I am annoyed that there's less focus on direct abuse of a child here, though. I think the conspiracy charge is valid but the key issue here is this is an adult who consciously manipulated and mentally abused a child with malicious intent.
The charges here focus on the act of deception and abusing a website, which seriously aren't the problem here. She didn't steal MP3s; she tormented a teenage girl. This is about bullying and wanting to hurt a person, and that's the issue that needs to be addressed.
This is definately nothing new!
on
Mashed-Up Music
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· Score: 1
Last summer, over the radio, I heard one track where a DJ had taken the musical background to Britney Spears' "Crazy" and laid over Eminem's "The Real Slim Shady".
And the really scary part was that they fit together SO WELL. O_o
Re:Just read the entire IRC log...
on
Slashdot IRC Forum
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I have no mod points to throw at this comment, so I'm going to say that I agree.
Sites with large, loyal fan bases find that their readers are usually all too happy to pitch in with money and equipment donation... when those in charge about completey open and honest-- and if they don't know the answer to that particular question go "Hweey! I don't know... but since you, the readers, are our bread and butter, I'll find out."
Popular RPG/nich-game site thegia.com was in a similar sort of situation a few months ago.
It was a case of hardware failure, requiring many thousands of dollars to replae lost and destroyed hardware.
So they set up a "domations" page. saying exactly what the problem was, exactly what needed to be done... and a list of "crazy things the staff would do if certain monetary goals were met."
IN addition, small extras were offered (exclusive wallpaper) as well.
Witihin DAYS, they had raised 10,000 dollars(US).
What can./ learn from this?
Be completely open and honest. Full disclosure. Thell what the money is needed for., why and how much. Make it very clear that they are ASKING its lifeblood (the readers) to help the site out.
And maybe offer a little tangible extras.
Re:What other MS-compatable alternatives are there
on
Mozilla 0.9 Out
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· Score: 1
Have you tried Opera lately? A lot more configurable than IE, with all of its best features. It runs beautifully on my steam-powered, p-233, Win98, 64 MB RAM system.
...everyone seems to want freedom from something (wether if be something that offends them, differing viewpoitns, et. al), instead of remebering that the 'net has at its bedrock the principle of freedom of something: namely, information.
"I find this especially disturbing since it amounts to government subsidation of the censoring industry. Censorware is not perfect, and without the impetus of competition, there is no drive for manufacturers to improve their product. Rather than having lawmakers force people to use their product, censorware makers should strive to make their product most appealing to concerned parents such as myself."
Too late! Under the recently passed CIPA (Child Internet Protection Act) headed by McCain, all computers in schools and libraries are required by law to have filtering technology if they want to recieve federal eRate funds.
And while the Dubya administartion is dangling this carrot on a stick, there are whispers on Capital Hill that Bush might be going through with a proposed idea to consilidate each eRate payment to a school or school district into one huge block grant as well, making the issue moot. But since there's nothing but vague, unclear positions being put forth ion this issue right now, schools and libraries are over a barrel.
So don't worry about the gov't susidising filter companies.. it's happening already!
(whimpering voice) "But..but.. I'm so disappointed because it didn't turn out like I thought it would, and..."
Grow up, next!
(still whimpering) "But I'm upset because I wanted something so much different and.."
Hey, pal, join the club. I'm tired of cyber-ivory tower-intellectual bemoaning that fact that their pie-in-the-sky idealism isn't meshing with reality, so that means, since something is unfolding differently then how they planned, it must be a Bad Thing.
"When we said that we wanted to hear from the people, we didn't think they'd hold us to it! Now all these people are voicing their opinons! A lot of them are sending us their views! What, did they actually think we'd listen?"
I wonder when PayPal will let you attach payments to your emails; I bet that'd get your meassage heard.
...have we all forgotten that the first real "worm", called WANK, was released into NASA computers as a form of protest against the potentially radioactive material being used in space shuttle launches?
"Oh my god! Cartoon character endorsing a CueCat is a sellout of earth-shattering proportions!"
What, but the crappy liscenced games, t-shirts, candy bars, action figures and dolls somehow aren't? For crying out loud, I think there are a few tribes in the amazon using some of the "Don't have a cow, man!" t-shirts as penis sheaths.
First off, Groening doesn't own the characters-- they're property of Fox now, like it or not. Second of all, I hardly see how an endorsement by a cartoon character could somehow rocket the CueCat to popularity.
