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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.
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.
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.
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
or write a letter.
Try it, it's fun. I even bought a fountain pen. It feels nicer than a biro, or typing on the keyboard.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
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
Thanks for the update. I was really concerned there for a moment.
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 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
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.
Dear [friend],
I'm writing to inform you that you should visit this very useful website called bugmenot.com. You can visit it by going over to your computer, opening a browser window, typing in "http://www.bugmenot.com/" (without the quotes!) in the address bar and hitting enter.
I hope you enjoy it!
Sincerely,
KewlDude1774
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.
...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.
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.
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".
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:
There were some significant expenses involved in supplying the service. An incoming phone line and high speed modem for each "node", rows of computers, file servers, networking - and all of this could only support a limited number of simultaneous users.
What we were trying to stop were the people who would register several accounts in order to use more online time - preventing others from being able to log in. The whole point of verified user accounts was just that - to insure that the resources of the BBS were shared fairly.
Things are different now; not many of us here remember when a good 9600 baud modem cost $1000. Multiply that by 25, then add the monthly charges for 25 phone lines, etc.
We couldn't just "add more lines" to support every person who wanted to use the system for as long as they wanted, so limiting the amount of online time was necessary. Verified user accounts were there to insure that everyone got their share because some felt it was their right to take more for themselves.
These days you can put up a website that does most of what a BBS did, support thousands of simultaneous users - and do it for far less than the cost of one of those modems. The sites that require registration (and don't verify that the registration is legitimate)- their motives are questionable at best. The information they're collecting has a very low signal to noise ratio due to services like Bug Me Not and the basic truth that most people fill those registration forms out with false information. Sometimes I suspect that those news sites require registration "because all the other news sites do it"...
...but it's not. I just entered "bugmenot.com" in my FB status line and it worked just fine.
Now that BugMeNot will block logins for web sites that request it, what good are they? Why mention them at all?
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.
"Try it, it's fun. I even bought a fountain pen. It feels nicer than a biro, or typing on the keyboard."
I would, but my scanner is broken so I have no way to email letters.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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!"
I wrote a long note about BugMeNot and facebook's censorship, and it posted just fine.
An hour later (now), I checked facebook and my published note has vanished. Gone without a trace. No warning, no e-mails, nothing, it's just not there. I'm putting up another note about censorship (without using the BugMeNot phrase this time) to see what happens.
Regardless of what happens, I will be cancelling my facebook account by the end of next week. This is absolutely ridiculous.
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.
Anonymous Coward's Law /. thread grows longer, the probability of a post making references to goatse approaches one.
As a