Slashdot Mirror
Y2K Movie Followup: The Slashdot Effect Gone Wrong
Addition: 11/30 by michael : I thought I'd chime in here, since I started the fracas.
Blaming the ISP is sometimes appropriate, and sometimes not. Huge national ISPs have legal staffs to evaluate whether something should or should not be pulled. In general, they display an astonishing lack of backbone in defending customer sites, because even minor hassle from law enforcement just isn't worth it to them, and they don't have much excuse when they knuckle under. Small ISPs are a much different matter. No legal staff, facing the loss of your entire business if you guess wrong. Let's say he stood up for this guy and refused to pull the site, and the FBI seized the ISP's computers. Would all you flamers have stood up for him, sent him money to fight the good fight, talked to his other customers and begged them to stay on even though their sites were down? Yeah, sure you would. He made the best business decision available to him. The difference between this guy and one of the national ISPs is that they wouldn't have put the site back up again at all.
And if Wired has it right and you people are writing to the ISP's other clients, that's just sad. Save your anger for someone who's actually done something wrong. You want to get pissed off, give the FBI a call and ask them how their "investigation" is going.
Excellent point. Many people here seem to forget that. It was his income, and if the fbi comes to me and tells me to stop doing something or lose my income(in a logical connection) of course i am gonna stop. the vast majority of you would stop.
if the fbi told cmdrtaco to stop, i bet he would post something on slashdot, pass it on to all of the other sites that most slashdotterd would read, then shut down. the resulting wave of attacks on the fbi would influence them to let him put the site back up.
i was part of a small isp(doing mac tech support) and we could barely afford the connection (t-1) and phone bills. i was paid by the users who houses i went to. fortunitly, the tech support job was my first job at 16, so i didn't need it to survice.
if your primary source of income is threatened, then you will most likely stop. i don't know if slashdot is cmdrtaco's primary source of income, but if the fbi told him to stop or they'll do something bad to him, then i'm pretty sure he'll stop (if just long enough to get the slashdot community pissed off)
I've dealt with worse than the FBI myself. Knowledge of the applicable laws is all that is necessary
>>The government can take your property, and you have to prove that it wasn't purchased with drug profits to get it back.
As I understand it they still can't make the initial seizure without a court order. (ok, ok, ok, or catch you with enough drugs)
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
While we're at it, Slashdot needs a "stupid" moderation category. Because sometimes it's not a troll, it's not off-topic, and it's not flamebait... it's just stupid.
well my threshold is set at 1.. so I had to click to read your response... I was expecting a simple "suck it" or something to read.. but ok.. I like your response.
the points I made that need to be done to start up a business are for starting a business that will prosper. That will not file for bankruptcy down the road.
Yes any Joe Schmoe can start up a business. But will it be successful? Well.. apparently not. I know most people cannot afford to have a lawyer on hand. But if you're starting up a business... this is as important as buying your license. And if you can't afford the $200 to initially find one, well then I'm not sure you should be starting a business to begin with. Yes this is the land of the free... and Yes, it's wonderful that anyone who wants to be an entrepreneur can be one, but there are a few things you need to know. And indeed... an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. I'd rather pay up to $500 to find a lawyer before I even buy my domain than to run into trouble down the road and not have anything to turn to. Because if this was me... the second the FBI called... I would have been on the phone with my lawyer who knows me, and knows my business. People get scared very easily by the FBI. Now I'm not american, but in Canada, we have a constitution. This constitution doesnt protect me from my neighbor. It protects me from my government. My human rights legislation on the other hand protects me from my neighbor. Law enforcement screws up. They are not perfect. But people can't be ignorant to the law. You need to know what you're not allowed to do, and even better, what other people are not allowed to do to you.
I understand your market fill statement. I guess that leads to a question of what kind of business you want to run. Theres a market share for lots of stuff, but I know I wouldn't want to spend my professional life looking over my shoulder.
There aren't very many sucessful professional athletes that don't know the rules of the game. Business is no different.
You have paid for a total of 0 pages and so far 0 have been used up (0 today).
That's not spam.
Spam is one person sending bulk email to many - usually the same message, and always unsolicited. From the sounds of it, this was a case of many people sending a few messages to a few people. While it may have been a flood of mail, it by no means is the same thing as spam.
On the one hand, I imagine most of the messages were inflamatory at the very least. At best, they may have been simply informing the ISP's customers that their provider didn't respect their rights to free speech. While the ISP may have been legally within its rights, it's still a mark against them.
If the guy who run the ISP is pissed because his customers know the truth, well, that's too bad. His customers have a right to choose an ISP that will defend them.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
If you want a better example, there's plenty. How about South Africa and apartheid - or some states of the US, if you're prepared to go back a little further. Still gets the point across, but nowhere near as loaded for most as mentioning the NSDAP.
Incidentally, is this the shortest thread where Godwin's been invoked?
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
I think the reaction generated by all of this is just awful. The web hosting company, ran by one man, was just trying to cover his butt and make sure everything was legit. I can understand some people's complaints about backing down to FBI, but.... sending email to the web hosting service's other customers is just falk out un called for..... people think it is so good to rant, rave, and complain. But did the people writing those emails ever consider they knew nothing about the situation and put someone business and livelyhood in jeopardy? I think we should get the facts and think about the consequences of our actions before jumping off the deep end...... -Kyle
and the "Flamers" were just letting his OTHER
customers know that when it comes to the
question of his posessions or their rights,
which decision he makes.
I see nothing wrong with that. If he felt that
pressure from the FBI warrented taking it down
then ALL of his customers have every right to
know that this is how he does buisness, so that
they may decide whether they wish to continue
a buisness relationship with a person who does
not truely believe in free speach.
In no case do I see him as a victem. The customer
who had their page taken down (I assume it was a
customer and not his own) is the REAL victem.
The FBI is the agressor. He is the man in the
middle who just sat back and did as he was told.
I see no harm and no foul.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
---
Wieger was simply taking precautions in order to prevent the ruining of his life.
---
Hmm. It sounded to me like he didn't make any precautions at all. Did he even consult a lawyer? Common sense would tell me that he clearly had the right to keep his content up.
If I were in his position, I'd have contacted a lawyer, my upstream provider (to make sure they'd back me up), etc. The FBI has power, but they're media conscious as anyone. I'd have contacted Wired, Slashdot, etc. for help. I wouldn't have just pulled the switch.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
My guess is that you'd wake up with your house on fire.
It's happened before.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
It's not one customer, you fucking moron. It's one contract. This dickweed made a deal to host some content. He went back on the deal as soon as it was inconvenient for him, and he didn't even bother to find out first exactly how inconvenient it would be, or what his options were.
That's not "your freedom of speech ends on my server". It's "I'll sell you something but I want to keep total control over it". Even if the written agreement allowed him to drop the content, we all know damned well that he was representing that he'd try to give good service, not drop stuff for no reason at the first sign of trouble.
If he'd refused to host the stuff in the first place, that would have been a perfectly reasonable exercise of his freedom to control his server. Once he takes the stuff on, he's morally (and often legally) bound to make an effort to retain it.
Contract is the issue here. Freedom of speech is only peripherally related.
"You should already have counsel"... Huh? Why? What the hell for?
What are you thinking of here, something like "Uh, Mr Lawyer, can you please pre-inform me of the proper response for every possible threatening phone call?"
Oh yes, the movie was SOOOOOOO provocative. C'mon, it was a poorly-done spoof. About as professional as the Blair Witch Project. I suppose you think that the FBI should be calling up Arnold Schwartzenegger about the scary Y2K shit in "The End of Days" movie. That movie has a lot better chance of getting the general uneducated public freaked out about Y2K.
"...whom I wouldn't have trusted to run a small office network". What they hell releveance does that have to do with anything? ISPs that cannot support their customers will go out of business rather quickly. Sounds more like you are a hidden-agenda person for a megalithic communications company of some type. Go suck a balloon.
- If she did NOT like being a statue, I would immediately restore her to her animate state, apologize thoroughly, and go look for females with more of a proclivity for being marble.
Oh, I see. You petrify them, feel them up, and then ask them if they like being marble. Of course, being PETRIFIED, it's pretty hard for them to respond, isn't it?What you said didn't bother me in the least. Thank you, I'll throw all the stones I like. Believe me, I'm not judging you on your trolling.
"Prejudice is wrong; you should hate everyone the same."
Go suck a balloon!
I'm not exactly sure what caused the FBI to get so worked up. The video itself was basically some guy running a camera up and down a street of New York narrating in the background about some vague plot about a military takeover that never made a lot of sense, and wasn't very believable.
Quite frequently, if a more mainstream media source publishes something, they tend to be very careful with the words they use so as to convey the fact that people believe something happened, but they're careful not to explicitely say something happened for sure. They also rarely make unfounded assumptions. If something isn't explicitely stated by a source, most sources will note this.
The Slashdot "authors", on the other hand, aren't journalists. They're human, and they make assumptions and let their biases stray their take on a situation instead of being objective and letting the readers make their own decisions.
Thank you for a sanity voice. Too bad it's from someone who stated themselves as outside this community. Guys anger at being constantly sexually provoked and unable to actively respond could be constructively released in a number of ways, this isn't one of them. Female sexuality isn't the problem, our mutually increasing inability to deal with intimacy is; as well as many many groups use of female sexuality to meet their needs: whether for selling shit or covering inadequacy or getting revenge or whatever. Having been in a female teenage body for that number of years, I can speak to the complete yuckiness of these posts. So much for my fantasies of the general populace's (much less this particular groups') evolution away from mutually-victimizing sexual patterns.
I don't condone the flamage directed at the ISP guy, and I'm sure he didn't expect to get it - does he even read /.? But it puts /. in an intersting position in that Wired did think it newsworthy to mention the effect of the story being posted here. At times /. works a lot like usenet groups, but it manifests as different types of groups all at once, depending on the story. Almost all of the YRO sections stories will produce reactions similar to the *.advocacy groups - lots of varied opinions and heated discussion. Thing is, folks that are reporting on the 'net and its more visible phenoms - like /. - prolly don't realize this. In other words on the real net flamage is a fact of life.
/. world and impact the real world(tm). This kind of interaction is not really understood by all concerned - either by the hard-core flamers or the folks that that are the targets of said email flames, or those who report on it.
/. but I would send out email that expressed concern or alarm IF I knew all the facts involved. It's too easy to say something in the heat of battle, but if you do so in an email it's damned hard to take to back.
/. community can have and has on the real world can be a good thing, and when it is, this forum serves a valuable service to the net community as a whole. But when the reaction is tantamount to a cyber-riot and is mis-directed as this case was, I really worry about the implications. It would have been much better, IMHO, if the huge amounts of email were directed at the FBI and worded in such a way as to ask for clarification of the situation, express concern for the difficult position of the ISP, and concern over the legality of the action in the first place.
/. is no longer a geek/nerd secret club. The high profile can be a double-edged sword. When we interact with the real world as result of something read here, we should be real careful how we react.
What worries me sometimes is when the reactions go beyond the
I never send out angry email as a result of a story on
I'm rambling here, but I realy do think that the impact the
I come here for the serious stories and discussions, and I come here for the humor and craziness that the Grits Boy and the petrify-girls guy add to the atmosphere. Even the phursst pohoasters can be funny. But I think it's gotten to the point that
"shop smart:shop s-mart" ash
The Your Rights Online articles tend to be the worst example of biased, unresearched stories. Most real journalists make a lot of effort to present the facts and both sides of the issue to let the reader decide what's right and what's wrong. Most Slashdot articles, on the other hand, instead of just presenting us with a link and a summary, they try to offer their interpretation of the event and inevitably include a healthy dose of bias along with it.
