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eBay's Ill-Timed Lifetime Achievement Webby
theodp writes "eBay CEO Meg Whitman will accept a special Webby Lifetime Achievement Award next month on behalf of the eBay Community, which has 'permanently changed the way people connect, discover and interact with each other.' Perhaps by then, people will have forgotten how eBay enabled buyer 'Blazers5505' to hook up with sellers like 'oneclickshooting' just weeks before the worst mass shooting in modern US history, prompting eBay to issue a gun-parts-don't-kill-students-guns-and-ammo-do statement that showed little evidence of its celebrated commitment to social consciousness. CEO Whitman, who received $11.1M last year for her leadership efforts, has kept a low profile since tooting eBay's trust-and-safety horn for Wall Street analysts two days after the Va. Tech rampage."
Ebay didn't kill anyone, sheesh. If he hadn't gotten the parts there, he would've gotten them somewhere else. What next, a story on how McDonalds is supporting criminals by allowing the to buy lunch there?
Maybe I'm missing something here, but I don't see the hypocrisy.
Cho bought holsters and empty ammunition clips off of eBay, something they stated while refuting the rumors that any actual ammo or guns had been purchased. eBay expressed their regrets that any item purchased on their site was related to the shootings in any way, and contacted law enforcement and offered their assistance. How is this not committed to social conciousness?
Who are we going to crucify next in our crusade against anyone and anything that might have contributed to the VA Tech shootings?
Oxygen?
-"Law enforcement officials confirm that Cho Seung-Hui was seen to have been breathing during the video sent to the NBC. It is unclear what role the earth's atmosphere may have played, but the investigation is looking at every angle.
'We can not exclude the possibility that oxygen in the earth's atmosphere had a catalytic effect on Cho,' chief of Police Jurkfashe Eidjit stated to the press, 'We will be investigating this very thoroughly.'"
Shoes?
-"In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, police discovered numerous articles of clothing, including shoes, in the dorm room of Cho Seung-Hui.
'We are deeply disturbed by the presence of these articles,' investigator Stew Piddington stated, 'It is clear that Cho surrounded himself with many horrifying items, such as shoes.'
Companies such as Nike, Reebok and New Balance deny the claim that shoes had any influence on the shooter."
Or how about NBC?
-"In a shocking new development, CNN reports that the Virginia Tech shooter, Cho Seung-Hui, exclusively watched MSNBC.
'We've said for years now that MSNBC is a corruptor of our youth,' a CNN spokesman stated at the press conference, 'But now we have definitive proof.'
MSNBC PR representatives were quick to deny the corrupting influence it had upon Cho, but public opinion has turned against them. The MSNBC offices were burned down by an angry mob this morning in a display of solidarity with the mourning families of Virginia Tech.
'We can't let evil institutions such as these continue to propogate messages of violence and hatred,' one of the crowd stated, 'There's no telling what might become acceptible in our society if these unethical businesses aren't stopped.'"
Seriously, there were a lot of factors involved in the shootings, but trying to attack ebay as though they had personally furnished Cho with his weapons is ridiculous.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
What's your point, twerp? That somehow Ebay doesn't support your gun control agenda and is therefore bad in some way? Get a life.
If the jerk didn't get a gun, he would have just run over a crowd with his car, or he would have built an ammonium nitrate bomb. Evil and crazy men will do evil and crazy things.
Quite frankly the situation might have been ameliorated to some degree if concealed carry were legal on college campuses (VTech). Then a legally carrying civilian might have been able to stop some of the slaughter.
Why the Ebay smear?
"Man is nothing without the works of man" -- Helvetius
I'm not sure where the problem is in Ebay's position. Anyone can go into a store and legally by a gun clip, without a background check, and without being 18 (assuming the clip itself is legal to sell). Therefore, Ebay has no responsibility to verify the status of the buyer, unlike guns, and bullets.
It's the same thing with cigarettes and cigars. I can't buy tobacco products on ebay, but I can buy a butane lighter. Is this inconstancy on Ebay's part? Nope... anyone can buy a lighter, but you need to be 18 to purchase cigarettes.
