Slashdot Mirror
Best Way To Clear Your Name Online?
An anonymous reader writes "About fifteen years ago, I did something that I've come to regret on a university computer system. I was subsequently interviewed by a Federal law enforcement agency, although no charges were pressed and I have no criminal record as a result of my actions. At the time, I discussed the matter with a friend of mine who went on to mention it briefly in a text file zine with a small distribution list. I've generally tried to keep a low profile online and until recently there's been very little information about me available from the major search engines. Unfortunately, that zine mention was picked up by textfiles.com at some point and mirrored across the world. I've tried to address this with the owner of the site, but couldn't get anywhere. Even if my name in the source file is altered, cached copies will continue to link me with my youthful mistake. Have any other Slashdot readers had a similar experience? What practical steps would your readers recommend to prevent this information from hurting me? I am concerned that future employers may hold my past actions against me should they look for me online as part of their screening process."
Be a man and take responsibility for your actions.
Once its on the net, its on the net.
And I'm an idiot to this day. Any employer who would hold a youth mistake against you is also an idiot. Especially when you can google their name in return... Nobody is free of skeletons, just try not to have some real bad ones.
Shh.
I'm not sure how bad it is, but if someone types your name in google and the ONLY thing they find is that one thing you don't, then it'll stand out. Try to use your name for everything, so that those things appear first in the results.
If you're "John Smith", I think it will be pretty easy to disclaim being the SAME John Smith unless there are a lot of other matching details.
On the other hand, if your last name is "Szczerbiak", maybe you can make a case for wanting to simplify the spelling and change it.
Basically those are the first two options I can think of -- dodge, and go stand somewhere else.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Unless you have an incredibly unique name, you simply say, "I have no idea who that was, but it wasn't me". There is no other identifying informaton or anything else like that.
Not much you can do now, in regards to your online presence.
If an employer asks, calmy explain that it was a youthful mistake. Emphasize that you have not done anything like that since, and that you have a clean record.
Worst case: change your name.l
It's the Make Money Fast spammer!!!
Did you ever consider taking what you did and using it as a reason they SHOULD hire you?
Some thoughts:
1. Are you still friends with the writer of the zine? Ask them to send a DMCA notice. Don't know if it would work, but may be worth a shot.
2. Drown out the old stuff. Develop an online presence that will bury the old stuff into obscurity. Register your real name as your user ID on all the sites you post on. Downside: prospective employers, etc, will think you spend all day on those sites.
3. Change your name.
Sorry if this is of no help.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Just live with it. A reasonable person can see the difference between a simple mistake years ago (especially if there is no conviction) and a habitual law breaker. I sold alcohol to a minor because I was too lazy to check an ID, and it turned out to be a sting. It didn't ruin my life.
Whale
And what did you do?
(cap ensnare)
A good way to lower your profile would be to not link to the site in question on a prominent site like Slashdot. I think you deserve the karma hit for being that stupid.
It's 15 years ago, if they hold something minor (no charges were pressed) that happened 15 years ago as the reason for not giving you the job... then you probably weren't going to get it anyway.
A single act you did as a kid 15 years ago will not define who you are. Anyone who treats the event as a defining act is probably a jackass and not someone you want to deal with anyways. However, given how much effort/thought you have put into dealing with the situation, I would guess these events did have some kind of significant effect on who you are as a person today. Should it ever come up in a discussion, I would use it as an opportunity to put a positive spin on yourself and how you are a better, more ethical person because of your youthful mistake(s)
...posting the fact to a site where a good deal of the readership's instinctive reaction to the posting of sensitive information on the Internet is to find and mirror it in as many locations as possible is probably not the best first step. See "Streisand Effect". Then again, if you are just pretending to be the subject of the text in order to humiliate the actual victim even further, then I tip my hat to you sir. Bravo!
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Sucks to have to live with the consequences of your actions, hey?
If it was something really serious, well, don't do the crime if you can't do the time. If it wasn't that serious then you don't want to work for someone who would hold it against you anyway.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=92865
That's at least one giant step in the right direction.
You will be haunted by this all your life so you might as well end it all now.
if you manage to smokescreen your online identity with huge amount of positive material that bears your name (i.e. get your name on a lot of popular projects), with lots of cross linking, you will at the very least bury it into non-existance as far as search engines are concerned.
if it's result number 999 on google, i doubt your average employer will read that far into it, and if they do, the amount of positive things that have been said about you will probably outweigh the one negative result
and i'm not sure of US law in this manner, but is it legal to deny someone a job opportunity based on an alleged crime for which they were completely pardoned?
You just awoke a sleeping giant. As we speak thousands of once idle keyboards are feverishly trying away to unravel the mystery of just who you are and what you did - you even told them where to look. How fond were you of your name?
There is no way you can track down all those bits and alter/destroy them. Regardless fo the legality, it is impossible from a legal perspective.
Go Buddhist, give up everything, change your name, (your SSN will stay, IIRC) and reinvent yourself. Seems to me to be a lot for a stupid text file. As someone who would work at a summer camp, I would disappear 3 months out of the year to the world outside the camp. I'd come back fresh, refreshed and unencumbered. Live off the net for a while and see how really irrelevant it is to the Real World.
or just maybe remove all the link destinations?
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
And for the future, name all of your kids John Smith.
Create all kinds of web presence - create several blogs and crosslink them to high profile sites. Google juice the heck out of a personal web page you have. Post about work you do on various sites.
It boils down to make it so the one incident is buried in googles results to the second page, and even then - they will see all the positive stuff on the first page and wonder if it is even you.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
What avague and unlikely story...
This is up there with claiming you hacked a Gibson...
Change your name.
I know it sounds extreme, but it would solve the problem.
curious as to what this guy did online 15 years ago that would both warrant a g-man visiting him and his need to have it removed from viewing online?
Aw Frell this
Just hack into the server hosting the offending item and... oh wait.
You can always game the system. Remember search engines will only find your name if it is indexed. So all you need to do is create a bunch of websites and pages about yourself that are clean and sanitized as per your requirements on websites like LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace/Twitter, and some interesting blog sites that have high rankings as per ranking systems and high traffic such as Alexa (probably). Perform some search engine optimization on your webpages and profiles such that these sites come in the first page and textfiles.com is pushed back 2-3 pages. No one goes beyond the first page if they find the main stuff in the first few links. Remember that's why Google gave the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button.
Of course, if someone wants to they can find every detail on you, but you can divert them intelligently by using the internet. Think it over.
First[1], you need to invent a time machine. Then you travel back in time and either convince your former self not to do it or you kill all the witnesses and destroy all the evidence.
[1] You can actually do it last, if you like. Or in the middle. Whenever. It is a time machine, after[2] all.
[2] Or before all. It is a time machine, after[3] all.
[3] Or before all. It is stack overflow near line 5. Bailing
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If asked, say it wasn't you. Done.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.
Do other things that will get your name on search engines. Are you a programmer? Consider volunteering for an awesome open-source project (something people have heard of), so that "John UnfortunatelyUniqueMiddleName Doe added some cool features to AwesomeProject" appears first. They may still read the other stuff, but it will look a lot less like you've spent your whole life doing stupid things to computers, and mean that the advantages of hiring you are presented next to the information that may cause doubt.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
I would go follow Joel Spolsky's advice. Own your own brand. Make sure good stuff about you is posted, post under your real name, and dilute the bad stuff into oblivion (or at least off the first search page)
Any "normal" employer is going to give up google searching after the first 20 or 30 good hits. Any employer paranoid enough to require security clearances will find info even if you mange to scrub it off the internet. And if questioned about it, talk honestly about it - you regret it, it was a learning experience, and you have resolved to never do it again.
I'd DEFINITELY start by drawing everybody's attention to it online as much as possible. Perhaps by posting about it on one of the more widely read techie news sites? Maybe a sort of reverse Streisand effect could be created.
Offer to help them steal a universal decryption chip. And grow some dreamy blue eyes, feathered hair and side burns to die for.
I bought a used street sweeper and modded it with an extra tank on the top. I fill that full of white-out that I made myself in bulk from a secret family recipe (what can I say, I come from a long line of screw-ups). Then whenever I put my online foot in my mouth, I run out and hop in my "Eraser" and head off for my ISP's local datacenter... I whitewash the whole place top to bottom, and problem solved.
I'm a long-term Rocky Horror Picture Show cast member, and I run a web site for our local cast in Austin. I've been running this web site for over a decade now.
Cast members are frequently very interested to see photographs of themselves performing in the show. And since it's Rocky Horror, they're usually wearing lingerie of some sort. At the time the photos are posted, they're invariably very excited about this. Especially because I take pride in my photography, and most people haven't seen photos of themselves prior to this that someone had actually put significant work into.
A few years later though, these same people have frequently quit the cast, possibly graduated from college, and moved on to other activities. They may decide they want to apply for jobs in education, as music minister of a church, etc. They do some vanity searching on Google and are shocked... shocked I tell you!... that the Rocky Horror cast web site is still online and kicking with what had been posted some years previously.
Now keep in mind this is a hobby web site that I do purely for the enjoyment of myself and other cast members. It's done in my spare time, and I've always paid for it out of pocket.
I'm sure I could honor requests to remove all of these photos, but I simply don't want to. It involves a lot of time and effort on my end, to accomplish something that's actively taking away from things I take pride in myself. I get probably a half dozen requests per year on average at this point all basically saying the same thing: "Take down my photos now! You're causing damage to my reputation!". At some point I just had to say to hell with them all and whip up a form letter response saying "Sorry, but I'm just not going to do anything about it".
Seriously, what you did in your youth and what you do now, with 15 years of maturity (I imagine) and life experience, will have very little in common. Kids do stuff, that's what being a kid is about (and by kid I include those in their early twenties). I employed and worked with people with, let's say, interesting backgrounds. Most were (and are) a damn sight more interesting than the straight laced types. That said, not knowing what you did it's hard to comment fully.
