So the Continental Congress was an exploit based on the Kaminsky bug? Or was it an insecure workaround an intentional DoS from the root LDQN?
Lighthill@89
Either you misread what I said or I'm misreading your reply - my point was that I don't think the website was created in response to McCain campaign's return to smears (on the 2nd), but was instead created in response to McCain's attempt to claim that he was suspending his campaign to rescue the economy (on the 24th).
Lighthill@71
4. The domain was registered on 25th September, which suggests to me that it originated as a response to McCain's campaign suspension chicanery on the 24th. A week and a half is ample time to put something like this together. So I'd say that this isn't something from a general heap of prepped ammo.
A quick 'u' effort (in lieu of a tea break...). I'm blaming the lack of any coherency on the lack of any conjunctions, prepositions, or anything else I've been taking for granted, word-wise. Are there any which fit?
Skunk scum fully pump hum.
Snuffly, scummy runts sully sumps: numb?
Mulls....
Null!
Lull my bumps!
Snuff my lumps!
Cull my skull!
Dump skunk chumps.
Well, that's what category 3 was for - to avoid having to define too many exceptions. I had soccer fans in mind, so Scunthorpe and Arsenal were the particular examples that I was trying to support.
Cory, I accept that it's only a first approximation. But it's an easy first approximation, it's one which is actively measured, there's even essentially a high-score table for it, and I wonder if there are many who ever move beyond it.
You say that the heavy hitters have a good feel for genuine standing, but it doesn't appear to be the heavy hitters that people are complaining about. Being able to tell a PublishAmerica publication from a publication that actually means something to anyone other than PublishAmerica author is unlikely to help in an argument with a group of PublishAmerica authors.
Ugh, apologies for the overweening and probably unjustified cynicism.
PJ, I get the drug reference, but I don't get "poker-faced". Or, or, or do I? *Studiously stares at cards, unconsciously tapping table with index finger*
the first giant rush of Wikipedia articles was like watching entropy run backwards
I do think that one of the social rules that works a bit counter-productively in Wikipedia is that status tends to come from the number of edits made and to a lesser extent the number of articles edited, rather than from the amount and quality actually contributed (see Wikipedia and Aaron Swartz. It encourages the kind of trivial, meaningless edit Teresa noted on the Kibo article.
If the community were set up so that meaningful participation in a high-quality article were more prestigious than the number of edits, then a lot of the problems described would probably start healing themselves. The front-page featured articles could probably get that started by naming key contributors in the citation. But if there's a systematic problem occurring, then it's the system that has to be fixed.
Anton, that's why you need to revisit it regularly, because behaviour changes in response to moderation. It's also why context-based rules are important - 'BK' appears in a comment with words 'mayonnaise' and 'fries', trends away from flame, 'flame' could go either way, so leave that neutral, 'idiot' and "$likely_forum_hot_topic" trend towards flame - think of the way spam filtering works.
As a filter term, "cock" is an interesting one, sitting within categories 2. and 7. There are the obvious exceptions like "cockpit" and "shuttlecock", but otherwise you have to judge it by whether words such as "crows" and "chicken" are in the same post, or "sucks", "your mother" and "in hell".
Sock puppets are harder to detect, yes. We never had problems with those, somehow, so I never really looked at them. IP addresses are useless for the normal DHCP/proxying considerations. I suspect you could do something with response patterns (User A only ever appears within 3 posts of User B), but you'd need a few posts from the same sock puppet to get a reliable pattern. Even then I doubt you'd get anything reliable enough to do anything more than flag the situation to a moderator.
As to commercial viability - relatively few organisations run forums as a commercial enterprise, the target installed software base is highly fragmented, and the functionality is easily copied once described....
Anton@#11: I wasn't trying to claim that automated filtering could replace moderation. Just that it was possible to do it without fouling it up as badly as AOL did it.
However, you can use to flag posts for attention as well as automatic editing or deletion, depending on the triggering circumstance. On a really active board, that can identify a "you people" trolling (for example) early enough for a moderator to nip it in the bud before it derails a thread.
Anticorium@#7: AOL (and most others who've attempted it) messed it up because they didn't think through the problem properly. It's really not all that hard. I had to write a forum for a mainstream but impoverished sports publisher once, and although it was a few years, and broke the problem down into categories -
1. Character sequences which should always trigger a filter
2. Character sequences that should always trigger a filter, except when used as part of a few specifically defined words
3. Character sequences that should only trigger a filter if surrounded immediately by word boundaries
4. As 3., but checking for the sequence with standard word prefixes and suffixes
5. Character sequences that should normally be left, but which should trigger a filter if used with specific other words
6. Character sequences that should normally trigger a filter, but where the filter should be aborted if used with specific other words
7. As per 5. and 6., but using a scoring algorithm where more finesse was required
(Like I say, this was a few years ago, so I might not have quite remembered the list correctly.)
It took about a day to work out the categories, and another day to implement it. Then about a week to work out what went into what categories. Then about a week to respond to all the different ways people found to game it (leet speak, interspersing punctuation characters with the targeted character sequences, and so on).
Every now and again I'd drop in and see if anyone had found a new workaround, but it didn't happen very often. And the only time it picked up any false positives was when I hurriedly released a change without testing it, which ended up asterisking out any word ending in 'ing' until I somebody noticed the wailings from the users.
Seth@#130 - I don't think that analogy is relevant. Not only do I not have legally defined rights to research your navel, but you haven't made use of a state-granted monopoly on possession of a navel that requires as a condition that you grant access rights to it for research purposes. The existence or otherwise of any Seth Breidbart navel access control device is thereby immaterial.