Your reality is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever. - Baron Munchausen
Yes, because technical quibbling over terminology is really looked down upon here at Slashdot.
See you later folks, I'm off to go steal music through the tubes.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
Holy crap, that is a pretty trollish summary.
Admittedly, EBay has problems. But EBay didn't shoot anyone in Virginia.
Furthermore, they didn't cause Cho to go haywire. The fact that they made it easy for him to get magazines is not a problem -- it's a sign of how the internet has changed how people interact with eachother -- which is exactly the reason why EBay got a webby.
Mediums for exchange of information and property are not bad. People who use them for bad purposes are bad.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Gee, would it be possible to compose a more inane, hysterical post? I kind of doubt it. Every rhetorical flourish we decry from the the censors and prohibitionists we despise is reprised here--but since it is about GUNS and EBAY, well, were just supposed to swallow it?
They're correct about the whole guns don't kill people thing. This is Slashdot, so I'll make a technology analogy, even though people here tend to be far more political than technical. We like getting on Microsoft's case when they fix a bug, pointing out that there are far more existing bugs that they didn't fix. Hackers (or crackers, if you must) will exploit any available means to gain access to a system, so patching one hole in a system with many doesn't do a whole lot.
The same thing happens with gun law restrictions. Do you really think that if this guy wouldn't have been able to buy ammo on Ebay that he wouldn't have gone on a shooting rampage? He would have just found a different way of doing it, whether it be with a hunting shotgun, a sword, or a fertilizer bomb. Keep in mind that while I'm in favor of concealed carry, it doesn't mean I think that people should be able to access semiautomatic firearms without a significant (1 month?) waiting period.
I know that comparing the shooting to a system being hacked isn't all that accurate, but I'm trying to make a generalized point. There are many things out there that have both good and bad aspects, but that doesn't mean that we should focus only on the bad and ignore the good. Doing so is shortsighted and kneejerk, similar to all the save-the-children and ban toothpaste from airplanes crap. Be consistent in your criticism of this stuff.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
but it sure does seem that Slashdot's articles have been increasingly more "reactionary" or, at least, provocatively worded.
I mean, it's one thing to specialize your content for a particular audience, it's quite another to "pander" to them.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Let's concentrate only on the harm that guns make possible. That way we can demonify them. We can say that guns kill 20,000 people per year (in the US), so guns should be banned. But what if we did the same for automobiles? Cars kill 50,000 people per year (in the US), so cars should doubly be banned.
Nothing is wholly good, or bad, except possible people who try to claim something is wholly good or bad. THEY are wholly bad.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Add slashdot editor/submitter to personal block list for posting story that is nothing but flamebait. And only a day after I was praising digg for stealing our idiots. Looks like they missed a few.
To imply that Ebay is responsible in anyway for Cho's deranged killing spree is dishonest and contemptible. It's not like Ebay or Paypal are firearm friendly to begin with.
An appropriate first post for a submission that is a full blown obvious troll.
Slashdot is apparently now accepting terrible editorialization of news stories.
It is well known that eBay does not know its buyers and sellers. It cannot filter out scammers and fraudsters. Expecting it to filter out murderers is even more insane -- so insane that I can only speculate that this is not what the poster even has in mind. I assume, then, that the poster's complaint is that eBay allows these items to be listed in the first place.
Apparently, the poster is extremely fond of gun control. That's fine. You're entitled to your opinion. Choosing to capitalize on a tragedy to motivate a witch hunt in the name of your ideologies is another matter entirely. eBay allowed listing of these parts in full and complete compliance with state and federal laws -- laws which eBay has, in general, gone above and beyond the call of duty to satisfy.
