No criminal charges were made against me, only threatened with 'computer crimes'... mostly stemming from the scr1pt k1dd13 threats. The protective order wasn't obtained, although I was told that it was last week. They seek this action because I got in a verbal artercation as a direct result of standing accused of the email. It has now been proven that I did not send the email in question.
The arguement of them owning all content is simply to prevent me from ever running a site affiliated with the university again. IMO. I am now blacklisted, and a known troublemaker.
Yes, there is some information missing from the story, though I promise there are no falsehoods.
The inappropriate content: the first time the site was censored, this was a single comment made by Anonymous Coward, slandering a specific person in student government in a very childish and stupid manner. The next time around, it's more offensive content with obnoxious users.. mainly someone creating an account named 'fuckwit' and others.
The grounds that I was being charged with were mainly for the threatening email. Now that my name is cleared of that specific crime, I do not face the same actions I did a week ago when I wrote this article.
My other accusations stand from making constant white hat comments in an effort to get the shipshod network fixed so I didn't have to be bothered by it. Some people took that as threats from me to take down the system or delete their driver's licenses or somesuch. In other words, I have a long trail of minor annoyances and offenses that really get the administration disliking me. It is to the point that I am really a disruption. That's basically the rest of the story. I still don't think that it's fair to negate all my work based on the fact that I'm rude, honest, and asshole, etc..
Still, my main concern all along is preserving my work, and allowing SOS to operate well into the future.
Anonymous speech is a right - federal courts have upheld this many times.
Do you have any specific examples? I was told exactly the opposite by the administration when I compromised to allow the site to come back after the first weeklong censorship in march.
I have always seen anonymous speech as a right, but the main issue with the Dean was that I need to allow for accountability on SOS. If people break the law or the student code of conduct, they need to be help accountable. It was simply expressed that allowing Anonymous Cowards to post was unacceptable at any level.
For one, I have mentioned this in a couple other comments already, but I have been cleared on the script kiddie email, which was the main drive for legal action against me. Just a few hours before this article went live, I had my suspension withdrawn and had reached a settlement with the parties involved.
Where the site was hosted:
At sos.asuu.utah.edu, using university bandwidth and DNS records. The server was located directly in the student government offices on university of utah property.
What I had on it:
Slashcode and friends (mySQL, apache, perl, etc.)
Stories and comments posted by respective authors.
Student teacher/course evaluations for the entire university, Fall 2000.
Misc. scripts and programs to support minor features, (I.E. authentication for evaluations).
A substancial amount of my personal modifacations to templates and graphic design to support the UI of the site.
A stash of saved freeciv games. (I ran SOS as a 'secret' freeciv server every now and then.):)
Prior warning:
Very little.. especially to the level at which everything blew up in my face.
As for the nasty email, I rather see the administration's viewpoint represented as well, but I don't think that will happen. But fire away if you wish.. officially, I neither encourage or discourage you from sending it.
I think the police are out of it now. And no, Mormon jokes aren't illegal, but linking to goatse.cx is. I do not recall any such links on the site, so I doubt that there would be any sort of action against any user on SOS. Yes, the site logs IPs, apache does that.
As for evidence, I think that they were looking more for poor character references to prove that I'm an asshole. I admit to being an asshole every now and then.
As for the AC's comment about my Geekizoid authorship, that is no lie. I am a troll, and I have trolled in the past. I do my best to remain friend to all, be they troll, crapflooder, spork, k-whore,/bot, genuine slashdot user, or even cyborg monkey. I assure everyone that this is not an elaborate troll. There are plenty of ways to verify my story.
I am mormon. I do not see this as a religious issue in any way outside of the fact that most people in student government get offended a lot easier than people in the general university population.
I could never have created SOS at BYU.. I don't even think I'd be able to even last at BYU. I'd have to cut my hair and quick swearing sometimes, but I think that my wife would go bananas living in Provo.
Well, I am flikx and my degree is my number one priority. I was stupid to allow my grades to go down from putting so much time and effort into SOS, and as said before I was already making plans to get others to run the site.
Unfortunately, I was forcefully removed from the position I created and not allowed to resign on my own terms. This is the first thing that angered me. I spent all that time creating it, and one day I'm told to turn my back and take off. Then come stupid threats and all hell breaks loose.
