Slashdot Mirror
Vulgar Comment On Newspaper Site Costs Man His Job
DeeFresh writes "ReadWriteWeb has an article up today discussing an incident in which a school employee lost his job after leaving a comment on the website of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper. After the school employee responded to the newspaper's poll of 'the strangest thing you've ever eaten' with a feline-inspired vulgarity, Kurt Greenbaum, the site's director of social media, tracked down the commenter's identity through his IP address and reported him to school officials. When confronted, the school employee resigned from his job."
Time to start using TOR: http://www.torproject.org/.
Here kitty, kitty!
RTFA
he did delete the comment and the guy from the school kept posting the same thing multiple times
Now consider the following (bold text by me):
http://www.stltoday.com/blogzone/the-editors-desk/the-editors-desk/2009/11/post-a-vulgar-comment-while-youre-at-work-lose-your-job/all-comments/
By mid-morning, a number of folks had commented about their experiences with Bird’s Nest Soup, octopus, cow brains and rattlesnake. Then, while I was in our 10 a.m. news meeting, someone posted in reply a single word, a vulgar expression for a part of a woman’s anatomy. It was there only a minute before a colleague deleted it.
A few minutes later, the same guy posted the same single-word comment again. I deleted it, but noticed in the WordPress e-mail alert that his comment had come from an IP address at a local school. So I called the school. They were happy to have me forward the e-mail, though I wasn’t sure what they’d be able to do with the meager information it included. About six hours later, I heard from the school’s headmaster. The school’s IT director took a shine to the challenge. Long story short: Using the time-frame of the comments, our website location and the IP addresses in the WordPress e-mail, he tracked it back to a specific computer. The headmaster confronted the employee, who resigned on the spot.
So we have an individual who was using work assets to make not one, but two vulgar posts. It kinda makes you wonder how intent was this guy in checking that web page over and over (like many slashdoters do), re-posting the vulgarity as many times as needed... not the type of activity you are supposed to be doing while on the clock (after all, they give you a paycheck for work, not because you are pretty or something.)
The school was in the right in asking the guy "what are you doing, ON THE CLOCK, with OUR COMPUTER ASSETS, posting the same profanity several times?
It is also worth noting that the school didn't fire him, but that he quit on the spot... or so says the story, but that's irrelevant anyways. The guy had it coming.
Now I can't way to see the juvenile posters making this a case of libertarian freedom of speech vs 1984'esque police control and the war on terror.
I have eaten many different animals (or at least parts of them), including rattlesnake, crocodile, alligator, iguana, turtle, and many different molluscs, arthropods, echinoids, and whatnot from sea or river. I have also eaten squirrel, bear, dog, and cat.
So, I can say I have eaten pussy, and you can interpret or misinterpret it any way you want. Oh, and woof-woof, too.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I'm so sick to death on hearing/reading/learning of people who post something on the internet and lose their job over it. Regardless of whether the post was fictional or real, the man was not posting anything about the school he worked for. He kept the language to not use profanity, and whether someone reads it as 'pussy' or 'cat' doesn't freaking matter. There is no excuse for our society today for making people lose their jobs because of their personal life. A job is what the average person works for 8 hours a day usually away from home.
I don't have to read the comments. The guy posted with an anonymous name. I call Shenanigans.
Conversely, here is my message to the world. If you're going to post on the web with all the knowledge we have today about how it is used against us, then you subject yourself to scrutiny, right or wrong, you do.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
According to TFA, it happened...twice.
Not a stretch, no, but an abuse of power.
It's not a stretch that someone in the law enforcement would randomly want to run a background check on Barak Obama, but don't try it.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
He didn't know it was an employer but probably thought that maybe some student. Still an asshole and idiotic thing to do tho.
Anonymous trolling is "an asshole and idiotic thing to do". Embarrasing someone for trolling might be as well, but at that point it's just eye-for-an-eye.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
Also following excerpts are from their privacy policy:
Our web servers automatically collect limited information about your computer's connection to the Internet, including your IP address (but not the e-mail address), when you visit our sites. Your IP address does not contain personally identifiable information, nor does it identify you personally.
We will not share individual user information with third parties unless the user has specifically approved the release of that information. In some cases, however, we may provide information to legal officials as described in “Compliance with Legal Process” below.
I guess reading comprehension is troublesome for some.
He wrote Pussy once. Kurt deleted it. Exactly once more he wrote the word Pussy. Then Mr The Kurt decided on revenge.
Crapflood = a metric fuck ton of the annoying shit, not the word pussy posted exactly twice.
And given the question, any sane admin would have giggled like a school girl for a couple of milliseconds and then quietly deleted it. A half decent admin would tweak a couple of lines of code in the back end - a half a minute job - to prevent such words from being posted again.