... how come nobody's posted the relevant info on this guy? You guys are slippin'
I always wondered where that "permanent record" was that everyone warned me about. I always assumed is was with the FBI an NSA (they know me). Good to know they've outsource it to textfiles.com. I'll be really worried if it were google that owned it.
Thanks for sharing your story. Perhaps a few stupid young people will think twice about doing something "funny" IRL that could follow them for life.
> I've generally tried to keep a low profile online and until recently there's been very little information about me available from the major search engines.
And that's exactly the mistake you made, probably. Instead of keeping low profile you probably should have filled the web with positive information. This would have had two effects:
- people finding your youth mistake could contrast it with more recent contributions
- your positive contributions would have pushed your youth mistake to page 100 or something in search engines
In fact, it bugs me nearly every day:
A few years ago I was living in a place for just a few weeks and using the computer that came with the room there. Unfortunately, I apparently left my browser with the cookie or whatever that automatically logged me into gmail account. So, some asshole came along after I left and used the opportunity to use my email account to register for some forum that discusses getting Viagra in all kinds of illegal ways. My gmail address is basically exactly my name.
So every time I apply for a job, every time I apply for an apartment or whatever, when I meet a girl etc, I feel like someone's going to Google me and nearly the first result that pops up is all this crap about all kinds of illegal ways of getting Viagra for recreation use etc. It's a nightmare. I've done everything I can to email administrators of the forum (which has now seemed to be swallowed up into other forums so the same posts appear on several different sites) but no one ever returns my emails no matter how much I explain the situation. Due to the nature of my work, I'm very confident this has in fact impacted my career. I don't want to think about things like potential girlfriends, housemates, people generally interested in what I've done in the (scientific) community I work in, etc.
If anyone has any ideas for me on what I could do it would be IMMENSELY valuable to me. I'm very glad this has come up on Slashdot.
I don't think posting this question on Slashdot was the best way to keep it low profile.
This article should be titled: "How to drive a bunch of stupid slashdotters to my website and increase traffic by 1000%"
Change your name.
Sucks that your actions have consequences doesn't it? Those consequences can haunt you the rest of your life... let's here the typical "I didn't know" and we can all pretend it never happened, WRONG!
If you show some "net worthy" repentance maybe some good stuff will show up along with the bad.
The only way to control your name on the internet is to use assert control over it by using it actively. Make yourself known on the internet in a way you want to be known, so that this oddball reference to you gets buried into obscurity.
Your basically online with that story forever now. Not much you can do about that.
Instead you could try to put more of you out there. If this story is only one of a hundred and the others are more recent and show you in a better light then the old story will matter less.
zerocool?
This is one of many reasons why people have to use aliases, and why it shouldn't be illegal.
I have said it before, citizens must alias.
What you do in cyberspace, stays in cyberspace! Unfortunately, cyberspace is a bit more accessible than Vegas.
Bury the text file in search engine results by having a larger on-line presence. Write a blog, submit posts everywhere. Drown it in noise.
Install Ubuntu in Android
Kick your "friend" in the junk for using your real name. It won't solve anything, but you'll feel better.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
How long has Chris Hansen been doing "To Catch A Predator"?
Nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure. Wait, what were we talking about again?
Pretty much your only option is to change your name.
Reading the user comments on this makes me want to smoke crack...
or become a Republican
Either one will work.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Create a whole bunch of fake identities with the same name. Script them so that they are closer to the person described in the file than you appear to be. Run pipl.com a few times to see how it all turns out.
After that you can right a memoir and appear on talk shows. You won't need another job.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
Only it wasn't my youthful mistake. Someone else caused the Secret Service to come look at some systems on my campus; one of which I was connected to when the incident occurred.
Many employers will be reasonable about it, especially if no charges were filed. Those that won't, you probably don't want to work for anyway.
I will note that even having this Secret Service record didn't stop me from getting hired by a Federal Government Agency. It just took an extra three weeks for all the additional paperwork.
(Though, to be fair, if a prospective employer searched on my name, they're going to get more links about an Honor Harrington character than the real me.)
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
It has little or nothing to do with "society".
Did you rape and murder my sister while burglarizing her house 15 years ago?
If you did, and you get out of jail, I am going to cut your nuts off, first.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Q: Tell us of an accomplishment.
A: When I was at university, I made a foolish decision and -- insert very brief but accurate description -- and although there were no criminal charges or anything serious, I have regretted it ever since and have used the lessons learned to make the following improvements in my life and the lives of others: blah, blah, blah.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
There is no way to you to erase yourself from the web. Not unless you are Dr. Who.
And if you were never convicted of anything, and this file with your name is the only thing linking you to it online, then if someone asks about it just say it must be someone else with the same name. Weird how small the world is.
And since the submitter admits to his misbehavior, what she means is "whitewash" or "pardon".
... you can muddy the waters somewhat. I just ran across this bit of advice today, as a matter of fact: "If you're worried about [something you wish you hadn't said publicly] showing up on the search engines, then might I suggest posting to as many different online forums as you can find, making sure to sign your real name to each of them. Cat got your tongue? Simply scroll up three (3) posts, quote a sentence from it, and then say, "I fully agree with that!" Then sign your full name and click the "Post" button. It's that simple. Posting to numerous online forums will get your name all over the web, but not in any context that would matter to anybody. With your name showing up several dozen times in the search engine, this one story will cease to stand out as anything significant. (Any type of forum will do, but computer repair forums are the best for this purpose because the computer repair guys do this for advertising and they always make sure to get their forums listed on all the search engines.)" Courtesy of Positive Atheism
I mean, I'd never heard of this site before. The link to the site adds *nothing* to the story, except a lot of people (like me) will click on it and generate traffic.
Or, his name is Horror Kid
or even
Geeze I don't know. Many of the files up there are about preventing hacking too.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
aw hell, did you fall for that shit with redford going out for pizza, too?
Dont use a slashdot profile to ask a question that has a link to your first and last name.
Oh, look... it's Charles Whealton.
First off, to everyone who knows me: This wasn't my story submission
OK, now that's out of the way, I suffer from a related, but not quite so bad situation: I'm pretty much the only Erik Trimble on the Internet (that's not true, but close enough). Google me, and 90% of the first 100 returns point to me, in some way or not (FYI - the MySpace page for "leathercladdemon" isn't me. Really.) There's nothing bad there, it's just that my life has evolved, and having absolutely all of it retained and searchable over the past 20 years allows people to draw incorrect assumptions about me.
This is all the privacy problems that the current young generations seem to be completely oblivious to, and that pundits like to ignore. People's perceptions of you matter, as much as we'd like to think otherwise. That doesn't mean it has to rule your life, but to think that such perceptions don't matter is foolish. The problem with retaining all this data out in the open is that it seriously harms the ability of people to change. And we want people to change. Lots of Very Bad Things happen to society if we forbid people (either legally, or de facto) from changing their paths in life. For just a minor example, look at what being convicted of anything does to one's entire life. It's not good to have complete personal transparency.
I don't have a solution. At least not a simple one. But it needs to understood by everyone that it IS a problem.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
I think where you're going with this is when somebody google's your name, this is the first result. Why not create a personal site, say yourname.com and give people the side of yourself you'd prefer them to see?
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
"Um...How do I un-send an email?"
"Let's see...Do you have a time machine?"
"No."
"That's pretty much all I've got. I could call the IT department at the company where this person works and, maybe, if I get to the right person, convince them to find and delete the message but it'll probably take an hour or two so the person you sent it to will probably have read it by then. In fact, they've probably already read it in the time it took you to come down here. So, yeah, go with the time machine."
"But I don't have a time machine."
"Oh. Are you positive? Because a time machine is your best bet. Or you could call the person and beg them not to read the message."
I suppose it never occurred to you that all of those warnings people gave you about your actions following you for the rest of your life were accurate? I am in nearly the exact same situation as you except that I am lucky enough to have never had my real name associated with my alias at the time. However, I did not avoid a criminal record as you obviously did. I'm pretty sure you knew exactly what you were doing at the time and that there were possible repercussions for your actions. Now, part of being an adult is living with the life you've made for yourself.
Get in the textfiles.com servers and screw the informations related to you.
Keep your name, just have the spelling legally changed. That way your references will still respond to emails and phone calls, but you get a fresh set of search results.
Oh -- make sure to search any name you're considering changing your name to. Don't want to make things worse.
Any employer that relies on search engine information on their candidates to be accurate is a moron, unless they *really* research your background and know precisely which "John Smith" you are. You wouldn't *want* to work for anyone that just googles your name / college and automatically assumes everything they find is about you.
If they go far enough to actually research the accuracy of the information they found, you are *not* going to be able to hide anything anyway - they would have been checking with the college and previous employers anyway. Google my real name and you come up with a PhD in America who has expertise in my field. It's not me, though, and I've only ever been to America once and never got a PhD. His results are mixed in randomly with my forum posts, technical articles or random blog links, etc. A search is unreliable. A *real* background search would turn up whatever history you have anyway, and falsely denying that is worse than just having it on your record.
Don't worry about it, live life, work for whomever you please. If you think it's become a big, well-known problem in your field talk to your employers beforehand and explain that it was just a thing you did when you were younger. If they can't forgive that, do you *really* want to work for them anyway? What're they gonna find out about your youth next and hold against you?
Non-issue.
Not really. We're in a bad economy right now, and as such employers are extremely picky. It won't always be that way. It just happens to be that way at the moment.
Those with some years on us realize that it'll get better and past actions won't matter so much.
And just maybe this person has learned to moderate his/her online behaviour because of it. That's not a bad thing.
Face it. You will never get all the stuff off the Internet. That‘s like filtering packets with a blacklist.
I heard that in the US it’s rather easy to change your name (other than here in Germany, where you have to have a name like Hitler Likestogetraped to get it changed). Use it. Seriously. :)
And then don’t ever use that new name anywhere on the open Internet. At all. Ever. Period.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
It took about 30 seconds with Google to establish that you are Timothy Lord. There's an MP3 I found of you giving a talk where you even identify your Slashdot ID. So we can get that right out of the way.
Now then.
I Googled Timothy Lord, Tim Lord, both with and without quotation marks. You know what?
There are roughly 7 billion (Timothy Lord) and 10 billion (Tim Lord) hits on that name without quotes. It goes down to close to 100,000 hits to 17,000 hits when you add quotes.
Timothy Lord isn't that uncommon a name. "Tim" and "Lord" by themselves are very common. I have a hard time imagining any employer going through all those search results when there's not really any way of knowing that the Tim Lord they're reading about doing something somewhere at a university computer some time in the past is the Tim Lord they're interviewing for a job. And even if they did, you could always deny it, unless you're under oath or something, but I guess that's a moral question you only have to think about if they went through the hassle of Googling you and getting this hit to begin with.
If your name were, oh, "Cornelius Mytzlplyk" I'd say you have a pretty valid concern here. But "Tim Lord?" I don't think so.
Join Scientology. Then claim the files were posted online as a falsified attack by somebody that disagrees with your religious beliefs. The web site will be shut down in no time.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
It's like trying to get pee out of a pool.
do you tell people before you put the pictures up that you can't be bothered to tweak a few pages every 2 months when it becomes desirable for the pictures to come down again?
Or set the site up so that none of the pictures stay up for more than 12 months? (If people want them, they can snaffle them while they're still up)
Or why not set up your robots.txt so that only the frontpage gets indexed?
If you put potentially damaging pictures of people up on your website, you need to be responsible enough beforehand to recognise that you will need to 'budget' more time later to take them down again. If you can't do that, don't put the pictures up.
FGD 135
You're pretty much a dick. From the clips I have seen of the movie, it's kind of homosexual in nature. What if those photos are hurting someone's image or reputation? What if their friends, loved ones or potential squeezes assume this person is gay now? That's awful. If you were talking any other piece, I'd say "That's not so bad"...but you are talking Rocky Horror Picture Show"....that's synonymous with freak.
Have a heart. Don't be selfish.
I've got a well-published racist neo-nazi with the same name as me.
Life basically sucks, in some ways.
Get over it and get on with it.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
There are so many info sources out there right now. Posting embarrassing pictures of yourself on Facebook is one thing, but do you think your future employer will really be able to find the information on you, and really tell it's you? It might be that they won't even be able to find the info on you, and will probably not connect the dots if they do.
I would go to the interviews and wait to see if they bring it up. You may want to go to an interview you don't care about first just to see how much damage control you actually have to do.
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
You could always change your name. Might I suggest Mike Hawke, Miles O'Toole or Haywood Jablome as possibilities?
Just trying to help.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
You intentionally mentioned textfiles.com and a university mistake on slashdot?
I don't believe you are this retard.
You couldn't have made a bigger advertisement for this.
Are you sure you are the original person, or someone who wants to smear someone else?
Get a job with a company where 'real world' achievement is valued.
Make yourself a certificate, or spend a few bucks and have a custom trophy made.
They will only check the first few pages of the search results. Just do many favorable things and put your name on it.
Smith is a good choice if you're on the run from the police.
Deleted
wow, you are a jerk
Your name is George W. Bush and your crimes AGAINST Humanity.
You will NEVER be cleared.
Yours In Minsk,
K. Trout
All I will say is this. Don't lie about it... Generally employers won't go hunting down stuff like that unless you need security clearances. If you are being interviewed to get a top secret clearance, don't lie. Telling them "yeah, I hacked a network when I was younger" is a whole lot better than you saying you didn't and them finding out that you did.
If a future employer asks, I would tell them that you did make some youthful mistakes - I told my current employer what few I had because they were in my past... Any employer will understand that we make mistakes in school & in college (hey, it's what college is for). If an employer holds something you did in college against you, they're not someone you want to work for.
About fifteen years ago, I did something that I've come to regret on a university computer system.
EMACS? Richard is that you?
Change your name to Tigers Wood.
That sucks. Because I've got such a common name (first, middle and last) that my personal stuff doesn't show up for 13 pages in google. And I've done some embarrassing things.
is like trying to get pee out of a pool.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Why would I need to do any of this? Cast members are performing on stage in a public place, with no reasonable expectation of privacy whatsoever. Audience members are allowed to take all the photos they like as well. Should every audience member also be required to jump through these hoops before being allowed to post photos they took online somewhere?
Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure. In fact, anyone who posts on /. should already be ready for this eventuality.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
He didnt get arrested or go to jail. Seems like not a big deal, unless im wrong like hacked FBI web site and put up kiddie porn or something to that nature.... and if that was the case im sure he wouldnt be posting this cause he would probably be in jail still lol. I wouldnt worry so much, and if you did something cool might help you more than hurt, ya know like you know your stuff, you are so good, the best, etc, etc....
Visit my Forums?
Here is the offending file on textfiles.com:
I found it by doing a search on google for "site:textfiles.com university computer system" and it came up as the first match
The Anarchives
In early march of 1995 I was arrested for "Unauthorized Use Of A Computer". (About 15 years ago)
I was being accused of breaking into the computer systems at the University Of Toronto for the purpose of publishing "Anarchist newsletters".
---------------
Doing a little bit more research shows that Jesse Hirsh is also a contributor to Slash Code:
http://www.slashcode.com/docs/AUTHORS
Welcome to slashdot.org where not only do we help you with your problems but we make them worse at the same time.
Legally change your name to John Doe, or something similiar. Then break into all the databases used for the name change, and delete the information. Just to make sure, kill everyone who knows you changed your name. Burn down your house, your parents house, all the schools you went to, all the places you worked, your classmates houses, the auto license bureau, the Social Security Administration, and anyplace that may have you old name on record or any photos of you.
If anyone finds this after that, you'll just have to say "that must have been another xxxx".
By the way, instead of doing it on a computer, wouldn't a table in an empty office have been better?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
I’d say:
1. Well, you should have though about that some years ago, shouldn’t you?
2. Be a man, have some balls, and stand by the fact that you did the RHPS.
Seriously. Why cave to some retards with prejudiced opinions created from seeing some pictures of you on the net? Fuck them!
If they think it was what they wanted to do back then, then they should be proud of what they did! Do not act according to others define as cool. Define what is cool, by acting accordingly! (If one ever wants to lead anything, then that rule is a must.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
The only way to deal with something like this is to drown it out. There are tonnes of people with my name online, some of whom I disapprove of. So what did I do? Registered my name as a URL, built a decent website and made sure that anyone searching for me found what I wanted them to see.
You can't control what other people post about you, but you can control what you put out there.
Maybe this argument may work with people who don't actually know how little effort it is to change a webpage. Especially something as trivial as removing some images.
While I'm not homophobic like the guy above me, you are being a dick.
but is it legal to deny someone a job opportunity based on an alleged crime for which they were completely pardoned?
Uhh, yes. There is no "right" to a job in the USA. You can be denied for ANY reason except race, religon, or sexual orientation and those are hard to prove.
Why in the world would you think any employer "must" hire someone? Are you kidding me? The USA is a hire and fire at-will country and always has been. It doesn't even make sense to consider whether an employer "must" hire someone they don't want to hire because any employer in their right mind would simply eliminate the position before they would hire someone who is forced upon them. This isn't France.
I kinda-sorta give you a pass because it appears you are Non-US. I'd only point out that this distinction is one major difference between the USA and the rest of the world. There is no right to a job in the USA at all.
I seriously doubt that you can get that information to vanish or be unavailable for anyone looking for it.
However I seriously also doubt that many employers or anyone else will have much of a problem with it at all.
It is rather like the new car buyer worrying about a ding or two on their credit rating. They usually fail to appreciate that the last
1000 buyers had worse credit than theirs. Employers who dig deep may find that in fact you are the cleanest applicant they have had all year. Others may care less simply because the reality is that all they care about is making money of of their job-slave-employees.
I suggest that you not be vain but let any prospective employer know that you are a good catch indeed and they are lucky that you applied for a job with them. If they have so many applicants that you are simply one of the vast horde then you need to be in another trade anyway as the value of the job will be starvation level wages with no real hope of growth for you.
I bet if you made a "donation" he might be more apt to clean up anything you want purged.
Because then he'd only have 2 photos on the site. What, you think he's got tons of photos? If one out of the three people he's taken photos of wants the photos offline, thats 33% of his site!
1. Don't brag about what you did to your friends, or at least not to the ones stupid enough to use your real name. Let this be a lesson to you and all your script kiddie buddies, keep your trap shut. 2. Nobody pays attention to anything on textfiles.com, its mostly considered folklore, and most will figure they were bright enough to change their names to protect themselves. 3. Did the post it with your name, address, birthdate, and ssn number? If not just see #2, ie deny it dumbass.
Why couldn't you capitalize on the situation and when interviews ask about this situation, explain everything with honesty? Everyone's made mistakes. Prove to your prospective employer that you know how to recognize your mistakes and learn from them. Showing this type of integrity should be a plus. If it's not a plus, you may want to reconsider your desire to work for them.
Create as much obviously spam content as you can with your name in it. Then distribute it as widely as possible. High a sleazy SEO firm to mirror thousands of instances of this crap content all over the Internet. Write a perl script to automatically generate it, with your name scattered liberally throughout, based on any unholy combination of out-of-copyright literature, online freely available tax lot data, bad poetry, and random Wikipedia articles. Post it on blogs. Post it in forums. Bury your real identity in spam!