For controversial topics, we need article *summaries*, not *editorials*. We're smart enough to make up our own minds without having to read "Big Brother" every other line.
>>How many atrocities have been committed in history just because the people commiting them were in the majority?
./ers (and Linux users in general, in some cases).
And how many were committed because the majority remained wilent and willfully ignorant?
>>But how does spamming (how could anyone consider flames intelligent) solve the situation? Especially to the victim!
It is NOT SPAMMING to send e-mail to a company to express your unhappyness with one of their decisions.
Spam is UCE, these companies provide e-mail addresses for customers (or potential customers) to communicate with them. I don't see where the problem is.
>>It's this kind of 'hack the world' mentality that makes people look down at
It's this type of "we need to fit in" mentality that will forever keep geeks on the outside of things.
I don't see where you extract "hack the world" from my comment. Expression of dissatisfaction through e-mail and telephone calls is the 1990's version of the sit-in. It's a method of civil disobedience and it gets results. It is LEGAL, it is non-destructive and it is effective.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Fuck Slashdot
I've been waiting for an actual "slashdot" story for a while now.
1) Moderation has gone to hell. Be careful who you give it to, guys. I don't think anyone knows the moderation guidelines now. Short, short version: the first post probably isn't redundant, but it might be a troll, flamebait, offtopic, or massively overrated. And don't moderate anything as overrated if you have a better reason. If you just don't like it, try posting a *reply*. Still waiting for metamoderation to fix this one...
2) Quality of articles on slashdot has gone to hell. Get rid of those losers except Rob and maybe Hemos. Either moderate the stories, let someone screen them before they get posted, or moderate/edit the potential stories, or something.
3) What's with the messed up colors on some of the comments pages? I don't want some ugly green, or some red. I don't want a page to look *any* different than it always has unless I have an option to customize it. Where's the "make the comment page stay standard slashdot green, dammit!" button?
Slashdot used to be a cozy little website. Yes, now it's a lot more popular. Now we have guest authors who can write long, rambling articles, and new posters who can get cool, sensationalistic headlines, and a comments section that needs to go back to segfault. It's always been "News for Nerds". Now we need to work on that "Stuff that matters" some more.
---
pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
You say twice that you don't encourage flames, but you praise the "positive effect" of these flames, which is almost the same thing. You compare Wieger's actions to genocide. Tit for tat, let's compare your post to white supremacist rhetoric.
How do you think the Nazis pulled it off? Not one worker ever killed Jews en masse: the only thing they did is pull a lever, drive a locomotive, show the Jews to the gas chamber. I'm not saying genocide and censorship are of the same scale; I'm saying that in both cases, institutions promoting them hope everyone involve will say, 'Well, I didn't really do anything.'
How do racist leaders incite lynchings? Most of them nowadays actively discourage violence: instead, they rail on and on about how minorities are destroying the fabric of our country, hoping that someone will follow the logical progression and kill some for the alleged good of the country. I'm not saying racist lynchings and flames are of the same scale; I'm saying that in both cases, institutions promoting them hope everyone involved will say, 'Well, maybe he says he doesn't want me to [lynch/flame people], but look at the good he says will result.'
OK, so that was pretty low, but I think it illustrates the fallacy of your argument.
There are several things you should keep in mind:
On the Internet, the main prevention of censorship is the ease with which information can be spread from one site to the other, not the efforts of stalwart ISPs standing up the the FBI.
Your observation that flames caused Wieger to put the site back up is wrong. Read the quote carefully:
With the video again streaming from his servers, Wieger is awaiting another call from the FBI. Inspired by the nasty comments in his email inbox, he's been practicing his free speech.
"I'm going to tell the FBI, 'Fuck you! You've probably cost us our business, you assholes!'"
The flames inspired Wieger to decide to say "Fuck you!" to the FBI, not to put the site back up. He put the site back up because he realized the FBI didn't have a legal leg to stand on, not because of the volume of flames.
The FBI told him (falsely) that the provider upstream from him would pull his entire site if he didn't. Clearly, it wouldn't accomplish much to keep the site up if his upstream provider had already caved in.
Apparently, some people were contacting Wieger's other customers, trying to get them to close their accounts, presumably in an attempt to make it more costly for Wieger to take the site down than to keep it up. These people forget that the cost of the FBI prosecuting him could be greater than his entire income. In that case, the only possible way to make keeping the site up a rational business decision is to pledge money for Wieger to support him in fighting the FBI. I guarantee that if the e-mails, instead of threatening to reduce his customer base, said, "If you put the site back up, I'll contribute $X to your legal defense against the FBI," we wouldn't be having this discussion about flaming.
You're right, it did work. But could you imagine if this was you? The FBI calls you threatening all kinds of things. I would have done the same thing: take if off until I figure out if they can fulfill their threats. Free speech is wonderful but jail sucks.
This is at least one of the reasons why you don't have a hosting company. Having a business requires responsible behavior toward customers, and I am very pleased that we now have a good example that caving in to a bluffing from FBI was much more damaging than a person expected. I completely agree with people who flamed that provider and hope that it will make others think before damaging freedom of speech.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Why are you making this guy out to be the villain here? The FB-fucking-I came to his business (read livelyhood) and threatend to pull the plug on him, literally and figuratively. You expect him to spit in their eye at the door? Thats just plan foolish. I aplaud him for doing the smart hing and making sure he was in no real legal danger and then reposting the movie. proper prudent thinking. It is easy to be a reactionary when you have nothing to lose, but when your rent and food are on the line you better think smart.
By comparing anything this minor to NAZI sympathy is just setting yourself up for flames. It is a know Law that any sufficiantly long thread eventually will become a discussion of Nazis but isnt it a little soon? It is maddness to condemn this guy for looking out for his best interests.
-- Hail Eris
Where in that linked article is Slashdot mentioned? I don't see it. I didn't look too carefully, but I just saw a mention of "free-speech advocates," nothing explicitly about Slashdot.
An example of a fanning-the-flames slashdot story is the recent
`interview' with John Vranesevich. Maybe good reason to give him a
grilling: shame that isn't what he got. Instead just a lot of flames
badly disguised as questions...
It is FAR eaiser to flame and complain than to actually think and create constructive critiques of someone elses work.
The rash of 1st post BS (like on this article) is an example.
Or Mr. Barr's letter to mindcraft is another example.
And, given the paranoia of US Citizens, how many are REALLY going to pick up the phone and call the FBI asking 'hey hows it going', when documentation exists of what happens to citizens who decide NOT to play by government rules. Phil Zimmerman(PGP fame) and the old editor of PHRACK who was suied by AT&T over 911 documents come to mind.
*sigh*
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
I think I'm going to print this out and frame this obvious work of art. Future generations should be allowed to see this, in all its glory.
Amazing.
Well said. But the percentage of idiots is growing - must be that law that says that the universe's IQ is a constant...
This just shows that free-speech advocates, ecologists, feminists, slashdotters, and similar fanatics, should be treated with extreme caution... however right they may be individually, in groups they're unbearable. (BTW I'm proud to belong to all of the cited groups.)
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
- Huxley
Now that's a great sig!
Perhaps a solution would be to implement a feature in email clients that would by default keep all messages in a queue for a set period of time (say 24 hours) so that you can edit some hastily written words after you've had a good night's sleep. i'm sure this post would benefit from editing of some sort :)
Since your UID is smaller than mine, I can only conclude that you're trolling. -s20451 (410424)
Do you think Wieger will back down from his rights a second time without an explicit written court order signed and in triplicate? I doubt it - he is now all too aware that he is not alone.
Boy, that's a wonderful sentiment. It would have been an even more wonderful sentiment if most of the people who sent e-mail had offered to support him, with actual money, rather than threatening (and apparently succeeding) to drive away customers.
Dude, there's a HUGE differerence between being forthright about what you are, and spamming every single discussion board in existence. I don't mind your statuphilia or whatever you call it. I don't mind you being open about it, and proud of the fact. I'm happy for you and the fact you've found something you enjoy.
But I absolutely hate the way you go around spamming every single slashdot board in existence, pushing it in people's faces where it's not wanted, and most especially, not on topic. I'm sorry... can't you read anything from the fact that your posts are constantly marked off-topic? I'm sorry for being harsh, but... what the hell's wrong with you???
Be happy about your statue fetish. Be proud of yourself for who you are. If you find a discussion on sexuality, or repression of sexuality, or sex with statues, or sex with people, or whatever... post there.
But don't come into a fucking technology forum discussing news and tech, and fucking well SPAM us with that stuff! It's not wanted. It's OFF TOPIC!!!!!!!!!
You don't see anyone else spamming every single thread with posts on what they do to their girlfriend, or boyfriend, or whatever. And there's a damn good reason for it. It's SPAM. It's NOT WANTED. It's OFF TOPIC. Get it????
If you want to advocate, fine! Do so! BUT NOT HERE!!!!!
The only thing you're doing is making people hostile. Hostile to you, and your ideas and your beliefs. You're being counter-productive, dude. You're turning people OFF, not ON.
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
"This man obviously did not study the laws or care enough to find them. This is no different than a used car dealer telling you that a car has never been in a wreck, you find out it's been in 3 front end collisions, and the dealer says that he just didn't know. These are things that the dealer should have known before the car made it to the lot (if he's not lying). "
That situation is not the same. The car dealer is lying. We are talking about a guy who started his own web hosting business not knowing all the details of the law. This man was not a lawyer and should not expected to act as one. His business is web hosting.
Not to say that he shouldn't have stood up and told the fbi to produce something more substantial, he should have.
That's the problem though, is that anyone who gets in the line of providing service is EXPECTED to know the law surrounding it.
Here's a better analogy - what if you went into a restaurant and found that no employees were washing their hands after using the restroom because THEY DIDN'T KNOW.
That's why McDonalds has to put signs in their restrooms and literally fire employees if they don't, because they get sued either way.
-Erik-
Well put. This (my post) is basically a "me too" post, which I usually frown upon, but I also look upon it as a sort of vote. I have been reading SlashDot for a couple of years and it has become quite apparent that it has become dangerous, like a loaded gun pointed at random. I used to read SlashDot for serious Linux news. Now I use linuxtoday.com for that and I view SlashDot as a sort of Jerry Springer Show 'Focus on Linux Edition'. It would be well for the Linux community in general to start distancing itself from SlashDot. To be fair, I should say that SlashDot still posts some pretty good stories, and interesting info. But It's getting hard to take a significant portion of the clientelle seriously. Unfortunately, my refusal to take them seriously does not assuage the damage done by this vocal minority, or the damage done to the very causes we try to support. How does that song go? "We always hurt the ones we love"?
-Steve Bergman
As he said in the Wired story - he can't afford counsel. If the FBI actually wanted to do something and fight it in court, then he'd probably be scrambling to the ACLU hoping someone would take his case pro-bono. Regardless, I have a strong feeling he never considered the possibility the FBI would find a site run by one of his 50 clients and threaten him over it. "Calls from the FBI are not routine, but they aren't rare, either, nor are similar calls from others".
I really, really don't think so. "Hi yes, this is the FBI again. After surveying x bazillion pages on the web, we've determined you need to take this, and this site down". This story was a fluke, and that's why it was a story in the first place.
"These things are even less rare if you're hosting something obviously provocative, like that movie"
Porn sites and such, yeah you may expect it. This? I'd never have guessed a really poorly made, very obscure, video about rioting on New Years would have gained the FBIs interest considering there's all sorts of this sort of thing in bigtime media. I would also guess hosters don't know the details of everything their hosting.
"The reason this bugs me is that I'm getting really tired of the general level of incompetence that's tolerated on the Web"
I think you're confused at where you're placing the blame. I think I'd be a little bit more worried about the FBI's actions, eh? You seem to have lost sight of what the actual problem.
