Slashdot Sort of Makes Amends

Slashdot still doesn’t get it, but it did modify the text on its Department of Justice to read,

The U.S. Department of Justice announced that it had been instructed by the Bush Administration to cease its drive to break up Microsoft, which has already been found guilty of violating U.S. anti-trust law in a complaint filed by the Federal Government and 19 states.

Better than the first time around, but it doesn’t any sense at all to say the Bush administration ordered the Department of Justice to do something, because the DOJ is part of the Bush administration.

That makes about as much sense as saying that the Clinton administration ordered the Department of Justice to proceed with the Microsoft case in the first place.

Still, at least they’re not claiming that the decision came from Bush personally.

More Slashdot Lies

Slashdot is back to simply inventing news when the reality doesn’t fit it’s world view. An item on the front page of the site about the Department of Justice’s decision to not seek a breakup of Microsoft says,

The U.S. Department of Justice announced that it had been instructed by President Bush to cease its drive to break up Microsoft, which has already been found guilty of violating U.S. anti-trust law in a complaint filed by the Federal Government and 19 states.

The problem is that there’s not a single sentence in any news story that even hints that President George W. Bush had anything at all to do with the announcement. Of course, if you’re Slashdot whether or not something is accurate seems to be largely irrelevant.

The one advantage of traditional media is that people who make egregious errors like that do tend to get fired pretty quickly.

Oh, and, I told you so! Dan Gillmor, Dave Winer, etc. were all crowing about how the Appeals Court ruling was a devestating loss for Microsoft and Bill Gates attempts to put a positive spin on it weren’t fooling anybody. Not!

I Really Hate Slashdot Sometimes

In 1997, ABC “reporter” Cokie Roberts blasted the Internet in a column she wrote with her husband, Steve. Among other things they complained about was that (surprise) the Internet didn’t allow for any mediation of views by responsible folks.

To us it [unmediated web communication] sounds like no more deliberation, no more consideration of an issue over a long period of time, no more balancing of regional and ethnic interests, no more protection of minority views.

Jon Katz, who at the time was writing for HotWired, turned around and ripped on the Roberts’s saying,

The column serves as a window into the dark and disconnected heart of Washington journalism, a culture that fiercely defends its own freedom but has mixed feelings about everyone else’s.

Katz was certainly right, but on the other hand a very popular web site Katz now writes for on occasion, Slashdot, seems intent on proving Cokie and Steve Roberts main contention correct.

This morning, for example, Slashdot posted an item titled Microsoft Fakes Citizen Letters of Support. As is typical with Slashdot, they post an excerpt from a user who first submitted the story to the site.

According to this Seattle Times article, Microsoft is sending letters to Utah’s Attorney General in support of the company, but with fake signatures of citizens (some of whom are dead!). The article says: “Letters sent in the last month are on personalized stationery using different wording, color and typefaces, details that distinguish Microsoft’s efforts from lobbying tactics that go on in politics every day. State law-enforcement officials became suspicious after noticing that the same sentences appear in the letters and that some return addresses appeared invalid.””

This is where I start to get really angry. If you actually go read the Seattle Times story, Lobbyists Tied to Microsoft Wrote Citizens’ Letters, it bears little resemblance to this summary.

Is Microsoft making up letters, signing dead people’s names to them, and then sending those letters to Utah’s Attorney General? Of course not.

What actually happened here was a number of pro-Microsoft lobbying groups conducted telephone surveys about the MS antitrust case. People who indicated they opposed the antitrust case were sent a package including an already prepared letter opposing the antitrust case that they could sign and mail to their state’s attorney general.

So where do the dead people come in? According to the Seattle Times,

Utah officials found that two prefab letters from Citizens Against Government Waste bore the typed names of dead people. Those names had been crossed out by family members who signed for them. And another letter came from “Tucson, Utah,” a city that doesn’t exist.

It is reprehensible for Slashdot to claim that, “Microsoft is sending letters to Utah’s Attorney General in support of the company, but with fake signatures of citizens (some of whom are dead!).”

This from the same site where editors and readers go ballistic because the film Swordfish‘s portrayal of hacking, and specifically computer encryption, was beyond laughable. But at least everyone seeing it new that Swordfish was a piece of fiction, while Slashdot continues to engage in such shoddy practices and pass them off as fact. And, of course, almost never makes any sort of corrections or retraction notices.

And personally I just don’t get it. Here’s my favorite story about Cokie Roberts: she’s a liar as well. Roberts was almost fired by ABC for an incident involving faked “live” coverage outside the White House. Basically, ABC ran footage showing Roberts reporting live from the White House, but in fact the footage was actually shot on a sound stage in front of a blue screen with the White House added in later.

That was extremely shoddy journalism, and at the moment Slashdot is not a whole lot better.

I guess I really don’t understand why anyone would want to put out such a shoddy product. I mean, I understand why traditional news agencies often get burned — incredible deadline and economic pressures — but I don’t see how independent web sites are doing anybody a favor by repeating the same mistakes of traditional media.

Who Puts Out More FUD: Microsoft or Slashdot?

Sometimes I think the answer to that question is Slashdot. Today’s case in point is a post by Timothy about Google’s terms and conditions for posting to Usenet via Google.