Besides, if they did their homework, they would know that Groening's on record as saying that Abkar and Jeff would be willing to shill for anything. ^_~
I'm sorry, but my parents taught me to always read each contract I enter into and know what I'm signing to.
So I read through each EULA, going over the various Terms and Agrements. That way, if I see something I don't agree with, I can always not accept. Conversly, this way I know my responsibilities as an end user.
Think of each HD that gets fuX0red as User Darwinism.
And it's not so much "people are voyeurs" but "people find the internet a medium in which they can rant/rave/bare their souls to comfortably". Some of it is the anonymous aspect-- how many of your site visitors do you see in person?-- and some of it is just the fact that some people are very open about themselves.
Hell, I'm even guilty of it myself. (Nothing from this year uploaded yet, because I'm trying to recover them from my old HD. ^_^;;
...(we're talking a good 10-12 years ago), twice every month, our entire 4th and 5th grade class in Elizabeth, NJ (city motto: "Come for the low tenament housing, stay for the crack!") would be bused to a facility that would give us two-hour courses and worksheets on the basic concepts of computers (A printer is an output device. A keyboard is a input device. This is how a computer knows what order to follow basic commands...), combined with some "edutainment" games.
And that opened up another world for me. I tried my hand at making some simple BASIC games, and while programming didn't turn out to be my cuppa, I still remained fascinated with computers.
And yes, while I didn't have a home computer, (but remeber, this is duroing the lates 80's early 90's when those weren't all that common to be in the home) what ever I was able to use at the library and school, I did. Eventually, I became interested in graphic design, which has led me to my carer today (webmaster/graphic designer). I can only imagine what things were like if I had 'net access when I was younger...
And I think you all are missing a very important point here:
The Packard Foundation report, which includes studies by a number of other experts, found that schools serving poorer kids are more likely to emphasize word processing and other simple tasks while those serving more affluent students taught computing as a means of promoting cognitive skills, problem-solving and gathering information on specialized fields of study."
Yet another example of how those from families with lower incomes are subtly lowered in thier expectations...
"The report also found that computers are turning out to be especially effective in dealing with some learning disabilities, a valuable treatment that poorer kids are also deprived of."
And children with learning disablities need all the help they can get.
Katz isn't saying that schools a hand-out; he's calling for a hand UP. It's not a child's fault that their parent is poor, and believe it or not, one's economic status does not equal one's abmition or moral fortitude (i.e. not all poor people are lazy).
... communites, but I've seen that such a coimmunity can and does work, and if it's strong enough, will weather damn near anything thrown at it.
Cafe Eblana, the messagebase I host and maintain, was first founded about 6 years ago, becoming the first Squaresoft-centered messageboard on the world-wide web.
The messageboard has gone through 3 different webspace hosts, and four different maintainers, and yet, has remained essentially the same. Many people have posted here in excess of two years or more (and that's forever in internet time;), and there are quite a number of "oldbies", i.e. people that have been around since the board fisrt starting.
We still get a good number of new people every year... and how do we do it? Simple. We aren't out to make money or accomplish some overreaching objective-- we've stayed true to the original founding premise: a fun, relaxed atmosphere where people can gather to post and debate about anyhting they want... the only bond besides our affiliation with the board is our shared love for console RPGs...
I see the whole thing as another ploy of monopolies using the system to get more money out of our pocket and into theirs...This shortage is not something that just happened.
Californians have been watching the population and new homes grow for years. Since their scheme of raising rates failed, now the power companies are crying shortages to put the pressure on the politicians to allow them to have their way.
See...once a patent is granted, they apply it retroactively to the time of filing!
Why? Logic dictates that no one could possibly have been using it before they filed for a patent, right?
Well, of course someone was, because they didn't actually make it up. What sucks is that any one who wants to prove different has to demonstrate this to invalidate the patent. If you can come up with a description of this phenomenon (ie, indexing or prior search engines, in this instancee) which was *published* before the patent was *filed*, then that counts as "existing in the prior art" and the patent is invalid.
That's the real problem, is that the patent clerks don't always know all the time just exactly how to check for something considered to be "prior art." The information has to be "out there" and the right people have to see it for ridiculous patents like this to be overturned.
About threee years ago, I was homeless, and basically did a lot of what the article outlined... who knew that what I thought of as "surviving" was actually some kind of hip trend?
Just watch your back; some underground, outta the way tunnels do have the occasional squatter or so. Don't poke them with sharp sticks or anything.
Anonymity, which remains crucial to privacy on the Internet, is being squeezed out by the rise of electronic commerce.