You're very right. My degree is most important. I have learned a lot from four years of engineering school.. and I came here to be an engineer. The sooner I put this all behind me, the better off I will be.
No real critical details are missing from my account, though I was a bit slanted at the time. I wasn't vindictive or out for revenge, but the email is what really got things going. A million little annoyances where bringing SOS down.. and I relate the two issues, the IP issue and running the site, with my personal problems of facing disiplinary action. As I said earlier in the threads, an addenum is in order.. I have resolved (for the most part) those issues mere hours before this story was posted. You are right when you say this:
Some of the other issues, such as intellectual property ownership and data ownership on a university-owned machine, are still arguable. But they seem largely separate from the criminal issues which make the case seem so dramatic.
I should not have even mentioned my personal problems on this one.. though I hope people understand what I was feeling while right in the middle of all this. The administration has already contacted me concerning this article, and to say the least, I have a few people really disturbed. Some things in my oratory need clarification, and can be miscontrued and misrepresented; but that aside from that, I tried my best to present my side and do my best to simplify the issue.
I am still most concerned with the future of SOS, if there even is one. I want to see it continue to be a part of the campus online services at the U. It's almost completely out of my control at this point, but I really value the insight provided by fellow slashdotters.
A. I was told the server was wiped, now I'm told that it's simply locked away. Either way, I have absolutely no access to the site, outside of my own personal backups. I did this for the university.. even if I wasn't asked to create the site, my statements saying that I created it for the U seem to be coming back to haunt me. Plus, they don't use it to keep the site out of my hands only, I see it as a good way to keep the site under for good.
B. Well, hindsight is 20/20; I wish I was smart enough to realise that a year ago.
C. Done, and done.. before the story even hit slashdot.
The administration has fully adhered to part D. They have played that part by the book. I have never accused the administration of not upholding that at all.
Though I was well aware of facing impending expulsion by committee, I doubt I would have stood a chance. They'd have so many poor character references and examples of bad material on the site that it would be open and shut -- lawyer or no lawyer.
I'm not really sure why I chimed in, but I wanted to support anyone else who's tried to run this sort of site. You get a lot of flak and you spend a lot of time to make something that people enjoy using, and then you get beaten upon, criticized and eventually shut down, all because people fail to get along. It's really a shame. My site grew to about 1000 hits a day before I removed it from the public discourse, I know what it's like.
You summed it up right there. I really should have known better from the beginning. I really had a lot of hope, and put my heart into my work. Though, I've learned something. Maybe not the best lesson, but I should have just blended in. Non-caring commuter students never get in trouble and get better grades than people like me.
Violating the student behavioral code at the University of Utah. There were a couple major incidents.. one being the script kiddie threatening email I mentioned in the article. It was just proven today that I did not send the threat at all. So I'm more or less in the clear on that just from things that transpired this day.
My behaviors notwithstanding, I still take issue with the fact that the site has been shut down before, and is currently shut down; plus the fact that I have no power whatsoever over the last year of my work.
There are others out there than can and will run the site for me, and I was planning on taking the back seat before fall semester anyways.. but having the site censored on account of the actions of few that effect many. -- That disturbs me.
I have a lawyer that helped me a great deal in resolving some of the personal issues of this case. Yet another addenum that needs to be added. At the time I wrote the article, I had no lawyer, a million threats, I was scared, and obviously pissed off. The administration is pretty fired up now that the slashdot article hit.
So to all the lawyer suggestions, I did my best with no money, and a friend of the family really helped out. My personal problems are more or less resolved, now onto the problems with the site itself.
Okay here's where a couple clarifications need to be made. For starters, I need to get a bit of an addenum added to the article, I had meant to do that, but it went live within hours of my resolution.
First off, expulsion and criminal charges are direct punishments to me. Just before this article was posted, and before I had the chance to get a couple of things changed, I had more of less resolved the personal punishments against me. Unfortunately, I regret even mentioning them, because it taints the article. Obviously, I was disturbed facing such things, so I think that many should know where I'm coming from. Someone else came forward for that stupid curt little script kiddie threat that I so adamantly denied. With this, the main legal and punitive threats have been minimized. Although, I'm under all new scrutiny thanks to this article running on slashdot. I still stand by what I've said.. no lies or falsehoods have been presented here.