Slashdot summarizes the policy as, “Google Owns Your UseNet Post,” which is completely false. The actual terms of service say,

By posting communications on or through the Service, you automatically grant Google a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, modify, publish, edit, translate, distribute, perform, and display the communication alone or as part of other works in any form, media, or technology whether now known or hereafter developed, and to sublicense such rights through multiple tiers of sublicensees.

This is a very sensible policy; anything less would be asking for legal problems. Contrary to the Slashdot take on the TOS, Google doesn’t own your Usenet posts. Rather by posting you are granting them a “non-exclusive license to use, reproduce,” etc., etc. your post. Why would they want this?

For a number of reasons, but the main reason is that it will help forestall frivolous lawsuits as technology changes. For example, I ran an animal rights discussion group that had about 20,000 posts that were not part of a database. The current software I’m using for my web site uses a database and at some point I plan on bringing those old posts into the new system.

In that case you don’t want to have to deal with lawsuits from people saying “I never authorized you to include my post as part of a database compilation.” Sounds like hair splitting, but the Supreme Court has already ruled that there is a substantive difference between the two that is actionable.

Google also doesn’t want to get be left behind by technological change. Suppose that accessing the Internet by cell phone becomes all the rage, and people begin searching Google’s Usenet archive from their phones. Again, you want to protect yourself as much as possible from people suing on the grounds they intended their posts to be accessible from computer web browsers, but never gave permission for those posts to be accessed from a cell phone.

Finally, I can’t help but point out the sheer hypocrisy of Slashdot doing hand wringing over who owns posts after that web site’s own debacle when it decided to take posts from its web site and reprint them in a book without even trying to obtain permission to do so.

Why Katz Gets Flamed

PopPolitics.Com has a profile of Jon Katz which, among other things, tries to figure out why people on Slashdot flame him so much. The answer, of course, is inadvertently contained in Julia Lipman’s piece.

1. Lipman writes,

He’s maligned and even dissed by members of his own constituency who fail to recognize him for what he is: a leader of one of the important social movements of the Internet Age.

I suspect if Katz doesn’t think of himself as any sort of leader of a social movement, but he comes across as a self-appointed spokesman for what he thinks is some broad “geek” social group. Thanks, but no thanks.

2. Lipman writes,

But most of the flames his stories receive aren’t just about the stories; they’re about him. Katz is a big-name writer using his own name at a place where most of the monikers are more along the lines of “Hemos” and “CmdrTaco.” He’s writing about technology from the perspective of a journalist. Some of what makes Katz distrust big media might make Slashdot readers distrust Katz.

Give me a break. First, I know I don’t and I doubt most other Slashdot readers think of Katz as a “big name” writer. Maybe Lipman’s impressed by his resume, but I’m not.

But more importantly, the problem is that he writes like someone who cut his teeth writing for major magazines. His analyses always tend to be mind-numbingly superficial.

Just compare Katz’s review of several books about the Internet including Carl Sunstein’s Republic.Com to Matthew Gaylor’s review, both of which were published on Slashdot this month.

Katz’s flowery prose would probably be adored by fans of the New York Review of Books but for the life of me I have no idea what Katz means when he writes things like, “Net culture is not known for carefully dissecting its own implications” or “…a new strain of rationalist political sensibility is emerging from this tech generation” and especially thing like, “As John Raulston Saul wrote, this is a brilliant, successful and creative culture, but an Unconscious Civilization in many ways, unaware of the political realities spawned by the very technology they are making and using, or by the daunting challenges the unchecked rise of corporatism poses. Sometimes the fallout can be serious. As a consequence, it created an Unconscious Revolution.”

For Katz, it’s all about the platitudes. For Gaylor, on the other hand, even if you aren’t a right wing nut like myself the review at least gives you some idea of what Sunstein actually said in his book rather than Katz’s vague description that, “Unplanned, unprogrammed encounters are central to democracy” without ever mentioning that what Sunstein is really calling for is more state control over free spech (ironic for someone who writes for the Freedom Forum, isn’t it?)

Matthew Gaylor Slices and Dices Cass Sunstein

Jon Katz loved the book, but Matt Gaylor does an excellent job of outright slamming Cass Sunstein’s book, Republic.Com for Slashdot.

One of the most bizarre ideas that Sunstein advocates — and this is the sort of thing that could only come from an academic — is a sort of equal time provision for web sites. A site that is say anti-gun control would be required by law to link to a pro-gun control site. Gaylor quotes Sunstein as saying,

We might easily imagine a situation in which textual references to organizations or institutions are hyperlinks, so that if, for example, a conservative magazine such as the National Review refers to the World Wildlife Fund or Environmental Defence, it also allows readers instant access to their sites. …To the extent that sites do not do this, voluntary self regulation through cooperative agreements might do the job. If these routes do not work, it would be worthwhile considering content-neutral regulation, designed to ensure more in the way of both links and hyperlinks.

Does this mean if the NAACP produces a report on online hate groups that it has to link to each group? If a gay/lesbian site writes and article about Fred Phelps, do they have to links to GodHatesFags.Com?

What an unbelievably stupid idea (and, by the way, unconstitutional).