From your response to another poster: "... and, for likely cases like this, yes, you can even get your lawyer to explain enough of the law to you, in advance, that you at least feel comfortable telling, say, the FBI to wait while you call that lawyer."
And in the meantime, take the site down while you're finding out what's going on. Once you've got the facts, put it back up. That's what the guy did. If the guy had refused to put it back up ever, as I imagine many larger ISPs would've, that's a different story.
"We're talking about the feds, not a bunch of film critics. From their point of view, it's provocative"
And god knows what that means. As I said before, if I were hosting this site and the FBI called me about it, I'd be scratching my head as to what exactly caught their attention about it relative to what else is out there.
"... and BECamation, which obviously can't support its customers because of its total lack of a clue, should be one of them."
I'm a little lost on how this incident points to "not supporting the customer". "What? The FBI called, and you took my site down temporarily in order to make sure things were kosher? HOW DARE YOU, incompetent idiot! And by the way, if the FBI actually does do something about it that's illegal, could you uh, front the money to fight them in court for me? That's what I expect out of my ISP you know".
"The reason this bugs me is that I'm getting really tired of the general level of incompetence that's tolerated on the Web"
I have no idea how you relate this to incompetence on anyones part other than the FBI. Which, strangely, you haven't taken issue with.
How many registered users are there?
I don't know what the actual laws allow them to do, but the reality of it is that people have had cash seized simply because they were driving around with too much cash.
I've never heard of any threshold for "enough" drugs to make you subject for forfeiture. There is a whole list of crimes that being suspected of makes you subject to forfeiture. http://www.fear.org has a bunch of information about civil forfeiture.
it's not going unnoticed. A couple of days ago I posted on a similiar theme about the bs iD story - another software spy .
...etc. These (and other qualities) are what you find in any good reporting organisation.
It seems to me that the writers/posters at slashdot are posting more purely technical and slanting towards the net culture/we world. This is fine because you can want a bit of diversity. But not at the expense of accuracy of facts, ability to quote sources, accountability
One solution (there are surely others) is for users to moderate stories for *quality* much like our posts are moderated. This will force the writers to lift their game as users can quantitativly access a story. Read the post to see what i recommended. Slashdot can only improve.
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
You all know this. It's fine that we all talk on
I used to own and run an ISP and I have to take my lumps to protect many-a-user. People didn't like what they had to say, for a nunber of reasons. I stuck to my guns. It took all my time to deal with issues like that (that and Pacific Bells continuous billing errors).
So, if you have just come home after a night of drinking, or what not. Yell, rant, go wild here and not to the inbox of some poor guy trying to stay afloat.
-- Smile
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
Obviously you have no idea what you're talking about.
Anybody who has any serious chance of needing a lawyer should have one. You don't ask them all your questions in advance. You call them up when you need them. The point is that you know who to call... you don't have to spend time finding a decent lawyer when you need an answer immediately. Your lawyer will already know your business, so you don't have to spend a lot of time explaining the situation to her. You will already have a relationship of trust, so you don't have to spend a lot of time building one.
... and, for likely cases like this, yes, you can even get your lawyer to explain enough of the law to you, in advance, that you at least feel comfortable telling, say, the FBI to wait while you call that lawyer.
We're talking about the feds, not a bunch of film critics. From their point of view, it's provocative. It doesn't matter how well done it is. They have no sense of humor and no sense of aesthetics. If you don't know that much about feds, you're really not in a position to have an opinion here. Um, incompetence isn't relevant to complaining about incompetence? Exactly what is relevant?I expect basic competence in every area... technical, business, and legal.
Most of the small ones, and many of the big ones, are incompetent. Most of the big ones, and many of the small ones, are disorganized and unwilling to help their customers to the degree they deserve. Damned few of either kind provide an acceptable level of service. Hosting providers are often, but certainly not always, worse than bandwidth providers. Consultants vary widely but are frequently completely worthless Web designers are the absolute bottom of the barrel.
If the FBI contacted the ISP, and he did such a thing, he could be found guilty for obstruction of justice, even if the act of justice being performed by the FBI was illegal.
The right thing to do is not "avoid the problem", but rather to confront it head on, and stand up for your rights. Running to some mystical data haven won't solve the problem. The FBI is an agent of the country with the most firepower. Fortunately, it's also one of the most democratic countries in the world.
If you want to have rights you must stand up for them, and be prepared to fight for them. Don't wait for the ongoing of infringement of your right to be fought off by thrid parties.
To purchase it is not like spending money but rather it is an investment in the future in a blow against the empire
The FBI has not been the friend of militia groups... and they might try to use their power by claiming that such videos incite violence, conspiracy and so forth, thus presenting an allegedly clear-and-present danger. They'd probably have much of the media on their side, as well.
Despite the First Amendment, it's not unusual to see journalists going on and on about the evils of, say, Paladin Press, or hate groups, or militias; and then cheerily, but incorrectly, implying that they're all part of some Hillaryesque Right-Wing Conspiracy headed by Limbaugh, Buchanan and the Aryan Nation.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
I am the original poster (and the person who started the "naked and petrified" trend on Segfault, though a bunch of other lame-brains picked up on it... the sexually explicit comments were NOT mine, and I'm also the author of the famous "immobilized and not fully clothed" letter to ESR, the first ever "naked and petrified" post to reach a moderation point of 5, and stay there), and I would like to clarify.
I would NEVER transform a girl into a statue unwillingly if she didn't enjoy being a statue. If she did NOT like being a statue, I would immediately restore her to her animate state, apologize thoroughly, and go look for females with more of a proclivity for being marble.
Rufies are NOTHING of the sort. They do NOT actually transform flesh into any kind of inert substance while preserving the consciousness of the transformed person. That's what's important.
In all of my fantasies, the women LOVE being statues. In fact, the transformation is usually voluntary, or at the least, temporary. Many of the women I talk to about this say they DON'T think they'd probably enjoy being statues. But until science or magic actually advances far enough to find out, we don't know WHAT it would be like to be a statue, and whether or not the women would enjoy it.
So how can you decide if it's good or bad?
And since it's something that can never happen, in our lifetimes or probably ever, what is the bag fat hairy yak-brained idea??
Petriphilia (or statuephilia) is a VERY common interest. You'd be surprised how many hundreds of us there are on the Internet, and how many THOUSANDS in the world. So before you switch into FLAME FLAME FLAME FLAME mode, maybe you should read what this article is actually saying. How would you like it if I criticized YOUR sexuality?
Okay, I'll do just that.
GOD, YOU'RE SICK! YOU ACTUALLY HAVE *SEX* WITH PEOPLE! THAT'S DISGUSTING! YOU CAN GET ALL KINDS OF DISEASED AND PREGNANCY AND STUFF DOING THAT!!! SICK SICK SICK!! YOU SEXUALISTS MAKE ME WANT TO VOMIT! I'M HEVER READING SLASHDOT AGAIN!
There. You didn't like it very much, did you.
Throw stones elsewhere, or better yet, don't throw stones at all.
I was actually rather disheartened when this got moderated up. That's not what's supposed to happen. My "Open Letter to ESR" was supposed to be moderated up, and it was. Because, not to brag, it was very clever. This was no more clever than my favorite cartoon, Pokey the Penguin. It was meant for those who, like me, keep thresholds at -1, sort by score, and always skip to the bottom of the article to find the REAL good stuff.
I apologize for the inconvenience caused by it being moderated up.
For those who want to learn more about people who love turning girls to stone:
http://www.oaktree.net/argoforg
http://members.xoom.com/meddie/Medusa
We're really quite normal, good, honest people. Please don't judge us based on the fact that one of us (me) enjoys a good Troll now and then!!!
Good day, and God bless.
I sent a >100kB mail once (pure text). Over 20000 words... Took me a whole (off-line) summer to write it, though: Spend a few hours every evening writing...
Well, anyhow, seeing the moderation totals for this comment is quite interesting. When I checked, it was:
Moderation Totals:Offtopic=8, Flamebait=1, Troll=2, Funny=5, Overrated=2, Total=18.
Nice going -- finally a moderator war...
/* Steinar */
(This comment is of course GPLed.)
I agree, right or wrong, the FBI can totally screw you if they have a reason. It's easy to trumpet free speech when you're just some anonymous coward on a Web forum, but when that notice comes in the mail on government letterhead, I think a lot of us would be really scared. Not everyone is willing to spend thousands of dollars or risk jail time just to make a point. It takes a lot of courage to make that stand knowing you might lose despite being in the right.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
No, I disagree.
If you read some of the recent commentary on Slashdot you'll see (a) that certain buzzwords ("free","open source", "linux", "Carmack", "privacy") generate almost pavlovian responses from Slashdotters and that (b) there is a mob mentality at work here that oftentimes belies the true spirit of the posted topics. (People, in other words, aren't reading the "original" material -- they're simply responding to the posts and, more often than not, completely missing the context ofthe original article) and (c) the result is oftentimes meaningless noise. Even the voices of reason -- of rationality -- oftentimes don't even get moderated up.
I see posts oftentimes talking about the "Slashdot effect" -- as in: "Let's Slashdot the site..." And more often than not I get the sense that the poster has no real sense of what he/she is saying, has no real sense of the context in which it should (yes, that's right: I said "should") be said, and has no real depth of understanding of the implications of his/her words.
I won't take the high road and say I don't do this. I do do this -- and I have -- and anyone can check my recent posts and see the proof.
I'm fascinated by Slashdot and the community it appears to generate. But like all communities there's an authentic "core" at work and a lunatic "fringe" that often misunderstands the core and, ultimately, misrespresents the core. Too often the world outside the community is only interested in the fringe and not the core (since, as we all know from reading our Tolstoy, that all happy families are happy in the same way -- so what's the point about writing about happiness, right? It's the sadness -- the conflict -- the makes for the best television.)
Here, I worry that the fringe is overtaking the core -- and the end result is hollow hype: the same sort of meaningless, parasitic criticism that gets written by Berst or Dvorak or ZDnet or PCWeek. The proof of this comes when Slashdot is seen as merely fringe commentary. In this Wired story, oddly enough (or maybe not so oddly) that exactly how Slashdot comes across: as part of a manic finge that misresponds to key stimuli (the buzzwords, in other words). Pavlovian dogs, in other words.
But the internet itself engenders that sort of thinking, I guess. Sorta like the 1-Click Ordering patented by Amazon: one click, and you can send a well-intentioned (but ill-thought-out) "fuck you" spiralling around the globe.
..might be for a few of you who have no good reason not to use this guys ISP (maybe yours pisses you off and you have been meaning to switch) to actually ask him if he has much of a back bone for this sort of stuff now (FBI threats) and switch to his ISP if you believe that he dose.. and tell him so.. /. may have made his life miserable for a little bit, but if he is really one of the good guy there is no reason that we can't make shure that he ends up better off for it (financially).
I seem to remember that the artist lives in New Jersey? Is the ISP located in NJ too? and dose it matter where he is located, i.e. dose he do web hosting. I would definitly talk to the guy about switching.. execpt that I'm in school and I get everything for free.
Regardless, if the guy really is more protecting of people's rights now, then someone out there sould definitly figure this out (by talking to him) and switch to his service. If people were to switch to him specifically for freedom based reasons then the FBI is the only looser here.. and we can all home happy.
Jeff
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I'm not talking about the idiots who go off and send emails.
I'm talking about publishing a questionable news story without verification... especially since the posting was in the form of flamebait and included a link to the ISP's contact information.
The old carpentry saying
"Measure twice, cut once"
has some important, useful information that it would behoove us in the information age to take heed of:
"Think twice, click once".
...and be civil!
I'd highly suggest reading the slashdot article mentioned in this posting Thoughts from the Furnace
-core
The Slashdot "authors", on the other hand, aren't journalists. They're human
Heheh.