My main concern is with the punishment enacted primarily against me (censoring the entire site) as punishment against everyone. The site should have had protection against any accusations that fly against me, and the inane mild crapfloods should have been ignored in my opinion. They can cut hosting, that is obviously at will, but what I see goes far beyond that.
I usually wish my notebook didn't even have a parallel port. It does nothing but take up space.
Call me boring, but of all the desktops I have, just one has a printer hanging off its parallel port. I think a more interesting question to ask would be how many terminals do you have hanging off the Vax in your closet? (2/8);-)
Order a pizza and run a freeciv server. That never gets old for me.
Another great idea for boring nightshifts is to hold a make-believe radio show. Seriously, this can get entertaining, especially if you invite new and interesting guests to your "show".
If things at your job are getting old, then maybe it's time for a new job.:)
Re:I wonder if I could...
on
Got Tracks?
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· Score: 1
I'd put them on my suburban..
That is, if I had the $$$, and the time to drive it anywhere other than to class and work. It may prove very useful in the midwinter when I have a 7:00am final. I really could have used these on the truck last december. Invent my own parking space on/in the snowbank.
Take that parking services. The best hope for these is that I can park out of reach from where they could give me a ticket. --
What's worse is that the University of Utah is known as the U.. now everywhere, on every sign, every newspaper article, every website, (even mine!).. YOU becomes U.
Under Mandrake, I recall a "compat-glibc" or "campat-libc5" package. I don't remember seeing them under Mandrake 8.0, but under 7.x, they were there.
I'd say install the older rpms first, then install the newer ones with 'rpm -ivh'.. shouldn't be any problems after that.
I had some of the same binary incompatibilities when I upgraded this notebook from mandrake 7.2 to 8.0.. quite a few problems in fact. A few recompiles and some old libraries installed fixed everything. Needless to say, I'm not installing Mandrake 8.0 on a production machine.
I've worked as a photo developer for about 2 years (and about two years ago).. the problem is that the film has a different shaped sprocket at the top of the spool. You cannot load regular 35mm film canisters in them without modifications.
The big question is, why bother? You can get a cheap 35mm camera with better optical quality for around $30 or less; and it will last longer than a disposable unit. Now go out to your nearest K-Mart and buy one of those kids' cameras and give up the silly idea of "hacking" something useless.
--
"One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us."
Nothing wrong with building devices that can give or take a beating, I do that every day as a Mechanical Engineering student.. they should simply name the show someting that doesn't have the word "robot" in it.
Slashdot Mirror
No criminal charges were made against me, only threatened with 'computer crimes'. .. mostly stemming from the scr1pt k1dd13 threats. The protective order wasn't obtained, although I was told that it was last week. They seek this action because I got in a verbal artercation as a direct result of standing accused of the email. It has now been proven that I did not send the email in question.
The arguement of them owning all content is simply to prevent me from ever running a site affiliated with the university again. IMO. I am now blacklisted, and a known troublemaker.
--
Yes, there is some information missing from the story, though I promise there are no falsehoods.
The inappropriate content: the first time the site was censored, this was a single comment made by Anonymous Coward, slandering a specific person in student government in a very childish and stupid manner. The next time around, it's more offensive content with obnoxious users.. mainly someone creating an account named 'fuckwit' and others.
The grounds that I was being charged with were mainly for the threatening email. Now that my name is cleared of that specific crime, I do not face the same actions I did a week ago when I wrote this article.
My other accusations stand from making constant white hat comments in an effort to get the shipshod network fixed so I didn't have to be bothered by it. Some people took that as threats from me to take down the system or delete their driver's licenses or somesuch. In other words, I have a long trail of minor annoyances and offenses that really get the administration disliking me. It is to the point that I am really a disruption. That's basically the rest of the story. I still don't think that it's fair to negate all my work based on the fact that I'm rude, honest, and asshole, etc..
Still, my main concern all along is preserving my work, and allowing SOS to operate well into the future.
--
Do you have any specific examples? I was told exactly the opposite by the administration when I compromised to allow the site to come back after the first weeklong censorship in march.
I have always seen anonymous speech as a right, but the main issue with the Dean was that I need to allow for accountability on SOS. If people break the law or the student code of conduct, they need to be help accountable. It was simply expressed that allowing Anonymous Cowards to post was unacceptable at any level.
