all want to present every story in such a manner that in reenforces their personal, political and/or social world view. There always seems to be an agenda. This is true whether it's MSNBC, CNN or Fox News. We as a society have become so inured to listening to journalists, editorializing (journalizing?) that we don't even realize it any more unless we hear a journalist from "the other camp" and then we just assume that "our" journalists are just giving us the facts and that "their" journalists are heavily biased.
All-in-all, my sense is that PJ does a good job of presenting the facts (she provides publicly verifiable sources) and when she provides opinions, I can usually tell they are opinions. But then again, maybe it's just because she's a journalist in "my" camp...
You know, just give me a good old-fashioned reporter and let me figure out where I stand on an issue. I'm a big boy, I think I can handle it.
"terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution
Go back under your bridge. If you read Groklaw, you know that it is hardly a "blowhard blog." Rather, it is a collection of commentary and court documents on the SCO/IBM case and on other legal issues affecting the FOSS community. If you don't like the commentary, you can add to it -- thoughtful comments from any point of view are welcomed.
Furthermore, PJ has been quite forthright about who is paying her (nobody), and she's already defended herself against far more clever attacks than your silliness. The simple basis for her credibility is the fact that every commentary she posts is heavily footnoted from court documents, all of which are carefully documented and archived for posterity. If you don't agree with her commentary, you can argue from the facts, which are helpfully provided for you right on the site. There is a strong reason why Groklaw is heavily trafficked by both IBM and SCO attorneys -- and that is that it is an informational site of high value to both parties, as well as to interested observers, which you, apparently, are not.
Bottom line: PJ's identity is irrelevant, and so, my little snowflake, are you.
Because in a followup interview, the guy who runs Sys-Con said that he saw nothing wrong with what O'Gara did, that it was ethical, moral and factually accurate, and that the only reason he caved was because the website was under a Denial of Service attack.
Basically, the guy is completely out of touch with journalism ethics and his own conscience, and even if they could ignore their ethical obligation to stand up to him (another journalist ethics thing), they can't be professionally associated with such a hack if they value their careers.
Given that you say you only have access to five lines of the log data, your assesment of the situation is suspect. You need a lot more data to determine if wget is being used malevalently.
Oh, and wget retreiving the same page can be caused by a number of things besides being used as a DOS attack. Suppose, for example, there is a persistent network error (such as ICMP filtering breaking path MTU discovery). That will cause wget to retry the transfer many times. Or perhaps (based on the Konquerer problems reported earlier) wget was getting some sort of "Temporary Error: browser not recognized" from the server. An error in a script intended to perform some other function such as mirroring can degenerate into fetching the same page. Someone might have even written a script to download your home page at regular intervals with the intent of seeing exactly what changes were made exactly when. The wgets might have had the same IP address but not even come from the same machine if the IP address turns out to be a cache on a large network. The cache could even use wget as its retreival mechanism. Or, more likely, is used by a web to email gateway (of the old fashioned sort that allows email only users to retrieve web pages) or a cell phone gateway. Sometimes wget is also used to get messages into web logs after mail to webmaster bounces. while /bin/true; do
wget -O /dev/null http://www.example.com/your_site_is_handicapped_in accessable.html ;
sleep 1;
done
Which has the amusing effect that when they look at the weekly/monthly web logs, the #1 ranked page on the site is a criticism. Waste of bandwidth, yes, but hardly a DoS attack - rather a retaliation to the webmaster's denial of service through incomptence.
Also, sometimes manual wget users load the same page more than once when testing commands such as "wget -O - http://www.example.com/ | fgrep -i HREF | sed ..." while writing a script to extract urls from a site. Or, it could be that there were a grand total of five uses of wget and that your ignoramous publisher didn't know what wget was, googled on it and DoS and found that some crude DoS scripts use wget and was oblivious to its legitimate uses.
So, 5 lines in the log show a tool that is occasionally used for DoS attacks but usually used for other things and he concludes that is proof of an attack. Kitchen knives are occassionally used to commit murder, therefore existence of kitchen knives is proof of intent to murder.
I also find the eudora=autourl very odd. Looks like the web link was being distributed by email and got corrupted. Some SPAM filters may filter email by checking the spammyness of any linked-to web sites. wget could be used for the retrieval portion. In that case, the wgets would just indicate that people were bitching about your site by email.
Not to mention the fact that your publisher was a horses ass. After claiming there was a DoS attack (which he described as something like the most massive DoS attack against a publisher in history), he may have been to embarassed to admit otherwise and may have fabricated a few records as "evidence". If he had given you the complete web log five days earlier, I might be more inclined to believe it. But saying, in essence, "on the basis of five whole lines from a web log provided to me by someone who has just proved he is ethically impaired, I conclude that there is some truth to the claims" just doesn't wash. Not that it would take much to convince me that someone launched a trivial DoS attack.
Kudo's for resigning, though. Good luck finding a new gig. Maybe even one that pays.