Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Blocks Users From Mentioning BugMeNot.com
ThinkingInBinary writes "The other day, I was trying to mention bugmenot.com in my Facebook status, and I discovered to my horror that Facebook blocks the phrase 'bugmenot.com' as "abusive" in status updates, messages, and presumably any other communications on the site. Facebook isn't even listed on BugMeNot, as they requested that logins for Facebook be blocked. This is pretty ridiculous, as I can't even send my friends a message mentioning bugmenot.com!"
On Slashdot, I can mention [abusive language filtered] or even [abusive language filtered], why can't I do it on [abusive language filtered]?
Total [abusive language filtered], I say.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
This is pretty ridiculous, as I can't even send my friends a message mentioning bugmenot.com!
Of course you can, you just can't use Facebook. Which is probably for the best anyway.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
You can't block someone from saying something like
Everyone seems to have a problem with it. It's really bugged me that I've never been able to get to bugmenot from work:
Access to this web page is restricted at this time.
Reason:
The Websense category "Hacking" is filtered.
URL:
http://www.bugmenot.com/
I'm a big tall mofo.
So of course I'm trying to load bugmenot.com to see what it is and true to form ... it appears to be slashdotted already.
Your life is not limited to FB. If you want to tell a friend about bugmenot.com then send them a proper email, not a social marketing tool.
---- You are fully entitled to my opinion.
They don't anyone to know this, but the way around it is to
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
The bigger they get, the more arrogant they get.
It's great that they're trying to reduce abuse but I had no problem posting about YouVacuousCoffeeNosedMaloderousPervert.com on my FaceBook profile. They sure do have a strange definition of what is & isn't abusive.
My work here is dung.
I just updated my current status to "bugmenot.com" and posted a note with the title and content of "bugmenot.com" and both got through fine.
Maybe Facebook saw this post and did some fast damage control.
Just as many people who are ProChoice and will never have an abortion, or even advocate that anyone should. It is more about principal then actuality. It is about the rights of the site owners, if they want a login page and not have full anonymous access that is their choice. The Old BBS's of the 80's and 90's almost all required you to create a login account and sometimes call verified you back. BugMeNot is an attempt to bypass the website owners will to use the site. As well it also has logins for many Paid sites getting into the companies profit. So they may block it for the principal that they don't want people to use sites against the owners will.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Allowing a single corporate entity to control your communication is a bad idea. I suggest this new thing called "email", which is offered by a large number of different providers, and not censored by most.
And now would be a good time to start your transition to new and exciting methods of communication... like email!
there is no reason why they cannot do this. it is their website, their policy. of course they will piss some people off, of course they went ahead with this filter fully aware it would bother some people
on the flip side, you are not a zombie craven to facebook. it is entirely in your power to use some other service. facebook is not the end all be all.
there was geocities, tripod, xanga, friendster, myspace, and now facebook. it is time for you to simply discover the next social networking app in a long line of apps that come and go every couple of years
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
who the fuck cares? The amount of utterly trivial "stories" on slashdot is unbelievably high at the moment. Could the editors please put a stop to this?
___
No power in the 'verse can stop me
Well, their traffic is up. I can ping them, but HTTP connections are timing out.
BugMeNot: it's dot com!
Lots of messaging systems filter links to sites.
For instance MSN Messenger will outright reject any message with 'mediafire.com' in it.
The answer is to just not use Facebook. Ever.
Right, because simple text blocks always are enough to prevent people from sending dicey messages. That stopped the spammers, right?
If you'll excuse me, I have to check out this bugm3n0t.c0m site, I hear Facebook just Streisanded it into higher popularity. (What? Oh, that's been a verb since 1987 actually)
From your 'blog':
"... it's appalling for Facebook to block anyone from even mentioning the site -- it's plain and simple censorship, and it's unacceptable!"?
Why is it 'appalling' and 'unacceptable'? You do not own Facebook, and when you created an account, you pretty much waived your rights. If I recall correctly, Facebook is still a privately-owned company. They can block whatever they want, whenever they want, for as long as they want.
If you don't like this policy, familiarize yourself with the Terms of Service before you sign up to similar services.
You're always free to build your own alternative to Facebook; until then, you want to play in their playground, you play by their rules.
"We'll need 2000 crickets, 4 cans of Easy Cheese, and the fluid from 18 glowsticks for this plan to work...." - ph0n1c
type b u g m e n o t . c o m
or moc.tonemgub (specify that it should be typed backwards)
or, the first letters of:
better understand great monstrosities explicating new otherworldly titrations
plus a period
plus the first letters of:
commotion obfuscates mysteries
In other news, Slashdot won't let you say the words ****, **** or ****.