I'd try to come up with a better analogy, except that pretty much all analogies are bound to miss the point in some way. Copyright is a legal bargain. It offers creators the right to restrict others from reproducing their works, together with mechanisms for enforcing those rights. It also defines rights which the creators are not permitted to restrict. This latter group of rights collectively constitute fair use.
As such, fair use rights aren't rights granted to the public as a structure built on top of copyright. They're uses which a creator exercising copyright specifically aren't allowed to restrict; they're what's left over when all of the rights they are allowed to restrict have been defined. Therefore, building a barrier which does restrict those rights isn't stopping the public from swinging their fists at point where their fist trajectories intersect with publishers' noses, but being given an inch and taking a ruler.
Oh bugger. I promised no analogies, didn't I?
Jules@#94 - That's an interesting decision, especially as I'd been thinking of Bridgeman with respect to the parallels to satellite photography.
On a philosophical note I think I probably agree with Randolph@#100, insofar as it involves a non-trivial effort to create something that wouldn't exist otherwise. More significantly, I can't see any latitude in the Berne convention for a signatory to allow free use for any photograph except within standard fair practise or the context of of reporting current events.
Patrick@#101 - Lehman's quote does not represent Lehman's own position, but does establish that some copyright stakeholders (i.e. publishers) believe that fair use is no longer applicable. The fact that Lehman and his organisation rejected the argument does not mean that those arguing for it do not exist or are not attempting to achieve those goals via other legislative or other means intended to supplement the DMCA.
Personally, I have trouble with the concept of a specific legally defined right (whether it be fair use or a right of way) which is permitted to be abrogated by means of a deliberate impediment.
Seth@72: Are they not? I'm under the fairly strong impression that all photographs, satellite or not, are copyrightable.
A nice illustration of the nature of copyright in the UK: the football fixtures lists are copyrighted (and require licensing to publish) because they are a creative work. The football results, which are essentially the fixture lists with additional score information, are not copyrightable and can be published by anyone, because they are a matter of historical record.
I do think that the whole start-with-an-action-flashback trope has become so commonplace as to lose the majority of its power now. It probably needs to lie fallow for a couple of decades before it would start to become effective again.
Explicit foreshadowing seems to be in the same state for the same reason. I very much enjoyed Wilson's Spin, for example, but got tired of his repeated use of the construction, "This insignificant detail would become relevant when major character experienced as yet unencountered major plot point" at the end of what seemed to be pretty much every chapter. And he used a flashback viewpoint throughout....
Showing an endpoint, or a partial endpoint, and using the narrative to establish how things happened rather than what's going to happen is a classic Hitchcockian means of creating suspense. But it's been done to death: everyone knows what's going on, and it tastes stale. In the worst case, when you get to the "one hour earlier", you feel like you're going backwards, and that you've now got to sit through god-knows-how-much ancient history until you can actually start going forward with the narrative again. "How it happens" is theoretically suspenseful, but it doesn't have the narrative momentum of "what happens next".
This isn't a rejection of foreshadowing. I'm still in awe at an apparently throwaway line in Pratchett's Wyrd Sisters: "You'd have to be a born fool to want to be a king." The whole book is contained in that one sentence, but the key thing is that it 's not apparent until you actually reach the end. It's successful in that case, I think, because it's used to colour your understanding in hindsight and to add structure, rather than to set up and manipulate your expectations in advance.
Going back to the first chapter thing, I think that if you want to start off going straight into an action scene then the Indiana Jones/James Bond introduction structure has much to recommend it. Coming in at the end of what appears to be the previous instalment you get an instant action entrance to get you past the first page, and involved before the main story has to be set up. And if it's done well, you get your foreshadowing and arch-nemesis introduction built in, without feeling like you've actually come to a complete narrative halt at the end of it.
Patrick @ #115
Judging by your “of courseâ€, I’m probably clarifying something that doesn’t need clarifying, but exclusionary reasons #1 and #2 were intended as satire as well as #3, hence the apology for unfairness – I thought I might be setting up a straw man.
Having said that, I can see a way in which #2 could be applied without implying that all fandom is unfulfilled prodom, and having just read more of the debate elsewhere I suspect it's what Ulrika's getting at. It's an anti-carpetbagging mechanism - join us to be one of us, not to sell something to us. Which remains problematic, since if strictly applied, it could mean that somebody whose initial route into fandom is through prodom can never be fully accepted (this is where "talking" gets interpreted as "networking").
But it doesn't necessarily follow from that stance that a fan wants or needs to be anything other than a fan. Does it? (Serious question - I’m horribly out of my depth here.)
As I see it, a community defines itself typically by:
a. Inclusion: This person does things that we do and/or looks like us in some fashion, and is therefore one of us
b. Exclusion: This person does things that we don't do and/or does not look like us in some fashion, and is therefore not one of us
The mix of which techniques are used depend on the community in question, but will normally contain a mix of both inclusion and exclusion. Different factions in a community may have different standards. Arbitrariness also applies.
Things that Scalzi does that fit an inclusive model of fandom community membership:
1. Attends conventions, and talks to people at them
2. Writes stuff about Star Wars, and fanfic controversies, and books by SF writers (not himself), and participates in discussions about them
Things that Scalzi does that might fall foul of an exclusive model of fandom community membership:
1. Writes books as a pro, and writes about writing books as a pro, and does some self-publicity as a pro.
2. Got into fandom as a professional first, then as a fan, and thus in some way didn't pay his dues.
3. Erm, I don't know, did he once say "Sci Fi" instead of "SF"?
Okay, that got a little sarcastic and possibly more than a little unfair.
However, writing as somebody not a member of fandom, I would think (based on a purely personal opinion that stronger communities tend to be based more on inclusive factors rather than exclusive ones) that the inclusive factors should outweigh the exclusive ones. Indeed, the nomination indicates that a lot of people who think of themselves as fans also think so.
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