Mod parent up -- this is an extremely relevant point and I am surprised that nobody else has mentioned it yet.
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
I wonder where - in the St. Louis Dispatch policies - it states for employees to track down the ip address of those making offensive (but not illegal) posts and then contact the work.
Right here: http://www.stltoday.com/help/privacy-policy
Our web servers automatically collect limited information about your computer's connection to the Internet, including your IP address (but not the e-mail address), when you visit our sites. Your IP address does not contain personally identifiable information, nor does it identify you personally.
Oh wait...
Well, maybe here:
We will not share individual user information with third parties unless the user has specifically approved the release of that information. In some cases, however, we may provide information to legal officials as described in "Compliance with Legal Process" below.
Hmm no, that would make what he did against his own terms of service...
But wait, i see that compliance with legal process part now, so I'm sure it gives them permission there:
Compliance with Legal Process
We may disclose personal information if we or one of our affiliated companies is required by law to disclose personal information, or if we believe in good faith that such action is necessary to comply with a law or some legal process, to protect or defend our rights and property, to protect against misuse or unauthorized use of our web sites or to protect the personal safety or property of our users or the public.
Oh, holy crap. No laws were broken, so nothing in their terms states they can do this, and plenty of places state they can't.
If anyone needs fired, it's the ass at this paper that violated his own companies TOS, as well as broke the law to do it.
Greenbaum is the social media editor at the newspaper. A while back he posted the results of a survey which showed that:
61% of his readers did not want the editors deciding what comments were offensive
Given his response to the comments on the article, I don't think he's any closer to understanding what he was told the first time.
That sort of "pay back" would be just as bad as the thing that he did. Better if his employer simply reprimands him for violating the anonymity inherent in the poll he administrated.
Just because he could did not mean he was justified in doing so. The correct action would have been to delete the offensive content, then either (A) remove the anonymity, so that the anonymous user couldn't continue to post or (B) ban that IP for the rest of the poll (or permanently, it's your decision).
Since Kurt evidently violated the site's privacy policy by his actions, and that violation resulted in the wronged party losing his job, it seems to me that Kurt should be out on the street too. A reprimand seems too generous.
Otherwise, I agree with you.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2275
No! There is no reason to do a reverse DNS lookup in order to ban a single IP. Ban the IP and be done with it.
If you find yourself banning multiple IPs that appear to come from the same subnet, then it would be justified to do a reverse DNS lookup for the purposes of banning the whole range. Releasing that data would still be an abuse of power, unless you state in your privacy policy that you reserve the right to do so. They didn't.
Just doing the reverse lookup was a minor abuse of power. Releasing the information, IMHO, was most certainly a punishable abuse of power. He should be at least reprimanded on-the-record (just doing the lookup could perhaps be handled with a friendly hey-you're-doing-it-wrong, I'm-not-writing-you-up-for-it-this-time-but-please-don't-do-that-again).
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Lesson learned: When making anonymous posts, use either a proxy, an anonymous posting service (COTSE.NET), someone's open WiFi connection, or a friend's computer.
He repeatedly reposted the same comment after its being removed, so the lesson is when trolling, use either a proxy, an anonymous posting service , someone's open WiFi connection, or a friend's computer. Actually the lesson is don't be a troll!
What the guy who was forced to resign was doing was, in fact, trolling, by any definition of the word.
Free Martian Whores!
On the very same page!
We may disclose personal information if we or one of our affiliated companies is required by law to disclose personal information, or if we believe in good faith that such action is necessary to comply with a law or some legal process, to protect or defend our rights and property, to protect against misuse or unauthorized use of our web sites or to protect the personal safety or property of our users or the public.
What Greenbaum did was against the privacy policy of the site:
We will not share individual user information with third parties unless the user has specifically approved the release of that information.
Arguably, no. The privacy policy also says this:
"We may disclose personal information...to protect against misuse or unauthorized use of our web sites".
And obscenity is one of the misuses they list in their Terms.
But it's still incredibly lame that he did this.
The difference being that when you do a check on the president, you get suspended. When you look up the contact information for a citizen that calls you fat in a letter to the editor in order to send her an intimidating letter, it gets swept under the rug.
And for the record, Kevin Beary used to be my local sheriff, and yes, he's pretty damn tubby.
I've worked consulting for at least a dozen school systems. The Internet can be used by pretty much anyone FOR anything. Sure, there's a line - like don't download torrents at school and no watching online pornography in elementary school. But personal use is what most people actually use the Internet for at work - most work stuff is local - local file servers, local intranet, etc, and schools are no different than any business.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -