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UK Judge Orders Wikipedia To Reveal User's Identity
BoxRec writes with this excerpt from The Daily Mail: "A mother trying to identify a blackmailer who posted 'sensitive' details about her child on Wikipedia has won the right to find out who edited her entry. In the first case of its kind, a High Court judge has ordered the online encyclopedia's parent company to disclose the IP address of one of its registered users."
Nothing.
Because I don't want you to know who I am.
What if he/she used Tor?
So, someone anonymously leaks information about shady financial dealing by a businesswoman, and then sends a letter indicating that the press was notified of these dealings. Apparently no request for payoff has been made. Sounds like a whistle blower not a blackmailer.
Is it wrong that I'm curious as to what the editor posted to get himself in trouble? Seems like the Streisand effect might backfire on the girl if the Internet is as cruel as I think it is.
Not by the court's order, but that the Daily Mail actually published a decent, non-sensationalistic article.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
Can this order really be enforced? What country's laws is Wikipedia bound by?
Palm trees and 8
No excuse. None.
I piss off bigots.
Go Office Space on it's ass!
Why is this news? The victim showed a judge a blackmail letter. In that situation, of course a judge is going to sign documents forcing people with relevant information to disclose it to the police and/or DA.
Find free books.
whistleblowing is when you go to the press and release info of a criminal nature. blackmailing is when you send letters to the target with a threat to release the info, whether of a criminal nature or just a private, sensitive nature
please report to the nearest droid maintenance facility and have your moral circuitry checked out, thanks
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
How do people get tripped up on this stuff? If you are going to post something you KNOW you shouldn't post, use a proxy from a country like China or Russia. Then China gets the blame, and you stay hidden. Com'on. This isn't that hard.
Sadly, stuff you shouldn't post can include stuff you should post, but powerful people don't want you to post.
People need to know the limits of their freedom on the internet. I am all for freedom of the internets, expressing an idea, deploring stupid thoughts, but personal attacks and blackmail we need to have protections. Not because it causes social harm, people need to think before they act, but because it causes mental harm, long term mental harm. Mental harm our society will have to pay for in lost wages/taxes, mental assistance, and of course the sympathy/empathy we feel for these people. To become null to their pains is to become a person living in a warzone, not caring about those around us. We should not be that society.
blackmail is blackmail is blackmail
whatever you think of your rights online, criminal activity renders some of your rights null and void
of course you have rights in a free society: as long as you also abide by your responsibilities. this is true of actual, flawed societies that are not entirely free, and also true of any hypothetical societies you can imagine that function perfectly: when you break your responsibilities you have in a free society, you have abdicated your rights. do you honestly think there is any way around that fact? a society of individuals who do not abide by their responsibilities is by direct consequence a society with few rights as well
the government is a side issue: most of your rights are violated in this world by your fellow citizens, not the government. of course the government also violates your rights. in a society trying to improve itself, this is revealed, discussed, and punished. just like individuals who violate your rights deserve to be punished. sorry, they don't deserve to be punished, they MUST be punished to show there is genuine consequences for abdication of responsibility in this world. without such enforcement, there's no reason to respect anyone's rights, whether by government, or a fellow citizen
to most of you, the previous paragraph is eye-glazingly obvious
however, i feel the need to say it, because underneath this story we will see a lot of howling of the government violating people's rights. when the fact is, if you blackmail someone, you HAVE to have your rights violated, for the sake of a functioning free society, actual or theoretical
we see a lot of complaints on these forums and in general about rights. what we don't see much discussion is one about responsibilities. please do your small part and keep that in mind: for every right you claim, you are also taking on an implied responsibility you must keep if you wish to maintain the rights you cherish
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
What would happen should Wikipedia hand over false information? Surely the courts wouldn't know any better.
Can Wikipedia claim it's doesn't keep IP info?
European free speech and whistle-blower protections are too limited, and the UK has been trying to impose its rules on other countries for a while. Fortunately, they don't have jurisdiction over Wikipedia.