Only a handful of the 100 most popular online stores give shoppers adequate privacy, according to the EPIC ( it's a Washington-based privacy research group). The group's research focuses on whether sites use profile-based advertising and whether they use cookies in their site operations, both incredibly controversial practices on the Internet. The also focus on retailers' compliance with "Fair Information Practices''--those are basically guidelines that provide basic privacy protection for consumers--which *none* of the companies in the survey addressed properly, according to EPIC.
It's a shame that the US doesn't seem like's it'll follow other nations' lead in the privacy issue-- legally enforceable standards of privacy are necessary to ensure compliance with Fair Information Practices, and new techniques for anonymity are necessary to protect online privacy. The ECIP released a report last year on December 17th, that found that 18 of the leading shopping sites did not post a privacy policy, 35 of the sites have profile-based advertisers operating on their pages, and 87 of the e-commerce sites use cookies.
EPIC also reported that many privacy policies are "confusing, incomplete and inconsistent."
Doesn't surprise me. The stated policies of most big shopping sites run the gamut from bad to atrocious. People should have the right to buy without being tracked and without having their personal information sold
...only outlaws will have spam!
And I don't know about all you other jack-booted gub'mint thugs, but you can have MY canned-meat product when you pry it from my cold, dead hands!
Unfortunately, even the method of counting an ad's effectiveness ("click-through") don't really give an accurate picture of how effective an advertisement banner is.
You know what banners really get the highest click-through rates? Those ads that lok like little error message dialog boxes, followed by the banners with faux text-entry boxes and the "skock the monkey" ads.
Sure, a lot of people click them... but they don't work in advertising a product, because most user say "Gee, an error box! I'll just close thi--what the hell? A site? What a gyp!"
Darn straight advertising on the web doesn't work... that's because most ad firms are really adapting to the web at all. It's like they're storming onto a baseball feild in hockey gear.
And no ad campaign's gonna hit a home run with fake error messages.
Approximately four years ago I was a victim of true-name fraud where none of my own accounts were touched or anything was stolen from me. Someone just stole my personal information and started to open accounts under my name.
I found out when one of the companies called my current address (which was listed as my previous address) to notify me of my delinquency in payment. I explained to them that I had never opened an account with them, I had never been to any of their stores and the last time I was in the city that they said I opened the account in was when I was 14 years old. I told their fraud department that too.
I sent them a signed statement. Then they wanted a notarized statement so I sent them that. Then the wanted copies of my drivers license and my passport or social security card. After I would send each item they would demand more and more. I didn't want them to have copies of my drivers license or passport. I felt they were careless in letting anyone open an account in my name and I didn't feel safe giving my personal information to them. As to the identity of "my creditor" it was a Department Store in Memphis. I live in NJ!
It took 3 years before they finally removed the negative rating they had placed on my credit. I couldn't buy a car or get a student loan and I was in school. I was considered guilty until proven innocent.
Finally they removed it, but only because I called them for the 1000th time and lost it over the phone. Then they told me that they would take it off because they had been waiting for the receipts with "my" signature but they had destroyed those receipts over 1 year ago. So they had destroyed the evidence which would have cleared me but left the negative credit rating on.
Is there no was of fighting these companies against destroying your credit while you prove your innocence. I felt completely powerless and very angry that they refused to work with me.
Slashdot Mirror
I am annoyed that there's less focus on direct abuse of a child here, though. I think the conspiracy charge is valid but the key issue here is this is an adult who consciously manipulated and mentally abused a child with malicious intent.
The charges here focus on the act of deception and abusing a website, which seriously aren't the problem here. She didn't steal MP3s; she tormented a teenage girl. This is about bullying and wanting to hurt a person, and that's the issue that needs to be addressed.
Hey,guys. Slashdot sucks!
Last summer, over the radio, I heard one track where a DJ had taken the musical background to Britney Spears' "Crazy" and laid over Eminem's "The Real Slim Shady".
And the really scary part was that they fit together SO WELL. O_o
I have no mod points to throw at this comment, so I'm going to say that I agree.
./ learn from this?
Sites with large, loyal fan bases find that their readers are usually all too happy to pitch in with money and equipment donation... when those in charge about completey open and honest-- and if they don't know the answer to that particular question go "Hweey! I don't know... but since you, the readers, are our bread and butter, I'll find out."
Popular RPG/nich-game site thegia.com was in a similar sort of situation a few months ago.