--
For one, I have mentioned this in a couple other comments already, but I have been cleared on the script kiddie email, which was the main drive for legal action against me. Just a few hours before this article went live, I had my suspension withdrawn and had reached a settlement with the parties involved.
At sos.asuu.utah.edu, using university bandwidth and DNS records. The server was located directly in the student government offices on university of utah property.
Very little.. especially to the level at which everything blew up in my face.
As for the nasty email, I rather see the administration's viewpoint represented as well, but I don't think that will happen. But fire away if you wish.. officially, I neither encourage or discourage you from sending it.
--
I think the police are out of it now. And no, Mormon jokes aren't illegal, but linking to goatse.cx is. I do not recall any such links on the site, so I doubt that there would be any sort of action against any user on SOS. Yes, the site logs IPs, apache does that.
As for evidence, I think that they were looking more for poor character references to prove that I'm an asshole. I admit to being an asshole every now and then.
As for the AC's comment about my Geekizoid authorship, that is no lie. I am a troll, and I have trolled in the past. I do my best to remain friend to all, be they troll, crapflooder, spork, k-whore, /bot, genuine slashdot user, or even cyborg monkey. I assure everyone that this is not an elaborate troll. There are plenty of ways to verify my story.
--
I am mormon. I do not see this as a religious issue in any way outside of the fact that most people in student government get offended a lot easier than people in the general university population.
I could never have created SOS at BYU.. I don't even think I'd be able to even last at BYU. I'd have to cut my hair and quick swearing sometimes, but I think that my wife would go bananas living in Provo.
--
Well, I am flikx and my degree is my number one priority. I was stupid to allow my grades to go down from putting so much time and effort into SOS, and as said before I was already making plans to get others to run the site.
Unfortunately, I was forcefully removed from the position I created and not allowed to resign on my own terms. This is the first thing that angered me. I spent all that time creating it, and one day I'm told to turn my back and take off. Then come stupid threats and all hell breaks loose.
You're very right. My degree is most important. I have learned a lot from four years of engineering school .. and I came here to be an engineer. The sooner I put this all behind me, the better off I will be.
--
No real critical details are missing from my account, though I was a bit slanted at the time. I wasn't vindictive or out for revenge, but the email is what really got things going. A million little annoyances where bringing SOS down.. and I relate the two issues, the IP issue and running the site, with my personal problems of facing disiplinary action. As I said earlier in the threads, an addenum is in order.. I have resolved (for the most part) those issues mere hours before this story was posted. You are right when you say this:
I should not have even mentioned my personal problems on this one.. though I hope people understand what I was feeling while right in the middle of all this. The administration has already contacted me concerning this article, and to say the least, I have a few people really disturbed. Some things in my oratory need clarification, and can be miscontrued and misrepresented; but that aside from that, I tried my best to present my side and do my best to simplify the issue.
I am still most concerned with the future of SOS, if there even is one. I want to see it continue to be a part of the campus online services at the U. It's almost completely out of my control at this point, but I really value the insight provided by fellow slashdotters.
--
A. I was told the server was wiped, now I'm told that it's simply locked away. Either way, I have absolutely no access to the site, outside of my own personal backups. I did this for the university.. even if I wasn't asked to create the site, my statements saying that I created it for the U seem to be coming back to haunt me. Plus, they don't use it to keep the site out of my hands only, I see it as a good way to keep the site under for good.
B. Well, hindsight is 20/20; I wish I was smart enough to realise that a year ago.
C. Done, and done.. before the story even hit slashdot.
--
The administration has fully adhered to part D. They have played that part by the book. I have never accused the administration of not upholding that at all.
Though I was well aware of facing impending expulsion by committee, I doubt I would have stood a chance. They'd have so many poor character references and examples of bad material on the site that it would be open and shut -- lawyer or no lawyer.
--
You summed it up right there. I really should have known better from the beginning. I really had a lot of hope, and put my heart into my work. Though, I've learned something. Maybe not the best lesson, but I should have just blended in. Non-caring commuter students never get in trouble and get better grades than people like me.
--
Violating the student behavioral code at the University of Utah. There were a couple major incidents .. one being the script kiddie threatening email I mentioned in the article. It was just proven today that I did not send the threat at all. So I'm more or less in the clear on that just from things that transpired this day.