So they have the ip address. Big whoop. It doesn't reveal WHO posted, just the modem that was used.
Could have been a wifi user out at the street corner, a virus.. someone broke into the home and posted.. An IP in a vacuum isn't evidence.. its a suggestion..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Ah, Daily Fail...you seem to have forgotten that the Wikimedia Foundation isn't in the UK. Oh, wait. They didn't. They just ignored the implications.
Excuse me for asking the question nobody seems to be asking: How do we actually know she's being blackmailed?
1) Person says something about you don't like
2)Claim they're blackmailing you
3)Judge orders person's identity revealed
4)Lawsuit
5)Profit! (And jail time for the accused Blackmailer)
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
I'm not saying that there shouldn't be legal oversight. The problem is which is the authority?
When are we going to have the first incident of someone paying off a third world judge to obtain private information?
Where is the Switzerland of the internet?
Can you point me to the comments where the "slashhordes" have been outraged by this court order? I mean, your rant is all very nice, I just don't see who it's directed against? "we will see a lot of howling", "we see a lot of complaints on these forums and in general about rights"? Where?
what we don't see much discussion is one about responsibilities.
There's plenty of discussion. Indeed, if X is a right, then that surely implies the discussion that not infringing X is a responsibility.
Whenever there is a child involved all notions of common sense and rational thinking go out the nearest window.
.1 of a % chance that it will ever prevent a child from having to experience the smallest noticeable amount of pain
No law is too draconian, too invasive of one's privacy if there is even
I cant help but think that if Wikipedia don't comply and donate 100,000 GBP to some children's charity for their 'sin' in merely being involved in this whole thing they will be made out to be the bad ones and accused of sheltering paedophiles, rapists and other undesirables.
Do you think slave holders were not offended by being called murderers and inhuman? Do you think Catholics were not deeply disturbed by Protestants calling the Catholic hierarchy illegitimate and corrupt? The right to offend is an essential part of free speech rights.
In a democracy, you have a right to be protected form libel and criminal blackmail. You don't have a right to be protected from "mental harm" resulting from speech you find disturbing.
This news article was taken from the Daily Mail, a far-right tabloid newspaper which contains more foaming-at-the-mouth madness than a month of Fox News. This story was in all probability sandwiched between an article about how the eeevil not-quite-as-right-wing government are spending *your* taxes on a Christian Vegan Lesbian Holistic Nicaraguan Islamic Learning-impaired Whale-Yoga Ashram, and how the Fish-People really run the BBC which is why they showed eeeevil Nick Griffin and not an episode of Last of the Summer Wine.
Believe pretty much any article you read on Wikipedia before you believe the Daily Mail.
Does this court feel that the individual who committed the offense lives within their jurisdiction? Or does this court feel that it has the right to extend its grasp into other nations?
This treaty nonsense is an offense to liberties of free men around the world.
not that i believe posting "sensitve data" is right on wikipedia, but isn't blackmailing spose to mean that person x is threating to put person y's somthing real personal for example not actually doing it unless person y didn't do what they asked them, after all what wikpedia meant for i mean all sorts of things are on that site, biographies of people, peoples histories, histories of countries, famous people, informations about everything that can be written down?
and how bout the affairs and personal life/ data leaked to the media or anyone about people of general public interest, famous people, or anyone in the media could get their hands on, especially like elections, I mean come on sensitive data covers just about anything that means a lot to someone or almost anything that might mean somthing to someone? How do they know that a person who posted the data was another faction/ person/ ect. posing as a the unfortunate possible victim that the true black mailer is using?
so many questions, its hard even for the government to figure out at times what is the 'truth' and what isn't online? or do we have the ultimate way to blackmail a person the mother blackmails the other guy?
The internet, you go on to be warned things will spread that you don't want to, or you will be impersonated, like some one using the same name as me on face book, real name, if the kids info was on facebook and he played any of their games it's possible to get access to that. or even get friends in the game.
