Sean's Blog

First, it’s not that getting a forward about a joke or something is illegal, but that the act of passing on an e-mail that is written in assumed confidence could be. I caught wind of this on CNN Money. The research was done on Ned Snow, a law professor at the University of Arkansas.

There are a couple things that spring to my mind in regards to this. The big one is that if bloggers, consumer rights’ advocates, or others are limited in what they can post or make known from e-mails they received, it could be another hurdle for groups to overcome. I’m sure (or just hoping) that there are or would be laws and regulations to allow individuals to make e-mail correspondence known when it is something like this.

I guess the question that needs to be asked is this: what protects, if anything, post mail from being scanned and posted online? Whether there is something or nothing, then I would assume the same hold true for e-mail. I guess the thing that causes the biggest issue is that e-mail has also been used to replaced company memos, newsletters, reports, etc, and that is what makes e-mail different from just regular post mail.

read more | digg story

Someone messaged me to get my opinion on the Digg/HD-DVD issue, and here’s what I quickly came up with.

I have few things to say, but things that make this interesting include:

• the number of posts that then included “the hack” as either titles, descriptions, and comments
• the fact that this appears to be a “flash in the pan” meme that is taking off elsewhere on the web, such as the multiple appearances on ytmnd.com and a variety of songs and poems, a la the Streisand_effect
• that digg did a 180 on their original stance due to the actions of the community
• that Kevin Rose’s post had over 11000 diggs when I looked at it Wednesday morning, 12000 about an hour later, 27000 when I discussed it with some student workers in the afternoon, and now (11:00 PM EST) sits at 32721 after being initially dugg almost 21 hours and 34 minutes ago by Kevin Rose. (On a side note, it became popular 3 minutes later.)
• that those on Digg are willing to fight it out now that their users have declared their desire

Those are just some things that spring to mind. Really, I’ve been taking some time away from Digg, and hadn’t checked it as much lately. Even so, I would have missed this entirely if it wasn’t for the attempt to hide the information blowing up in such a tremendous fashion.

Numerous stories about the HD-DVD hack were being posted to Digg yesterday and soon afterwards, Digg was contacted by the owners of the HD-DVD intellectual property with a request to take the posts down. Digg did so, but once users realized what was happening, all sorts of stories were being posted that contained the hack code in their title, description, and in their comments. This prompted Digg to change their stance on the matter, and in his post on the Digg blog, Kevin Rose said

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

Click here to view/digg the article.

First, I’d like to say that I reached a first sometime around 1:40 EST this morning; a story I submitted to digg was made popular. To quote Matt at work:

Wow Sean, now you’re going to have all this clout. You can just start submitting any story you want now.

The article in question is titled University of Wisconsin-Madison Will Not Forward RIAA Letters To Students, which I found on The Consumerist, and you can digg the story here.

The article itself, which is mainly an article about an e-mail sent to The Consumerist by a student at University of Wisconsin-Madison, simply comes down to this: the universities are going to protect the students as well they can, but are going to make sure the students know that continuing to download music that they do not legally have the license to may face trouble down the line. Personally, I am not made aware of how many letters and what not we (the university) get about students using p2p in the residence halls, so I do not know where Bowling Green State University stands in relation to all this, but I’m sure we get some, based solely on the fact that I know my staff encounter p2p on student computers and that they all cannot be using the program for legal means. Really, not that many people need the latest linux distro.

While I don’t think that people have a right to take music just because it is so easy to get in mp3 format, I do not agree with the manner in which the RIAA is going about trying to catch people. While I am not as learned in the subject as I ought to be, I personally believe that aspects of the RIAA’s stances and arguments about the recent crackdown on student downloading are flawed. One article of counter arguments can be found on Techdirt, but overall, plenty of other players are getting involved, like NPR, but that’s more about radio play than downloading music. Overall, there’s just enough information available regarding the RIAA to see that why care more about the companies they represent than the artists, though that’s probably because many of the companies, and not the artists, are the holders of many of the copyrights to the songs.

As I said yesterday, the post I created was based upon a site I found via digg. The amusing thing was that for a couple hours afterwards, I was getting hits from Google searches regarding the string 584e4d59c580ca10f301d53814b700da, which the original poster included in his post. For those who care, it’s likely (99.99%) a hash that you can’t do a reverse look-up on. That’s why he had said “cryptically speaking”.

I saw this article on digg and I felt I had to comment on it. The digg article can be found here.

Now, I can appreciate the fact that sometimes jobs can be dreadful, and that once you realize that a job is sucking your will to live, it’s to time to leave, if only for the sake of your mental health. The author, VA, lists the 3 ways, in her opinion, companies treat employees in a negative way, which are:

• They Demand Respect While Simultaneously Treating You Like a Child
• They Make it Taboo to Steal
• They Demand a Two Weeks Notice Before You Quit

The first one can be a fault of anyone, not just a company, and as such, it may be tied more to personality types than company entities. Depending on the size of a company, it’s not the company that needs to treat employees well, but the people who make up the management of the company. If they become corrupt and soulless, there’s not much to be done.

