Tag: Boing! Boing!

Xeni Jardin Hasn’t Learned A Damn Thing . . . But I Have

Xeni Jardin has a post today about her “unpublishing” of Violet Blue-related posts that caused so much controversy. Go read it now before she decides to take it down.

The post is fairly long but doesn’t really say anything beyond reaffirming that their her posts and she’ll take them down if she wants to. In the comments to the post, Cory Doctorow, Mark Frauenfelder and David Pescovitz weigh in to indicate their agreement with Jardin’s position.

To understand my position on this, which I elaborate on very pointedly in the comments to that post, go read this Boing! Boing! post from 2005 which is Boing! Boing!’s coverage of the London subway bombings including photographs and updates on the status of individual posters like Cory Doctorow who was living in London at the time.

That post was removed from Boing! Boing! because in one of the many updates to it, Violet Blue is credited with pointing to a blog with additional information on the bombing. Violet Blue is extraordinarily tangential to the post, but because the string “Violet Blue” appeared in the post, Jardin deep-sixed it.

Now it is very clear from reading the comments in this post and in the previous Boing! Boing! post about the Violet Blue controversy, that I am in the minority who find it absurd that Boing! Boing! would retcon dozens of posts simply because of incidental mentions of Violet Blue over what turns out to be nothing more than a personal falling out between her and Jardin.

I’ll just sum up my thinking about Boing! Boing! by reproducing a reply I posted there to another user who defended routine removal of materials from the Internet,

Talia wrote:

“Well, if this is orwellian, I guess I’ve participated in Orwellian actions as well, as a person who has deleted things I’ve posted on the internet. And every other single person who has ever deleted anything they put on the internet, ever, has also participated in Orwellian actions.”

BTW, I have to say I find that odd. I don’t generally delete things on the Internet (I can only think of a single occasion where I deleted a single post I made at my blog because I realized it was seriously erroneous and would cause more harm by misinforming than by adding a correction). Believe me, I’ve said a lot of things on the Internet I wish I hadn’t, but coming from a journalism background, I’ve always thought it was important to stand behind your words and own your errors.

I’ve certainly endorsed the views of people, for example, who I later disassociated with. But I can’t ever remember thinking “gee, I should go back and delete all that stuff like it never happened.” And I really don’t remember ever thinking “I should take down this really long post because somewhere in there it mentions this person who I know longer like.”

And I find it bizarre that people do think that way, but that’s probably just my particular hangup.

OTOH, this whole episode was useful in that it showed us a side of BB I think many of us didn’t realize was there. If you had asked me before this if BB would go back and removed posts like that London bombing picture thread, I’d have said no way. Retconning is something only comic book writers and sleazy businesses do.

Now I know better.

By the way, I should add that Jardin and others have argued that it is routine for bloggers to remove and retroactively edited things. Personally, I would only do that under the most extreme circumstances as I mention in my comment on Boing! Boing! But now that I think of it, there is a very well known blogger who is known for frequently deleting and rewriting the things he posts — Dave Winer. At the moment, I think Winer would fit right in with Boing! Boing!’s vision of itself.

Boing! Boing!’s Confused Message on Science vs. Pseudoscience

Not to beat up on Boing! Boing!, but what the heck . . . I can’t be the only one who sometimes sees a lot of dissonance between the folks who post on Boing! Boing! For example, Cory Doctorow goes off on global warming “denialists”. Fair enough. I used to be fairly skeptical of global climate change, but I agree that the evidence at this point is so overwhelming for human-induced warming, that the only real debate now is over what, if anything, we’re going to do it about it rather than whether or not the phenomenon is real.

But a week later, David Pescovitz posts a ridiculous fund-raising plea for Loren Coleman’s International Cryptozoology Museum. Now I’m not quite sure on the one hand why Boing! Boing! would want to excoriate global warming skeptics on the hand, and then on the other turn around and help raise money for someone who spends his time on such scientific projects as The Mothman Death List.

Some of the commens in the Coleman thread made the absurd claim that since there have been “living fossils” found like the coelacanth, that cryptozoology is legitimate science. The problem, of course, is that the coelacanth and similar finds have been announced and described by working professional scientists while the cryptozoologists were wasting their time looking for Bigfoot (Pescovitz’s pet obsession) or the Loch Ness monster.

Again, I realize the folks who post at Boing! Boing! have different interests and agendas, but it is a little odd to see Doctorow post about the idiocy of pseudoscience, only to see that followed up by a post urging fund raising for pseudoscience.

Hipocrisy, The Name Is Boing! Boing!

The Boing! Boing! vs. Violet Blue death match at least gives BB fans something to do between Cory Doctorow’s posts plugging his book. For those of you who don’t care about Boing! Boing!, the short version is they had some sort dispute with sex blogger Violet Blue, and about a year ago went through and deleted several dozen Boing! Boing! posts that were either authored by her or mentioned her. It was only a few days ago, however, that anyone became aware of this retcon.