Don't think you meant it quite that way, but quite interesting how it came out. Of course there are those who do think that journalists are something other than human. Probably something more akin to whatever species lawyers belong to...
Ideology is for ideots.
Give me a break! Terminating a customer's account is not the same as stealing assets or killing Jews. It's more like a newspaper refusing to publish something in the Classified section.
Informing Wieger's customers accurately about what he did might be OK, but I get the impression that they were sent FUD. Imagine a customer receiving a message like this:
The FBI called Wieger and told him to take down a customer's site. They provided no warrant or other legal document. However, they told him that if he didn't, his upstream provider would disconnect him, resulting on all his sites being taken down, including yours. Fearing the loss of business. Wieger complied, taking the customer's site down. Once he found that the FBI was lying, he put the customer's site back up. Free speech advocates decry Wieger's actions, saying that he should of stood up to the FBI. Cancel your account with Wieger!
If his customers had been told that, do you really think Wieger would be facing the loss of his business, which he is? Therefore, his customers were probably sent misinformation. This is bad.
Obviously you have never been in business for yourself.
So now a one-man operation cannot exist if he doesn't have the balls to stand up to the FBI??
That IS horseshit. Let one of the US's more Rogue agencies show up on your doorstep and threaten your livelihood and see if that horseshit isn't in YOUR drawers.
Smith & Wesson: The original Point-and-Click interface.
There's a funny book called "Thank You for Smoking" by Christopher Buckley about a tobacco lobbyist who calls this the Yuppie Nurymburg Defense, "I vas just paying the morgage"
Extremism in the cause of liberty is no vice, Moderation in the cause of freedom is no virtue. --B.Goldwater
Utter crap. Both the SS and the Wehrmacht routinely massacred people (mostly Jews) in Poland, the Baltic States, the USSR, wherever.
In Kiev (for example), several thousand were walked up to large pits, ordered to strip and then shot.
In the Pripet marshes, the Jews were walked into the swamp and shot so they fell there, babies were to be held close to their mothers so one bullet would do for both.
In France and Italy, whole villages were expunged.
Sorry about this rant, but you have absolutely no idea of the scale of the operations.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
I stopped reading when you said "As a business student"
Then you SHOULDN'T have replied to something you didn't read.
dont get offtopic.. we're talking about Wieger. You could have made reference to what we're actually talking about
don't call me "man" or "buddy" or any other term that would imply you're replying to a male. Because you're not.
I'm not a first year "Arts" student. I don't know where the Arts faculty is in my school. I don't think it's anywhere near the labs. I don't plan on changing the world, fixing world hunger, or curing aids. I will have a degree. A specialization. And knowledge. (why are we all getting degrees? wow we must be stupid to just spend 50 grand like this for nothing.) Maybe we should all be cool like Bill and drop out of school then get screwed by the government down the road. oops.. should have stuck around for that monopoly/oligopoly lecture I guess Bill. Anyone that thinks education doesn't teach you anything is wrong. I'm a year away from my degree and even I know not to do what Bill did.
Talk is not cheap if you have anything important to say. Although I think I can understand why people have said this sentence to you.
I wont crash and burn waving the american flag because I'm not American... and if you would have read what I typed, you would have known that.
What I learn is real world stuff.
As soon as I read "AC" I stopped respecting.
thats it... threshold back to normal... now I know why I don't change it.
You have paid for a total of 0 pages and so far 0 have been used up (0 today).
he didn't know anything at the time...
it's his business if he takes it down.
he did himself a favor.
anyone who flamed him for taking it down deserves a kicck in the ass for being a selfish prick.
---bob
And,like most communities (or should i say systems?), analyzing ourselves is one of our favorite passtimes.
There is some truth to your concern. If you look at the Usenet which I mentioned briefly, the idiots did pretty much take over and drive almost everyone else out, at least for a while (I'm feeling comeback of it). On the other hand, I think that a lot of the stuff that people get emotional about here is rather important stuff, which is a glimmer of hope in this age of zero motivation. At least the flames are not usually over which editor, star trek series, or game controller is best.
Warhols old cliche about 15 minutes of fame is true on the net. The guy running that site got a couple of hundred emails (I'm sorry, but big deal, my daemons send me a couple of hundred mails a day (What is misconfigured btw?
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
>>Civil disobediance is one thing. Purposefully destroying someone's business is another. I mean, the guy is hardly, like he said, an AOL. Which, I'm sure you'll say: That's no excuse! .. maybe it isn't. But that's no reason to crucify the poor man's business over the head of his (over?)reaction to Big Brother.
What do you think the sit-ins and bus boycotts of days gone by were? They were a deliberate attempt to change conduct through hurting businesses financially. I have no problem with it, as long as facts are the weapons that get used.
>>I made no intention of saying they should 'fit in'. Your self-imposed geek exile is a fallacy. We're all alone on this big, dumb rock. Get over it.
I don't have anything to get over, I'm a college student with a good GPA, I makedecent money at my job and I'm married to a big breasted blonde.
You and your desire to fit in amongst people who don't want you, will forever keep you an alone bitter little man.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
If you checked, I linked to an explanation of it. I know what it is, I know that it's originaly a Usenet thing. But, we've certainly had Godwin invoked here before and that was definitely an analogy with Hitler and the NSDAP, so it's liable byu the slashdot extension convention that seems to apply.
:P
So
;)
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Exactly!
/. article. I watched the video clip, and I read the wired article as well. And here's what I would like to add to your insightful comment.
This has turned out to be a very interesting story. I read the initial
I agreed with Weiger's comments on the wired article. He seems like an intellegent person. But running a business is another story. And as a business student, it seems to me that he has gotten what he deserved. The 2 most important things you do before setting up a business are:
1. take some sort of business class... you need to know more than how to balance a book, or advertise... you need to know ethics, and laws, and the whole 9 yards.
2. you find a lawyer! You don't find one when you need one. This is the single most important thing to do before setting up a business. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. You don't go with the first lawyer you talk to... you interview many... because your lawyer is going to be your lifeline in a situation you least expect to happen.
I happen to have a really excellent corporate law professor this semester so I feel empowered by my knowledge now. And if Weiger wouldn't have been so entreprenuer gung ho... he would have done things "right". He also would know that he's probably got a very good Defemation case against the FBI, depending on the events that took place. It's sad that he's not sophisticated enough to know this.
Now as for the video, if he had any business sense... he would have never put that on his servers to begin with. Have you seen this video? omg! You're damn right the FBI wanted that taken down. Now wait a second... I didn't say it shouldn't be on the web. This is what the web is all about. But if I was a web hosting business owner... there is no way in hell I'd allow that on my server. It looks like some kind of terrorist plot and to tell you the truth.. it sent chills up my spine. I'm not tempted to email his clients and flame them for his actions, I'm tempted to email them and tell them that their are better businesses out there. Run by people with education. I'm sorry... but he really did get what he deserved. If his business goes down because of all of this, well... Darwin lives again.
Hizonner I'm glad someone else saw this. It seems to me that a lot of people are getting all caught up in the "no censorship!" and "I have rights dammit" parts of this issue. I want to be a hippy as much as the next person, but look at this from an entrepreneur prespective. Now think about it.... there ya go.. yikes.. what was he thinking.
You have paid for a total of 0 pages and so far 0 have been used up (0 today).
Everyone knows if you want a real news website, you go to The Onion.
Maybe Rob should somehow make it more clear to the world how many Slashdot readers there are for any given story. Approximately, that is, because of ACs and being harder to count "correctly" and all that, but still...
Readers? or posters? Forget counting the AC's, how about all the people who read Slashdot without posting? I know that, for my own part, I read Slashdot for a couple of months before I even posted for the first time, let alone got an account.
Chris
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
>>Terminating a customer's account is not the same as stealing assets or killing Jews.
The swiss banks might not have killed a single Jew, but they DID hold onto their assets after the Nazis expatriated and murdered them.
>>If his customers had been told that, do you really think Wieger would be facing the loss of his business, which he is?
Maybe he should have thought about the consequences of that BEFORE he pulled a paying customer's site.
Even the least constitutionally aware among us knows that the FBI would need a court order or a warrant to force us to do anything that we did not want to do. I don't buy the "they bullied me" defense. (I'll say it again) I've stood face to face with two armed BATF agents when I was falsely accused of owning an illegal firearm. I stood my ground and I haven't seen hide nor hair of either one of them in years. You don't have to be "brave" or "foolish" to stand up for yourself, just aware.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Slashdot effect gone wrong? Nobody got hurt, it just created some more publicity, and there's no such thing as bad publicity, right? And it created an investigation at the FBI because of complaints. That's good. Everybody calm down. Good I say.
Traditional Journalist integrity comes with age and size. Its cool when you have a small weekly alternative like most bigger US cities have...I use to believe /. was the digital equivelent of these alternatives. The main difference is that as the readerships of these alternatives grow, the only way they survive is to live off the facts and journalistic integrity far greater than the mainstream press.
/. just for the articles, ignoring almost all editorial anymore and simply clicking on the links. More often than not, I go back to wired and get a far more journalistic picture of whats going on than Roblimo or others seem to want to give you.
/. has dropped to the assumed midteens. He was once a damn fine journalist with articles like his last months Epcot stories. Others are way off the mark, reactionary and inciteful. In a few private messages I've sent him, his response was shooting from the hip trite cliches about BigBrother without a real idea of what he was talking about. Those of us in the fields that he seems to be an instant expert in know the only research he's done, or at the very least has choosen to alude to, we're from emails sent to him by disallusioned teens.
/. has brought in a large midteen population. Yes, these were always here, but one could tell the averge level of intelligence in the posters has declined. I have always welcomed the oppinion of others. I'm just sick of reading every other article about the pain of High School. I was a geek in High School. I won the first Computer Award for my school, after more or less teaching the first computer course as my teacher was clueless towards programming (she was however the one that fought to have courses, as well as our brand new Apple IIes). And yes, I got beat up or at the very least attempts were made, as any good geek, I took several years of martial arts. Guess what, this is life...people of small intelligence resort to violence when their little brains give away, and you're not the only ones being singled out, though ya do make yourself an attractive target. I'm just sick of hearing all the Hellmouth crap. Places like /. are just fueling the fire for these disallusioned teens to feel more disallusioned and more justified in their actions.
/. over the last few months. I keep loggin back on, and doing my daily metamoderation (my reg mod doesn't seem to work anymore...maybe I got metamoded out of it?) hoping that the quality starts the steep slope up again to where it once peaked. Unfortunately, by staying here, I have been fueling the flames just as much as anyone of the 'Journalists' here.
What we have here is just the opposite. Over the last several months, starting with Katz and as the new 'reporters' are added on, these journalists have been trying to make their name by stiring up controversy. While this may be a stepping stone for these people, this is slowly turning into the digital equivelent of the Enquirer.
I have been a reader of this site for several years under several aliases. I've seen if go from informative and the 'New Wired' to the 'Old Wired' with an XFiles / I got beat up as a kid / I'm getting beaten up now twist.
Slashdot was the Wired without the glitz, the advertisments, and the BS. Slashdot is now, all glitz no substance: I find myself skimming
Lastly, because of the Katz effect (was he fired from Wired, I wonder) the readership of
Because of people like him,
I've often thought about 'cancelling my subscription' to
clif
Flaming is one of these things. We're used to it, it's even considered a rite of passage by some. So shame on many of these people for flaming without having all the facts - there is no excuse for this.
However, there is also no excuse for Wired and these guys posting those flames. If I posted every "bad" e-mail I got, the 'net would have run out of bandwidth long before now. We don't need to air other people's dirty laundry or our own. There's enough blame to go around the table - I would expect people to act in a somewhat grown up and professional manner when dealing with this. Yes, it hurts when somebody calls you names. But you don't go crying wolf every time somebody says something you don't like - we have enough politicians doing that as is. Grow up - all of you.