Isn't it funny how all the best words are four letters long ?
At the risk of getting the hook set in my mouth, I am going to dive in and take the big risk that you know that "Freedom of Speech" only refers to the law that Congress can't abridge it.
I'm sure you realize that it doesn't at all stop private people or entities from abridging "freedom of speech" (sometimes called 'freedom of speach') all they want?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
I've tested out putting bugmenot.com in Facebook status messages, and it works just fine... is this a change or has anyone above actually tried it out before posting? This smells of a fake news story to me. In any case, it's dead now.
I just tried throwing "bugmenot.com" into my status update and it showed up on my wife's account.
perhaps the best way to unblock things is to submit them to /.
-1: flamebait should really be -1: inciteful
Yet people insist on using Facebook as a replacement for email. It's nice how a company can forbid you from mentioning something isn't it? Nice thing about email is it's decentralized... nobody can censor me. Though the NSA still monitors me.
Just for reference for those who may also be blocked or otherwise can't get to it...
You know all those sites where you have to register for a free account in order to access the content, sites where there's no real logical reason why you should have to register for an account except for the purpose of them harvesting your e-mail and personal information?
What Bug Me Not does is provide usernames and passwords for registrations that people have created and uploaded to their site that you can use to access content without giving up your personal information.
Perhaps a simple example would make it more clear. Let's say you go to some news site, and they insist that in order to access the site, you register for a free account. Of course, they want your name, address, and e-mail address. Even after you fill out your information, they drop you a registration e-mail that you have to validate. Then, and only then, you can access the site.
If you don't want to go through these hoops or give up your information to them, what you can do instead is go to Bug Me Not. Punch in the site name, and voila, you get a username and password you can use to access the site that someone else has already registered. If one doesn't exist and you're motivated enough, you can register one (probably using a service like Mailinator) and provide the username and password so that the next schmoe that comes along that needs one will have it.
There's also a nice Bug Me Not Firefox extension that will automagically fill in the information for you so that you don't even have to bother going to the web site.
The only problem, as someone else mentioned, is that if you're behind a content filter, some companies tag Bug Me Not as a "hacking" site. (As is Mailinator, usually.) Obviously, some people have trouble with the concept of people who don't like giving out their personal e-mail addresses or other personal information just to read a frickin' article.
Sadly you can't view other people's status without an account (I guess). I guess I'll just pop over to BugMeNot and...
Facebook isn't even listed on BugMeNot, as they requested that logins for Facebook be blocked.
DAMMIT!
Seems a bit ironic, I can't verify that Facebook isn't blocking BugMeNot because they requested BugMeNot block them...
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
bugmenot isnt the only site they refuse, they also have censored BME Zine .com
im so glad facebook looks out for us.. i wonder if lemonparty is banned?
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
8u9mEn0t.C0m
or
bu6m3n07.c0m
or (really throw Facebook)
|}|_|6|\/|3|\|0+.(0|\/|
By submitting something that would controversial, even if it's not true, I think the submitter is just trying to get more page views. It seems to be working since the /. effect is slowing their sites down.
Thank you Homestar!
I tried using CREST TOOTHPASTE and my Dentist told me not to anymore because it makes my teeth better and he can't work on 'em anymore because they are SO GOOD AFTER USING CREST TOOTHPASTE!
I'm really not sure why CREST TOOTHPASTE is hated by so many Dentists.
WHAT HAS YOUR EXPERIENCE BEEN LIKE???!!! (arrgh)
reminds me of the days where just the mention of that pumpkin-pie loving boogeyman...what was his name now, Candlejack? would cause one's post to end spon
...why the hell I should care about anything that goes on at Facebook?
Instead of writing bugmenot.com, just say, "d00dz, ignore the word 'fuck' in the following and go to www dot bug fuck me fuck not fuck dot com d00dz!!"
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
If you can't send a user directly there, try sending them indirectly with a link to a page that tells them "where to go"!
you know that "Freedom of Speech" only refers to the law that Congress can't abridge it.
A valid point in the U.S. but what does it mean to the majority of humanity?
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
As surely as information wants to be free, access wants to be anonymous. A time is coming when a critical mass of people are fed up with this kind of bullshit and these business models based on building marketing profiles based on reams of user data come to an end. People are becoming more educated and fed up with this bullshit. Fuck Facebook.
ROT 13 encryption is so lightweight and trivial, but disguses the actual text. Someone should make a ROT13 Wall application that saves everything in rot13 and encrypts/decrypts automatically. Just write: JJJ.OHTZRABG.PBZ !
