I guess those millions of Apple AirPorts already deployed don't matter to them?
Of course they matter. Each one is an extra revenue-generation opportunity.
Last I looked, Windows comes with "Internet Connection Sharing" and a control panel to turn it on with one button click.
Well, that shows you how little I know about Windows. I just dug around a Win2k box in the Control Panel and couldn't find this. Oh well. Thanks for the tip.
so if the TTL by default starts at all 1's (255) then a machine behind a NAT box would consistently report a TTL of 254 to the upstream router. that's a VERY good indicator.
man, stealth NAT sounds like a fun project. it also sounds like something that would piss off large corporations if released as open source. i haven't gotten to write something that fun in a long time...
So, what are the methods they use, and how can I make it more difficult for them to tell if I have a machine running NAT?.
I don't know. But let me take a crack at guessing the methods which an ISP would use to detect NAT.
O/S Fingerprinting. First and foremost, narrow down your suspect list. Find all the Linux boxes; these will have a higher incidence of NAT because Linux actually packages this feature. Try to develop a fingerprint list for hardware based NAT appliances and any Windows application that can grant NAT ability.
TCP Sequence Numbers. Many TCP stacks (cough Windows cough) have a predictable or semi-predictable TCP Sequence Number pattern. Running multiple copies of one of these stacks (say, two 98 boxes) behind a NAT box would allow an intelligent hueristic to detect multiple TCP stacks. Most of NAT happens at the IP layer, so sequence numbers are not rewritten.
TCP Source port. NAT-P (it has a couple names) involves correlating inbound TCP packets to the appropriate local host by port, and then rewriting the port field. There is no attempt made to randomize this source port field selection and a clever heuristic could probably fingerprint it.
i've probably dropped a few details here, so feel free to flame me with corrections. that aside, i can see a new open source project brewing: Stealth NAT. A NAT implementation that will rewrite TCP sequence numbers and randomize anything else that would give the impression that multiple machines were in use.
they'll probably start by O/S fingerprinting the NAT enabled hardware gateways you can get at buy.com for $150.
First of all this wasn't some deep dark conspiracy to use a masterfully written web script to rig a poll. Instead, they just sent a chain email to vote for their side. This has happened at Slashdot; here, click here to vote to fire Jon Katz. See?
I think the real humor in this situation is that they got busted by Exchange passing the subject line in the HTTP header when you click through. Their own anti-privacy measures just bit them in their collective corporate ass. Maybe this will cause them to think twice next time?
And it will probably fly well here. But if we're going to point fingers, personally I'd like to point one at Verizon. I live in the D.C. area, the Washington Post is my newspaper, Comcast cable is my cable company and Verizon is my phone monopoly. And not one of the three can deliver broadband. The cable modems here are all telephone return (ever tried it? not worth $60 a month) and the DSL service has a 9 month queue time, at which point the Verizon tech can't figure out how to install it. I watched them try futilely in my house for weeks. Hell, I watched them put my company on a 4 month long waiting list to get a T1.
The argument WP is giving is that consumer demand isn't there because there's nothing on the Net. I say baloney; the Korean broadband boom has been driven mainly by online gaming, which we have plenty of here as well. I say the demand exists and the problem is that the monopolies are busy strangling upstart competition to death (Covad) using incompetence as a weapon, and then catering to demand at their leisure, the same way they've treated phone customers for years. The only place they haven't successfully strangled the competition to death is the wireless arena, because they can't buy up all the airwaves. And they're getting slaughtered in that marketplace, surprise surprise.
Until you can circumvent the monopolies with cheap wireless broadband, they will continue to screw everybody.
More firms also are taking action to unmask anonymous posters. Pittsburgh-based software firm printCafe is taking legal action to learn the identity of anonymous posters...
"It's not about the First Amendment," says Terry Budd,... "It's to stop people from spreading vicious lies."
That's a pretty funny quote, considering that the most legally interesting First Amendment cases are ones that involve libel (vicious lies). That aside, you have to wonder who's liable for AC postings once the forum has "forgotten" the poster's identity. Say I run a weblog, and someone posts something deeply libelous to my weblog anonymously, and I don't keep access logs, or delete them within a few weeks. Am I now responsible for the comments because I've forgotten the poster's identity?
If so, then that is going to affect... Slashdot.
If not, then every weblog in the world should stop tracking poster's information to spare themselves the legal hassle.
Another quote that bothered me:
The court ruled Hamidi's e-mails basically amounted to trespassing.
"We were very pleased. Our view is that this was the equivalent of spam,"
Well, which is it? Trespassing is illegal, and spam isn't, except in California, and certainly not in this court. If email is trespassing, how do you ask permission to send email? His email didn't even meet California's standard for spam because he wasn't trying to sell anything, and it wasn't libel because no one, not even Intel, says that we was lying.
If you can trespass with E-mail, we're going to be living in very uncertain times. Or perhaps the lesson is merely: don't mess with corporations, they bend the law to their will.
Facilitation? Seth, it's already happening. Subscribe to that list, and you've got your Realtime Killfile already maintained for you. This is probably a far better solution than IP-gagging was. However it's a solution to the problem of people not wanting to listen to dissent.
Should we change the title to "News for Nerds, Comments that Agree"?
others clearly do not agree his self-assesment, which is pretty much the whole damn point of moderation
When Others don't agree, the point is that each Other has the same rights. When an editors has unlimited Rights, we in turn don't have any. It would be exceedingly simple to deliver a message to a user when an Editor had moderated them down, and it would stop all of this guesswork in it's tracks. You should be aware, by the way, that not every user has equal rights: when you're marked with the $rtbl flag, you cannot participate in moderation. You'll never get any notification that this has happened to you.
The opportunity to be open and honest about who is doing the moderation was addressed in a bug report on Sourceforge; the link is in my signature file.
You can brush people off as "too unpopular to be modded up", but without any means of verifying that, you'll excuse me while your half baked opinions make me giggle.
Try an experiment: go to kuro5hin.org, advogato.org, any random message board, and start posting "Turd Report" comments. Take note of the mean time before you're banned from the site.
When you are moderated down at K5, K5's system tells you who moderated you down, even if it was the Administrator. If you're moderated down at Slashdot, Slashdot sends you a message that says you were moderated down by a User, even if that User is an Editor.
Stop propping up straw men, I'm tired of disemboweling them. You can't compare yourself to those sites because their moderation and banning systems have accountability and yours doesn't. You refuse to add it. Read my sig.
for which he gets thanked every day with a load of hatemail from lusers.
Isn't there some love mail mixed in with that hate mail? There's got to be someone other than you who appreciates all the work he's doing.
I don't think people would be this upset about Slashdot if it wasn't something a lot of people cared about. That's a testament, as you say, to Rob's hard work. But if all he's getting now is hatemail, maybe he could try responding to it with some openness and documentation. Either that or he could add another automated tracking system to slashcode, maybe to weed out users who send him hatemail. Another slap in the face to his users, another artificial barrier, another way to make the Administration less human and less accessible. Maybe he could attach another snide comment to it like "Editors are Users too".
what are the odds that two of them would moderate something at the same time (hint: it's a birthday problem, the odds are essentially 100%).
I've actually submitted the solution to this problem many times before, but I will do so again for the record:
When moderating, moderators should be able to choose a threshold they wish to moderate to. If I see a comment at one I think should be 3, I would like to moderate it Insightful to 3. If I moderate it and it's still at 1, it goes to 2. If I moderate it and it's at 2, it goes to 3. If I moderate it and it's at 5, then I don't waste my moderation point. Someone linked a comment last week that was moderated up 14 times (+14, Insightful) because of the Birthday Problem you just mentioned. This doesn't change moderation to be like K5, it just makes Slash moderation un-broken and limits the number of accidental +5's that spout garbage.
If you try to prop up a straw man about not having time to add little features, I would point out that if you have an acknowledged problem (you just acknowledged it) in the basics of Slashcode, and you're spending all your dev resources on new features, then that argument is bogus.
? I'm just trying to get a feel for what the rules are, you see.
So are we. For instance, I was IP banned and bitchslapped without ever breaking one.
We're asking for some openness, transparency, and forthcomingness. Post some Rules. Tell people you moderate, profile, monitor, flag & ban. And don't tell me you don't have time for new features.
He shouldn't have to adjust his hat. Mine works great, but not everyone has a good one.
The point is that you can put all these suspicions to rest by making Editor Moderation visible through messaging. Just fix the bug I link to in my sig.
If you choose not to, don't fool yourself into thinking we won't notice. Your audience isn't stupid, remember?
No one cares about story selection. Let me spell it out for you: we don't trust you. We want to know when you're moderating posts, when you're banning users. You have detailed systems to accomplish this and everyone knows it.