Could this post have been worded better? Probably. At the moment, I'm alittle upset - both at how people responded, and how it was handled. The 'net is anonymous... stuff like this threatens that anonymity - MY anonymity. It's stuff like this that has conservatives clammoring for additional controls on the 'net and so-called "accountability" for people's actions.
A friend of mine told me that Segfault.org had a problem with sick twisted perverts like this one posting crap about females and such, and it got to the point that Segfault stopped allowing user comments or something. Not being a Segfault reader myself, I can't personally attest to this. But if these are the same sick people who caused the Segfault user comment demise as I heard it, may Slashdot PLEASE do something about them.
the real at&t mix
I realize that the editors at slashdot think thought they were providing a community service by informing the public. But this is just one of numerous examples of poor research being done prior to publishing the article.
Slashdot, like most other news media outlets these days appears to throw ethics to the wind in the rush to get the story out first.
The best way, IMO, to handle problems like this was what I (among several) suggested as the most direct solution: Mirror the site in an area outside FBI jurisdiction. As recent times have shown, once something is released to the 'net, it's pretty damn hard to get it off again. Throw up a couple mirror sites and that information is forever guaranteed to stay in circulation.
Well, maybe not forever, but at least until people get bored of it. ;)
<sarcasm>Save the flame wars for something useful, like the linux vs. bsd "Fork!", "Spoon!" debate.</sarcasm>
--
rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
"People will pay big bucks for the luxury of ignorance."
Good points all, and an interesting question as to what constitutes journalistic integrity in a /. (or /.-like) site.
/.?
/. effect is used for good rather than evil.
Is it enough that a "traditional" media site has run the story? Is it enough that a couple have? Is it okay to pass through stories until you get to a certain size, and then you have to kick in some fact checking? Drudge is cleary on one end of this continuum (the "anything goes" end), where is
Let's make sure the much-ballyhooed
P.
http://www.groksoup.com
There are many many arguments surrounding this whole issue... but in my opinion the 2 main ones are:
1) Nothing is effective unless it is constructive, this goes for criticism, conversation, relationships *anything*. Flaming is a pointless excersize and a complete waste of energy. Think of it from a simple point of view, surely it is so much better for both sides if the energy put into the argument was of a positive nature rather than negative. Not to mention the simple aspect of respect. - It's all be forgotten about on the web, primarily IMO because you are faceless and it's very unlikely you will get any comeback. Unlike IRL!
2) Dumbing down.... are we really getting more stupid??? Are we unevolving into chimps who don't understand subtleties anymore. Where satire and humor is lost totally? After all it was a satirical movie and if people decide to get scared about it then what are we to do. Is pulling it really the answer?
It's a strange situation, but one which is happening everywhere. TV, politics, almost everything has been dumbed down for the masses. It's a disturbing trend.
I have no easy answers, but the whole thing worries me deeply. It has such far reaching consequences not just to do with privacy and rights, but on a much more basic human interaction level.
>>Terminating a customer's account is not the same as stealing assets or killing Jews.
The swiss banks might not have killed a single Jew, but they DID hold onto their assets after the Nazis expatriated and murdered them.
Right, that falls under stealing assets. I maintain that it is not the same as terminating a customer's account with an ISP. You've haven't denied that claim.
>>If his customers had been told that, do you really think Wieger would be facing the loss of his business, which he is?
Maybe he should have thought about the consequences of that BEFORE he pulled a paying customer's site.
Come on, I'm sure he refunded the customer.
Did you even read my post? My major point was that it is highly unlikely that he would be facing the loss of his business if his customers had been sent accurate information rather than FUD. You have not responded to that.
Even the least constitutionally aware among us knows that the FBI would need a court order or a warrant to force us to do anything that we did not want to do. I don't buy the "they bullied me" defense. (I'll say it again) I've stood face to face with two armed BATF agents when I was falsely accused of owning an illegal firearm. I stood my ground and I haven't seen hide nor hair of either one of them in years. You don't have to be "brave" or "foolish" to stand up for yourself, just aware.
This had nothing to do with being aware of free speech rights. He was told by the FBI that his upstream provider had already caved in. In any case, the guy was a small operation and had probably never dealt with First Amendment legal issues before. He took the site down, did some research, and put it back up in a day or two. From now on, he won't have to take sites down to do research, because he had already done the research. This is hardly reprehensible or cowardly behavior.
Well, well. So it did work. People have complained that the ISP didn't stand for freedom of speech and it gave them a spine. Frankly, Weiger is trying to play the victim here. Saying stuff like, 'Oh, but we're just a lil' company, it wasn't our fault.' Yeah. But it's never anybody's fault when freedom of speech is concerned. You pull content from a website, and you're claiming you're just paying the rent. What you're doing next is approving of massive censorship in the name of passivity.
How do you think the Nazis pulled it off? Not one worker ever killed Jews en masse: the only thing they did is pull a lever, drive a locomotive, show the Jews to the gas chamber. I'm not saying genocide and censorship are of the same scale; I'm saying that in both cases, institutions promoting them hope everyone involve will say, 'Well, I didn't really do anything.'
Like I said, flames is never the solution. But making your voice heard is. In the light of the conclusion of this story, the Slashdot effect, civilised or not, did have a positive effect. I'm not endorsing it, but... Well, you gotta wonder.
I'm certainly not the first person to say it in this discussion, but I'm going to add my voice to the chorus. /.'s influence has grown tremendously over the last couple of months. Major news agencies regularly read here now. A news story on /. can have huge repercussions, as the story at the head of this thread and other recent articles here have demonstrated. With /.'s growth must come more respnsibility. Its one thing to yell "fire" out in the wilderness, quite another to yell it in a crowded building. When a news story that is bound to generate a lot of activity, such as something on privacy, or your rights online, at the very least, the parties involved should be contacted, and invited to present their side of the story here.
Also, in rely to Gawd Damn, that little AC freak posted the same thing in the Aibo thread..
Call on God, but row AWAY from the rocks!
Since no one seems to want to moderate this up, I'll repost it here and make sure it gets the benefit of at least my one little point. It's easy to send those digital bits out there, but when its your butt on the line, your very livelihood, not to mention your family's, it's a VASTLY different thing.
--
William X. Walsh
william@dso.net
Why? It seems fairly obvious that the Slashdot-effect went wrong. When does it go right? Even for the best purposes, it often crashes or overloads servers. Obviously, I read Slashdot, so don't jump down my neck, but I think the Slashdot-effect on a website is always a bad thing... at least for the systems administrator.
----------------- "I have a bone to pick, and a few to break." - Refused -------------------
Hehe...nice flaimbait! And you are reading on Slashdot for what reason?
nuff said.
sometimes there are too many people that get off by putting otheres down and if youve ever been threatend or subject to leagle action you would probably do the same thing
This is funny? This deserves to be -1'd!!!
The customer has NO right to expect the ISP to defend their rights for them, especially when such an action could reasonably be seen as putting an end to the EXISTENCE of the ISP's business.
Most ISPs have a Terms of Service that spells out that the ISP has the right to act and remove or suspend a site as a result of likely harm to the ISPs business or other clients. This is a reasonable condition. The ISP can't be expected to defend your rights at the expense of losing their livelihood.
It's not about freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is a right that protects your from the GOVERNMENT, not a right that forces a business to be the vehicle for your expression. If an ISP elects not to host controversial content, they are perfectly within their rights, and that's not censorship.
In this case, the ISP took precautionary action, got legal advice and did some research. His research and legal advice resulted in his returning the site to working order, after determining that no real harm or threat existed. This was the SMART thing to do. He should be praised for doing that.
I'd love to see you guys when the FBI comes knocking, and how quickly you cave in and give them what they want. Sure, it's nice to pretend you know how you will respond and react, but until they are there, you have no way of knowing what you will do. Do you have the money it takes to defend yourself? And if you do, is it likely to end up making you lose your business or livelihood spending all that money defending SOMEONE ELSE'S rights????
Get real!
--
William X. Walsh
william@dso.net
"Slashdot effect gone wrong ??"
Come'on, it seems to me everything went in the best possible way, given the situation.
And since all this was accompliced in the most civilized and police way I propose this method be used more often. So when you want to protest some companies actions, go for there customers. That is where it hurts most. But you have to be polite and with your facts straight. Giving references to news organisations will definately also help.
--
Why pay for drugs when you can get Linux for free ?
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Well, not really - civil forfeiture. The government can take your property, and you have to prove that it wasn't purchased with drug profits to get it back.
But in this case, it would have been pretty unlikely that they would try that. They wouldn't have to. The FBI could easily create or invent some reason to raid the business. They gave in not because of any specific legal threat, but because the FBI is a very powerful bully.
Not really. There are plenty of bbs's brimming with people with attitudes like this. Not to mention IRC's, Usenets, Churches...
It took me a long time to teach myself to take a couple of deep breaths first and really imagine what was going on in the other person's mind (and whether anybody needed to hear my angst over a post) before replying.
Most people never do. They feel that they have the innate right to express ANYTHING they may feel, at any time, because somewhere, somebody got the idea that we have the right to never be offended, that life is fair, etc.
Life only becomes fair, methinks, when people don't respond to any possible upbraidance of their "rights" with anger and flames.
With people as edgy as they are these days, and people out there flying off the handle and walking into work with shotguns...you bet the FBI is going to be edgy about anything that can possibly generate a buttload of flames. All they need is for just ONE of those people to decide that flaming just isn't enough to get that point across...
And just enough people, every year, do just that. Some stupid stunt that started out enlightened, but just winds up hurting somebody, and certainly damaging the rights of others.
Sophistry is not a big step toward species wide survival.
Listen to me Peter, I want this bench. You go sit on that bench over there, and if you're good I'll tell you the rest of
I propose a new modding category:
"What the..."
Question is, do you make it a positive or negative mod? Either way, that's what I'd have to mod this. It's definitely the strangest post I've seen on Slashdot yet. It'd be a shame to mod it down, but it kind of deserves it (it's offtopic, after all).
I clearly meant readers. In the context of the original discussion, it's not all that important how many people are posting to Slashdot, but what percentage of those who learn about something through Slashdot may be sending "angygrams", no matter whether they post or not.
And I know it's hard (or rather impossible) to do, but I also know that at least soms counting is being done, since there are lists of the most frequently accessed stories. Maybe if one has access to all the data that Rob has, it would be possible to make a (very) rough estimation of the number of readers. Accuracy is not all that important, anyway. What counts is to get a feeling for the order of magnitude.
Anyway, it's just a thought.
--
Linux user since early January 1992.
Eh... Yeah! Right.
;)
What is this some kind of Monty Python meets Benny King (I think thats who the comedian was who kept getting chased around by women in underware).
Definitely should get the award for most weird or disturbed posting so far. Deserves the golden padded cell award
However lets try not to encourage this too much.
People will always react to situation they are presented with. If Slashdot provides a story which is weak in details, than Slashdot is somewhat to blame for the reaction of their readers.
Did Slashdot call the ISP and get their version of the story before going publishing the article?
Did Slashdot call the FBI and get their story before going publishing the article?
Did Slashdot verify the story with the author?
Did Slashdot verify the story independently?
Slashdot should do everything it can to ensure that their readers are provided with complete and accurate stories. This is what journalizism is all about!
Um. So you think that some of the people who ranted on the ISP for caving in instead of standing up to the authorities did so in part because they would rather do that than risk standing up to the authorities themselves?
Hmmm. You know, I wouldn't be surprised.
I didn't send an e-mail.