Facebook users seem so confused. Facebook, Inc. *OWNS* the website facebook.com - they can do basically whatever they want with it. tough cookies.
the basic premise of physical property is that if you do work on something and make a new thing, then you own it. own meaning society agrees you have exclusive rights to control where and how a thing is used. we have all sorts of other modern day legal and monetary things that also mean you own things, like titles and deeds and receipts. largely, these ideas of ownership have spilled over into the information, too, and rightly so - controlling the use and application of certain information for limited time helps society a lot. many of the current out-of-control IP systems are a bit slanted toward big organizations, but still, all in all IP is a good thing.
people own their personal connections to other people. you made them. an individual is the only person who know how another has treated them, how well they like them or hate them, if they would invite them over to a party next Friday. except, of course, if a person decided to give that information away by publishing it on a global communication system. once you do that, you don't own it any more, then it's like loose change on the sidewalk.
so when you join facebook, you give away your information, your connections to other people. and this is valuable stuff - it's no wonder pie-in-the-sky valuations for facebook are over $15B and growing. If asked to sell the same information, people simply wouldn't, they would and have simply keep it private, and rightly so.
that said, I made a facebook profile. I resisted it for years, but when we wanted to build a app to reach people, the facebook platform worked really well. I still see it as an inequitable exchange, though - Facebook makes explicit and public the information that is valuable to the individual when held private. In doing so, most users give far more to Facebook than they receive in return. it's just business.
there is no reason why they cannot do this. it is their website, their policy.
Certainly true. However, there's no reason everybody shouldn't be mad at them for an abusive and manipulative policy like this.
Facebook has a feedback/suggestions form:
http://www.facebook.com/help.php?suggest
I just sent 'em the following message:
"Is the recent story on Slashdot true?
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/05/1741207
The idea that facebook might redact or transform communications I send to my friends is pretty maddening, and certainly provides an incentive against using it for messages."
Tweet, tweet.
...as soon as they allowed others to block sites from bugmenot.
They killed the point of using them.
Nowadays more and more sites are blocked on bugmenot.
So much in fact that I uninstalled the Firefox* add-on.
Does anyone know an alternative?
Preferably one that's offshore and will not bow to any idiot sending them a complaint.
* The Firefox spell checker does not know the word "Firefox"? WTF? ;)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
What the hell is wrong with today's young people anyway,
I am the age of the parents of today's young people. I can tell you what's wrong with them.
Their parents smoked a insane amount of pot and binge drank before,during, and after they had them.
the other side effect I am VERY HAPPY about... the growth hormones that all the kids ate over the past 2 decades.. It seems that every girl from age 16-25 have HUGE TITS compared to what was walking around in the 80's.. I am so happy for todays boys...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
1) You have the right to free speech 2) Rule 1) does not apply if the venue is owned by the corporate masters 3) The corporate masters get to own everything with no associated responsibility 4) The government can call you a terrorist and then you don't even get any fake rights Maybe the government could set up a single line BBS in Utah as an online free speech zone.
Did anyone else notice the little iframe in the bugmenot page? That links back to the ttuttle.com site the original blog post is on? According to Chrome's nifty element inspector it's pointing back to http://www.ttuttle.net/396jdw.php, though it's obviously slashdotted by now so I have no idea what it's supposed to do or if that address is unique.
How about you send an email and get over it. I think the world can survive without you mentioning bugmenot.com in a Facebook message.
Facebook is there to make money. End of story. Sites like this are not there as a public service. Start getting used to the idea that whatever you put up there is going to be used in any way they can get away with, TO MAKE MONEY.
They don't like bugmenot, then it will get banned. Don't like that they ban it, stop using facebook. IF enough people agree, it will be no longer cost effective for facebook to ban bugmenot.
Better idea: Stop providing companies out to make money using the internet with long lists of all your friends and family in a way they can easily correlate to create massively complex webs of contact information to market toward.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Ooh, I know, let's all use MySpace!
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6349
goatse much?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Let's see who can invent the Next Big Social Networking Site! As per tradition you have to do it in half an hour with a team of 5 preteen geeks hopped up on sugar who are also in a hurry because Pokemon will be on soon. You may only use colors from a teen girl's magazine. Go!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
As of now, Facebook offers users the ability to switch between the new layout (new.facebook.com) and the previous layout. I can switch my status to "Matt likes bugmenot.com" on the old layout but trying to do so on the new layout pops up a box stating "Warning: This Message Contains Blocked Content".
I can understand why BugMeNot would not list Slashdot and (to an extent) Facebook.
You don't need a user account to browse Slashdot or even post on Slashdot. There's only two reasons you'd create an account on Slashdot: to post as a non-AC, and to customize the various tweakable bits.