A lot of longtime Boing! Boing! fans are outraged, and a lot of people who could care less don’t understand the outrage. Its their site, right? They can do whatever they want, so why should anyone care? As someone who read Boing! Boing! back when it was still a paper zine, the answer is that we expected so much more from Boing! Boing! because those behind the site pushed for more from others.

For example, one of the disappeared posts is a rant by Xeni Jardin directed at Google for, of all things, supposedly “disappearing” sex blogs from its index. There are a lot of good comments from a variety of people in that post, including a couple by Violet Blue, but VB’s contribution is hardly the bulk of the post by any means. But because it mentioned her name, it was “unpublished” as part of the enmasse removals.

Boing! Boing! used to be the place you’d go to watch Cory or Xeni rip into sites who would do something as stupid as silently remove content that was about the horrors of silently removing content. Now, however, they’ve become that site.

Sigh.

Boing! Boing! and Slashdot Distort Statement by RIAA’s Cary Sherman

The last thing that any anti-RIAA activists needed to do was distort what RIAA chief Cary Sherman had to say about the Sony rootkit debacle. And yet both Boing! Boing! and Slashdot have chosen to push completely ridiculous interpretations of a comment Sherman made in response to Sony’s actions.

Boing! Boing! claimed that Sherman said that lots of companies install rootkits. According to Boing! Boing!,

RIAA President Cary Sherman gave a recent college press-conference where he addressed Sony’s rootkit fiasco (among other things — the whole transcript is worth reading for a quick visit to the planet greed). His take? Other companies do the same thing all the time!

Slashdot one-ups that claiming,

President of RIAA Says Sony-BMG Did Nothing Wrong

But Sherman’s comments do not support either interpretation. You have to willingly distort his actual comments to arrive at either claim. Here’s what Sherman actually said,

“They have apologized for their mistake, ceased manufacture of CDs with that technology, and pulled CDs with that technology from store shelves. Seems very responsible to me. How many times that software applications created the same problem? Lots. I wonder whether they’ve taken as aggressive steps as SonyBMG has when those vulnerabilities were discovered, or did they just post a patch on the Internet?”

Sherman’s point is clear — Sony screwed up, but it was far more responsible and pro-active than even many software companies are when vulnerabilities come out. He’s absolutely right on the recall point. When was the last time a software company pulled product off the shelf to avoid exposing consumers to software vulnerabilities? I seem to remember a publisher pulling a game that contained a virus, but not much other than that. Most prefer, as Sherman notes, to simply post a patch on the Internet.

Now Sherman’s point about the responsiveness of Sony is certainly debatable. An alternate interpretation is Sony had to be browbeaten into recalling the CDs — after all one of its executives said the rootkit wasn’t a big deal because most users wouldn’t even know what a rootkit was.

But Sherman is clearly not saying he approves of Sony’s actions, and he’s also clearly not saying that many companies use rootkits.

Distorting his words and meaning to say so is really a dumb thing to do.

More Nonsense from Boing! Boing!

Cory Doctorow makes the ridiculous claimthat,

. . . shut down the Lokitorrent site (Xeni’s post from yesterday), they hijacked the domain and put up a snotty note that included the phrase “You can click, but you can’t hide.”

That follows on Xeni Jardin’s posting yesterday, which quoted reprinted speculation that the MPAA had hijacked the domain name,

Many Boing Boing readers wrote in today to express dismay at the MPAA’s decision to replace shuttered filesharing sites with their own content. Reader Brad Clarke says, “Taking down a site is one thing but putting up their own content has GOT to be illegal. He’s to hoping they finally went too far.”

But if they would actually bother to read the news stories they link to, the explanation is likely a lot less dramatic,

The Motion Picture Association of America said Thursday that it had won a quick court victory against LokiTorrent, and was launching a new round of actions against other online piracy hubs. The data provided by the onetime file-swapping hub would provide “a roadmap to others who have used LokiTorrent to engage in illegal activities,” the trade group said.

. . .

As part of the court order, the site’s operator was asked to pay a settlement fee of close to $1 million.

Unless Xeni Jadin and Cory Doctorow have evidence that MPAA hijacked the domain — which they should certainly disclosed if they’re goig to go around making these sort of charges — a more likely explanation is that the folks behind LokiTorrent cut a deal with the MPAA to turn over the entire site. Losing a court case and facing a proposed $1 million settlement fee has a way of doing that to people.

Boing! Boing! Has the Right Approach to RSS Feed Ads

I think Boing! Boing! has exactly the right approach to ads in RSS feeds. Their feed has the full text of their blog entries, and they’re putting ads in about 1/3rd of those in the RSS feed.

Frankly, I think it’d be perfectly reasonable to put them in each entry. What I can’t stand and unsubscribe from immediately are the folks who have a headline from their blog, followed by an ad, followed by another headline, followed by an ad.