Better not be facebook, beacuse if it is its going to go to become a lawsuit.
Face it People, The internet, don't post information on any site unless you know its secure, especially sites like facebook, and games that then run using face book or any other similar application as people can get into the friends list and look around. If people go your data will be sold to others come on. I see a lawsuit coming with this "the Black mailer" suing family its bound to happen
Wikipedia editions are not anonymous
My heart is pure, but make no mistake, it's pure evil
What would happen should Wikipedia hand over false information? Surely the courts wouldn't know any better. Can Wikipedia claim it's doesn't keep IP info?
You can't take back the lie.
You never know what will be exposed in a civil and criminal investigation.
What will come out at trial.
It makes no sense to open the door to deeper and more dangerous inquiries into your own conduct.
My modem is located in the front bedroom and when I use the laptop in the kitchen all the way in the back, the laptop will switch to a neighbours signal which is much stronger there.
Im actually using it now and surf all my porn this way.
also, i have your bank account password. give me $1,000 and fuck off, or i will empty your bank account in its entirety
zzz
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
if the issue is just that someone doesn't want information out there they don't like, then wikipedia is being violated by the court system for the sake of an inflamed ego rather than an actual case of criminality. in which case, one would think then that this is an actual criminal case. if its not a criminal case, it soon will be, with the court system as the defendant and wikipedia as the plaintiff
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
There really ought to be a "-1 Impossible to Read" mod.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
If only I read followup headline that said 'wikipedia tell UK to blow it out their ass,' today would end as a good day. Then wikipedia gets removed from the UK and pissed-off protesters would show the government that they are sick of trading in protection for their freedoms. It would then be followed by a spectacular event of pink clouds precipitating candy and rainbows that we can use as space elevators. Finally, all UK politicians would simultaneously get a hearts attack, become resuscitated, then get another heart attack.
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that is one of the reasons blackmail is effective. Because taking action against it is likely result in the info being revealed.
Someone tried it on David Letterman not that long ago. They tried to extort money from Letterman based on knowledge of an extramarital affair Letterman was having. Letterman went to the cops, and the info about the affair came out, causing Letterman considerable hassle and embarassment. He had foreseen that and decided he was in a position to weather the storm (he is still a rich old dude no matter what) but others in the same situation could very well have just shut up and paid.
"On this spot in 1989, nothing happened."
So, I wouldn't be justified in publishing information about Mark Thatcher being involved in trying to steal a country, solely on the basis that he's the child of Margaret Thatcher, milk snatcher?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Depends. I once wrote to George Bush Sr a letter threatening to blow the whistle to the whole world that George Bush Jr is a good for nothing drunk, unless he sent me one million dollars. I never got a reply, though...
Nonsense. When the whistleblower is exposing incest or certain types of child abuse, the whistleblower automatically reveals the names of children involved by revealing the abuser. And sometimes a whistleblower or anonymously protected exposition is necessary because the guilty person cannot or will not be pursued by law enforcement, as occurred with the Catholic priests finally convicted of child harassment in the strange cases that led to Cardinal Bernard Law being taken off the short list for the next Pope.
if i shout fire in a crowded theatre, and this leads to someone's death, than i am criminally culpable
yet according to you, this is protected free speech
no: there genuinely exists in this world, simply as a result of clear logical consequence, that some speech must be disallowed for the sake of justice in this world. the "fire" in a crowded theatre example is merely one of a million such scenarios where free speech is genuinely and intractably incompatible with the concept of justice
your problem is that you are a free speech fundamentalist. a fundamentalist is someone who adheres to a concept WITHOUT EXCEPTION: free speech, the free market, the infallibility of the bible/ quran/ torah, whatever. there are millions of types of fundamentalists, each being someone who holds a concept to be without exception and utterly unquestionable, like you and free speech
the truth is that in this world, every concept, even the ones you hold most dear, have exceptions, and must be questioned. the concepts i hold most dear have exceptions and must be questioned. that's just the nature of this world: its complicated. fundamentalism therefore creates suffering in this world because it tries to impose a cookie cutter simplification of human nature onto a complicated world, such that all of the inevitable exceptions of real human behavior in the real world are not tolerated, and are punished... when such behavior isn't really wrong, and may in fact be what is right
your words speak of a young mind. you are probably 14 years old. give it time, you'll figure it out... and if you actually aren't 14, god save us all from the fools and the fundamentalists in this world: the simplistic way you think about your world is poisonous
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You're an idiot. We're all someone's children.