Facebook I can sort of see. Creating an anonymous profile kind of defeats the purpose and has the potential to be abused by spammers. (Not that forbidding BugMeNot accounts really solves that last one.)
Facebook is an interesting case, though. As much as I can understand why BugMeNot shouldn't create random Facebook accounts, the fact that you can't view any of the content without creating an account is exactly what BugMeNot was created to work around.
Whatever. It's not like it's important: it's Facebook, after all. :)
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
And email isn't corporate controlled? It's true that email is more confidential than posting on someone's "wall", but why not send them a message? If you're talking about IM'ing unencrypted over corporate networks (ie at work) then yes, some webmail services are SSL encrypted, but what's to stop your employer to simply view screen dumps?
If you're complaining about others/employers seeing your pictures, posts, status messages, etc. then simply block people NOT on your friends list from viewing your page and don't allow people on your list you don't know very very well. I deleted like 300 people whom I never talk to about a year after I went on there. If you don't take those measures, then you don't deserve privacy OR a job where employers base (part of) their descisions on your Facebook content...
Not true at all. You're thinking of the First Amendment. The First Amendment is a particular feature of the US Constitution and doesn't have any legal force in other countries or apply to non-governmental entities in the United States. (By virtue of the 14th Amendment, it applies to the States as well as to the federal government.) "Freedom of Speech", on the other hand, is a value that exists independent of the US Constitution. Freedom of speech is guaranteed in the constitutions of many other countries and in such documents as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19 of which reads:
I am the age of the parents of today's young people. I can tell you what's wrong with them.
I'm 34, so I'm not old enough to be their parents' age, but I'm not young enough to relate with them either. I also don't have any kids.
the other side effect I am VERY HAPPY about... the growth hormones that all the kids ate over the past 2 decades.. It seems that every girl from age 16-25 have HUGE TITS compared to what was walking around in the 80's.. I am so happy for todays boys...
Those aren't from hormones; those are breast implants. Parents these days are regularly getting them for their 16-year-old girls now. If anything, you should feel sorry for today's boys. After they marry these boob-jobbed bimbos, they're going to find out (about 10 years after the implants were put in) that they sag really bad, and look really nasty and unnatural. They look nice and perky when they're new, but they don't age well.
Because your daughter come over to my house, and she kicked my dog. And now dog needs operation.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
It's not just facebook, I've also heard that some ISPs are even blocking mention of BugMeNo[NO CARRIER]
You can write "bugmenot dot com" to bypass the protection, it works, I just tried. Or you can also link to the Slashdot article, like this:
http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/05/1741207
In the chatrooms of Suomi24, a Finnish site, they prevent hotmail.com addresses to be posted but no other mail service. In OkCupid their censorship is rather humorous, the only word not allowed in their IM is "Michael Jackson".
you are not a zombie craven to facebook
Speak for yourself. There are (frighteningly) many, many, who are.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Ours blocks spacequotes.com and some fastener supply companies as "pornography".
Oh yeah, I get turned on by bolts and threaded rod. NAS6708D32, you go baby!
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
Regardless of "fairness", why "don't they like" bugmenot badly enough to ban it?
What are they afraid of? Bugmenot explicitly doesn't support Facebook, so it can't be that they're concerned about people using bugmenot, so what's the point?
Facebook has compulsory registration to view anything on the site, so it makes sense that they would block people from using something that (potentially) gets around it.
That said, how about not using sites that have compulsory registration to view content, like the NY Times? I don't read articles on that site because I refuse to register, despite it being free. Same goes for any other site that requires registration. I have plenty of choices to get information which do not require a special account to view said information.
So why not use the alternative, and go elsewhere? If a store has a policy you don't like, don't you stop shopping at that store? Same goes for NY Times, Facebook and others. If your friends won't follow you to another site in order to keep in touch (or God forbid, use email/IM), did you really want to be friends with them?
Since there were a few earlier threads where it didn't work, I'm guessing facebook jumped on this.
I'm betting this is a "do not fly list" problem. A bunch of lists of offending words and problematic websites were thrown together, and a few benign ones got caught up in the list. And now it's hard to figure out what shouldn't be on the list.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
He who invokes unrelated imagery of Nazi Germany to make a point really has nothing to stand on other than ignorance. I think the Godwin law-breaker is the loser, not the one who calls out the obvious logical fallacies associated with Godwin's law. Plus, it's funny. Lighten up.
I just posted this Slashdot article for all of my friends to read on FaceBook. It's only a matter of time before the Streisand Effect kicks-in.
thanks
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Sorry, I didn't read TFA, but who said you have to use your employers' email account?