When you're done, not only will no one be able to find the original offending zine, but even if they do they won't be able to tell if the info is real.
Alternatively, change your name to "Mike Jones," for which Google already returns 2,390,000 results in only 0.24 seconds.
Instead of having no internet profile, have a very active internet profile. You'll probably flood Google with references to yourself that wil obfuscate any searches for your name and your past, Mr. ZeroCool.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
yea, your an asshole.
The goal is not to remove what was said or to focus on it. If you try to cram a genie back into a bottle, you just end up with a bloody pulverized genie (or a pissed off one) and that's far more noticeable. Instead, say and do interesting and useful things. Make your college escapades waldo in a where's waldo picture.
I am skilled in determining the age levels of adolescent models.
DAM, resume builder.
Jake Baker http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Baker http://www.textfiles.com/magazines/CHN/time1.txt
I found your name in five seconds. Was not so difficult using the information you provided. There are already zillions of other stories about you out there. This stuff is so deeply buried, who would even care? No charges, no criminal record. Being so all scared about it won't give you many credits for courage...
I'm someone who suffers from a problem described in a comment further down, in that my name is rather unique and it used to be incredibly easy to find me on the net. You can still find me with a simple search, and I'm hoping the old information that used to be there is incredibly hard to find in cache from years ago. In any case, the only thing you can find so far of me is whois information of my website. It's a quick jump from there to my website, which is highly "opinionated" to say the least, and has no bearing on my work.
My question is, what should I do about my site's whois? It has my full name and address on it. At the same time, if something goes wrong with my domain I don't want to lose it because my name isn't on it properly.
Sorry this is probably an old question which might be OT but I didn't think of it until I saw this post and, well, maybe someone else can benefit from it as well.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
?? Tmothy posted something from an anonymous reader. He isn't the person asking the question
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
As a person who dox were also dropped on textfiles.com, I also had the same thoughts about it. One may think of it as a badge of shame... while my relatives love using it as an extra story just to one up someone.
Personally, I don't mind it anymore. At least I can say "I was there and here's the t-shirt". In fact, I would do something to "update" or "refresh" your image like others have stated.
I met with Jason Scott while doing all the conferences. His stance is very justifiable and I wouldn't ask him to change. In fact, if you did, you'd probably get the finger as his status as an "Archivist" is pretty much bulletproof. However, Jason is always willing to accept "new submissions". By doing so, you can give "the rest of the story"... which is probably something alot of e-zines from back in the day lack. All of us sorta dropped off the scene pretty quick once the world changed. But if you got something like this hanging over you, I'd suggest spin doctoring it.
Besides, with facebook and all the other social networking sites being spidered by search engines, I doubt textfiles gets even 1/100th the traffic these sites generate.
Now if I can ever finish a new e-zine update worthy.... it was so much simpler to write back then... ;-)
boom goes the dynamite....
I'm very surprised by how easy it was to narrow the OP down to a handful of candidates. But good news! Googling your possible names along with 'crime', 'criminal', 'university && crime' and so on didn't ever bring anything linking you to your mistake on the first three pages. Will some employers check more deeply? Probably. But go to a 'net cafe and search for your name along with keywords; looks like you're in the clear.
Unless one of your potential employers was a big reader of 90s h/p zines. (What? One can wish!)
Posting to slashdot can't be helping the situation.
IT's no going to be a problem for long.
When the generation that first took to My Space and facebook get to about 40, everyone will realize that it's stupid to judge people by some whacky thinkg they did when they were 15. Once a significant portion of people are in the same boat, no one will care.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The difference is that the audience probably doesn't care to post the names of the performers. Personally I think you just like being an ass.
become Martin Bishop
Even if you argue it was only intended for a small readership, what if those in the small readership are your potential employers? What to do now? Try not to spread it, duplicate or propagate further, but you just made that mistake by posting to Slashdot. So this latest incarnation of the info will be indexed by Google along with all comments, research on you and speculation about it. So you did it again...
At this point I like the suggestion somebody else posted about putting a lot of info about yourself online (good stuff) to dilute the perceived bad info.
Change your name, even if only to an alternate spelling/
Just wanted to mention how Slashdot never fails to disappoint.
For the record, textfiles.com has no ads. None. Going to it or not going to it doesn't affect my revenue/income particularly. I don't run that site for money.
But if you'd rather hear a much funnier story about the legal threats I get, please watch my video That Awesome Time I Was Sued for Two Billion Dollars.
Create multiple websites about you. In one, you were a beer-drinking guy who moved to the Barbados. Not you.
In another, you authored multiple books and magazine columns. Might be you.
A few more randomly generated ones and some near-look-alikes and you're done. They won't know what to believe. Oh and set a tracker on the websites, so you can see which ones your prospective employer visited (ID them by their IP)
Keeping a low profile online is stupid. It guarantees that any mention of your name is the bad one. You should have spent years doing stuff with your real name that you wanted people to find so that the old event would be buried. Hell, bury it as if there were multiple people with your name...
I'd actually hire an SEO and deal with it now.
I Albert Walter from Wisconsin, did something similar as you, several years ago, i stole private information from my company (Software Systems, Inc). I, however, didn't make your mistake, i never told anyone or claimed to do it on the internet, because i knew i would be doomed if i did that.
That last paragraph reads like this:
I take pride in damaging people's reputations.
You're a prick, Shawn McHorse. I wouldn't hire you to mow my lawn. Eat that, google.
I changed my name by deed poll - I won't tell you to what, but it happens to also be the name of a mildly popular book. It worked fantastically! I have made myself practically ungoogleable, even if you know who I am and what I do. I'm buried under pages and pages of boring reviews and commentary.
If it happened 15 years ago and you weren't even charged with a crime then you are thinking this is more of a problem than it really is. People who have actually committed crimes manage to get security clearances as long as you are honest about what happened. If it was just an arrest they don't require you even mention it at all past 10 years. And that's for a top secret clearance, much less a job.
Be honest and show you've grown up and people won't care.
Bullshit.
If they are in public then too bad. If they gave permission, either explicit or implicit, then too bad. If they where in a situation where it's to be expected by a reasonable person, then too bad.
Trying to hide or change history of ANY kind is a bad thing.
No one is under any obligation to change something just becasue someone doesn't like it. It's thinking like yours that holds things back.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Trying to hide or change history of ANY kind is a bad thing.
And so would denying a job for a stupid-ass reason like the candidate used to be in Rocky Horror. But I could definitely see it happening. And unfortunately, two wrongs can sometimes make, well, a less-wrong.
Doing it wasn't the problem it was talking about it. Now, unfortunately it's going to be around for a long time. I doubt too many people are actually likely to stumble across it. If they do, just be honest and say you were young and stupid and have grow up a lot since then.
So you can always get a job there.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
I just read the file and there isn't anything in there that would cause any reasonable person cause to not trust you.
The only way that would come up is if they were looking to fire you/not hire you anyways.
My official arrest record is worse then that and it's never hurt me.
Of course, posting it on Slashdot means you didn't learn anything from the event, or that you are just fishing for attention.
http://textfiles.com/politics/SPUNK/sp001201.txt
Now people will be able to more easily find it.
You might want to try a suggestion from a previous poster: create a bunch of other 'fake' Erik Trimbles with obviously different profile information and randomly selected photos and the begin replying to lots of various blogs with those accounts and generally muddy the waters on Google for any Erik Trimble searches. This disinformation campaign could be as simple or elaborate as you like, but even a modest amount of effort here might pay some useful dividends by creating a few more targets for the amateur Google sleuths out there.
Recommendations must, above all else be honest in regards to what YOU know.
As the response above suggests you can say "He did some stupid things in the past, but later he worked very well for me, and I think based on this that he is now a high quality person." Yada... Yadd..
Lay the facts on the table along with your opinion.
As for the original topic. The AC's mistake was keeping a low profile online. HR will be suspicious of anyone with no online identity at all. Especially for tech jobs. However. Let's say you apply for a Sysadmin position, and they search on your name. That search brings back a flood of discussions, forum posts and debates, most of them technology related. After the 1st few pages of boredom they will announce: "This guy is a geek and spends his online time in the company of geeks."
An ancient blog post about a criminal investigation would probably get lost in the torrent.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
The only way to fix problems like this is the Reverse Streisand Effect: flood the Internet with positive, high-profile and truthful information about yourself.
4chan in my slashdot? it's more likely than you think.
I'm a veteran of the Second World War, I'm an avid golfer, I have three young sons, I donate to charity, I served during the Gulf War, I have two grown children, I'm five years old, and I died in 1823.
So I'm doing pretty well, I think.
(Conclusion: Using names as unique identifiers doesn't work. Ask any database admin.)
Just sucks for people who get caught in it now, when it still matters to the people making hiring decisions.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
That's not very nice. You could at least remove their last names so they don't show up in Google.
No offense, but it kind of sounds like you're just being a dick.
what's your name?
Copy yourself to the clipboard and then delete yourself. Create a new record and then paste yourself from the clipboard and save. You'll then have a new primary key, and references to the old you will be orphaned, or maybe even delete themselves depending on how serious the engine is when it comes to referential integrity constraints.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
If this is the biggest challenge in your life, be thankful. Keep being thankful until you realize how unimportant it is.
Develop an online presence is the best thing you can do. There are so many ways to do it too.
1) Start a blog. It can be about anything. It works best if you focus in on a topic.
2) Join a online community. If you blog about something, find others that cover the same topic and contribute comments. Find forums that cover things you are interested in and get involved. Ask some questions and later respond to other new people when you know the topic better. Post valid comments on slashdot or any other site like this.
3) Make something and share it. Write a macro, script, addon, program, or wallpaper and released it. contribute to open source projects, even it its just tracking down bugs. These create a conversation online and content that others will talk about or repeat.