The second one, that companies make stealing taboo, is hard to swallow. Stealing is taboo; the companies do not make it taboo. The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary lists stealing as “to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as a habitual or regular practice”. If a company chooses to look the other way when some paper clips, binders, tape, paper, etc. go missing, well, there’s your bonus. The company purchased the goods, not you. Then again, when one gets further up in the corporate hierarchy, they tend to assume they can use company property for their own, but would yell at people who do it beneath them. That’s just the way it goes.

If you want, you can say that overall, American companies steal our time by giving us less vacation then other developed companies, or by having it take a year before you can take a week or two of vacation, or that they expect you to stay late and/or come in early, and work weekends and/or holidays without any bonus because you might be salaried, even though the job is Monday through Friday, 8 to 5.

The third item, the two week notice, is more for people who don’t want to burn bridges behind them and wish to give the company time to work on getting a replacement or that position’s affairs in order. If you are fed up with an employer, or they are fed up with you, the termination is going to be immediate. If an employer knows a position is going to be ending, they will try and give you as much notice as they can, provided you haven’t pissed them off. After all, if an employer felt about an employee, how VA feels about her employer, it would have happened in a “don’t come back after your vacation” type manner.

In regards to “cutting you into the profit”, once companies get big enough, you get corrupt middle management who are the ones that hoard the wealth and give the “ata boy” pins. Smaller companies will take care of their workers as best they can.

Portable fan forces residence hall evacuation, flooding from sprinkler system.

I saw the fire truck and emergency vehicles over at Founders on my way home last night, but figured it was just a false alarm, as is typical in any college residence hall. Well, at least no one was hurt and the fire was contained. I did like the quote about a student who wanted to air out her room but was concerned about starting another fire. If fans were a large fire threat, they wouldn’t be allowed in to begin with. I have two fans in my office over at Saddlemire, which is mainly due to the fact that the building gets rather hot in the spring, summer, and fall, so I’m assuming I’ll still be able to have them.

I was rather distraught though, that a fire on campus, even though there were not injuries or fatalities, was beat out by the death of Anna Nicole Smith as the main article on the BG News website. That’s almost as bad as Paula Zahn bumping her discussion with Richard Dawkins after the horrifically biased “panel” the other day, so that she could waste air time talking about Anna Nicole.

On a related note, I set off the smoke alarms last night while pre-crisping some pepperoni for our pizza.

read more | digg story

An assistant professor of visual communication and technology education at Bowling Green State University is confronted with network security and campus police after using Tor on his computer. Those of you who attend BGSU may recognize the name of the article’s author, Dr. Paul Cesarini.

All in all, it was an interesting article to read. Without knowing specifically whom from network security spoke with Dr. Cesarini, chances are I’ve spoken with them, due to my position in RCC at BGSU. I can see where someone using that sort of program would cause issues on the network, especially if the user was purposefully hiding their tracks. A big assumption I could make is that it wasn’t anyone in the residence halls they were speaking with, as I probably would have heard about it; then again, that’s an assumption, not a fact.

That is a benefit of working at a university. Had something like this happened in the “real world”, it could have easily led to someone’s termination, whereas in this case there was the benefit of arguing for academic freedom.

read more | digg story

Hopefully you read, or will read, the article I wrote at the tail end of yesterday, as this is just a quick follow-up.

Browsing the most recent 10 pages of upcoming news in about 10 minutes lead to at least 5 easily noticeable users who were spamming in one manner or another. It’s probably just as well that I saw and buried them, as I have not found much on digg this morning to keep me occupied, aside from the article about Blizzard banning 105,000 accounts and taking 12 million gold out of the WoW economy.

This got me thinking. It would be nice to have an option to mark a user as a spammer. That way, you don’t have to worry about hoping you mark their articles as spam and that enough other people mark them as spam and that hopefully someone in the upper echelons of digg notice and do the same or block the site and or user. Marking a user as a spammer would be a simple way of saying “look, I believe that everything they have submitted is abusing digg and that they should be stopped,” but that’s just me.

While not spammers, there are those who submit duplicate stories. They seem to think that when digg tells them that a story already exists, that digg is obviously wrong. Or they don’t take the time to see if the story actually exists in case the URL is slightly different. Do you know how many times I’ve marked submissions about how “Robots could demand legal rights” or “Title of Harry Potter 7 revealed” over the last day, and most of them from http://news.bbc.co.uk news.bbc.co.uk? In this case, it’s partially due to the fact that the BBC site has multiple different links to the same stories, so all someone has to do is digg a unique url to either bypass digg’s “BTW, someone did this already” system or to justify to themselves why they can or need to submit it themselves. Really though, if it’s important and on a very popular site, like the BBC website, chances are someone already dugg it.

I also realized that what I should have done when I finished writing that article last night was wait until this morning to digg it. As the case is, I would have had more to add to it this morning.

Live, learn, wash, rinse, repeat.

In our continued efforts to combat cheating in World of Warcraft, more than 105,000 accounts were closed and over 12 million gold was removed from the game economies in Europe, Korea, and the US in the month of November.