Though with a site like Slashdot, given the amount of people who read it, I'm not surprised that people did. I'm sure that some of the e-mail was well-written, thought out arguments for why the person should have kept the site up. I'm also sure that the majority of the e-mail wasn't of this form at all.
I'm a bit optimistic when it comes to the slashdot populace. I think most people here are of above average intelligence, and are capable of rational argument. I think what happened in this case was that these people did what I did. Nothing. I didn't have all the facts, and I knew it. I wasn't going to take it upon myself to mail this person and tell him to do something that I myself might not have done. I think the majority of clearheaded slashdotters thought the same way.
But there are a lot of people on slashdot, and not all of them are exactly clearheaded. There are flamers for all types of wars (KDE, Beowulf, Emacs, pick your favorite holy war), and those who are simply abusing slashdot for their own bizzare reasons (petrified posts, anyone?). Most likely, it's these people who are flaming and using the Slashdot Effect for ill. That's what I'd like to think.
Personally, there's not much I can do about it. I could flame the flamers, but then I'm at their level (some would say that's exactly what I'm doing here). I certainly don't advocate the canceling of slashdot accounts. The only action I see as being fair is to push the positive side of the slashdot effect more. It can be done. Some positive things that slashdotters have done in the past include the Mass mirroring of deCSS and helping to critique and rewrite for Jane's Intelligence review. Those on slashdot who are well-spoken, intelligent and can actually get their point across without the caps lock key could help turn our failing reputation around.
-Denor
People seem to forget that our government, technically is a REPUBLIC. Hence, no different than china in a power sense.
They can take anything they'd like technically, if there weren't laws protecting against it.
It's called a hostile takeover. It happens all the time.
-Erik-
For the record, I am not a: racist, nazi, spammer, FBI agent, gay basher or alien. I do not encourage flames nor did I flame this guy in the first place. As a matter of fact, I was surprised to see Slashdotters picked up on the ISP instead of the FBI.
Again: try not to misquote this, this time, people:
Although the means were despicable and wrong, the end result is that the guy understands his rights better. No, I never said the end justifies the means. No, I didn't say the guy was the rightful target. I never encouraged flames and stated so many times.
All I did say was, somehow, there is a small positive point to this mess.
Side-note: To someone saying the Holocaust was carried by the Germans knowingly: I totally disagree. Yes, the SS knew exactly what they were doing, but all the truck drivers, lever pullers, etc. who have been rightfully idemnised for WW2 were 'just doing their job'. Look up the Milgram experiment some day.
This is the first first post that isn't lame!
Oh, well. Hopefully nobody found my site too slow this weekend. It felt neat to see "http://moxy.wtower.com/mirrors/timesq.ram" mentioned all over the net, though.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
This I do not get.
Granted I imagine the tone of plenty of people was less than tasteful, but when I don't like something for a good reason, I go out of my way to tell anyone else I know that might be purchasing/using it not to as well.
This is no different. The administrator acted stupidly and lost business because of it. This should have never made it to any news service.
If Ford pulls another stunt like the pinto, and you know someone that's going to buy one, are you going to tell them not to because of the burning effigy AKA gas tank on thier possible new car? I bet you would.
Are you going to tell you relative not to use AOL on general principle? I bet you would.
But of course, that's big business, and they can stand to lose a few dollars, right?
There are a lot of big ISP's (I can think of 2 specifically in Oregon - teleport and internetcds) that are losing money because of the way they address their users' needs, losing to smaller ISP's. Why? WORD OF MOUTH.
Being heated is not nessicarily being rude or inflammatory. A lot of people could use this knowledge in real life, because I deal with assholes like this everyday, they can't make the distinction between angry and downright predatory.
Man the logic here really amazes me.
-Erik-
Actually....Not to nitpick but "Date Rape Drug"
is more an article of Media Hype and Drug War
Propaganda than actual event.
I don't know about "ruffies" myself but They call
GHB (a drug 99.999% of people who have taken it
take it willingly because they enjoy it) and
ketamine (something that, short of walking up to
someone with a syringe, there is no way to "slip"
to someone) "Date Rape Drugs".
If there is a Date rape drug...its alcohol.
In any case...yea this is totally off topic....
the "Date Rape Drug" thing is just a pet peeve
of mine cuz I LOVE GHB and have taken it MANY
times myself. Now it will probably soon be illegal
because of the "Date Rape Drug" propaganda
against it. Right now its FDA banned but you can
order the precursor and make it in your kitchen
so easily it isn't funny. (without using toxic
reagents)...once its illegal the precursor will
even be unobtainable.
If it weren't for that I wouldn't have responded
to the offtopic post. As a side note, once GHB is
a Schedual 1 substance...Posession or Sale of
Animal meat in this country (steak, hamburgers,
etc) will technically be illegal. Of course
since the brain produces GHB naturally, living
will also be illegal...but it already is since
DMT is outlawed.
Oh well...food for though...
oh and on the subject of "Rape Drugs"...people
should exercise intelligence. If you suddenly
feel massivly intoxicated or like you might pass
out...don't go home with anyone. Grab a phone or
a bartender, or security and demand someone call
911 since you believe you were drugged.
THAT is the ONLY way to combat this sort of thing.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I realize this guy has no "legal defense fund." However, if the FBI's actions end up puting him out of business (or even harming his busness in any way), wouldn't he legitimately have a case aginst the FBI?
If so, is this the kind of case a lawyer might take on contingency?
It seems that the FBI's actions here are not unlike a certain software company that uses its size and power instead of legal means to get the results it wants.
Hmmmmm well....
I don't see how he is the Victem.
He was threatened. He took down his customers
site. His CUSTOMER was the real victem. A victem
of the FBIs scare tactics.
I think it is a good thing that these people did
what they did (even if they could have perhaps
done it with a little more tact). His other
customers SHOULD be aware that if the FBI decides
they dislike what they have to say, their provider
is going to just cave in and pull their sites.
I am glad he came to his senses and finally did
the right thing. If he had not done that then he
deserves to lose his buisness.
He made a mistake. He fixed it. If he is a victem
of anything, it is of being used as a Pawn in
the FBI game of control. The people who sent out
their emails were simply standing up for what is
right. Just because he was acting out of fear,
doesn't mean he should be allowed to continue
doing it.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
HaHa that's a good idea.
I've had sex with a few gals, they seemed to enjoy it... so I might start "volunteering" women in the future.
Oh wait, that would be rape.
Don't worry, I do not take you seriously.
At any rate, these guys (him and the Grits down my Pants guy) provides me with my daily dose of surrealism. That's why I read only high (3+) and low (0-) comments on Slashdot. Don't give me the middle!
A customer was a victim?
Ever thought that may be OTHER peoples are victims that FBI tried to protect?
Fact: I live in NYC (unfortunately)
Fact: I have to work on Jan 1 08:00-20:00 shift, and the same Jan 2. Yeah, i'm one of those poor schmucks who have to actually suffer from this whole Y2K scare (as in a bunch of extra load culminating in 2 unpaid 12-hour shifts on-site during holidays).
Fact: It takes me 1.5-2 hours on a NORMAL day to get to work.
Fact: if this bozo "artist" and the likes of him and their irresponsible "self-expression" lead to riots in my city, and if that f&^ks up my life, I'd be perfectly happy to go pay him a visit and blow his head off for causing me grief.
The only fault i seee with FBI is that they didn't do it the proper way, so the bastard wouldn't be able to weasel out of it.
"The right to figure things out for yourself is the only true freedom everyone shares. Go use it"-R.A.Heinlein
This guy is losing his lifeline because of the overreaction of a bunch of teenagers with nothing better to do and no concept of responsability. You people honestly scare the hell out of me sometimes. This guy could quite possibly file a suit against andover.net (depending on the wording of the original article filed on here) for defamation of character with malicious intent. That's right - if you made it out to seem like this guy was being a coward, and the mindless hordes of slashdot followed suit, then that is malicious. I sincerely hope that he does not file suit, but I hope that his business is not destroyed by this - and that maybe, JUST MAYBE, the honchos of slashdot will learn a major lesson.
--
Matt Singerman
Matt Singerman
http://matt.vegan.net/
Yeah, I used to really like Segfault. Anyhow, it all started with just a few posts about Natalie Portman...then in time she was naked and petrified. Well, I can just scroll past all that crap if it is sporadic, but after a few months Segfault was riddled with those posts.
IMO- You can tell where the post is going after the first line so it does not hurt to just scroll to the next message but it is annoying when all of the posts are like that. Granted there are many posts that I would like not to read such as the "You people should not criticize Windoze, it RuLeS!" B.S. posts...but guess what? There is an extent that free speach is a good thing, and there is a time where you have to listed to very lame people. But remember, there will always be a time where someone else thinks that you are lame and would like to not listen to you.
It looks like this particular petrification post was actually funny, and it is not like the ones on Segfault. If it gets like Segfault was, all of them will be moderated down to -1 anyway so just keep your threshold up around 1 or 2.
-Dan
The FBI does this sort of thing quite a lot. It is a pattern of conduct and their practice. I would like to see some concerned attorney (with the time of course - a slashdot alumn?) bring an action for damages naming the FBI as defendant for the deprivation of individual civil rights under color of law. The FBI in this case at least has clearly deprived the ISP of there rights under the Constitution and federal law to the detriment of the ISP an has acted under the auspicies of its office.
The logic is that people jumped to conclusions without learning all the facts or even trying to.
Yea, it's true. Every story had someone talking about Natalie Portmans um, thing? and so they just stopped them. The story is here.
I feel much the same about homesexuals who have to shove their sexuality in my face. Or heterosexuals who do the same. Fine, do your own thing, but don't shoove it in my face. I'm quite willing to accept your sexuality, I'm not willing to accept rude and annoying behaviour.
Well if you had read the article, the administrator admitted to pulling the site due to a threat from teh FBI. No court order, no nothing. Nothing other than someone on the other side of the phone (for all he could have known it was a prank) said they were FBI and to pull the site.
The internet (and even moreso the web specifically) pushes the limits of free speech. A website administrator should be prepared for that, and know the laws surrouding it.
Anyone getting involved in a business should be responsible enough to know the provisions and laws surrounding the business they're in, and hopefully get an idea of the varying types of clientel that they are going to be serving.
This man obviously did not study the laws or care enough to find them. This is no different than a used car dealer telling you that a car has never been in a wreck, you find out it's been in 3 front end collisions, and the dealer says that he just didn't know. These are things that the dealer should have known before the car made it to the lot (if he's not lying).
Another good example is IT contracting services that never come through with their promises because they had to do the studying after they signed the form. I've seen this happen countless times, personal friends/business owners that go through a contractor and get promised all this bullshit, only to have them come back 3 days later saying "We can't do this, but we're going to have to charge you a service fee because we did all this work finding out that we couldn't do that". Those consulting businesses seldom last very long, because business owner A tells business owner B.
I still don't agree with the METHOD that was used to alert the other customers, but a polite letter explaining the situation or just a link to a webpage that had a more full explanation would have been a better idea.
After all, word of mouth is what caused people to realize that all the BS that was happening with their windows boxen were happening to others. I still find people that think that their computer is cursed, and don't realize it's the Operating System until I tell them. Then, they're much more aware of what they're getting into when they buy microsoft. How is this any different?
-Erik-
There are a couple of things I can think of that would improve the situation:
---sheath
It's not going to do one bit of good. It *can't*. Because in any crowd, there's always going to be *some* flamers writing nastygrams. It's not because Slashdotters are particularly rude, it's simply because the huge number of responses means that even a vanishingly small percentage of flamers will still produce enough of them for a news article or a section on a web site. If Wired *wants* to run a story about nasty flamers, they will, even if the flamers are only 0.01 of all the replies--you can't stop them. The media likes to sensationalize.