It was a case of hardware failure, requiring many thousands of dollars to replae lost and destroyed hardware.
So they set up a "domations" page. saying exactly what the problem was, exactly what needed to be done... and a list of "crazy things the staff would do if certain monetary goals were met."
IN addition, small extras were offered (exclusive wallpaper) as well.
Witihin DAYS, they had raised 10,000 dollars(US).
What can
Be completely open and honest. Full disclosure. Thell what the money is needed for., why and how much. Make it very clear that they are ASKING its lifeblood (the readers) to help the site out.
And maybe offer a little tangible extras.
Have you tried Opera lately? A lot more configurable than IE, with all of its best features. It runs beautifully on my steam-powered, p-233, Win98, 64 MB RAM system.
...everyone seems to want freedom from something (wether if be something that offends them, differing viewpoitns, et. al), instead of remebering that the 'net has at its bedrock the principle of freedom of something: namely, information.
...that Usenet and newsgroups must be the ultimate evil, since newsreaders have had killfiles anf greps and filters for over a decade, huh?
Too late! Under the recently passed CIPA (Child Internet Protection Act) headed by McCain, all computers in schools and libraries are required by law to have filtering technology if they want to recieve federal eRate funds.
And while the Dubya administartion is dangling this carrot on a stick, there are whispers on Capital Hill that Bush might be going through with a proposed idea to consilidate each eRate payment to a school or school district into one huge block grant as well, making the issue moot. But since there's nothing but vague, unclear positions being put forth ion this issue right now, schools and libraries are over a barrel.
So don't worry about the gov't susidising filter companies.. it's happening already!
Grow up, next!
(still whimpering) "But I'm upset because I wanted something so much different and.."
Hey, pal, join the club. I'm tired of cyber-ivory tower-intellectual bemoaning that fact that their pie-in-the-sky idealism isn't meshing with reality, so that means, since something is unfolding differently then how they planned, it must be a Bad Thing.
I wonder when PayPal will let you attach payments to your emails; I bet that'd get your meassage heard.
"Net Backlash"? Listen, Jon, just because we see a "jon katz" in the byline and collectively groan doesn't indicate a backlash.
If that's not hacktivism, I don't know what is.
First off, Groening doesn't own the characters-- they're property of Fox now, like it or not. Second of all, I hardly see how an endorsement by a cartoon character could somehow rocket the CueCat to popularity.
Besides, if they did their homework, they would know that Groening's on record as saying that Abkar and Jeff would be willing to shill for anything. ^_~
So I read through each EULA, going over the various Terms and Agrements. That way, if I see something I don't agree with, I can always not accept. Conversly, this way I know my responsibilities as an end user.
Think of each HD that gets fuX0red as User Darwinism.
And as a member of Saucybard.com, I was one of their cadre of site reviewers... mostly a lot of sites from teen domains (or angsty teen domain owners or hostees).
And it's not so much "people are voyeurs" but "people find the internet a medium in which they can rant/rave/bare their souls to comfortably". Some of it is the anonymous aspect-- how many of your site visitors do you see in person?-- and some of it is just the fact that some people are very open about themselves.
Hell, I'm even guilty of it myself. (Nothing from this year uploaded yet, because I'm trying to recover them from my old HD. ^_^;;
"Hegemon, I choose you!" ^_~
And that opened up another world for me. I tried my hand at making some simple BASIC games, and while programming didn't turn out to be my cuppa, I still remained fascinated with computers.
And yes, while I didn't have a home computer, (but remeber, this is duroing the lates 80's early 90's when those weren't all that common to be in the home) what ever I was able to use at the library and school, I did. Eventually, I became interested in graphic design, which has led me to my carer today (webmaster/graphic designer). I can only imagine what things were like if I had 'net access when I was younger...
And I think you all are missing a very important point here: The Packard Foundation report, which includes studies by a number of other experts, found that schools serving poorer kids are more likely to emphasize word processing and other simple tasks while those serving more affluent students taught computing as a means of promoting cognitive skills, problem-solving and gathering information on specialized fields of study."
Yet another example of how those from families with lower incomes are subtly lowered in thier expectations...
"The report also found that computers are turning out to be especially effective in dealing with some learning disabilities, a valuable treatment that poorer kids are also deprived of."
And children with learning disablities need all the help they can get.
Katz isn't saying that schools a hand-out; he's calling for a hand UP. It's not a child's fault that their parent is poor, and believe it or not, one's economic status does not equal one's abmition or moral fortitude (i.e. not all poor people are lazy).