My behaviors notwithstanding, I still take issue with the fact that the site has been shut down before, and is currently shut down; plus the fact that I have no power whatsoever over the last year of my work.
There are others out there than can and will run the site for me, and I was planning on taking the back seat before fall semester anyways .. but having the site censored on account of the actions of few that effect many. -- That disturbs me.
--
I have a lawyer that helped me a great deal in resolving some of the personal issues of this case. Yet another addenum that needs to be added. At the time I wrote the article, I had no lawyer, a million threats, I was scared, and obviously pissed off. The administration is pretty fired up now that the slashdot article hit.
So to all the lawyer suggestions, I did my best with no money, and a friend of the family really helped out. My personal problems are more or less resolved, now onto the problems with the site itself.
--
Okay here's where a couple clarifications need to be made. For starters, I need to get a bit of an addenum added to the article, I had meant to do that, but it went live within hours of my resolution.
First off, expulsion and criminal charges are direct punishments to me. Just before this article was posted, and before I had the chance to get a couple of things changed, I had more of less resolved the personal punishments against me. Unfortunately, I regret even mentioning them, because it taints the article. Obviously, I was disturbed facing such things, so I think that many should know where I'm coming from. Someone else came forward for that stupid curt little script kiddie threat that I so adamantly denied. With this, the main legal and punitive threats have been minimized. Although, I'm under all new scrutiny thanks to this article running on slashdot. I still stand by what I've said.. no lies or falsehoods have been presented here.
My main concern is with the punishment enacted primarily against me (censoring the entire site) as punishment against everyone. The site should have had protection against any accusations that fly against me, and the inane mild crapfloods should have been ignored in my opinion. They can cut hosting, that is obviously at will, but what I see goes far beyond that.
--
I usually wish my notebook didn't even have a parallel port. It does nothing but take up space.
Call me boring, but of all the desktops I have, just one has a printer hanging off its parallel port. I think a more interesting question to ask would be how many terminals do you have hanging off the Vax in your closet? (2/8) ;-)
--
Order a pizza and run a freeciv server. That never gets old for me.
Another great idea for boring nightshifts is to hold a make-believe radio show. Seriously, this can get entertaining, especially if you invite new and interesting guests to your "show".
If things at your job are getting old, then maybe it's time for a new job. :)
--
6 months and $150,000 worth of medical bills.
--
I'd put them on my suburban..
That is, if I had the $$$, and the time to drive it anywhere other than to class and work. It may prove very useful in the midwinter when I have a 7:00am final. I really could have used these on the truck last december. Invent my own parking space on/in the snowbank.
Take that parking services. The best hope for these is that I can park out of reach from where they could give me a ticket.
--
What's worse is that the University of Utah is known as the U .. now everywhere, on every sign, every newspaper article, every website, (even mine!) .. YOU becomes U.
Arrghghg.. make it stop.
--
Under Mandrake, I recall a "compat-glibc" or "campat-libc5" package. I don't remember seeing them under Mandrake 8.0, but under 7.x, they were there.
.. shouldn't be any problems after that.
.. quite a few problems in fact. A few recompiles and some old libraries installed fixed everything. Needless to say, I'm not installing Mandrake 8.0 on a production machine.
I'd say install the older rpms first, then install the newer ones with 'rpm -ivh'
I had some of the same binary incompatibilities when I upgraded this notebook from mandrake 7.2 to 8.0
BTW- Nice to see someone from the UofU.
--
Do you usually end all communications with IAAL, or do you still accidentally append IANAL?
--
I've worked as a photo developer for about 2 years (and about two years ago) .. the problem is that the film has a different shaped sprocket at the top of the spool. You cannot load regular 35mm film canisters in them without modifications.
The big question is, why bother? You can get a cheap 35mm camera with better optical quality for around $30 or less; and it will last longer than a disposable unit. Now go out to your nearest K-Mart and buy one of those kids' cameras and give up the silly idea of "hacking" something useless.
--
"One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us."
Troll or no troll, RMS IS A DIRTY BEAST BEARDED GNU HIPPY.
Fuck you.
--
Why, yes I do. Who do I need to call to get a few large objects crushed.. er I mean tested?
--
Nothing wrong with building devices that can give or take a beating, I do that every day as a Mechanical Engineering student.. they should simply name the show someting that doesn't have the word "robot" in it.
Problem solved.
--