4) Post your hard to find questions in newsgroups. These get mirriored all the time.
5) Link back to yourself when ever you can. If you have a signature, link back to your blog or project. Don't over do it.
6) ???
7) Profit
Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
Granted, we don't know how 'bad' or negative the action in question was, but here's my thoughts based on my experience...
People aren't supposed to discriminate during interviews if it's not 'theoretically' relevant, but the reality is that it happens. But more importantly to you, do you really want to work somewhere where they're judging you with such shallow naivety? Me - not so much. I've turned down a few positions and not returned for second interviews over the years purely because the impression I got from the company was one that I felt I didn't want to associate with in the long term.
The technical reality is that you may never be able to fully clean up something that makes its way onto the internet. You can obviously try to hunt things down to the best of your ability, though. That said, reputation can be powerful, but you can always put on the best face in front of a potential employer. People make mistakes, everyone knows this. But if I'm interviewing someone, I'm not going to care so much about the mistake, instead I'm going to look for how maturely you explain and carry yourself during the rest of the interview.
I would first start by not posting this on slashdot under your name... unless it is "your friend"
Doctors do Massage in Longview WA now, who knew?
spam your name all over the net with good stuff about you, bury the indiscretion by working on the SEO of the newly written articles.
You are posting on a public forum about taking down your online presence from a past transgression. Are you serious?
If you're any good at what you do, this won't be a problem. no one cares.
"Society needs to wake-up and realize punishing someone for what they did 20 years ago is ridiculous"
Why?
You ruin someone's life forever by raping them, and it's not ok for it to follow you forever?
Or are you talking about parking tickets, or some other trivial matter which NEVER follow anyone for twenty years, and NEVER cause people to have issues with jobs and housing and such? Which never follow anyone for twenty years and therefore are irrelevant to your point?
For felons, society ALREADY DECIDED YOU ARE WRONG and their past should follow them. For notihng pissant crimes, you don't lose jobs or housing, so again your point is worthless.
It never occurs to you people that maybe the reason your viewpoint is in the minority and considered juvenile is because you're in the minority and your opinion is juvenile.
Who modded this whiny garbage up anyway? You should be ashamed of yourself for such a stupid moderation.
You're THAT starved for attention you submit a story about yourself to Slashdot, faux complaining about being judged for once being a self-styled 00b3r 1337 h4x0r and then when nobody clamors for more info about your wonderful self, you actually go so far as to post a link to the very info you pretend to be concerned about people finding.
Is your facebook page not getting enough hits or something?
Considering that you already spoke with the guy that runs textfiles.com, he knows who you are, what the issue is, and what your name is.
I think it would be pretty funny if he came on here and posted some details.
I know most people are saying "sucks for you" and "make noise for the search, so they can't find the bad stuff".
How about stopping with the 'keeping a low profile' and actually make a good name for yourself.
If someone sees what you did in the past, then they can say that at least you've changed as you are currently doing a lot of good.
At the moment, they only see the bad you've done as you've kept too low a profile.
I've done some bad stuff as a kid, but I can say that I've grown up and I'm proud of what I'm doing now.
Print out the story, capture as many links to it as you can and have an explanation of what happened during an interview. That is unless you were having peanut butter sex with your dog, after all its your dog, right? If that's the case you really screwed the pouch.
a good anti drunk driving group talker may of been some one who was a big drunk only have something happen to them or someone they know to make then stop and become some to speak up.
This might be your problem:
"I've generally tried to keep a low profile online"
Step up your online presence. Be helpful on message boards. Have a twitter and facebook account. Generally have an online persona so that the only thing people find in a search isn't a reference to you and crime. If your only online presence is negative that's bad. If there's lots of positive and noise it's probably not that bad.
Funny how you conveniently ignore the law, which is the only measure of adulthood that matters.
And as a professional cognitive scientist, please stop lying about what we say regarding adulthood and then linking to a WASHINGTON POST article as though it proves anything other than the fact that you have no idea what the fuck you're talking about.
Why are so many posts with factual errors modded up?
Interesting interview on CBC radio recently with Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. She used to work for the CBC, a fairly buttoned-down workplace. When she was asked about the culture differences, and hiring people, she noted that by the time you've seen 500 drunken party photos, you realize that you can't find any young hires that don't have some nonsense in their past. Like the recent study on the effects of porn that could not find any controls (guys who've never consumed any). So a blameless life experience starts to look fishy - either it shows a lack of initiative or courage, or it's been doctored in some way.
Welcome to slashdot.org
If irony was strawberries, we'd all be having smoothies right now.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
Instead of trying to get the information removed and perform a cover-up like the shady Bush Cheney administration, why not blog about your mistake, how it happened, what you learned from it and how you have grown since then. If you blog this information on a prominent blogging site, it will be easily found as well and then problem solved.
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
Jack Gorrie The University of Toronto mourns the recent passing of Jack Gorrie, the university Provost's Adviser on Information Technology, and more recently, a member of ORANOs Board of Directors. Gorrie, 55, passed away on Aug. 30 after a short battle with pancreatic cancer. This is a major loss to ORANO and our university community, said ORANOs Board Chair, Dr. Ross Paul, President of the University of Windsor. His years of experience brought an important perspective to our work at ORANO. He will be missed, he said. An obituary notice was published in the Globe and Mail. The University of Toronto also issued an announcement.
If your employer asks you about this then deny everything.
Like you said, you have no criminal record, you never had any charges filed, and you weren't involved with the making or distribution of this magazine. Tell your employer you have no idea what the zine is talking about. You've never seen it before and it has nothing to do with you.
Interviewer: "We found this online."
You: "Hmmm? What is this? Wow, that's interesting, I've never seen that before. No idea what this is talking about, must be another guy with a similar name. Well, whatever, what other questions did you have for me?"
If he presses the matter then simply say that you have no idea what the paper is on about and that if he has any doubts then he should go re-run your background check. Even if your name is unusual, your clean background check should be a pretty damn good way to "prove" that you've never done anything illegal.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
Are you sure? Maybe he just has to press ^Z often enough ...
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
We can't imagine how much better off the world would be if even 10% of the population did this. It's all a question of perception. Do you believe that you are lost in the world tossed about by forces beyond your control, or do you believe that you have the power and authority to be responsible for yourself. This is the point of that story at the beginning of the Bible where God asks Adam "why did you do this thing I warned you not to do" and he is like "well she told me to do it" and then he asks Eve and she's like "well the serpent tricked me into it".
Real men take ownership of their lives. What we live in right now is a world filled with whimpering spineless children. We need to man up and take responsibility for ourselves.
kudos.
--- I do not moderate.
And you would do well to check in on people's drinking habits, past and present.
How you use the information is up to you, the employer.
Just as you may LIKE the idea that the person made fools of the university network admins.
The point is that there are times where it is relevant and times where it is not. There are things that cross the line, and there are things that are perfectly sound.
What the poster is worrying about isn't some ethical violation, some invasion, it's a perfectly reasonable checkup. He can try to hide it, downplay it, or spin it to his advantage. But faux outrage over the fact that employers consider it is ridiculously retarded.
Please post your name here, and we'll all do our best to help...
I got a lot of stuff about me written all over the Internet. I've been accused of a lot of things, but nothing ever proven in a court of law. I am usually persecuted because I am mentally ill and my schizoaffective disorder causes behavior and actions that some people don't like and then post about it on the Internet or my own words on the Internet during one of my "bad cycles" makes me look bad.
What you should do is tell the potential employer the truth, that you got investigated but no charges were filed against you. That you learned from it and moved on so as to not make that mistake over again. Apparently since X years of not being investigated proves that you didn't do it ever again, and that you know enough about it to help prevent it on your employer's systems. You take a negative and turn it into a positive as Kevin Mitnik did after he was found guilty and he wrote books on the subject and got hired as a security consultant. Even if you do have a criminal record like Kevin Mitnik, you can still turn it around by doing what he did and owning up to it and finding a way to foil others who use the same methods.
If your potential employer still gives you a hard time about it, just say it was X years ago, really really old, and you have moved on from it and suggest that the employer move on from it as well as you'd rather focus on your skills and talents and ability to do the work for the job than dwell over mistakes of the past via ancient history that hardly anyone cares about anymore.
Worst possible case scenario is that nobody hires you, even then you can start up your own small business and take business management lessons at a community college to learn how to make it profitable and apply for a small business loan after writing up a business plan and earning enough money to get a bank's attention.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Are the audience members posting said pictures on-line, and labeling them with the actors name?
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
Ctrl-A, Backspace (or Del if you're that way inclined)...
dnuof eruc rof aixelsid
If you don't want an information to spread, simply don't inject it into the system. If you are afraid that what you do might be defamatory, then simply don't do it. If you think that what you do might be controversial, but you deeply believe that it is the right thing to do - then do it and forget about the consequences.
I hate to break the news to you, but actions have consequences.
Get over yourself and take responsibility for the choices you made.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Change your name. It's what the rest of us do. Anonymous Coward is working well for me!
Next time you need/want to post something on the internet, use an unsecured public network, or a proxy server. NEVER post to a site that requires that you register. NEVER use your real name and information. If information really stays on the internet forever, then I would be screwed. When I google my name, none of the nefarious things in my background show up. Not even the glug glug vroom vroom.
AFAIK, that is your only option.
You, sir, are a class-A cock bite. Also, read up on robots.txt
That was A LOT longer ago than 15 years--more like 33.
Dude. Never, EVER converse with some dude in lingerie about "mowing your lawn". Or "plunging your toilet". Especially the toilet plunging thing.
Is that you, Kevin Mitnick?
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
Seriously, let it go! It just is what it is. *I was young and dumb" works in a lot of situations and I'm sure this is one of them.