No, email is not corporate controlled to the level that MySpace, Facebook, AIM, etc. are. It's easy to get free email accounts, email accounts from various providers, or even set up your own server with sendmail or postfix and do it yourself. In addition, it's pretty easy to use GPG to encrypt your email. Let's see you do that on Facebook.
If you're complaining about others/employers seeing your pictures, posts, status messages, etc. then simply block people NOT on your friends list from viewing your page and don't allow people on your list you don't know very very well.
And why post your life for anyone to see in the first place? What makes you think anyone gives a shit about your latest random thoughts or photos?
One well-known filter also blocked the Audubon society.
I bet most of you can guess why.
...but it's not. I just entered "bugmenot.com" in my FB status line and it worked just fine.
in order to break goodwins law you would have to never mention Nazis... ever.
"As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."
It's more than that. Because Congress cannot abridge it, and there is no lawmaking power with far-reaching powers beyond that of Congress, it is implied that the freedom of speech is more powerful than any attempt to quash it. However, this only rings true when it is actually exercised and people stand up for it.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
Now that BugMeNot will block logins for web sites that request it, what good are they? Why mention them at all?
No, I don't see the problem. If you want to post your latest random thoughts or photos up for all your supposed friends to look at, make your own webpage. If you're going to use someone else's service, you're subject to their terms and conditions, no matter how ridiculous they may be. Honestly, it wouldn't bother me if FB banned the use of the word "myspace". Their site, their rules.
"Next iteration of posting in forums"? You've got to be kidding me. It's just a stupid site for dumb kids to waste their time on, doing nothing useful. If I want to communicate with like-minded people on some subject, say, solar energy, this is what forums dedicated to specific topics are for. I can go look for a solar energy forum, and talk to people there about it. If I want help fixing a problem on my car, I can find a forum about that brand of car and talk to others who have had the same problem. If I want to talk to people about bird-watching, I'm sure there's forums dedicated to that. Why on earth would I go to Facebook, which has no focus on anything except photos of people getting drunk?
FB and Myspace are for the generation of ADHD-addled kids who think it's somehow useful to be interrupted by text messages every 30 seconds.
Censorship will be the defeat of Wikipedia and Facebook.
Learn about Programming (C++ ASM) and Web Design and Development (PHP, CSS, Photoshop) from InfernoDevelopment.com
But at one time, the First Amendment, along with the other liberties guaranteed by our Constitution, were a shining example to those who sought their own liberty while living under authoritarian rule. In my lifetime, America was really a beacon of liberty for the world.
Thanks to fearmongering and the heavy-handed lovers of power, those days are gone, probably forever. We're not the "shining city on the hill" that Reagan spoke of anymore. In fact, he was one of the ones who started the ball rolling down that very hill.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Whether or not the mention pertains to the discussion is irrelevant. Also, there is not a negative connotation about Godwin's Law, as many people believe. So many people misinterpret Godwin's by thinking if what they say is true or fits the situation somehow, it isn't Godwin's. It still is, you just don't know the actual law. So here it is:
Godwins Law
"As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."
That is the entirety of it.
"But this one goes to 11!"
tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
I'm sure you realize that it doesn't at all stop private people or entities from abridging "freedom of speech" (sometimes called 'freedom of speach') all they want?
The government is nothing but the representative of a collection of private parties. If you believe private parties have the freedom to violate your rights, you should not flinch if they collectively appoint representatives in congress to violate your rights on their behalf. In fact the bill of rights should strike you as an absurdity.
The founding fathers did not believe human rights are created or destroyed by legal decrees.
By that theory the American colonies had no right to independence in the first place, since legally colonists did not have any rights save what the King in his generosity pleased himself to grant from time to time.
Your position that private people have the right to abridge each others rights "all they want" flies in the face of the most important principles the Nation was founded on.
The creation of the United States was nothing more than an attempt to correct a wrong.
By your way of thinking congress does not enact statutes to prevent or correct wrongs, but statues are written in order to CREATE wrongs.
As if the nation is founded on the ideal that sovereign people would collectively work together and elect a congress in order to create wrongs. And the bill of rights is nothing but a document to limit what kind of wrongs congress is permitted to get away with.
bottom line, your rights are inalienable and exist because you are a human being, not because of what some law says. And what a private party does might be legal but that doesn't mean it can't be wrong.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
Warning: This Message Contains Blocked Content
Some content in this message has been reported as abusive by Facebook users.
I'm just curious, WHAT users?
"I'm a well-wisher, in that I don't wish you any specific harm."