Telling people here not to be rude, in an attempt to avoid situations like the Wired article, is like getting a bin of ten thousand apples and expecting there not to even be a single bad one. It doesn't work that way.
As it turns out there are lots of similarities between acting like a moron in the real world and on the internet. Similar actions have a similar effect. I just can't believe that people went after this guy's customers. That is irresponsilbe and just plain vindictive.
It seems when children are raised in the future we will have to teach them that courtesy in the real world is to be applied to the net, because all the adults today have thrown common sense out the window.
All right, so quite a few crusaders around here went off half-cocked and blamed the wrong man. Also a number of inappropriate assumptions were made that might cast certain Slashdotters in the role of buffoons.
On the other hand, I hasten to point out the obvious redeeming characteristic of this mass action: Hello! It worked!
What did the flamers accomplish apart from gratifying their egos ("laid my life on the line" - please!) and offending a number of inoffensinve people? Well, for one thing they riled up Wired, a cool-wannabe but nonetheless mainstream media publication, to run a story about the violation of a man's rights. For another, they provided Wieger with a glimpse of the boiling vehemence of thousands of people who - although they were insulting him - were also expressing their support for his rights in their own emotionally strangled fashion. Do you think Wieger will back down from his rights a second time without an explicit written court order signed and in triplicate? I doubt it - he is now all too aware that he is not alone.
Did you read his final quote at the end of the Wired story? "I'm going to tell the FBI, 'Fuck you! You've probably cost us our business, you assholes!'" Now a man who might have backed down timidly has the defiance of a fucking lion.
Suppression tactics work by cultivating a sense of isolation in the victim. The government works to portray artists as exhibitionist misfits. The christian right works its damndest to instill the idea that people who enjoy pornography or drugs are freaks and loners. The liberal left demonizes christians as a tiny and irrational sect working to install pews in every classroom. Eventually the ostracised target accepts the lesson, begins to believe that he or she is really all alone, and capitulates.
Wieger won't do that. He can't. He's been taught the opposite lesson in a most unforgettable manner. I won't say there are no negatives to flame - I've had more than my share of lost hair due to it myself - but I also reject the contention that it is useless and immoral.
Something to ponder.
-konstant
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Not everybody is that strong, in and of themselves, to challenge something like the FBI. The guy called the artist and his superiors, and getting no other orders, pulled out.
So obviously, we're not talking about the sort of person who goes around challenging authority.
Please...sometimes consider that not everybody may react like you, may think of the same things. Not everybody can be a "hero". Just running his own business, to some degree, takes balls enough.
We all have limits.
Listen to me Peter, I want this bench. You go sit on that bench over there, and if you're good I'll tell you the rest of
That is such classic sig material. Brilliant.
I have to agree with Hemos on this one as well. Blaming the host is just not right. I might not agree with the FBI's stance, however if they came to my door and told me to take something off our systems at our company, it would be hard to say no.
I don't think we can expect every host who's pressured by the gov or any group to stand up to them all the time. There's more than just the question of removing a video here. There could be massive time, financial, and legal expenses for the host to fight such action. Goodness knows I don't have the resources to fight the FBI, and I can't be sure I would get help from organizations that do.
As a small web host myself (less than 100 clients), I know how terrible situations like this can be. While I've never had this extreme, there have been many situations where lawyers and companies have contacted me saying that one of my clients is infringing on so and so's rights. In my opinion (and in our terms of service), all content of the site is property of the client, and therefore all responsibility of content is that of the client. I will take the material down either a) at the request of the client, or b) by court order. It's easy to get scared as a "little guy". If I had been in this small hosts' shoes, I think I probably would have removed the material too until I verified the legitimacy of the FBI's claims.
Have you meta-moderated today?
In a suffiently large group of people, there are idiots. Some are true idiots, some are half idiots tipped over the line for a momemnt, and some are just ok people who happened to have a bad day or overeact to a story and act stupidly. Most of us try to control ourselves and think things over before we say them, but some people are better at that then others.
In my opinion, Michael jumped the gun the other day when he started painting id and John Carmack out to be evil, when in fact the lack of documentation on the disabling of the hardware string was just an oversight. He wasn't flaming profanities by any means, but I would assume that him writing for slashdot must mean somebody thinks of him as a rather levelheaded and thoughtful dude. And if even the most levelheaded of us can overeact on issues we are emotional about, should we really be surprised that there are others who do so more often, and with less grace?
I'm sure there isn't a reader here who hasn't overeacted and flamed someone unecesarily at one time or another. A few years ago I made a vow never again to send an email while I am angry because of trouble that had gotten me into. Its a good rule that I try to apply even today (though older and wiser), but not even it is foolproof.
Now onto my real point: given the size of the Slashdot community, and compared with other communities I have taken part in on the Internet, the flames emerging from us have been rather benign. We have been through this with somebody posting the examples of horrible mails they have recieved from Linux users and Slashdot readers a number of times now, and my surprise has always been at how mild the flames actually are. In my Usenet days I once had a person I had been arguing with over some pitiful subject post hundreds of messages to a popular group with subject lines containing explicit sexual insults about me. Just an idiot, they happen, and I certainly did not attack or blame the majority of the subscribers of the group.
The nature of free expression is that stupid things are said. The redeeming quality is that the smart things are more plentiful, more provocative, and more important.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
There's a definite "fuck you" nature to net denizens. When anyone does anything counter to general internet philosophy, many people take it upon themselves to foil the perpetrator at any cost. DeCSS is a recent example. Hackers in Norway cracked DVD encrytion and released the code to do it to the 'net. The MPAA, representing major movie houses, started threatening webmasters everywhere with lawsuits if they don't remove DeCSS (whose legality hasn't been decided in any official manner either way, but no matter to the MPAA). Sites fearing suits and wasted $$$ roll over, but others elsewhere who are beyond the litigative powers of the MPAAs lawyers are deliberately propagating DeCSS high and wide and hosting in on servers in nations with no copyright law. And users are downloading copies "just in case it's outlawed later". Had MPAA simply shut up and did nothing, far fewer people would have DeCSS or even heard of it. Piss of the net and it pisses right back onto you.
I know what you mean.. There is a comforting feeling to get that dose of 'Petrified/Grits' along with the regular commentary. Kind of like the moronic poking/prodding/slapping bit the Three Stooges did; Moe always won, Curly always got it the worst, and we always laughed.
I must say that 'Mr. Petrified' has gone above and beyond his usual effort for this one. He's moving beyond the standard one-line 'xxxx xxxxx NAKED AND PETRIFIED'. Either that, or we're seeing a new 'Mr. Petrified'.
Keep up the good work!
.sig: Now legally binding!
Good grief - the guy got a call from the FBI saying he needed to take the video down, or they would get his upstream provider to do it. He takes it down temporarily to figure out what's going on. When he finds out the FBI is just bluffing him, he puts it back up. I can't see you are so outraged by it, or find this guy to be incompetent. I've never worked for an ISP, but I would imagine that most ISPs don't get calls from the FBI threatening to shut them down as a matter of rountine. When a law enforcement agency is threating to shut you off, you probably want to be damn sure you know what's going on before you begin attempting to spout legal dogma and take a stand. Just pure intuition about American law is fine, and if I got such a call I'd probably think they had no basis for it... but until things were a little clearer, common sense dictates taking the site down. There's plenty of reason to distrust the FBI, but you'd figure if they went to the trouble of calling you over a site and making really bold threats, they weren't doing it with no basis. This guy may have been able to call a lawyer, but I imagine the conversation "Hi, I run a small ISP, and the FBI just called threatening to off my buisness unless I take a certain video down" would be a free consultation from Lawyer X in the phonebook. Anyway, the site is back up and all is well. This guy was just using what most people call "common sense" when dealing with the situation. The reaction described in the Wired Story, is a lot more disturbing. As alluded to, the problem was with the FBI, not this guy.
Slashdot isn't just pretending to be A news agency, they want to be THE GEEK news agency. And if they want that, as I've said a million times, they will have to DO IT RIGHT.
Every Slashdot "editor" (especially Taco, Hemos and Katz) needs to take classes in:
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Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
So the more over-reactionary elements of slashdot have over-reacted
(again) sent useless flames Wieger instead of well-informed
objections to the FBI.
This article nearly overwhelmed me with deja vu.
Now, now people. We are all familiar with slashdot. We are all
familiar with how easy it is to be immature on the Internet. We all
know how easy it is to misunderstand these things and get mad at the
wrong party.
I think the most likely chain of events was became obvious when the
original article was posted on slashdot.
We all knew this was going to happen
What I don't know is why wired thinks this is news.
After I read that wired article, I (once again) wished I hadn't given
wired's hit counters one more little boost that (a) they don't
deserve, and (b) will encourage them to become still more
sensationalist, continuing their transformation from a typical lousy
computer magazine to the Enquirer of the net.
It is certainly regrettable that these things happen. It is worth
pointing out that slashdot at least tries to apologize and convince
its more over-reactionary members to be better behaved next time.
But news? Come now. This happens all the time.
Slashdot can be forgiven for posting a link to this article because
they are trying to apologize (A Good Thing(tm), even if it doesn't
change the behavior of slashdot's more reactionary readers).
Oh, btw the way, if share my opinion, moderate me up. If you don't,
moderate me down. Encourage like-mindedness.
Why not make it user configurable?
If the user wants to read posts marked as "offtopic humor"
he or she can set it to +1, and if not, to a -1.
In reality, until Slashdot reporting cleans up their act, they provide Gossip for Nerds, Stuff that Likely Doesn't Matter!
Err... did you actually read the Wired article?
Go ahead and moderate this one down if you want, but I think it needs to be said.
/. has done an awful lot of posts that are just fanning the flames, and what's really wrong is that this is generally done without looking into the issue at all.
/. has grown, and grown huge, and with the growth should really come some responsibility.
/. started, it was perfectly reasonable for Rob to just post some pointers to stories on other sites; it was more of a personal thing, like sending e-mail to friends. But now slashdot has really become a news service, but still refuses to adopt the responsibility that news services should have; the responsibility to at least try to independently verify a story before publishing it.
/. had tried to contact the people involved before posting the story. And in many cases, the commentary on the /. posting has turned out to be plain ol' wrong.
/. (at least I don't), but a minimal re-checking of the source is a pretty reasonable expectation.
Lately,
/. used to be a small site, that basically gave 'sightings' rather than stories. But
When
The last few weeks have seen a lot of stories that would have read very differently if
It's easy to blame the flamers for getting out of control, but at some point slashdot has to accept the responsibility for what is posted here by the staff. When somebody like CNN posts a story without checking the facts, everyone here gets very upset. Slashdot has grown to the point where they should begin adopting the same kind of journalistic integrity they insist from others.
Nobody expects a full private investigation into stories from
One would hope that Andover.Net is providing $$ so that Slashdot can provide a quality News service for Nerds so that the stuff published here can really matter.
Just in case it contains a germ of the truth, help awaits you at:
realdolls
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
This is the sort of thing that I look for, sifting through dozens or even hundreds of posts - someone's experience! An opinion means little if the person offering it doesn't have a point of reference. Thanks for posting from the pov of someone who knows what he's talking about.
When was the last time you stood up the FBI? The last time your business was on the line because of something said or written on a site you controlled? You get calls all the time telling you to cease and desist and you just blithely tell them to fuck off? I doubt it. Sending money, when you have it, is easy. When your under the gun it's a different ball of wax. The guy did the best he could and put the site back up when he got the word that it was cool. That's as good as it gets. Give him a break and direct your negative energy elsewhere. All this bullshit internet bravado is tiresome. It's very easy to be a keyboard quarterback and tell everyone else they need to stand up for their rights. But sending cash to the EFF and flaming the shit out of everyone who doesn't match some libertarian pose doesn't make you a revolutionary.