I'm sure I could honor requests to remove all of these photos, but I simply don't want to. It involves a lot of time and effort on my end, to accomplish something that's actively taking away from things I take pride in myself.
So basically, you take pride in getting people turned down for jobs in a shit economy because you won't take a few 10YO pics offline. Wow dude, you need to meet some of these people in a dark alley.
Of course, if you consider yourself such an awesome photographer that you just can't bear to ruin the artistic integrity of your site, you could always, y'know, redact their names.
As for how you got modded "insightful", just... Wow. I hope you just managed to sneak a troll post (or some form of sarcasm I totally missed) past the mods, because if serious, you really do suck as a human being.
Nice site design, very original.
If you have any respect for your fellow castmembers you would take the 5 minutes to honour their requests. Ask them to give you the full path to the pictures in question and remove any reference to them. Literally 5 minutes work.
I hope anyone considering being a member of the cast does a quick google search first and finds your comments here, decides you are too much of an arsehole to be associated with and thinks better of it.
I hope they tell the organisers of the show that you are the reason they aren't doing it too.
As a thought experiment: if your local paper sent someone to the show to take pictures for publication would they get releases from the actors? I'm guessing they would, which would put the performance at least in the grey area between public and private. I'm betting (some of) those performers wouldn't have gone to the opera wearing their RHPS lingerie.
Privacy has a contextual component. In this case the context is a performance made *to a like-minded audience*. You can't separate the context of these pictures from the situation in which they were taken. Publishing them openly is a change in context, and is, rightly, being seen as a breach of the performer's privacy expectations.
If it's really only for you and the cast then put it all behind a membership wall. People inactive for too long no longer get access, but you and your cast can see anything from any time. Maybe even allow past cast members to request access. This has the advantage that it doesn't breach the parameters of the original context.
Step 1. Don't post the story about what happened to you on Slashdot.
Does this rag smell like chloroform to you?
This country (USA) calls itself Christian? So much for forgiveness. Guess that's God's responsibility, huh? Oh well. Action, reaction. Guess you're fried.
I have kind of the same question
I have my own domain that is myfirstname@mylastname.com
kind of a different last name so it was easy to find
last xmas some china man went out and sent a ton of spam for watches with my e-mail as the one sending it. I would get 1000+ spam rejects a day for a few weeks. Now i have problems e-mailing freinds that use hotmail because i am blacklisted? How do u get off of that? Really bugs me as its my name, and it is rather hard to change that.
Linking to it from your own website seems like a bad idea.
http://jessehirsh.com/25-random-things-about-me
Also, given that this page was the first obvious mention in the first 30 Google results, WTF are you worried about? Also WTF link to it from your own site?
change name only way you can be sure that it wouldn't tie back to you as easily.
Change your name to Lorenzo Von Matterhorn.
Changing your name or adding e.g. a middle name may have the wished effect.
Yeah... well... so like I've been sort of... hanging out a lot after work, you know, and like... well I've sort of hooked up with some lush trim and like, my wife finds out and she like, tries to take a golf club to my head and so like I crashed my SUV, sort of. Anyway, I think it's like getting out and I was wondering if you had any suggestions for the on-line portion. i can handle the other stuff, I'm just worried about the on-line stuff YouTubes and stuff.
Possible translation:
"A good spokesperson for an anti drunk driving group may be someone who had been a big drunk, only to have had something happen to them (or to someone they know), leading them to stop and subsequently to speak up."
Take off every 'sig' !!
Actually at that time if you *don't* have plentiful personal information and details of private life on those sites you might be ostracized. So post away :)
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
I'm pretty much the only Erik Trimble on the Internet
The solutions people proposed above seem relevant to you: Get a few stock images of dudes, then go make Myspace accounts with them, each one taking blame for an embarrassing part of your life. Also make sure to name your kid Mohammed, its the most common name.
Typo - meant "pants down".
getting your name off of a sexual predator list after suffering a frivolous statutory rape charge.
In other words, you lost control of the situation after it was mirrored from the original source.
8==8 Bones 8==8
I think arguing about whether or not someone should be given a second chance is not helpful.
My big question is: If you did this misdeed 15 years ago, what have you done in the past 15 years to distinguish yourself as a reputable and trustworthy individual. The issue isn't whether or not time heals old wounds, but how well you spend your time re-establishing your value to others.
You can write cease-and-desist letters
Sure, you could do that. Be aware, that lots of webmasters, as you call them, arent really in the habit of giving a care in the world about what your limits on their speech should be.
Steve Caton had an even more clueless lawyer do that exact thing. Now instead of just having his court cases publicly posted on the county website, his name will forever be associated with making threats to remove that same information when someone searches for his name
There is little you can realistically do. What hits the Internet "lives forever". If your mistake was so serious that it may affect your ability to get employment, you may want to consider changing your name. Alternatively (and I am only half joking here), since a black (or grey) hat background is almost a pre-requisite to a career in infosec... if you are into computers and security is of interest to you, you potentially can "pull a Microsoft" (i.e. turn a weakness into a strength) and leverage your shady actions as street cred for a Computer Security career.
--- "I didn't think anyone would understand it" -Prof. Bob Muller
"I've generally tried to keep a low profile online and until recently there's been very little information about me available from the major search engines."
This is your problem. If the only thing about you on the web is this report from fifteen years ago, that's the only thing prospective employers are going to find on Google. Start a blog, use your real name in discussion groups, write letters to the editor, start a StackOverflow account under your own name (this is my highest ranking Google hit). You've got to put good stuff about you on the web if you want to drown out the bad stuff.
Once you're on the web, you're on the web. The only way to get around it is to create so many other entries, and post so much mundane boring stuff as that they'll never be sure if they're looking at the correct Jonathan Albert Ruffenstein or the one that plays the violin or the one that collects hound dogs, etc. So, post lots of stuff out there so when they search, they get so many results that they're not sure which one is you, which one isn't, etc. That's your best bet, my friend.
I never had sex with that woman.
..register more than 600 Slashdot accounts, keep using them until you get Moderator ability, then downvote EVERYTHING here to -1 as to not draw more attention to yourself online.
Explain that you were required to do this after being issued notice of double-dog-dare.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
Not enought information ,how old was he? what did he do? did he do it again? This is why your told your past can hurt you very easly online.When its out, its out forever and that my friends is a very long time :)
Jack of all trades,master of none
One of my concerns about raising children in a small town is if it will prepare them for the "real" world outside the city limits.
Oddly, I think it does. In a small town, one learns very quickly that the whole town soon learns of whatever you say or do. There is no real anonymity. And growing up, you learn quickly not to make public anything you don't want your "whole world" to know.
Yet I hear time and again the sentiment that people think they're anonymous on the net. How ironic that someone who presumably understood enough about computers to use them for nefarious deeds did not think of the longer term consequences of their actions
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
You pride yourself on being an asshole?
I think your main two options are to hit everyone up with heavy duty lawyers, or else bombard Google with so much other information about yourself, that this drops down to page #100. Maybe a third option is to fabricate an identity of someone else with the same name as you, and pretend you were a different person.
It appears that you learned from your mistakes so you want to be a normal law abiding person now. The most important thing in that sentence is "learned from your mistakes", we are all human and learning from our mistakes is an important part of life and we should not held for minor infractions we did in our lives. People that "never" make mistakes when they were young will make them later in life and that is not a time to learn.
Back to original subject of getting your name off the damned cached file servers around the world is tricky. As for the rest of the world, there are no treaties or regulations on this thing so the best way is to contact the local law enforcement, political and legal authorities where the file is located and find out what they can do to assist you. As for the USA, the ACLU or other legal help organizations can help you create an "cease and desist" order and have them forcefully remove those files.
You need to change your name.
Someone should tell kids to use a cover name when they're going to commit stupid mistakes as a youth. That way, when they start getting spammed later in life for s**t they did earlier, they can ditch the sullied handle, pick a new one, and move on.
When there's going to be an electronic record of your deeds, kids need to be thinking ahead. Just like a tattoo, that tweet, wave, email, or blog posting is likely to be more permanent than not.
Slowly but surely. Kids still do stupid stuff, but now pretty much ALL of it gets on the Internet. Instead of you being in the minority, you'll just be another person with wacky kid crap online. You're just about 10 years too early.
If these people "Didn't get caught" how would you know of said activities?
"Didn't get caught" means that nobody in authority was able to pin blame on them for it. This doesn't mean that they didn't brag about it to anyone and everyone in their peer groups (or even outside of them). "Didn't get caught" and "everyone knows" aren't mutually exclusive.
You're worried about what's on the internet and what others will think.
After all is said and done, if you're ok about it with your inner self, then great. If not, if you're like me and my personal demons, you're in for some serious regret.
I say do what you can to:
a) undo what's possible;
b) repair what can't be undone;
c) compensate what can't be repaired;
d) contribute if compensation is no longer an option and
e) resign yourself to it.
We're just some specks of dust, in the end.
As Joe Rogan allegedly said trying to get something off of the internet is like trying to get the pee out of a pool.
I have personally mirrored textfiles.com and I can tell you right now that I'm not going to remove you from my archive. You will never be able to clean it off.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Your biggest mistake is keeping a low profile online. Your best bet is to get yourself out there as much as possible to drown out those links (unless that text excerpt is a famous issue - then you have a challenge on your hand). The more you fill up the search engines with "you", the more those files go away. Good luck.
Create so much other stuff about yourself that the bad stuff is buried deeply enough that people won't bother.
So in other words, you're a douchebag. How hard is it to take a couple of pictures off of a website from years ago?
I have never even considered this when applying for any job that I've ever had, from entry-level computer tech at a local business to systems admin of a fortune 100 company, to developer for E-commerce solutions, to starting my own company. I have plenty of my life on the internet, including job applications, old employers, photos, forum posts, videos, etc and I have never been denied any of my previous jobs, which *MIGHT* happen to include all of the above positions. Even going into something like PCI compliance, I can't imagine someone, or someone's HR department caring, or even thinking of caring.