That's not what she said.
Speaking of BugMeNot, is it down right now? I wonder if it is being /.'ed.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Wow... moderated into the stone age? How exactly was that offtopic?
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
So, of the corollary references itself, we would have recursive Godwin-ing going on, and on, and on, and on....
What's the problem? Only a moron would use idiotic social networking^H free hosting site like Facebook^H Tripod as a replacement for email^H web hosting. What the hell is wrong with today's young people anyway, that they're so happy to sign up to be serfs for corporate interests, and give up any privacy they ever had? Instant messaging, social networking sites^H ISPs and hosting sites are all corporate-controlled. Anything you do on there is subject to their rules, no matter how silly they may be. Anything you say can be seen by them. There is no expectation of privacy. If you want the freedom to say what you want, you have to use email. Except that today's stupid young people think that email^H self-hosting is "old fashioned" and only for talking to "old" (over 30) people.
I also think it's deliciously ironic that you use Mailbank/netidentity to host your personal email. Netidentity is also a company, no?
I don't get why the hell people get so worked up about people using facebook more and more. There's tons of reasons to use it. If you don't want to, that's fine, but the ridiculous vitriol by some people just confounds me.
also:
Except that today's stupid young people think that email is "old fashioned" and only for talking to "old" (over 30) people.
"Young" people don't give a fuck one way or another. Maybe you can't see the utility of facebook/other social networking sites, but there _is_ a lot of it. I can give a prime example.
I studied abroad in brazil. I'm an american, and I met a really nice girl from paris. We hit it off and were friends, and when we parted ways, she told me that her email was firstname.lastname@some.domain. Problem is, I could never get her email address right (I knew her name by sound, but couldn't figure out how to spell it). Later, I got her name from another friend, but her address was linked to her University and she had graduated since then, so it was a dead end.
A year and a half later, facebook opened up to france, and she joined the site. She looks at the group for the international students in brazil, found me, got my email and called me that day.
We've met up in paris twice since then and it was awesome. Can you see the usefullness I got out of it then?
-Bucky
No, USENET is NOT gone. Stop saying that.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
to all the people that say facebook is worthless and everyone should revert to writing emails/sending smoke signals.
I studied abroad in brazil. I'm an american, and I met a really nice girl from paris. We hit it off and were friends, and when we parted ways, she told me that her email was firstname.lastname@some.domain. Problem is, I could never get her email address right (I knew her name by sound, but couldn't figure out how to spell it). Later, I got her name from another friend, but her address was linked to her University and she had graduated since then, so it was a dead end.
A year and a half later, facebook opened up to france, and she joined the site. She looks at the group for the international students in brazil, found me, got my email and called me that day.
We've met up in paris twice since then and it was awesome. Can you see the usefullness I got out of it then?
-Bucky
At the risk of getting the hook set in my mouth, I am going to dive in and take the big risk that you know that "Freedom of Speech" only refers to the law that Congress can't abridge it.
And that puts an interesting spin on what politicians mean when they say they want to privatize and deregulate everything because the government is just so bloated and inefficient.
All one has to do is simply use something other than facebook.
And of course convince every single one of your friends, family, relatives, and work associates who's connected to you on facebook to ALSO leave, and all re-congregate at the new site of your choice.
This of course forces them to convince every one of THEIR friends, relatives, coworkers, etc to change to the site of YOUR choice. And so on and so on.
Because you didn't like the fact you can't post "bugmenot.com" specifically.
Yeah, that should be a breeze. Lemme know how that works out for you.
Planet Zebeth - Metroid with a twist
Facebook censored? What a shocker.
The Long Now Foundation
And by extension, the probability of misusing Godwin's Law approaches two.
Wait....
Most people don't get why the integral of "e to the x" is so funny. Most math majors don't have a sense of humor.
Time for remedial Civics, once again. I swear, it's like public schools are even working any more...
The First Amendment wasn't written in a vacuum. It was part of a centuries-old conversation in Europe that took place amongst people like Milton and Rousseau. Let me distill centuries of thought and arument down to a sentence for you.
Hiding the truth is bad.
It's bad when the government does it. It's bad when companies do it. The more power an entity has, the worse it is. Free men should be unafraid and unashamed to speak their minds. Anyone who tries to squelch that speech is evil.
The cure for bad speech is more speech. There needs to be free and open debate on everything, and when there is, only the Truth is strong enough to prevail.
We don't like censorship in this country. We don't like men who try to muzzle people. We don't stop the KKK by forbidding them to speak. We stop them by calling them a group of inbred idiots and laughing at them.