If you don't want people to know when you're posing as a User and moderating posts, that's fine. But if you don't tell people about it in your FAQ, that makes you just as hypocritical as every corporation you post an article to bash. You're forgetting your audience. We're nerds, computer geeks, programmers, hackers, freedom fighters. We have a finely tuned bullshit meter. And you people are setting it off.
Correct your FAQ to tell people that you're logging IP's and moderating posts. Or don't. But if you choose not to tell people what you're up to at the very least, don't whine about the consequences of being caught. You run a website that lives to "out" people, hell anytime Microsoft makes a wording mistake you are on them like hounds. That's your userbase. If you want to talk the talk, you gotta walk the walk.
Read the link in my signature. We're just asking for a message when an editor moderates us so we know when we're in danger of being blacklisted. And you know what I mean by blacklisted, the $rtbl flag, a secret user database flag to mark "the bad people". We read the Slashcode. We're not stupid. We won't be silenced. And the more you talk down to us, the angrier we'll get.
You should know what happens when people act condescending.
Seth, there's a great way to let users who actually care find out that they've been moderated by an editor. That way is the new Slashdot Messaging system. This keeps such information out of public view (increasing signal to noise) and still in the hands of the people affected by it.
I suggested that this was a bug, because the Messaging system would say that you have been Moderated by a User when an Editor moderates you.
The response was that there are no Editors at Slashdot, only Users. You can read the full bug report by clicking the link in my.sig.
But suffice it to say you're not the only one who thinks this would be a great idea.
Also, for the record, "bitchslap" refers to a specific script [slashcode.com] in the codebase which retroactively sets all of a user's comments to score:-1. Important point: it's only ever been used on user accounts that posted using scripts.
Jamie, I must respectfully nitpick. When the bitchslap script was used on this account, it was because I had posted over 100 comments at the +2 level by clicking on submit a whole bunch (the multipost bug). I did not use a script to do this, and I was bitchslapped to -25 karma anyway.
I'm not complaining here about fairness or unfairness, per se, but rather about the accuracy of your comment. I was IP banned and bitchslapped even though I had not used a script, nor broken your "scripted abuse" rule. If you can point me to the rule I broke, I will publicly stand corrected. Furthermore, I have never ever used a script to access Slashdot. Please understand that I am not calling you a liar; you may have been unaware of these facts. I just hope that you can be more careful with the facts in the future.
Anyway to everyone who is worried about editors moderating posts, stop worrying. Editors are users too, they only get 5 mod points just like us. You can read more about this in the link in my signature.
. Could the biggest problem with Linux usability be that most of the people teaching newbies to use Linux are too smart and know too much?"
If you are unable to communicate basic concepts of computer use to another person, this is not a qualification for being "smart". Nor does it prove that you know too much; it barely proves that you know anything.
Communication is a fundamental skill. Which is more marketable: the ability to implement a container object using polymorphism, or the ability to clearly explain a container object that uses polymorphism during a job interview?
You can be intelligent and have good communication skills. In my opinion intelligence without communication skills is not very valuable. Whatever you do, don't for a minute make the mistake of thinking that because you understand how to use a computer better than someone that you are smarter than that person. At that point the world has just named you Nick Burns and effing moved on. If you are trying to teach a skill to someone smarter than you, and you fail, whose fault is it?
If someone has a lot of Linux knowledge but can't communicate it, I don't think an abundance of intelligence is the hangup. I think a lack of basic social skills is more likely. The Renaissance Man is an outdated concept, but it is partially applicable here. The idea is that being well rounded - the Arts, Literature, Science, and physical fitness - all of these things make for an effective human being.
Any assertion that you can be too smart to talk to someone effectively can only be made by someone who has totally lost touch with society. Let me give you some advice: Microsoft hasn't.
This board isn't run by good people. It's run by petty tyrants. The success is a result of the readers/posters (even the FP'ers, trolls, etc.). - ghomwell
It would have been a different thing had Taco been talking up how open/. was and then never released anything. - Squirrel Killer
Honestly, I think the Truth lies in between these two statements. As a professional software developer, I know that just a few people (Marketing) whining about feature requests can add up to massive heartburn. Take a good swath of the Internet's geek population and turn them into your "Marketing Department", you're going to have to put up a lot of walls between yourself and your users. Slashdot isn't K5, it has at least twenty times the userbase. Has K5 been more responsive to user feature requests? Yes, but again, it's a different scale.