If you're trying to get into government contractors, or government security positions requiring a security clearance, then they already know, in a zine or not. I would make sure that I provided a thorough explanation to even have a hope at passing their screening process. If you're applying somewhere, let's say Ebay... are they really going to look through your results? Really?
The only possible explanation that would make sense is either if the position is a very high level (CXO, President, etc) at a medium to large size company, or into politics and government. Do you really think that Time Warner knows the google results of a senior level network administrator, or cares? (Hint, they don't)
Grandpa: My Homer is not a communist. He may be a liar, a pig, an idiot, a communist, but he is not a porn star.
That at least it's a text file, and not some video
of you getting fucked in the ass, as seems the custom
among the younger generation on the internet.
I don't have a solution. At least not a simple one. But it needs to understood by everyone that it IS a problem.
I don't see the problem. I never understood why some people considered change to come through changing other peoples' perceptions of you. I still dress, talk, and look much as I did twenty years ago (less hair and its greying). But I have changed where it matters. An appearance is merely a uniform. You use it to expedite communication or to blend in with a particular group.
Now, if you've done something hideous embarrassing (like "Star Wars kid" or the "I love you" guy), then maybe you have an albatross that you can never quite get rid of. But here's my take. Recently, we had a story here about the Star Wars Holiday Special, commonly thought to be the worst two hours of TV ever. Every major actor who showed up on that, showed up on a zillion TVs and their shame has been recorded and will last as long as there are men to breathe and internets to surf. Yet when we think of the cast, we think of the movies they starred in.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/17/1824232
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
LOL DumbAss all ya had to do was stfu now ya made me look 199* university computer Federal law enforcement agency no charges text file zine site:http://www.textfiles.com LOL DUMBASS
Of course he is under no obligation. He is still an asshole for it though.
I have never written anything that can be used against me but idiots, who I don't even know, have, and have done so years ago. Sometimes I have been successful having the content pulled but sometimes it is based in other countries. Who knows how it has affected me - no one has ever mentioned it to me, but perhaps someone looking at my resume will see something they don't like and I don't get a call.
So my name is on lists in lots of nice capacities - I patch some program, I help this or that project out. If you can Google your name, and one of the first 50 responses is something bad about you, you're probably in trouble. If a few of the first 50 are patches for some software, you helpfully answering someone's question etc., that is better.
I've succeeded in removing my name from a few places, I suggest you being nice about it, and in some cases, dishonest about it.
Wow. Just, wow.
Look at all those people telling you what a dickhead you are for refusing to delete your own work.
I'm amazed, as prolific as the Slashdot crowd tends to be in their favoritism toward openness and information sharing at any expense, that these same truth-loving geeks turn so hypocritical over a few pictures that they're not even involved with.
You'd think that they'd understand just what the implications are of revising history. Alas.
Keep it up. Just because someone did something in the past (whether for fun, sport, eroticism, criminal intent, or whatever), regrets it now, and wants to wash it all away, does not somehow compel another free man to do anything about it.
If it did, we'd be living in a very different world right now, with every journalist, blogger, photographer, and webmaster busily rewriting history, pro bono, for anyone who has a problem with the past.
Kid-proof tablet..
Yep! It's like not being able to sleep because a second cousin of your brother in law has posted the Internets full of pictures of himself screwing a goat,
"That could ruin our family's reputation!" ^-^
Dude tell us what you did. If it was hacking into a computer, i guess no employer will held that against you, but i think you did something kinky and embarrassing, or just a sent a thread or something stupid from a university. Just give us a hint, hahahaha.
Asshole.
You are such an idiot for comparing "rewriting history" to "dude dancing around in lingerie."
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso
but is it legal to deny someone a job opportunity based on an alleged crime for which they were completely pardoned?
Uhh, yes. There is no "right" to a job in the USA. You can be denied for ANY reason except race, religon, or sexual orientation and those are hard to prove.
Actually, that's not quite accurate. Certain STATES (not necessarily the feds) explicitly put limits on criminal background checks. Now, as a job seeker, you would probably not be told it was the XXX charge that you cleared of. Usually these cases show up when someone internal blows a whistle. But it can expose the discriminating company to lawsuits and hefty fines.
Hey retard.
Ever tought about the sorry bastards who got the same name you do? ...ever tought how much problems you caused them for being an idiot? ...ever tought about shutting the fuck up and changing your name, because you are propably the sole reason your name has a bad name.
just for a second. try to imagine if your name would be unique. ...yes. i mean unique. ...
now imagine if you really do have a problem. change your fcking name.
goddamnit.
get out of my slashdot!
The folks who run jails are done with Michael Vick; they seem to have decided that two years in the can is how much punishment you deserve for running dogfights and killing some of your dogs. That's not the NFL's problem - they're trying to Look Good to the public, and having an employee who (at least in the past) was the kind of vicious asshole who enjoys cruelty to animals probably makes them look worse than having somebody who got caught smoking dope. (And that's different from a player who got caught using steroids, which is cheating, or got caught gambling, which might lead to a player throwing a game to pay some debts.) On the other hand, if Vick puts in enough time doing public service with the Humane Society or whatever, maybe he'll get forgiven by most of the public, but it'll be a tough sell to get people do decide that he's changed.
If Anonymous Coward did something stupid when he was young, well, hopefully it wasn't *too* disreputable, and if you get past the HR department robofiltering when you're applying for a job and get to a real interview with somebody who's found out about it, you may have to admit having been stupid when you were young. Who knows, maybe they were also stupid when they were young :-)
Meanwhile, it helps to have a relatively common name, so the first half million Google hits are about somebody else, and to have enough positive reputation that the most common hits for your name with useful keywords get good references.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
diddums... I'm guessing Pam Anderson and Paris Hilton will be thinking the same thing 30-40 years from now when they're celebrating xmas with the great grand-kiddies.
Dude, I hope that wasn't an electric guitar - we couldn't think of hiring anyone for a technology job who did anything that dangerous!
If it's an acoustic guitar, then maybe okay if it's a cheap one and not a Martin. And it it was just a banjo, then meh, whatever, that's ok if you don't play it at the office.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This topic came up in the 90s, back when there was an ongoing Cypherpunks movement discussing how technology was changing society and how to deal with it. Other than of course using pseudonyms and unlinkable multiple identities, there was also the suggestion of having a service that was constantly publishing disinformation about you, so that any bad stuff that was actually true was lost in the noise of internet trolls claiming that your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries and obsessing about how full of eels your hovercraft might be.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This is a problem in how people think "don't have an online presence to avoid these problems". In principle, it would be great, but principle is little more than that. You have a prime example of why you need a greater online presence. This one little issue mirrored across the web is amplified by the notable lack of other information about you. You should make a stronger web presence where you put in the information you want people to see, and over time, this will drown out the other information. Just make sure you are not a douche/troll/jacka$$/etc, contribute to the web, and that is what people will find.
Post the same story all over the Internet using 10000 different names in place of your own. Have a few that replace the name with "a Nigerian businessman". Then, as others have said, start building a positive online persona discussing your involvement in flower arranging or some other non-computer related field.
It might not be of much use right now, but in 10-30 years I have no doubt that online dirt is going to just be assumed by the shot-callers. That's because, in 10-20 years, the people currently in their 20s and 30s will rule the world, and virtually all of these people have grown up with the knowledge that secrets no longer exist.
Now, if you did something truly malicious or destructive, you might still have some issues, but drunk pictures or evidence of shenanigans will have to be swept under the rug or else *nobody* will be acceptable.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
To make a long story short, nobody cares. If you weren't ever prosecuted and the body was never recovered, why would your prospective employer care about the deed? If that job requires a Top Secret Security Clearance and your employer is willing to spend up to $20,000 to do a deep-tissue background check, chances are that brief mention in that silly little zine will be among the last of your worries. The next thing you should acknowledge that you're not going to be able to erase all traces of yourself and that zine. Aside from being a waste of time pondering it, you don't have the money or resources. There are people who have been trying to erase parts of history since the beginning of civilization. Everybody has at least one sexual encounter in their past that they regret whether it was with a snaggle-toothed woman, confused drunk man or thoroughly startled livestock. That's part of life. Own the f*** up or it will PWN you. All that said, the real lesson here is to Control Your Press – and it's never too late to start. Whether through the posting of blogs or articles, it's very possible to generate enough content of your choosing. By putting your name on it, Search Engine spiders will eventually come to embrace those links more than the ones connected to some ancient g-files from the 80s and 90s. Good luck and next time use protection.
Max Nomad . Bohemian Griot Publishing, LLC . http://www.bgpublishing.com
Of course people have a right to hold it against you. That's who you are. You're best bet is to join the Russian cybercrime mafia! Don't deny your true nature!
As a thought experiment: if your local paper sent someone to the show to take pictures for publication would they get releases from the actors? I'm guessing they would, which would put the performance at least in the grey area between public and private. I'm betting (some of) those performers wouldn't have gone to the opera wearing their RHPS lingerie.
You don't need a release to report the news, sorry. Of course you wouldn't go the opera in lingerie - what a stupid thing to say - you wouldn't go in torn jeans either.
Reboot macht Frei.
If one does want their public performance to be public, then one should not perform it in public.
It is moronic to assume that one should be able to recant and recall and invalidate their past actions, even if they do turn out to be somewhat embarrassing as age, wisdom, and reality take their toll on the subject.
Folks are frequently documented doing far worse things in public. Will it come back to haunt them? Perhaps. But it doesn't matter: It's not the photographer's role to censor the public actions of those around them, but rather just to record reality through the view of a lens.