there are exceptions to every concept
such as to free speech by shouting fire in a theatre resulting in death WHEN THERE ISN'T A FIRE
now that i've tacked on the braindead fucking obvious qualifier, without which you think you are allowed to smugly weasel out of examining your free speech fundamentalism, i suggest you finally examine how you have failed in creating a logically coherent set of "principles"
yes, you are "principled"
pfft
assholes who consciously defy self-examination of their own failures usually have a whole bunch of complementary adjectives to describe their supposed wholesomeness
morons who don't vaccinate their children are fighting for individual rights (at the expense of public health)
morons who don't allow their children blood transfusions are fighting for religious freedom (at the expense of their child's death)
morons who quote the constitution as if it were the fucking bible without actually THINKING about the concepts behind the document are defiling the very spirit the framers of the constitution committed to paper. if the founding fathers were reading this thread, they would point to your braindead zeal as the very enemy of the concepts they were describing
the constitution describes a trust between the people and its government. this is a living trust, meaning with changes in society and technology, its words should, rightfully, change over time to adhere to the PRINCIPLES it embodies. meanwhile, aping the fucking words and NOT THINKING ABOUT THE MEANING BEHIND THEM is merely making a trust with a dead, static long ago era. you sitting there spouting the words of the constitution in the same way a religious zealot shouts verses from the quran or the bible makes perfect sense in summarizing exactly what you are: a brain dead, zombified, unthinking fucking fundamentalist, an enemy of the PRINCIPLES the founding father held dear
now grow a fucking brain and THINK and QUESTION and therefore validate your sorry rotten mind
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Well, more to the point, why should privacy exist on wikipedia, especially when the page topic is another person.
Its not wikileaks after all.
How can reliability of information be achieved without accountability?
Yes, I fully understand the theory that crowd sourcing will eventually get it right, but when there is no crowd involved, and there are simply a couple of individuals talking trash there can be no expectation that the content will ever be believable.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
someday, assuming a more nuanced social skillset, you might have a child
in which case, the irrational desire to protect that child from the various dangerous scenarios of adult life will be felt in your own mind. and it is an irrational desire. much like the irrational desire to feed. or the irrational desire to fornicate. in other words: not so rational from a point of view of principles and concepts, but very rational from the point of view of the preservation of and continuation of life: take care of your children
biological imperatives trump all high minded concepts. principles and concepts work only when they aren't interfering with biological imperatives. as an example: every right, freedom, and sense of decency you hold dear and valuable in your mind is just one food riot away from being completely violated without any recourse to justice. no police, court system, or government body can remain coherent when those police, judges, and government bureaucrats are more busy with trying to procure some food. so pay attention to those biological imperatives, they matter a hell of a whole lot. ignore them at the peril of losing all progress we've ever made in human society
so if you have kids, you will understand that this impulse isn't so irrational after all, as there is a very real biological rational reason to protect your offspring from the real world until they are able enough physically and mentally to protect themselves: for species that have a small set of children, such as homo sapiens, evolution favors the survival rate of organisms that actively protect their offspring
all i'm saying is that "think of the children!" might be the butt of every slashdot joke, but it is also a "hysteria" that you need to make peace with and accept, because it is simply never, ever going away. because it actually makes a hell of a lot of sense, but from a different point of view, a point of view that trumps all other points of view
without children, all the arguments you could ever have about rights and freedoms won't matter one bit if there's no one here to inherit the society and the government you tried to improve. the health and well being of the generation that comes after you is all you leave in this world, on an individual and a societal level. so it really is of the highest importance that you do your best to protect them until they can fend for themselves
this simple, brutal logic defeats and overrules all other arguments you can possibly make. "think of the children" reigns supreme. deal with it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