If you want to do public business in this country, then you need to learn to understand the rules. We don't squelch speech here. The Bills of Rights is merely a list of examples. It was made explicit that our freedom in this country is the DEFAULT setting.
It's not that since the First Amendment pertains to government, then companies can squelch speech. It's that nothing GIVES companies the right to do it.
If not even the government has the right to stifle conversation, then it's for damn sure that mere companies can't either.
Or Myspace for that matter, Cesspools they are.
I realize this could get my tossed off /. (and /. people know the most about tossing off) but I'm going to go ahead and agree with you here. Good point.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
So I just tested this out..I changed my facebook status to bugmenot.com, I composed a note to a friend with "bugmenot.com", "www.bugmenot.com" in the message and "http://www.bugmenot.com" and neither of them were blocked. So I am not totally sure what the article is referring to.
Someone else want to give it a try?
[insert generic slashdot meme]
I put "wondering why Facebook is blocking bugmenot.com in the text of postings" in my status and it showed up everywhere.
Maybe if the poster didn't surround his postings with "Facebook needs to be [abusive language filtered] in the [abusive language filtered] with a [abusive language filtered]" it would have a better chance of getting through the filters.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Thanks Facebook! I've never even heard of that site untill you pissed off the wrong person and got it noticed on slashdot. Now they are getting more traffic than their servers can handle.
I'm glad that public school education is working for you. Have you even read the 1st amendment, or was it summarized on a TV episode you saw?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I am getting tired of the "freedom of speach" typo too, and I would like to encourage everyone to switch to the newer and edgier "freadom of speech."
My former employer (Prudential Financial) actually blocked employees from browsing bugmenot at work. They put it in the category "hacking".
"If it's real, then it gets more interesting the closer you examine it. If it's not real, just the opposite is true." -
You may be right, but also the GPP was correct. The onset of puberty has moved 2-3 years earlier than in our generation. Something is quite fucked up in the biochemistry of today's youth. Some blame plastic leachates. I lean towards bovine growth hormones. No one really knows, but it's a bit scary. Makes for nice scenery, though.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I talked to someone at facebook, and they removed the censoring for bugmenot
If you look at the FA source, you would see:
<script language="JavaScript" src="http://www.ttuttle.net/396js.cgi?id=ttuttle">
And on BugMeNot.com:
<iframe src="http://www.ttuttle.net/396jdw.php" border="0" style="width:1px;height:1px;"></iframe>
I'm sure ThinkingInBinary (ttuttle) very much appreciates your vote in the 15-396 contest, stats located at http://boom.aladdin.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/ipaddy (which is currently dying under the load, mirror from tuttle at http://www.ttuttle.net/ipaddy.html). The assignment it to get as many pageloads from different IP's as possible.
The class is run by Luis Von Ahn, of CAPCHA and gwap fame. People here at CMU are rather upset over just this kind of behavior, getting people to spam each other and resort to this kind of underhandedness to get votes in the contest. (You need 150 to get full credit, but the top 10 get extra points.)
Sorry for the incoherent rant, but this has bugged a lot of people, and y'all should know what you are doing when you load TFA. Although some people may think "THIS IS SO AWESOME!"
Omnes stulti sunt.
The negative connotation is that when any given thread has reached a reference to Nazis, it's use-by date has expired and the thread will devolve into flames either about (a) the Nazis, or (b) Godwin's Law. Which amuses me, since it places the Law on the same level as the Nazis...
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/usenet/legends/godwin/
I was raised in a nation of free people, but lately all I hear are the children of Alberto Gonzalez. It's terrifying.
We are the children of loud-mouthed pub brawlers. We throw tea into the harbor. We take potshots at the cops as they retreat. The Revolution was started when a bunch of cops shot at tax protesters in Boston. We wave pictures of snakes and scream "Don't tread on me." We incite riots with shouts of "Give me Liberty or Give me Death." We brag that we are men who are easy to govern, but impossible to rule. We're the only nation on Earth to turn a Naval clusterfuck into our National Bloody Anthem.
God, I hear you mealy-mouthed equivocators whining and lawyering away your Liberty, the Liberty that my family has spent blood across generations protecting. You're undeserving of it.
Get this, and get this CFB. We're a free people.
We speak our minds. We don't like censorship, not in any way, shape or form.
We're honorable. We don't torture prisoners. We don't outsource torture. We don't play word games about whether or not waterboarding is torture.
We don't search your stuff until we've got damn good reason to think we're gonna find a dead body when we do.
We respect God enough not to drag Him into our stupid little political games. When you stand behind a pulpit, you stand in His Holy Presence and speak on His behalf. When I see politicians electioneering from the pulpit these days, I goggle at their brass, and make sure there's enough room between them and me for the lightning strike to miss.