Cafe Eblana, the messagebase I host and maintain, was first founded about 6 years ago, becoming the first Squaresoft-centered messageboard on the world-wide web.
The messageboard has gone through 3 different webspace hosts, and four different maintainers, and yet, has remained essentially the same. Many people have posted here in excess of two years or more (and that's forever in internet time ;), and there are quite a number of "oldbies", i.e. people that have been around since the board fisrt starting.
We still get a good number of new people every year... and how do we do it? Simple. We aren't out to make money or accomplish some overreaching objective-- we've stayed true to the original founding premise: a fun, relaxed atmosphere where people can gather to post and debate about anyhting they want... the only bond besides our affiliation with the board is our shared love for console RPGs...
Californians have been watching the population and new homes grow for years. Since their scheme of raising rates failed, now the power companies are crying shortages to put the pressure on the politicians to allow them to have their way.
Why? Logic dictates that no one could possibly have been using it before they filed for a patent, right?
Well, of course someone was, because they didn't actually make it up. What sucks is that any one who wants to prove different has to demonstrate this to invalidate the patent. If you can come up with a description of this phenomenon (ie, indexing or prior search engines, in this instancee) which was *published* before the patent was *filed*, then that counts as "existing in the prior art" and the patent is invalid.
That's the real problem, is that the patent clerks don't always know all the time just exactly how to check for something considered to be "prior art." The information has to be "out there" and the right people have to see it for ridiculous patents like this to be overturned.
Just watch your back; some underground, outta the way tunnels do have the occasional squatter or so. Don't poke them with sharp sticks or anything.
Only a handful of the 100 most popular online stores give shoppers adequate privacy, according to the EPIC ( it's a Washington-based privacy research group). The group's research focuses on whether sites use profile-based advertising and whether they use cookies in their site operations, both incredibly controversial practices on the Internet. The also focus on retailers' compliance with "Fair Information Practices''--those are basically guidelines that provide basic privacy protection for consumers--which *none* of the companies in the survey addressed properly, according to EPIC.
It's a shame that the US doesn't seem like's it'll follow other nations' lead in the privacy issue-- legally enforceable standards of privacy are necessary to ensure compliance with Fair Information Practices, and new techniques for anonymity are necessary to protect online privacy. The ECIP released a report last year on December 17th, that found that 18 of the leading shopping sites did not post a privacy policy, 35 of the sites have profile-based advertisers operating on their pages, and 87 of the e-commerce sites use cookies.
EPIC also reported that many privacy policies are "confusing, incomplete and inconsistent."
Doesn't surprise me. The stated policies of most big shopping sites run the gamut from bad to atrocious. People should have the right to buy without being tracked and without having their personal information sold
...only outlaws will have spam! And I don't know about all you other jack-booted gub'mint thugs, but you can have MY canned-meat product when you pry it from my cold, dead hands!
Sure, a lot of people click them... but they don't work in advertising a product, because most user say "Gee, an error box! I'll just close thi--what the hell? A site? What a gyp!"
Darn straight advertising on the web doesn't work... that's because most ad firms are really adapting to the web at all. It's like they're storming onto a baseball feild in hockey gear.
And no ad campaign's gonna hit a home run with fake error messages.
I found out when one of the companies called my current address (which was listed as my previous address) to notify me of my delinquency in payment. I explained to them that I had never opened an account with them, I had never been to any of their stores and the last time I was in the city that they said I opened the account in was when I was 14 years old. I told their fraud department that too.
I sent them a signed statement. Then they wanted a notarized statement so I sent them that. Then the wanted copies of my drivers license and my passport or social security card. After I would send each item they would demand more and more. I didn't want them to have copies of my drivers license or passport. I felt they were careless in letting anyone open an account in my name and I didn't feel safe giving my personal information to them. As to the identity of "my creditor" it was a Department Store in Memphis. I live in NJ!
It took 3 years before they finally removed the negative rating they had placed on my credit. I couldn't buy a car or get a student loan and I was in school. I was considered guilty until proven innocent.
Finally they removed it, but only because I called them for the 1000th time and lost it over the phone. Then they told me that they would take it off because they had been waiting for the receipts with "my" signature but they had destroyed those receipts over 1 year ago. So they had destroyed the evidence which would have cleared me but left the negative credit rating on.
Is there no was of fighting these companies against destroying your credit while you prove your innocence. I felt completely powerless and very angry that they refused to work with me.