liberal this, milgram that, peta this. grasping at straws
you're firing your shotgun while stumbling back: a lot of random shot all over the place, none of them even remotely reaching what i am saying or who i am or what i represent to you and your "thinking", such as the absence of thought that you represent can be described
you don't venerate the concepts and ideas in the constitution, which i do highly value, you instead venerate the literal words, aping them back without the slightest attempt to actually digest the concepts behind the words. you're exactly like the maniacs holding up verses of the quran before they commit various atrocities: fundamentalist idiots, the whole lot of you. the document means everything to you morons, the thought and the concepts behind the document, nothing. because you've never actually thought about what the fucking words actually MEAN, you've just encrusted the literal words in gold glitter in your mind and marched around with them. fetishization, not moral thought
i value the constitution more than you ever can, because i am actually thinking about what the constitution actually means. you are merely regurgitating the words, and providing no thought to what the words mean. you're a fundamentalist. you're an enemy of what the founding fathers were trying to do when they wrote the constitution. you're very much what is wrong with this world: you've stopped thinking
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Grasping at straws? Hardly. I'm describing you perfectly.
You do not care for the ideals of the men who envisioned and wrote the constitution. You view it as an means to control other people.
Of course other people must be controlled, by you because in your liberal elitist douchbag brain no one is capable of handling the burden of freedom.
So, did you finish that movie yet?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
and you write "You view it as an means to control other people"
yeah, you got me. excuse me, i have to go suck obama's cock, since he appointed me dark overlord for retarded thread arguments, secret liberal fascist agenda workgroup #7A
pffft
any other paranoid rant you want to project on me and what i am actually saying? or maybe, gee i dunno, do you want to fucking actually read what i am actually fucking writing and actually fucking respond to that?
small cluebat for you: when arguing with people, it helps to respond to what they actually fucking are saying to you, as opposed to atavistically projecting your dimwitted little hysterical fears on your opponent, and reacting to that instead, as if your pantytwisted little fears actually have the slightest thing to do with what the other person is ACTUALLY FUCKING SAYING. its a sign of intellectual bankruptcy: you've run out of coherent things to say, so you throw scary words around
as i said, you're grasping at straws: you don't have anything substantiative to respond to me about what i am saying, so you're accusing me of random completely unrelated bullshit. because some part of you recognizes you've lost the fucking argument, but your stubborn pride prevents you from actually admitting i have a fucking point about your fundamentalist way of thinking about your so called "principles"
a three year old can be taught to say "free speech is important". it doesn't mean anything until he understands what free speech is. a teenager can be taught to say "free speech important above all else". it doesn't mean anything because he doesn't understand how complicated real life is. young, naive idealists understand principles in the most simplistic of ways. its a sign of ignorance of a wider world, a lack of wisdom and life experience. in fact it isn't really principles they have, because such inexperienced simpletons only understand the world in relation to their preconceived notions about how the world should work under ideal conditions that never really exist
real principles are understanding the concepts that are valuable to you in relation to how they actually work in the real world, how to sustain them, and how to keep them safe from some unfortunate and ugly truths about human nature which unfortunately bind us all. only then can you be considered a wise person: when you see how delicate such a concept as "free speech" really is, how hard it is to maintain it, and how it can never really be perfect in this world
instead of fucking marching around with words written in glitter that you worship, pridefully boasting you have "principles" because you say free speech is above all, which any fucking moron can say, and never really mean anything. well: i say pancakes are the most important thing is the world. oh yeah for me! who the fuck cares? what does it fucking mean? it doesn't mean anything. only when you have a coherent vision of how delicate and yet important something like free speech is are you a truly principled person whose mind has an appreciation of THE REAL WORLD
