Category Archives: Internet

I’m a big fan of Archive.org and especially of the web-indexing project it calls the Wayback Machine.

How odd, though, to find that the Wayback Machine hasn’t visited discourse.net since March 26, 2005.

Do you suppose I offended it?

Susan Crawford had a visit from a Taiwanese legislator:

In Taiwan, internet access is virtually free.

At one point, he noted that Taiwan watches Japan and Korea very closely and tries to compete with them in making low-cost broadband access available. They’re going great guns, so Taiwan is too.

He asked me whether the US was watching Europe closely to see what they were doing — we talked about northern Europe, and the UK, and I told him about the European Commission’s rejection of Deutsche Telekom’s plans. “Aren’t they your competitors?” he said.

I said that as far as I could tell the US doesn’t care what Europe is doing with broadband access policy. We don’t feel that they’re competitors of ours. We’re content to slide farther and farther behind, while feeling confident that we’re leading the world.

Actually, this could be said about a lot more than just DSL and telecommunications policy….

UPDATEIt turns out the problem was the Googlepedia extension that was running wild. (It replaces the right half of your search results with the wikipedia entry it thinks is most relevant to your search.) As the author of the extension put it, “Recent changes to Google meant my AdWords removal code also removed website descriptions.” And he kindly provided a fix.

Where oh where have my snippets gone?

All of a sudden, my Google search results have gone all laconic. Instead of the rich snippets and the offer of a cached copy, all I get are one-line links from page titles. I have reproduced this on three computers, attached to two different networks. Search results on the main google, but not on blog search, now look like this:

In contrast, the blog search still works like it used to:

This is disconcerting and much less useful than what I have become all too accustomed to. Is this an evil beta? A move to force me to sign in and personalize (and be tracked!)? Was there some copyright-based injunction no one told me about? Or is it just a bad day down at the server farm?

Or… is The End of Google as We Know It?

DreamHost Blog » iTunes Music Sore,

today, October 3rd, 2006, The Day Against DRM, we’re announcing a new (beta!) product:
Files Forever!What is it?

It’s a new service (during the beta only open to DreamHost Customers) that allows you to sell your own digital files, a la iTMS.. but with a few key differences:

No DRM is allowed.. period!

Once you upload your file to sell, you pay a tiny one-time storage fee, and we serve it FOREVER at a nice, permanent, URL.

Anybody who buys a file somebody offers via Files Forever get an online backup of it included.. that is, they may re-download the file as many times as they want, FOREVER!

Any file you buy from Files Forever you can also “loan” to your friends via the service! They are then allowed to download the file as much as they want until you ask for it “back.” (This is awesome, trust me.)

We handle all the payment processing / shopping cart stuff, and take just 5% + 50c for credit card fees. (We combine purchases to minimize these costs too.)

You can even offer an “affiliate cut” for people who re-sell your files!

That’s it pretty much!

You can also keep the files you upload private.. so Files Forever also doubles as a very cost-effective permanent online archive solution, as well as an easy way to email big files to your friends.

I think this is pretty clever.

My friend Susan Crawford of the Cardozo Law School has been tirelessly organizing One Web Day (see also the One Web Day Wiki), a sort of Earth Day for the Internet.

And today is the day.

I feel like such a lout for not getting more excited. But then Earth Day never did that much for me either…

[This Miami Cross Blogination posting is by Gus Moore of Miami Beach 411.]

Good afternoon ladies and gentleman. Class is now in session. I am very happy to be with you today, substituting for Professor Froomkin. The subject of today’s session is: Did the Craigslist Sex Baiting Prank Break the Law?

By now I am sure many of you are familiar with Jason Fortuny’s sex baiting prank at Craiglsit. For those who are not, I brought along the cliff notes (warning: not safe for work):

"Last Monday Seattle resident Jason Fortuny carried out a thought experiment into reality — one I think anyone who has surfed Craigslist sex ads has entertained. He took a hardcore Women Seeking Men ad from another city and reposted it to see how many replies he could get in 24 hours. Then he published every single response — photos, emails, IM info, phone numbers, names, everything, to a public wiki. Then they went public on Jason’s LiveJournal page calling it The Craigslist Experiment, inviting readers to identify the CL ad’s responders.

"(…) Since then Jason has had *his* private info published to CL and been threatened physically, threatened with lawsuits, and has been hated on by everyone from online BDSM communities to Wired. Wired called him "sociopathic" while commenters are saying things like "Disclosing an email to the public is indeed a violation of privacy, and if anyone has a spine, they will take you down with a massive lawsuit that will make you regret ever doing this. You are a liar, a xenophobe, and deserve to have your ass beaten to within an inch of your life."

The story went viral, getting posted all over the web.

The prank has people divided; some cheer Mr. Fortuny for outing these sexual deviants, while others want to tar and feather him.

In my opinion, what Mr. Fortuny did was wrong. He could have performed the same experiment without violating people’s privacy by blacking out the subjects contact information and identifying pictures.

It does teach us a lesson – be careful about what you share with strangers.

TIP: If you don’t want your "business" posted all over the internet, then don’t email it to people that you don’t know.

My questions for the class are:

1. Did Jason Fortuny break the law?
2. Is publishing an email illegal?
3. Is The Craigslist experiment a 2257 violation? A commenter at Threadwatch.org thinks it might be:

In summation, after carefully reviewing the statute, it looks to me like this prank fits the criteria for a privacy tort claim.

There may be some Discourse.net readers more qualified to answer the legalities of this than I.

Heck, who am I kidding? I’m not an attorney. I’m just a substitute for the day. Discussing Miami travel is my thing. Professor Froomkin was just nice enough to invite me to hang out with you. I don’t know anything about Privacy Torts and 2257.

So, I will take this opportunity to learn what the class thinks.

Was this prank illegal? Will these dumbasses victims be awarded civil damages? Could there be a criminal indictment against Mr. Fortuny for posting nude images? Morally speaking, was the Craigslist sex baiting prank right or wrong?

If you would be so kind to continue this discussion after class, we can all meet up in the Comments.

Thank you for your time today. Class dismissed. 🙂

Sources:
• 4 Common Law Privacy Torts
• 2257. Record keeping requirements

• Are Accounts of Consensual Sex a Violation of Privacy Rights?
• Encyclopedia Dramatica – RFJason CL Experiment (warning: not safe for work)

Gus Moore is the Miami travel expert who founded the community website Miami Beach 411. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?