Is Slashdot the result of it's administrators or it's users? Well, yes. Look at Slashdot's leading story submitter and you'll find someone who has contributed a lot to Slashdot. But also take a look at Slash 2.2, and you'll find a near rewrite of slash, with a lot of new faces. The new Troll profiling and banning code implemented by Jamie McCarthy is a lot more sophisticated than anything any weblog has implemented before, with multi-level tracking by IP address, IP subnet, user account, hidden form gatekeepers (a form of "ICE"), and hidden user flags that silently alter/.'s behavior per-user.
Is Slashdot ruled by petty dictators? Sure, read my sig. Read this. But also keep in mind that Slash has a dedicated community of really persistent jerks, so a "tyrannical" stance is reasonably justified. This userbase is quite possibly the most critical group of people on the planet.
Rob never had to GPL Slash or open the code up to user inspection, but he did it, and it's been the cause of a lot of heartburn for him. And he's stuck by his guns. Rob's user bio used to say "I have secret powers" for a long time. If you ran/., wouldn't you get a little bit of a power trip too?
Honestly I think all this speculation about VA whatever is out-of-band here. I think/. can survive - will survive - with or without VA. You can like the model or hate it but it has worked and will continue to work.
If you have important data that you would like to give access to over the web, the secure solution to this problem exists and can be implemented regardless of your operating system.
Keep the "real" system completely disconnected from the Internet
On a periodic basis, write the entire DB to some compressed format. Optionally you can write only "changes" if your update interval is high, but that's a detail.
Send the compressed information via a temporary, read-only link to the Web-Connected system. Read-Only can be sneakernet with magnetic tape for the paranoid or an Ethernet cable with the Rx portion cut for the slightly less paranoid (yes you'd need custom software), or just a time-clock enabled FTP server for the appropriately paranoid.
Connect your read-only system to the Internet, protecting it with a decent firewall. Use SSL.
If you absolutely MUST allow web-enabled users to change data, write all change requests to a file which is shipped back to the real system on intervals and fed into the real system one-transaction-at-a-time while monitored by a human.
Insurance companies do this. I know, because I helped enable one. When you have low-volume, high importance data (like the personal records of Native Americans!!) this approach is justified. I'm not surprised in the least, however, that our underfunded park service wasn't able to hire a government contractor that would take security seriously. We can be as condescending as we like (and we usually are) but if you've ever tried to work through federal procurement procedures, you understand you're dealing with a very limited talent pool.
Slashdot Mirror
This has to be a hoax. Next thing I know you'll be posting a story about how Microsoft is going to "specialize in computer security".
Har de har har.
So, anyone who has a laptop computer and an 802.11b access point that NATs is automatically some kind of AUP-violating scofflaw?
Yep. Read the last article about it. They're definitely gunning for anyone employing these devices.
I guess those millions of Apple AirPorts already deployed don't matter to them?
Of course they matter. Each one is an extra revenue-generation opportunity.
Last I looked, Windows comes with "Internet Connection Sharing" and a control panel to turn it on with one button click.
Well, that shows you how little I know about Windows. I just dug around a Win2k box in the Control Panel and couldn't find this. Oh well. Thanks for the tip.
so if the TTL by default starts at all 1's (255) then a machine behind a NAT box would consistently report a TTL of 254 to the upstream router. that's a VERY good indicator.
man, stealth NAT sounds like a fun project. it also sounds like something that would piss off large corporations if released as open source. i haven't gotten to write something that fun in a long time...
I don't know. But let me take a crack at guessing the methods which an ISP would use to detect NAT.
i've probably dropped a few details here, so feel free to flame me with corrections. that aside, i can see a new open source project brewing: Stealth NAT. A NAT implementation that will rewrite TCP sequence numbers and randomize anything else that would give the impression that multiple machines were in use.
they'll probably start by O/S fingerprinting the NAT enabled hardware gateways you can get at buy.com for $150.
Wonder how they're identifying scripts... by user agent or just by frequency heuristics.
Either way, I missed that; thanks.
Hey, could you quote where they verified it was a scripted attack and not someone clicking 250 times? Thanks!
First of all this wasn't some deep dark conspiracy to use a masterfully written web script to rig a poll. Instead, they just sent a chain email to vote for their side. This has happened at Slashdot; here, click here to vote to fire Jon Katz. See?
I think the real humor in this situation is that they got busted by Exchange passing the subject line in the HTTP header when you click through. Their own anti-privacy measures just bit them in their collective corporate ass. Maybe this will cause them to think twice next time?
And it will probably fly well here. But if we're going to point fingers, personally I'd like to point one at Verizon. I live in the D.C. area, the Washington Post is my newspaper, Comcast cable is my cable company and Verizon is my phone monopoly. And not one of the three can deliver broadband. The cable modems here are all telephone return (ever tried it? not worth $60 a month) and the DSL service has a 9 month queue time, at which point the Verizon tech can't figure out how to install it. I watched them try futilely in my house for weeks. Hell, I watched them put my company on a 4 month long waiting list to get a T1.
The argument WP is giving is that consumer demand isn't there because there's nothing on the Net. I say baloney; the Korean broadband boom has been driven mainly by online gaming, which we have plenty of here as well. I say the demand exists and the problem is that the monopolies are busy strangling upstart competition to death (Covad) using incompetence as a weapon, and then catering to demand at their leisure, the same way they've treated phone customers for years. The only place they haven't successfully strangled the competition to death is the wireless arena, because they can't buy up all the airwaves. And they're getting slaughtered in that marketplace, surprise surprise.
Until you can circumvent the monopolies with cheap wireless broadband, they will continue to screw everybody.
More firms also are taking action to unmask anonymous posters. Pittsburgh-based software firm printCafe is taking legal action to learn the identity of anonymous posters ...
... "It's to stop people from spreading vicious lies."
"It's not about the First Amendment," says Terry Budd,
That's a pretty funny quote, considering that the most legally interesting First Amendment cases are ones that involve libel (vicious lies). That aside, you have to wonder who's liable for AC postings once the forum has "forgotten" the poster's identity. Say I run a weblog, and someone posts something deeply libelous to my weblog anonymously, and I don't keep access logs, or delete them within a few weeks. Am I now responsible for the comments because I've forgotten the poster's identity?
If so, then that is going to affect... Slashdot.
If not, then every weblog in the world should stop tracking poster's information to spare themselves the legal hassle.
Another quote that bothered me:
The court ruled Hamidi's e-mails basically amounted to trespassing.
"We were very pleased. Our view is that this was the equivalent of spam,"
Well, which is it? Trespassing is illegal, and spam isn't, except in California, and certainly not in this court. If email is trespassing, how do you ask permission to send email? His email didn't even meet California's standard for spam because he wasn't trying to sell anything, and it wasn't libel because no one, not even Intel, says that we was lying.
If you can trespass with E-mail, we're going to be living in very uncertain times. Or perhaps the lesson is merely: don't mess with corporations, they bend the law to their will.
You could try banning his IP address and see if that helps...
Just a thought.
Didn't you guys forget the Title change?
Slashdot
News for Nerds. Comments that agree.
Facilitation? Seth, it's already happening. Subscribe to that list, and you've got your Realtime Killfile already maintained for you. This is probably a far better solution than IP-gagging was. However it's a solution to the problem of people not wanting to listen to dissent.
Should we change the title to "News for Nerds, Comments that Agree"?
others clearly do not agree his self-assesment, which is pretty much the whole damn point of moderation
When Others don't agree, the point is that each Other has the same rights. When an editors has unlimited Rights, we in turn don't have any. It would be exceedingly simple to deliver a message to a user when an Editor had moderated them down, and it would stop all of this guesswork in it's tracks. You should be aware, by the way, that not every user has equal rights: when you're marked with the $rtbl flag, you cannot participate in moderation. You'll never get any notification that this has happened to you.
The opportunity to be open and honest about who is doing the moderation was addressed in a bug report on Sourceforge; the link is in my signature file.
You can brush people off as "too unpopular to be modded up", but without any means of verifying that, you'll excuse me while your half baked opinions make me giggle.
-
Try an experiment: go to kuro5hin.org, advogato.org, any random message board, and start posting "Turd Report" comments. Take note of the mean time before you're banned from the site.
When you are moderated down at K5, K5's system tells you who moderated you down, even if it was the Administrator. If you're moderated down at Slashdot, Slashdot sends you a message that says you were moderated down by a User, even if that User is an Editor.
Stop propping up straw men, I'm tired of disemboweling them. You can't compare yourself to those sites because their moderation and banning systems have accountability and yours doesn't. You refuse to add it. Read my sig.
for which he gets thanked every day with a load of hatemail from lusers.
Isn't there some love mail mixed in with that hate mail? There's got to be someone other than you who appreciates all the work he's doing.
I don't think people would be this upset about Slashdot if it wasn't something a lot of people cared about. That's a testament, as you say, to Rob's hard work. But if all he's getting now is hatemail, maybe he could try responding to it with some openness and documentation. Either that or he could add another automated tracking system to slashcode, maybe to weed out users who send him hatemail. Another slap in the face to his users, another artificial barrier, another way to make the Administration less human and less accessible. Maybe he could attach another snide comment to it like "Editors are Users too".
In the end, it's really his call.
-
what are the odds that two of them would moderate something at the same time (hint: it's a birthday problem, the odds are essentially 100%).
I've actually submitted the solution to this problem many times before, but I will do so again for the record:
When moderating, moderators should be able to choose a threshold they wish to moderate to. If I see a comment at one I think should be 3, I would like to moderate it Insightful to 3. If I moderate it and it's still at 1, it goes to 2. If I moderate it and it's at 2, it goes to 3. If I moderate it and it's at 5, then I don't waste my moderation point. Someone linked a comment last week that was moderated up 14 times (+14, Insightful) because of the Birthday Problem you just mentioned. This doesn't change moderation to be like K5, it just makes Slash moderation un-broken and limits the number of accidental +5's that spout garbage.
If you try to prop up a straw man about not having time to add little features, I would point out that if you have an acknowledged problem (you just acknowledged it) in the basics of Slashcode, and you're spending all your dev resources on new features, then that argument is bogus.
? I'm just trying to get a feel for what the rules are, you see.
So are we. For instance, I was IP banned and bitchslapped without ever breaking one.
We're asking for some openness, transparency, and forthcomingness. Post some Rules. Tell people you moderate, profile, monitor, flag & ban. And don't tell me you don't have time for new features.
He shouldn't have to adjust his hat. Mine works great, but not everyone has a good one.
The point is that you can put all these suspicions to rest by making Editor Moderation visible through messaging. Just fix the bug I link to in my sig.
If you choose not to, don't fool yourself into thinking we won't notice. Your audience isn't stupid, remember?
Michael Sims, I refuse to fight your straw man.
No one cares about story selection. Let me spell it out for you: we don't trust you. We want to know when you're moderating posts, when you're banning users. You have detailed systems to accomplish this and everyone knows it.
If you don't want people to know when you're posing as a User and moderating posts, that's fine. But if you don't tell people about it in your FAQ, that makes you just as hypocritical as every corporation you post an article to bash. You're forgetting your audience. We're nerds, computer geeks, programmers, hackers, freedom fighters. We have a finely tuned bullshit meter. And you people are setting it off.
Correct your FAQ to tell people that you're logging IP's and moderating posts. Or don't. But if you choose not to tell people what you're up to at the very least, don't whine about the consequences of being caught. You run a website that lives to "out" people, hell anytime Microsoft makes a wording mistake you are on them like hounds. That's your userbase. If you want to talk the talk, you gotta walk the walk.
Read the link in my signature. We're just asking for a message when an editor moderates us so we know when we're in danger of being blacklisted. And you know what I mean by blacklisted, the $rtbl flag, a secret user database flag to mark "the bad people". We read the Slashcode. We're not stupid. We won't be silenced. And the more you talk down to us, the angrier we'll get.
You should know what happens when people act condescending.
Rob's name for a perl script to take care of flood-bots.
It was used on me, and I have never in my life used a script to access Slashdot.
I was also IP-banned.
Free at last.
We can make whatever political statement we like about the American laws he may or may not have broken.
But I'm pretty sure he's going to be happy to go home to Russia and see his wife and children.
You know, Russia. Where he's safe from government persecution.
Seth, there's a great way to let users who actually care find out that they've been moderated by an editor. That way is the new Slashdot Messaging system. This keeps such information out of public view (increasing signal to noise) and still in the hands of the people affected by it.
.sig.
I suggested that this was a bug, because the Messaging system would say that you have been Moderated by a User when an Editor moderates you.
The response was that there are no Editors at Slashdot, only Users. You can read the full bug report by clicking the link in my
But suffice it to say you're not the only one who thinks this would be a great idea.
Also, for the record, "bitchslap" refers to a specific script [slashcode.com] in the codebase which retroactively sets all of a user's comments to score:-1. Important point: it's only ever been used on user accounts that posted using scripts.
Jamie, I must respectfully nitpick. When the bitchslap script was used on this account, it was because I had posted over 100 comments at the +2 level by clicking on submit a whole bunch (the multipost bug). I did not use a script to do this, and I was bitchslapped to -25 karma anyway.
I'm not complaining here about fairness or unfairness, per se, but rather about the accuracy of your comment. I was IP banned and bitchslapped even though I had not used a script, nor broken your "scripted abuse" rule. If you can point me to the rule I broke, I will publicly stand corrected. Furthermore, I have never ever used a script to access Slashdot. Please understand that I am not calling you a liar; you may have been unaware of these facts. I just hope that you can be more careful with the facts in the future.
Anyway to everyone who is worried about editors moderating posts, stop worrying. Editors are users too, they only get 5 mod points just like us. You can read more about this in the link in my signature.
That's all,
--sllort.
. Could the biggest problem with Linux usability be that most of the people teaching newbies to use Linux are too smart and know too much?"
If you are unable to communicate basic concepts of computer use to another person, this is not a qualification for being "smart". Nor does it prove that you know too much; it barely proves that you know anything.
Communication is a fundamental skill. Which is more marketable: the ability to implement a container object using polymorphism, or the ability to clearly explain a container object that uses polymorphism during a job interview?
You can be intelligent and have good communication skills. In my opinion intelligence without communication skills is not very valuable. Whatever you do, don't for a minute make the mistake of thinking that because you understand how to use a computer better than someone that you are smarter than that person. At that point the world has just named you Nick Burns and effing moved on. If you are trying to teach a skill to someone smarter than you, and you fail, whose fault is it?
If someone has a lot of Linux knowledge but can't communicate it, I don't think an abundance of intelligence is the hangup. I think a lack of basic social skills is more likely. The Renaissance Man is an outdated concept, but it is partially applicable here. The idea is that being well rounded - the Arts, Literature, Science, and physical fitness - all of these things make for an effective human being.
Any assertion that you can be too smart to talk to someone effectively can only be made by someone who has totally lost touch with society. Let me give you some advice: Microsoft hasn't.
This board isn't run by good people. It's run by petty tyrants. The success is a result of the readers/posters (even the FP'ers, trolls, etc.). - ghomwell
/. was and then never released anything. - Squirrel Killer
/.'s behavior per-user.
/., wouldn't you get a little bit of a power trip too?
/. can survive - will survive - with or without VA. You can like the model or hate it but it has worked and will continue to work.
It would have been a different thing had Taco been talking up how open
Honestly, I think the Truth lies in between these two statements. As a professional software developer, I know that just a few people (Marketing) whining about feature requests can add up to massive heartburn. Take a good swath of the Internet's geek population and turn them into your "Marketing Department", you're going to have to put up a lot of walls between yourself and your users. Slashdot isn't K5, it has at least twenty times the userbase. Has K5 been more responsive to user feature requests? Yes, but again, it's a different scale.
Is Slashdot the result of it's administrators or it's users? Well, yes. Look at Slashdot's leading story submitter and you'll find someone who has contributed a lot to Slashdot. But also take a look at Slash 2.2, and you'll find a near rewrite of slash, with a lot of new faces. The new Troll profiling and banning code implemented by Jamie McCarthy is a lot more sophisticated than anything any weblog has implemented before, with multi-level tracking by IP address, IP subnet, user account, hidden form gatekeepers (a form of "ICE"), and hidden user flags that silently alter
Is Slashdot ruled by petty dictators? Sure, read my sig. Read this. But also keep in mind that Slash has a dedicated community of really persistent jerks, so a "tyrannical" stance is reasonably justified. This userbase is quite possibly the most critical group of people on the planet.
Rob never had to GPL Slash or open the code up to user inspection, but he did it, and it's been the cause of a lot of heartburn for him. And he's stuck by his guns. Rob's user bio used to say "I have secret powers" for a long time. If you ran
Honestly I think all this speculation about VA whatever is out-of-band here. I think
Now if I could only be a user.
Insurance companies do this. I know, because I helped enable one. When you have low-volume, high importance data (like the personal records of Native Americans!!) this approach is justified. I'm not surprised in the least, however, that our underfunded park service wasn't able to hire a government contractor that would take security seriously. We can be as condescending as we like (and we usually are) but if you've ever tried to work through federal procurement procedures, you understand you're dealing with a very limited talent pool.