Folks need to be responsible for their own actions, for they are theirs alone.
Kid-proof tablet..
IANAL, but I'm pretty certain there is civil law that prohibits the disclosure of such information without benevolent intent. If they published it to warn others of a realistic risk you currently pose, that would be justified. But it sounds like they're just posting it as web fodder.
It's sort of like tortious interference, but for that they would only be publishing the true information with the intent to mess your life up. And it's not defamation, because it's true. There is law in between those that should at least make it more of a pain in the ass for them to fight than to just take it down. Something to do with revealing inflammatory information without just cause... man I wish I could remember.
Call a paralegal, they'll at least look it up without having to pay a retainer.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
...and forget trying to censor the net - it's a Sisyphean task even for large powerful organizations.
The best option is just to brazen it out: laugh "The things we did as kids!" or something similar, and give the other guy[*] a pretend-punch on the shoulder. Act like a brash confident jock instead of a wimpy guilt-ridden nerd, dammit.
[*] If it's a gal, just pull the punch at the last millisecond, pause a moment, then exclaim "geez, now I'm treating you like one of the guys!". Women often claim to hate antics like that, but in my experience, they're likelier to get all wet as a result...
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Do you fold your underpants?
How hard is it to simply remove people's name in the page text? Google doesn't (yet) do face recognition on photographs.
Maybe you can't remove some entries, but can be one within a large number of unuseful information. You can alse try to increase the number of references to information with positive vision about you.
I assume you're trying to counter the so-called "poor man's background check." i.e. You apply for a job and the hiring manager or HR person googles your name looking for dirt.
Well, I've thought about this some as a theoretical exercise. How to remove or obscure negative content on the internet with your name attached?
I call it "extreme makeover: web edition"
First off, laying low on the internet is the wrong approach. The result of this is that negative content will be all anyone sees when they google your name.
You need to get proactive and start creating positive content (lots of it) with your name on it. The beauty of this is that none of this positive stuff has to be true. After all, who's to know if it's you or another person with the same name? The same logic applies to that negative information about you. Who's to say that's really you or someone else?
Message boards are a good place to start. Join all sorts of charitable boards using your real name. Even post some nice things (not necessary). The search engines routinely scan the major message boards and will pick up your user profile after a while. The list of content creation ideas goes on and on.
You'll never succeed in expunging the internet of that negative news with your name on it. BUT, you can permanently push that web turd to page 10 of the search results.
The "poor man's background check" I mentioned earlier is really pretty lame if you think about it. Anyone doing this is doing so knowing they'll potentially get lots of hits from people other than you. Yet they do it anyway. This is warfare and you need to counter this threat with your own offensive.
This has been an issue for politicians and celebrities for a long time now.
I come from a political family and learned at a very early age to never write anything down I "wouldn't want to share with my mother." For decades, very powerful people have been struggling with this, and the best solution they have is "don't do anything wrong." Some of them are morons and get in trouble, but most of them won't use a public bathroom without an employee standing guard.
And yeah, I'm not using my login here. That's lesson #2, don't give people reasons to investigate you more than you have to.
Tell us what you did! We're curious as all hell now!
Yes I have had a similar experience - you can read about it here.
While you may consider the photograph your work, and taking away such as removal of
merit of the photographer, the act of theft and right to one's own image and soul are at stake in addition to other factors.
There are amateur photographers and there are those who make their livelihood from it. Those who make their livelihood require consent and written release from their subjects. Unless there is an equal exchange between photographer and subject, the subject is being exploited without compensation.
>If it did, we'd be living in a very different world right now, with every journalist, blogger, >photographer, and webmaster busily rewriting history, pro bono, for anyone who has a problem >with the past.
We do not have nearly as many storefronts with buggy whip manufacturer logos on them because times have changed. CNN's web site yesterday was not the same as it was today. Your every journalist, blogger, photographer and web master wants all the benefits without the RESPONSIBILITY of being what they really are: publishers and editors.
, make sure you don't post it on Slashd... oh never mind
Am I reading this right? You get "a half dozen requests per year on average" - or 1 every couple of months - to take down photos, and that's too much work for you?
If you can't take that much time to admin your site, which is minimal, you shouldn't be posting them up in the first place.
Please practice responsible web administration.
I would say if anything that would be a positive thing not a negative.
Considering how difficult it would be for the average manager to even KNOW about let alone FIND that information on the internet, well it really is a moot point.
If the manager DOES know about this sort of stuff, and actually reads textfiles (as I recall this was back in the era of BBS's and "computer enthusiasts"), I think he would likely be more impressed you are actually mentioned in them, and think you might be someone special.
That said, you never did say what it was you did, and perhaps that matters. If you dabbled in some phone phreaking or cracking, big deal. The thing back in the day was to see if you could gain access to something just to see if you could, everything was new. Its not like now, where it's to steal money and extort people, steal identities, or other nefarious actions.
Of course if what you regret is getting caught by campus security attempting to make sweet love to the university computer system, then the potential employer may think you odd and take a pass. :)
The Internet and Google cache are forever. You have no idea who or what could malign your good name. It might not be you, it could be someone else that posts on a message forum about you. You have no control over your name anymore.
The only protection you have is security through obscurity. I'm blessed with a very, very common name. That fact, in addition to my early decision in the mid 1990s to never post anything under my real name has made me completely anonymous. I have about 30 email addresses, each with different uses so that they can't be searched for. I have several different "personas" that I write under, and I try to maintain different writing style each time, different spelling mistakes, etc.
This is about the only thing you can do, it's too late for us, but you can keep your children's name generic so they can't be found easily on Google, and to teach them not to be complete dumbasses and do something they will regret forever.
Timothy, Here's an EASY way to minimize the damage of this article: flood Google with MORE articles about you and take over the real estate. How many pages of Google do people search? 1, 2, MAYBE 3. So YOU want to create lots of material which will force the old, static information about you to the END of the line. How do you do this? Create a blog, use your name on it in the "signature" at the end (as I do on THIS post), and keep writing. If you search MY name, Charles Seymour Jr (or Charlie Seymour Jr) you will see that I "own" the first 9 pages or so of search results. There are MANY thousands of pages (not all about me) that come up when a search on my name comes up and I have 8, 9, or 10 mentions on each of those first pages. So, anything from years ago (being old and not changing, the way a blog changes) will be forced to back in the Google search. Voila... THAT is your solution. And hey, it's a GOOD one in two ways - (1) you put out great material about you so when people search about you they find out what you think on one or more topics (keyword areas) and (2) it pushes the damaging material way back. CURRENT info trumps old, static info every time. Hope this helps! Good luck with this! Charlie Seymour Jr http://ultimateworkathomedads.com/
Don't bother trying to censor the internet. It's not going to happen. Your better bet is to just get a higher profile for yourself in the present. Just be more judicious about what you release about yourself this time. Be prolific and useful, and bury the one bad reference.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Your name must be shared with quite a few other people in the world. You could say that there is information on the net about another person with the same name, or deny it in the same manner if it's pointed out to you. If my name were Michael Vick and someone mentioned what happened a few years ago, I would say that it wasn't the same Vick they read about. Unless there's a picture or something else relevant only to you in the information, you have a way out, unless the judgment is made without asking you first about it. There's no way around that last one unless you preemptively bring it up first, if you want to risk doing that. Or, you can tell the truth up front and see where it gets you.
Get the name of the relevant HR guy at the company in question.
Make a bunch of embarrassing posts in various places using the same name, but not pretending to be him, just someone with a similar name. Just screw up his own Google search results so he may get the idea that Googling someone's name generates more crap than useful information.
Just in case his name is Shawn M. Chorse, everyone should know that he likes damaging people's reputations.
You could say something like this on your resume, down at the bottom, in small print: "You may find in google something I did 15 years ago while young, for which I have made necessary life corrections. I look forward to discussing my current character and qualifications with which I look forward to using to advance the interests of your company." Then make sure you are so qualified that they *want* you. Honesty, candor, and virtue may be the best answer in a world that is losing those qualities.
A Free, fast personal organizer for touch typists: onemodel
I'm just going to teach my kids to be remorseless sociopaths.
When they say "No regrets!", they'll mean it.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Just change your name legally. Sure it's a bit of a headache but eventually the old, bad stuff will whither on the vine.
Two similar pictures:
1) Fat man dresses in lingerie and stands on White House front lawn in protest of imported garments.
2) Fat man dresses in lingerie doing the cha-cha (or the time-warp perhaps) at a friend's party.
Is it news? Though the camera's lens takes the same picture I hope you would admit that reason yields two different answers. There's lots of factual things that could be reported but aren't news. Maybe the *first* such performance of Rocky was news, but now it's just facts.
And we get back to my point that context is king. My opera question illustrates the point exactly: context establishes and informs social norms (which you seem to support, while in the same breath calling me stupid...unique). You can't take someone's actions in one context and transpose it to a wholly different one without expecting an (at least) occasional reaction.
I'm not saying the OP has *no* point. I'm saying that these ex-cast members do as well. Given this a reasonable reaction is to form some sort of compromise. The OP *is* wrong in that he has flatly refused to consider such.
sorry, but a RHPS performance that's open to anyone isn't a house party. The basic thing I want to get across is too many people have a stick up their butt. The OP may be a jerk for refusing, but it's his prerogative and his time.
Reboot macht Frei.
Publishers and editors, sure.
But not revisionists.
I stand by my opinion, no matter how unpopular it might be.
Kid-proof tablet..
Just look at the pictures here: http://www.austinrocky.org/bio/shawn.php
It also says that he was married... I wonder why he's not anymore (hint: look at the gay flag on the bottom of the page).
If you're (un?)fortunate enough to share your name with other people you can just mention that it isn't you. If there's only one of you on Google maybe try changing your name to something common like John Henry.