Ummm, hasn't anyone else noticed?
You called him a coward because he wouldn't 'stick up for himeself' in the face of the FBI. Now, the name FBI has a fair bit of weight behind it (wether it's from actually, the movies, or x-files...?) and I don't blame him for what he did. (I think what he did was a kind of instinctual response)
Now you're saying that he's no longer the coward because he's facing up to the FBI?
No, He's still the coward he was... he just has a few hundred bullies knocking at his email.
All your 'flaming' and 'telling him his rights' did was give him something else in this world to be afraid of...
Hope you enjoy this type of popularity.
EFF, the Electronic Freedom Foundation, is one of the most respected advocates of "electronic civil liberties" in the United States. This includes the freedom to communicate, and the freedom to protect your communications from unwanted interlopers. You can suppport your continuing right to use data protection tools-- which Administration oficials are working to remove-- by supporting the EFF.
EPIC, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, concerns itself with publicity, lobbying, and court challenges, in the continuing battle over personal privacy in the Information Age. How much of your private business and personal habits do you want to be freely available to corporate and government busybodies? If your answer is anything less than "I don't care, let them have it all," you probably want to support EPIC.
Most ISPs would actually kick him off for overuse of bandwidth. ISPs HATE traffic. It's the bane of their existence. (At least for small ones.) Advertisers like traffic. ISPs who host advertisers that pay for their used bandwidth like traffic. Small ISPs don't get anything advantageous from more traffic, it just slows down their paying customers' connections (and connections to those customers' pages). It's hard to say what our ISP would do in his place... probably the same thing. Pull it down until we could check with a lawyer. Hell, the ISP even tried to get ahold of the guy BEFORE they pulled it (But they couldn't get ahold of him). Frankly, that shows a lot more consideration than most places would have.
And in the real world if people say, called you on the phone and said what was in those emails, you could sue for harassment. If they called your customers and said those things, you could sue for defamation. But no, this is the internet! So since it's a different medium, people are just supposed to say "Oh, well, it's just email, it really doesn't mean anything"? The internet is a means of communication, and people are just as responsible for their comments/email/etc as they are for what they say in public or on the phone.
Leilah
~ Leilah
And what's the crap about a "rogue government agency"??? If such an agency existed and produced a video, why shouldn't it be put on web sites?
As usual, it seems like the FBI is going way overboard in their zeal to "protect" us. Welcome to the police state.
I wonder if the FBI is monitor this dialog too?
Can't imagine they'd let any negitive comments of them go by unnoticed.
'cause i can do my best work with the mannequin brigade' - all /. comment i've ever seen.
this is the funniest
coming soon: smackamerica.org
Well, that was an attempt to be slightly modest, but all well. Her clit.
I am not a revolutionary, and have never claimed to be one. Were I a revolutionary, I would be taking action, not whining on Web sites or worrying about lawyers.
The point is that this guy's business was not on the line, and he didn't have the brains to know that. Furthermore, he was in a completely foreseeable situation, and he had made no preparations for it... he hadn't even thought about what he'd do. That makes him incompetent and an unsuitable choice for any customer who needs reliable service.
OFF the point, I have had my job (not a business, but still my livelihood) potentially on the line over something like this. I wouldn't have been on the street if I'd lost the job, but I would have been out literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock.
I have also run a site that posted very controversial material submitted by others. I think I have some idea of the risks.
I have also received an (unjustified) cease-and-desist letter, from a company with many times my financial resources, alleging trademark infringement in a domain name owned by me personally. I replied to it with legal action, not by folding.
I don't think I've ever told the FBI to go away, but I assure you I at least know when they are and aren't in a legal position to order me around... and if I'm not, I'll call my lawyer first. That's not only the right thing to do, it's also the safe thing to do.
None of which has anything to do with the fact that this guy clearly wasn't properly prepared to be in the hosting business. He didn't even have a policy for this sort of case.
You're right, it did work. But could you imagine if this was you? The FBI calls you threatening all kinds of things. I would have done the same thing: take if off until I figure out if they can fulfill their threats. Free speech is wonderful but jail sucks.
Ozwald
"What the..."
Question is, do you make it a positive or negative mod?
You could have it twice, one positive and one negative.
It shouldn't be more confusing that the post that you are moderating is anyway.
it's probably the most moderated comment on slashdot, ever.
so far people waisted 12 moderation points on this, so far:
6 offtopic, 5 funny, 1 flamebate.
It's a battle between the light side and the dark side (or should I say the petrified side?)
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The FBI refuses to comment on exactly what action was taken by them; only that they responded, "appropriately."
So what we're left with is an indie filmmaker with tons of free publicity; a Web administrator with embers in his mailbox; and a government agency that claims it did nothing wrong, and besides you can't prove anything, anyway.
I don't presume to suggest such a move would be easy with the Armed Men in Dark Suits at your door, but it's for reasons like this that it is absolutely crucial to insist on the proper paperwork, so that both you and your adversary have proof something happened. Otherwise, the gallery will wonder whether someone's trying to pull their leg.
Whether it's the FBI, the MPAA, the RIAA, or the Illuminati, don't do a damn thing unless and until they make a formal request in writing. Otherwise, you're just shortchanging your own credibility.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
So the FBI strongarmed a small business. Not good. People flamed the isp's other customers because he caved in. Thats fine with me. If his customers think this is a bad move on his part, and think that for some reason any other isp would act different, it's their own choice to leave. Thats the unfortunate reality for the isp's owner. Freedom of choice means freedom to be stupid and uninformed as well.
Sure, flaming isn't very mature, but is it any different than arguing in real life? Telling the average person to not flame is like asking the human race to evolve an order of magnitude beyond what we're at now. You should work for change but you have to deal with the current reality as well.
Selfishness is a root probem in our society. He put his money (and perhaps well being) in front of a right we need to stand up for. Sure this is just some silly y2k movie but the principle is the same.
"I have put my life on the line several times for [free speech] and all the freedoms guaranteed under the US Constitution," one angry advocate wrote Wieger. "You were not given a court order. You just got scared for your mortgage and your Lexus payment and are in that light a coward."
Obviously a flame but in a way he's right as well. People in the past did fight and die for the freedoms we have today. I know this sounds preachy and holier than thou since I can't live up to the people who really did put their lives on the line. But lets not simply ignore the fact. Simply saying that "thats just the way it is" is part of the reason the world is the way it is.
Anyway, I think that as you read the article and think about the situation that developed, the most important thing to remember was nicely stated by Wieger:
"The [free speech advocates] are saying,'Why didn't [Wieger] stand up for the Constitution?'" Zieper said. "I think that's very easy to say from afar. But when the knock comes for you, it's a terrifying experience."
It is one thing to stand up for certain things no matter what, there comes a point where one has to say, is this worth losing my house, my car, my computer, my whatever? And I'm sure someone will flame me saying that if they don't have their 'rights' they don't want to live, let alone have any of those possessions. While that too may be true, Wieger was simply taking precautions in order to prevent the ruining of his life. And when dealing with anything like this, situation and individual preferences will dictate.
And finally, I think we need to remember that not everyone has the same morals nor does everyone choose the same level of involvement. Me, for example, I support forest and wildlife conservation efforts and show my support passively by donating money to groups like the Canadian Wildlife Federation. But I can't ever see chaining myself to a tree and actively protesting in that manner. Does that make me any less of a supporter? I dunno for sure, but I don't think so.
-dr
I know, offtopic.
It can be good for a company's bottom line to lie to cheat and steal from consumers. Does that make it right?
I am one who has had multiple accounts cencelled by multiple ISPs, not for breaking their rules but for getting complaints from too many people because they didn't like what I had to say.
(While I'm at it, Tim Gaiches from Telerama likes to suck big dicks!Ý)
If the FBI couldn't get a warrant to pull the site WHY would anyone be concerned with the FBI confiscating their computers? In case you didn't know it does require a court decision to deprive a person in the US of property.
This ISP pussied out, plain and simple. The FBI asked and the FBI got. I'd be wary about spending any money with these people in the future. It's because of spineless actions like these that threaten to turn the internet into the largest infomercial that the world has ever seen. If opinion is punished, denied and censored, commerce is all that will remain. Controvercial ideas are the reason why the first amendment was written. If we are all homogenous, then why do we need protection?
I say that this is the correct response to this IS a nice slashdotting. Clogging a company's e-mail server with 10 thousand complaints about their practices is a GREAT way to get their attention.
I also think that informing a company's customers of their actions is a great way to force a company to re-examine their business practices. If their customers agree with those actions, then they'd be more likely to stick with that company and not defect to others, but if they're unhappy that company will pay a definate financial penalty for their actions.
From the standpoint of the Swiss banks it was the right business decision at the time to hold the stolen assets of expatriated european Jews. Was it the right thing to do? From a business standpoint it was. After all SOMEONE would have taken the money, why not them?
For Microsoft it's always a good business decision to stomp out competition before they get a chance to mount a serious threat to the corporate bottom line.
I could go on for years citing example like this.
My point is this, just because it's the best "business decision" is no more valid an excuse than the "Just following orders" excuse of Nazi war criminals.
I say WAY TO GO SLASHDOTTERS! You're on the way to becoming one of the most powerful forces of change on the 'net. Lest I remind you all of that peope PC commercial? "Strength in numbers my friends." It is people like us who built the internet, it must be people like us who fights against the commercialization of the net where "the bottom line" is always the most important motivating factor.
LK
ÝI don't have any personal knowledge of Tim Gaiches as it regards to his penchant for sucking dicks (big or small), I'm just venting.
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I have a list of links to organizations who are interested in defending similar freedoms.
Union for the Public Domain, EFF, Digital Future Coalition, and more.
Please take a look and feel free to suggest any more to me.
Tweet, tweet.
I think that one of the advantages on being online is anonymity and the potential freedom it allows. We can't be anonymous in RL (at least, not without a lot more work); so what? Think of all the stories about people who are timid shells (no offense meant) off line, yet vibrant, outspoken online individuals. Accountability, yes, but not through loss of anonymity. (Don't ask me how; I don't know. I just don't think it's the answer.)
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It's not the rambling I object to, so much as the mumbled incoherancies...
The full results never can be known because the real results involve what happens the next time this guy considers putting up something potentially controversial. I suspect that, given the immaturity he got exposed to, he'll likely decide to screw it all and play it safe. Better to avoid the crap in the first place then to risk a barrage of hate mail. Censorship will happen, but quietly, under the covers, and caused by the very people who were trying to fight it. And they won't even have a clue that it happened.
The cake is a pie
Some aspects of the message were funny. But I found them completely overshadowed by the scary sexual overtones of being able grope unwilling females held in permanent bondage. I don't doubt that the whole thing was a joke. I just find it in very poor taste.
"Prejudice is wrong; you should hate everyone the same."
You point out correctly that there something about flaming to a screen and not a face, that makes it more vicious. As if, somehow, the consequences are lesser, like giving someone the finger on the road.
/. There are people here who confuse freedom and libertarianism. Such people would flame both the FBI and the web site owner, as you can see. It is not necessary for these people to understand, for example, what kinds of procedures the FBI uses to investigate complaints. You can see that one enterprising lib even worked guns into this issue. Hey Lib, why don't you take your concealed weapon and get the web site guy for refusing to stand up for your principles dude(tte)? Libs.. sheesh.
But this is
The moderaters can't decide what to do with this either. It has been moderated 14 times already... standing at 1: Off topic right now. Who knows what it will be when I finish this.
Pretty interesting. I think it deserves a 1 or a 2 myself. The comments underneath are interesting enough to warrant a few plusses.
All these trolls will go back to posting the Natalie Portman/Statue garbage at Segfault where it belongs (arguabally).
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with