This witch hunt smells to me of exactly the same bullshit we went through after 9/11, when people looked for anyone and anything to blame, and when highly questionable "solutions" were pushed through the legislature with little thought or caution. And now after Va. Tech, we've got the usual crowd of people utterly unable to accept a world in which tragedy is a reality, attempting to blame anyone and anything for allowing this to happen. eBay gets blamed for allowing Cho to purchase magazines, even though these magazines were readily available elsewhere. Video games get blamed for allowing Cho to "train" for the murder. And, of course, the right of the People to keep and bear arms gets blamed for giving him the freedom to own firearms in the first place. Of course, the second amendment is hardly the only victim in the aftermath of all this: the first amendment has also suffered considerably, with people getting arrested for having highly laughable "warning signs," like violent writing.
Frankly, these school shooting do not scare me. I fully accept that someday, it could be me among the dead in such a tragedy -- or my wife, my sons, or my daughters. But, eventually, my name will be among the dead for one reason or another. I refuse to live what days I have left, be it 100 years or be it a week, gripped in fear about when the curtain will drop on my life. And so what scares me far more than school shooters and terrorists are the people who are unable to do this; people whose fear is so profound that they will not only undermine their own lives in a futile attempt to stop death, but they'll demand that you undermine yours as well, ironically by undermining the very rights that literally millions of people have voluntarily stepped into the line of fire to protect.
So, in conclusion, I do not find Cho to be a terribly threatening in the grand scheme of things -- not nearly so threatening as folks like Jack Thompson or, apparently, the author of this post, who attempt to inflame the matter with laughable policy suggestions that curtail our freedoms and do nothing to maker us safer.
Just because their social conscience differs from your own does not mean that they are wrong. When you persecute a company or an individual out of an outright intolerance for their beliefs then just how much of a dialogue do you expect?
We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are.
-- Anais Nin
The ignorance of the writer does track with the general ignorance of the subject by those hellbent on banning guns. Generally a gun banner is someone who doesn't know anything about firearms, doesn't WANT to know and most especially wants to wallow in the fear their ignorance produces. They are also highly likely to be unstable people projecting their own instability onto the public at large.
This is a stupid thread inspired by a stupid press article on a stupid subject. eBay is not in any way responsible for facilitating lawful commerce in lawful products. Cho bears sole responsibility for his insane rampage, nobody has to share the guilt with the possible exception of whoever made the decision to keep his court judgement of mental unfitness out of the instant check system. But even there it is doubtful he could have been prevented from going on a killing spree, there is always homemade explosives, poison gas, car bombs, black marget weapons, etc.
Democrat delenda est
I worked for the company that sold the 9/11 hijackers their hotels. Could we have stopped them?
What about American and United airlines?
How far will the polemics go? There's fair laws for the posession of guns already.
People need to stop focusing on the things and start helping those who are ill. It's obvious that Cho was mentally ill. It looks like many people did try, and some attempts were successful. But really - let's get wicked and blame the people who are, in my mind, really at fault:
1. The university knew he was in deep trouble - several teachers and students reported many, many problems with the poor fellow. Why was he still there?
2. The family weren't informed or simply ignored (I would assume) a huge number of problems in their son.
3. The mental health community, Doctor's, Counselors and Psychologist apparently didn't follow up on Cho.
4. Perhaps the insurance company was at fault here? Did they pressure the mental health workers to "get him well" without a thorough investigation?
Really - guns, while they were the final horror of this situation - had little to do with why Cho went *snap*.
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
I'm not a gun nut. I don't own any weapons. I think of the NRA as an organization that tends toward paranoia, and which attracts more than its share of fringe, radical elements. But I am completely behind the rights protected by the 2nd Ammendment. The reasons the founders put that in the Bill of Rights still exist today.
If some people want to ban guns, their path is clear: an ammendment to the Constitution. They are perfectly welcome to try getting such a thing passed.
Notice how Slashdot went nuts when a school board put a kid in a "special school" for making a game map of his school but then goes after EBay because somebody shot up a school after buy holsters and empty clips.
,his family, his roommates?
Both are cases of fear of those that are not like you.
I will bet big money that the person that wrote the summary really hates all guns. I am also willing to bet they don't hunt or shoot targets for fun. There for their mistrust of anyone that has anything to do with guns. They are all gun nuts waiting to shoot up a school. They are differnt from them and are not to be trusted.
BTW I really am not a gun person. I don't hunt or own a gun myself.
The school board members probably don't game. They know that the kids at that shoot up the school in Colorado played violent video games and that the young man that shot up VT made maps for a violent video game. They may or may not know that they where not of VT. They may also know that the September 11th terrorists used a video game "Flight Simulator" to practice their attack. People that play violent video games are differnt from them so they do not trust them.
BTW the last FPS I played I think was Quake. I am not really into FPS but I do love Flight Simulator. I also really dislike games like GTA. I find them distasteful and will not play them myself.
It is easy to hate the stranger. Those that are not like you. It is dangerous to trust the stranger. These are rules that go back to the cave man days. What scares me the most is most "Open minded" people have this exact same view but they just don't see it.
I have no idea how we can get rid of this trait. It is the core of racism and all other forms of prejudice. Probably the best we can ever hope to do is to admit that we all have it and to not let it rule our lives.
The simple truths are just this. The vast majority of gun owners will never shoot up a school. The vast majority of gamers will never shoot up a school.
The real questions about the VT shooting are a lot more harder.
Why didn't the laws on the books stop him from buying the gun in first place?
And the really sad question is just this.
What in his life made him so unhappy that this seemed like a good idea? How can a person feel so unloved and alone that going around and killing a large group of innocent people and then killing himself is a good idea?
Where where his friends
Ebay has no blame or guilt in this.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I'm all for hating eBay for the genuinely annoying things they do, as well as their , their questionable exclusion of Google Chuckout and other non-Paypal payment gateways, but blaming them for some random nutjob buying something which isn't even against the TOS to list - or illegal to purchase - is really clutching at straws.
How is the VT event in any way remotely relevant to this Lifetime Achievement award, or - for that matter - how is the Webby award even newsworthy?
I am rather stupified that slashdot would attempt to become a gun control forum. What are we, boys and girls? If MW gets a Webbie, good for her, and to E-Bay. If the next bomber buys his fertilizer at WalMart, do we decry them as perveyers of WMD?
It's getting difficult to keep track of all the companies I'm supposed to be morally outraged at... I'm surprised that Slashdot permitted it through and tagged it so benignly, clearly someone has a political point they wanna make... Do people really blame Ebay for school shootings now? Perhaps we should get rid of all technology that enables violence and violent thoughts to be conveyed... --Ray
http://www.beanleafpress.com
You're not the one in danger of downplaying the events at Virginia Tech. I just can't decide whether it's a eBay hater using the shootings as justification, or a gun hater using eBay as an excuse to spout off. In either case it's a rather crass use of a horrific event for political posturing.
I'm a firm believer in increased gun control myself but nonsense like this is an insult to the discussion.
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
... I also have a hard time signing on to the idea that having one or more armed students shooting it out with Cho would have led to a better result. I think it highly likely that the student body would have ended up caught in the cross-fire, with no good way to escape, and no easy way for the police to figure out who were the bad guy(s). Among the possibilities: Cho bursts into a classroom and begins shooting the students. An armed student begins returning fire. Then a third armed student, hearing this, enters the room. Whom does he shoot? Where do all these bullets end up (given typical college classroom construction, at least some will penetrate into adjoining rooms)? What are the police supposed to do when they enter?
I think adding more armed students into the mix at VT would have changed situation from "slaughter pen" to "Vietnam firefight", only with poorer training and worse aim... which is not necessarily an improvement.
It's also worth mentioning that Israel had some problems with terrorists going into their schools and shooting kids. The solution? Armed teachers and parents. Terrorism isn't a problem in Israeli schools any more.
There's now rumors that maps of American schools have been found on computers in Iraq owned by terrorist cells. We may very well see a large-scale attack on our schools soon, thanks to our policy of disarmament, which obviously worked so well for the single madman at VT.