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Posting AC - a Thing of the Past?
c0lo writes to point out an article from the Indystar. From the article: "A Marion County judge has ruled, for the first time in Indiana, that news media outlets can be ordered by the court to reveal identifying information about posters to their online forums."
Posting this anonymously
The only reason a court would be gathering such information is to stifle free speech.
To ensure this information is never stored in the first place.
1. People under tyranny
2. Write pamphlets anonymously
3. Make a new country
4. GOTO 1
5. "Goto considered harmful"
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Who knew?
Random judge, in Indiana, usa, fucking marion county, decides what are the web standards and realities of life on internet ?
Read radical news here
Cyberbullying? Not likely, it's stifling of speech. Find out who they are then drag them into court to put the fear of the Law into them. Once they're scared into submission, the plantiff can continue on safe in the knowledge that no matter how foul he behaves, no one will comment. I doubt it'll go far.
Real dumb move there by the decision-makers. What will happen is that Joe Clueless who makes a comment about someone sucking might get stung, while there will be a heightened interest in using a proxy for traffic; likely an offshore proxy that will either reply with unmitigated laughter, or a high resolution picture of a middle finger (or perhaps a sole of a shoe depending on geographic location) when someone demands IP logs.
VPNs are becoming really easy to use these days. The iPhone can activate one with a couple button presses. Browser extensions can activate Tor access with a button press.
If push came to shove and people started being arrested and sued left and right, it wouldn't be difficult for even Joe Sixpack to move to a VPN service, which would make current police work against real criminals a lot harder because every connection, the forensic officer would have to bed the VPN server for IP to IP correlation logs, or be able to monitor all connections to the VPN server and prove that connection "A" went into the network, and was routed to site "B", and do it well enough in a presentation to convince a jury.
If this judge were smart, he would have let the small fry go. This way, the nasty criminals would still be easily catchable without having to make any and all police investigations international affairs.
Already happened. Moot got subpoenaed and showed up to present IP logs and such on the Palin email skiddie. The court also had him define "newfag" and "rickroll".
So there's 3 scripts on this page whose sole purpose is to track you. I'm also willing to bet there's enough information stored in various locations (for example timestamp on the message cross referenced with the log files) to figure out who posted those anonymous comments.
If you're logged in, but check the "post anonymously" setting, slashdot apparently retains your association as the author of that comment. You cannot mod your own comment in such a case, even if you logout and login again. I don't know about actual AC postings, although I suspect at the very least the source IP address is retained.
What if newspapers and other sites purged identifying information within a few days of the post?
That would be enough time to subpoena the information immediately in cases of "clear and present danger" or if the police are monitoring a site as part of an active investigation, but not enough to go after comments made more than a few days ago under a one-off handle or as a "guest"/"anonymous coward."
Assuming you don't pre-moderate non-registered comments, you need to keep IP addresses for at least a few hours to make things like spammer-in-progress-from-same-IP-address-blocks work.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I find these charges hard to believe
Then don't believe them
If you are a teacher and someone online calls you a child molester, your boss may be legally liable if he just ignores you and it turns you you are a child molester and you later molest a student. He's pretty much obligated to give the claim lip service and suspend you just long enough to do a cursory CYA examination and declare the allegation "trivial," "unfounded," "without merit," or something similar. If the claim has zero evidence backing it up, he might be able to do it in less than 10 minutes but he can't just ignore it.
On the other hand, if the person making the false claim makes specific allegations, like "countertrolling was my neighbor in Springfield, Illinois in 2002 when I was 13 years old and he molested me and my younger brother. When I told my mom she didn't go to the police but he moved away the next week" and you know from his resume he lived in Springfield until mid-2002, you may have to suspend him for a few days until you can prove to yourself that there is little or no basis to this allegation.
If the allegation cannot be dismissed as unsubstantiated and it becomes your word against his, your Principal may be forced by his HR department or his school's liability-insurance-carrier to reassign you to non-teaching duties until YOU can prove it is a lie. If word leaks to the general public, parents who are more concerned with their kids than the truth may turn it into a political issue and you may find yourself pressured to resign unjustly.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
ref: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/28/newspaper_anonymous_commenters/
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I'm partial to young america minnesota myself. easy zip code: 55555
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Don't post stuff in the USA.
Pretty soon the US is going to see all parts of the internet hosted on non-US soil, to avoid all the US BS. Companies will follow suit. As will Jobs.
Then the US will just be a tiny speed bump on the information superhighway. I mean the great thing about the internet is that it is distributed, it doesn't actually have to exist in a certain place and thus be subject to its stupid laws. Just move the physical bits somewhere nicer.