you're a simpleton. grow some iq points, try to understand your much worshipped but little understood constitution and its free speech someday, and then say something actually useful about free speech and how it actually works, and how to actually protect it. hint: its slightly more complicated than worshipping the constitution like a fucking cargo cult, protecting it from the horrible scary liberals
oh yes, evil liberalism: THE VERY FUCKING PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATION OF THE FUCKING CONSTITUTION, you moron. and ah yes, freedom of speech: A LIBERAL IDEA. sheesh. get some edumacation some day, knuckle dragger
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
any fool is aware of the fact that you can cause a panic by shouting fire in a crowded theatre, and that a panic might result in a trampling. it doesn't matter what you intend, a riot, a joke, a laugh, anything: you caused injury via a foolish act. you are therefore guilty of a criminality according to any common sense definition of crimininality... in any country. i have to say in any country, because i don't know what the hell being an american or not has to do with anything
we're not talking about actual criminal code of a particular country, we're talking about simple moral concepts that make sense to anyone from any world culture. and your car analogy is completely off-base: diffusion of responsibility in a traffic situation is not at all analogous to one perpetrator creating a panic, where culpability is clear and obvious
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
according to simple straightforward logic
of course there are edge conditions that are contentious and open to debate
but there also situations where the use of "free" speech results in an uncontroversial injustice, directly and inevitably, such as shouting fire in a crowded theatre
such that we are talking less about belief and opinion, and more about simple reality
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Since ifwm's pithy and accurate post was modded to oblivion, allow me to respond.
Whistleblowers do not reveal the names of children involved by revealing the abuser.
An excellent recent example is the nursery worker recently arrested in the UK for abusing her wards. She was vilified for the original offence, but then attacked constantly by the media for days because she wouldn't reveal which children she'd abused.
The abuser was clearly known, but not the victims. (Yes, there's photographic evidence. No, I don't know why they can't identify the victims from the photos - could be that all 3 year olds look the same naked or that they didn't include the heads in the pictures, or something).
In UK law sexual abuse victims have an automatic right to anonymity. I think that's sensible and appropriate; I would personally extend the right to those accused of abuse to protect their reputations too - there are too many false accusations, which destroy peoples careers and family lives. Remove the anonymity at the point they are convicted of the crime, not the point at which someone (who remains anonymous) accuses them.
I think TFA is great! There's an incredibly appropos photo of Jimmy Wales, who looks in the picture like he's so scared he's about to piss himself.
Mr. Justice Tuginhat? You can't make this stuff up!
Free Martian Whores!
You, and ifwm, need to be carefully with that phrase "do mot reveal" and "Never". Was that child care worker revealed by a whistleblower? Then you're not necessarily citing a relevant example. But even for cases that involve normal prosecution, rather than whistleblower cases, try the infamous Fritzl case (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritzl_case). Because it was incestuous abuse, the identity of the children involved is obvious.
Some whistleblowers have to act in the face of police or corporate unwillingness to act against the offenders. The nature of the whistleblowing, and what exactly to publish, needs to be judged on a case-by-case basis, because absolutes such as "never children!" will trap some of them into useless editing of their accusations.
In the UK the Fritzl case would have been tried anonymously, so that the victim could remain anonymous.
Whether whistleblower or not the authorities in this country do their best to protect victims from reputational loss associated with sex related offences.
Hey isn't this like the copyright theft of the UK National Gallery pictures whereby Wikipedia told the National Gallery to go fugg themselves because under US law it was OK. Well given that the wikipedia servers are in Florida which is way out of the jurisdiction of the UK courts then Wikipedia should say "Go fugg yourselves. Send us a picture of the event."
Bingo.
Just rewarding you for affirming the basics. Pre-Net, you could squash info because random people couldn't get an exposure critical mass. Now the Amplify effect needs to be accounted for every day.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine