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LiveJournal Says Users are Responsible for Content of Links
Many of you might remember the previous story about LiveJournal erroneously deleting hundreds of users as suspected paedophiles, spurred on by pressure from the group, Warriors for innocence. Since then, they've been taking action against users hosting material on their servers that they believe to be illegal. Today, LiveJournal management have demonstrated a serious lack of understanding in how the internet works, declaring that users are responsible for the content of the webpages that they link to in their blog entries. A user points out the obvious flaw: "I get ToS'd because the link's been redirected to a page full o' porn, even though context clearly shows that when I originally put up the link that it didn't actually land on a page of porn?"
One wonders how such a long-established blogging company can be so ignorant about the nature of the world wide web.
It was started by a geeky highschool kid... a classmate of a friend of mine who definitely understood how things worked. Of course it's changed hands since then. I would chalk this up to PHB syndrome.
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)
The blog post in question states:
If there's any good news, current policy dictates that if LJAbuse is able to determine based on the content around your link that you initially posted to a "safe" site and that link has now been redirected, you will be contacted and asked to fix the link. They will most likely not use it as a "strike" against you in their shiny new "two strikes yer out policy" if LJAbuse decides that you didn't intend to link to a site LJ/6A thinks contains ToS-able content.
Which contradicts the comment quoted in the summary.
Of course, as sick as I am of the "LET ME TELL YOU INTERNETS IT IS HARD TO BE AN OPPRESSED HARRY POTTER FANFICCER", I do hope that LJ isn't really going to start kicking people out for old links.
I used to have a Barbie site that got a fair bit of traffic, and of course (this being the late 90s when a links page was a requisite for any site), I had a page of links to my other favorite Barbie sites. I once got a letter in the snail mail from a lady telling me what a horrible person I am for luring children in with Barbie stuff and then showing them porn. Sure enough, one of the doll domains had been bought out as a "doll" domain, and this lady for some reason thought that I had actually gone through the trouble of creating a site with all this info on doll collecting (and I'm sure 7-year-olds find listings of flaws discovered upon deboxing a doll fascinating) just to lure kids into a porn site. Oh, and that was the day I learned not to put my home address on my online resume.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Just for the sake of irony, I submitted a "terms of service violation" complaint against the Warriors of Innocence blog. I recommend anyone else who's pissed at this behavior do the same. They're hate-mongering enough that there's a chance it'll do something. And damn, would it be funny.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
I made a steganography program once (hidden message) that hid a message in spam. It didn't and couldn't send email to anyone, but you could hide short messages in a "spam" email and copy/paste it to your friends. It got taken down as a "spam tool" even though I can't imagine it could ever be helpful to spammers.
Anyhow, now that we've established that ToS violations can occur for stupid things, have you never heard of trolls? Apparently, all one needs to do is get someone to link to some site they control, then change that site & report the person who linked it. Certainly not out of the question if you have anyone on the internet who hates you (yes, that might require that your blog have readers, so many LiveJournals will be immune...). Even on Slashdot, people like to submit links to things like TinyURL, then swap them out for Goatse after they get modded up. Hell, at least one troll group put out a random redirector that would send you to Goatse some % of the time while giving you normal content the rest. They could redirect all traffic from the LJ ToS enforcers to porn/Goatse/whatever with a simple modification of a script like that.
Got any LJ blogs you hate? Just convince them to link to you, report them, and they'll be down in no time at all, apparently.
Jesus H. Christ, you're right. That site isn't even safe for the Internet... haven't they ever heard of, oh, I don't know... LINKS? Seriously... all content in one place. Buncha right-wing, witch-hunting, self-important, ignorant morons. You'd think that someone at LiveJournal would go to their site and say "Huh... what a group of nutters" and then proceed to block their emails/phone calls.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Note the story in the Firehose - http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=270479
Now note that this story is identical, except for the fact that samzenpus removed the "An anonymous reader writes" part and claimed it as his own work. This anonymous coward is a little bitter.
Once a social networking website becomes popular it ceases to be cool and people move onto the next one. Buying a social networking site, like Murdoch did, is a losers game. Better to apply the catfood brands principle and set up successive sites so that as each previous website loses favour you have two others ready for people to move to.
(catfood brands theory - if you have 2 companies making 1 brand of catfood each with about 50% market share, it makes sense to launch another brand rather than trying to promote your existing brand. So now you have 2 companies, one with 2 brands and 1 with 1 brand. The newly launched brand will take away sales from both existing brands but with the company with 2 brands benefiting overall. Until, obviously, the second company launches 2 new brands. And so on.)
There's a difference between child rapists and the people that WfI targets. WfI targets anyone who happens to not fit their definition of a "fine, upstanding citizen" - could be queers, could be pedos, could be them funny brown people, could be people who like drawing funny pictures, they're all the same to WfI.
Of course, the not-so-funny thing is, the vast majority of child rape is perpetrated by NON-pedos. So, by sending people haring off after pedos, they're targeting the wrong people.
Gun control: The belief that a woman, raped and strangled with her panties, is morally superior to a dead rapist.