For those who don’t know, gold is hard to come by in WoW. There are also probably millions of accounts, so this may only affect between 3% and 8% of all WoW users directly, and quite possibly less than that.

Now sure, this is just a game, or more than just a game to some. Imagine though, a world where all records, accounts, and other information is digital. What happens when there is that shadow government, that many have always claimed exists, and they decide that there are people that are abusing the system? All information about them is gone in the blink of an eye. And what happens if someone who isn’t at fault is swept away in the process? Sure, in the case of WoW, they can argue to get their account back. But if the government did it, what then? “We have no record that the person you’re talking about existed.” What about the economy? Debt could be eliminated or created instantly. Financial hardship could come and go as the wind.

I just wanted to put that out there. Think on it.

read more | digg story

I like digg, but I found out today that trying to be a good community member left me feeling like Sisyphus.

I browse digg on average three times a day: morning, afternoon, and evening. I don’t submit too many stories, but I read a chunk of articles at any given time, digg things that I find interesting, comment if I absolutely feel the need, and bury when I must. Don’t take that last one the wrong way; I bury articles when they are one of the following:

• a “testing digg” post,
• the wrong topic,
• obviously spam, or
• blatant self-digging.

The first is pretty easy to find. Typically it’s a title is something like “Just a test” with a description of “Testing the Digg Submission System”. These just baffle me make think, and occasionally comment, “Trust me, the digg submission system works. Did you miss the fact that other people can get it to work?” You know their just up to no good and will probably lead to number 3 shortly.

The second thing I bury are posts in the wrong topics. These are also easy to spot, with titles like “Hot Job” and description “He’s got a great job!” being put in the category “Design.” Considering that “Design” is surrounded by “Apple” above and “Gadgets” below, it’s not like they mis-selected the category. Surprisingly, if you follow the link, you see a not-at-all-funny picture. Items in the wrong category also tend to lead to spam.

The thing about items posted under the wrong topics is that it didn’t fit in any of the available topics. Guess what? If it doesn’t fit in a topic, don’t digg it, it’s that simple. I’ve come across a couple articles online and thought “This’ll be a great digg!” only to find out that it didn’t fit in a given category. On a side note, the Charisma 20 shirt over at Real Life was one such item.

They say “all roads lead to Rome,” and that’s the case in regards to things I tend to bury on digg. While I haven’t spent the time to track those who do test posts, as the only two I do know of haven’t done anything lately, and that looking up “test” doesn’t get you very much, I can’t say for certain that testing leads to spamming. But given the fact that you don’t need to test the fact that digg works, you could actually try to digg a real article first, or if this is on a personal site, make a post and try digging it as if you know it works.

Wrong topics almost always make me think spam, since most digg spammers are just going to skim the topics and randomly pick something. The real dastardly thing they do is then give it a fake title and/or description so that it fits in the category, and before you know it, you’re looking at an article that has nothing to do with the description you just read on digg.

There are also those spammers who promote things in the right categories and dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s. Their list of dugg and submitted sites however typically only rotate between a handful of different sites. While they are putting things in the right places, it’s an abuse of digg in my opinion. I’m not against them and their attempt at making money. I’m just upset that they focusing on the money first and the digging is jsut a means to an end.

Real abuse is sometimes due to the ability to have a site added to digg with the click of a link on a site or the simple submission of an article. I have seen quite a lot of Hubpages on digg, and almost every single one has been a wrong topic. I think that if one wasn’t a wrong topic it was completely by accident or someone is really trying. However, when you see a title of “Stick weaving for a quick homemade gift” and a description of “As weaving goes, this is the fastest way to do hand weaving I’ve ever seen. Come see my photos and learn how to do it” listed as “Offbeat News”, you don’t even have to click the link to know it is not news, let alone offbeat. If you check on the user profile of the person that submitted it, you’ll probably find pages upon pages of dugg articles. However, those dugg articles will all be self-submitted articles, which is item four, which follows.

While I understand that depending on a particular site’s presence in the web, it may not get dugg unless the site owner or a dedicated, regular visitor diggs an article. So I’m not against self digging. However, I am against people who do 50% or more self digging. Typically, the real culprits have one or two stories dugg that were submitted by someone else, but every other article listed in their list of dugg stories is all from the same site, which matches their username.

Things can always change though. If more topics are added and some of those sites I (almost) automatically mark as spam have a proper place to go, I won’t care as much. IF asked, I would suggest a top-level “Blog” category with possibly items like “Personal” and “Professional”. Once the automated moderation algorithm has had more practice, it’ll catch more of the user spam, so they’ll actually have to try to be real diggers. Even the bury system can be cleaned up. Even though it tries to be generic, there are some items it can’t accurately categroize, such as outdated news and articles.

Am I going to self-digg this article? Probably. I’m gonna try my hardest to find a category that fits, but I already believe there won’t be one. The standard, though, appears to be to put any digg news in the “Tech Industry News” category.

“When in Rome” and all that.

I’ll post it and if it gets buried, it gets buried. If I get flamed, I get flamed. If some actually choose to read the article, perhaps they’ll see where I’m coming from and leave it be.