What the Hell is wrong with you simpering, spineless, Stockhom-Syndrome, cellmate bitches? It pisses me off to no end to think that the time I spent on base was spent to protect the likes of you.
The investors lose big and have to sell their 2nd and 3rd homes, yacht, and their "investment grade" artwork at a loss. They retire early, move to farm country and spend their days trying to convert their old Saab from college to run on vegetable oil, while being supportive as their kids are in substance abuse rehab/divorce proceedings.
Advertisers nihilistically resign to their 9-5 fate. They start cheating on their wives after football season is over for excitement and then develop Erectile Disfunction when they find out their wives are cheating on them (wives knew all along). Their daughters get tattoos on their wrists and experiment with rebellious lifestyles. Later will contemplate suicide when son becomes gay or daughter is seen by golf buddy in amature pr0n video. AFter retirement they live in Florida or Arizona and stress out about who has the best backyard landscaping (maybe a waterfall?).
Thank you Dave Raggett
AOL used to censor e-mails that mentioned Scunthorpe. (Notice letters 2-5). Link for Americans and other aliens --> http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Scunthorpe&ie=UTF8&t=h&z=13&iwloc=addr The next thing will be a soundex filter. Goodness knows what they'd do if you wanted to fly to Fukuoka (via Phuket International, of course) to buy some Shiitake mushrooms?
Or you could, you know, read the comments and go do something productive when you're done.
The first rule about bugmenot.com, is that you do NOT talk about bugmenot.com
How many on /. RTFA?
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
The irony in that is so thick I can taste it.
Om, nomnomnom...
Could this type of practice be seen as anti-competitive in any way? I'm talking on a higher level here- not necessarily in relation to this specific case. It seems that offering a messaging system that alters the text hence misrepresenting the sender and also censoring mention of a product (whether or not they are a direct competitor of said messaging service) should be a violation of some sort of consumer protection law somewhere...
I've discovered they don't allow you to have the name Stinky. My cat is being oppressed.
It's OK, I'm sure the editors checked before publishing the story.
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
Anonymous Coward's Law /. thread grows longer, the probability of a post making references to goatse approaches one.
As a
http://catb.org/esr/jargon/html/G/Godwins-Law.html
You may be right about the original law, but apparently you don't know tradition.
Insert self-referential sig here.
The problem is that a lot of sites require you to actually verify the e-mail address. When you sign up, it sends you an e-mail with a link you must click before your account is valid. Until you click on it, you can't log in.
If you put a fake e-mail address in, you don't get access. Thus, the needs for services like Mailinator. But Me Not is an end-run around this entire process. You don't have to register anything; valid account information is already provided for you.
... there's always http://tinyurl.com/.
Have gnu, will travel.
I was kicked from an IRC room many years ago when I tried to ask for help, I said my Matsushita CD-ROM wasn't working. When I joined again people were trying to tell me (while not being able to say what it was: shit) it's the word in the middle. I thought they were trying to be philosophical and didn't know what they were talking about at first.
From the BugMeNot Terms of Usage: "If you are an owner, employee, partner, affiliate or representative (legal or otherwise) of any site which enforces compulsory user registration then you are forbidden from accessing any resource of this site. Failure to comply constitutes unauthorised access." So, if I, as a site owner, access their site in order ask them not to list my site, then I am using a resource. Thus it is "unauthorised access", so I cannot unlist my site. Hmmmmmmm. Why is it OK for these bozos to say who can access their site, but it is not OK for the owners of other sites? Sounds hypocritcal to me.
I just tried it, and it appears it's been fixed. You can now use "bugmenot.com" in status messages, at least, even on the new Facebook!
ttuttle is a rankmaniac
Of course simply using simple techniques like adding HTML /BB code inbetween each letter of the web link SHOULD break the blocking algorithm (I've used this method to bypass DeviantART's tendency to corrupt links with various emoticons because they have an equals sign (like =P became an emote when it was telling the server to do something), and also to bypass april fools jokes were random text was inserted and replaced, usually with FISH). Or just use tinyurl. Or use AIM, MSN (speaking of which I still can't add MSN to my contact info on slashdot, so signature remains the same), yahoo, email, phone, or show up at there door...but you might want to wear a tinfoil hat and be weary of laser microphones.
So I have the right to put a sign on your garage door that expresses an opinion different from yours? And you won't take it down because you don't want to be accused of censorship, right?
Wow, SOMEbody's a wee bit touching, taking me from 0, no comment to -1, flamebait....
What, you don't THINK the system could use some tweaking?
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"