Post by Traveller on May 23, 2006 9:34:21 GMT -5
Some things are so sick and so outrageous that they simply can not be accepted. One of them you've probably heard a little about on this board, and it's been enough to make us seriously rethink our support for Burning Man.
This all began when one of users (Dustbuddy) checked a claim made by one of the regulars on ePlaya (Rockdad), alleging that a Prof. Van Romero of the New Mexico school of mining had spoken in support of an unusually loopy conspiracy theory that Rockdad was fond of - one that had the Bush administration conspiring with Al Quaeda to bring down the World Trade Towers. Dustbuddy did not have to look far to find contradictory evidence, including transcripts of interviews with the aforementioned Prof.Romero. He posted mention of what he found, along with links to relevant resources for documentation purposes. Rockdad had engaged in fraud to support a pet theory, and Dustbuddy called him on it exactly the way he should have.
I won't say that good men can't have bad moments, but there's a difference in the way good men and bad ones respond to those bad moments, and the way Rockdad respond to his own was disgraceful. Based on nothing that any sane man would consider evidence, he accused Dustbuddy of being a sock puppet of a user calling himself .Hughmungus. Hughmungus had gotten himself into a good many fights, and that was the point of the accusation. The idea is that one points to somebody, claims that he is a hated member of the community in disguise, and then counts on the credulity of many of those present, expecting that the one wrongly accused will then be attacked by the enemies of the person he is supposedly a sock puppet of. It's a method for orchestrating a campaign of harassment against the person so accused.
What more darnning truth could I tell about much of the staff of another site, but that they were supportive of this effort. As anybody who has ever run a board can tell you, when one looks at a post on a board one is moderating, the IP of the user appears at the bottom of the post. This doesn't necessarily allow one to distinguish between different users, because two from the same ISP may very easily end up posting from the same block of IP addresses, but in this case there could not have been a problem. Why? Because Dustbuddy was posting from a strictly local ISP based out of Naperville, Illinois and Hughmungus was posting from Reno, Nevada. The two locations are thousands of miles apart. Seeing the IPs, there could not have been any reasonable doubt.
Very reasonably, Dustbuddy asked that the mods vouch for the fact that his IP didn't match that of Hughmungus, and very unreasonably the moderator on hand (Spectabillis) clutched at straws, looking for any excuse to refuse to comply. Finally, Dustbuddy, after days of trying to reason with Spec, gave up and did the only thing he could. He made a Usenet post using his Googlegroups account, linking between the thread on eplaya and the post in the Googlegroups archives. This had the regrettable effect of greatly disrupting eplaya and somewhat disrupting this forum, because predictably this brought a wave of spambots. This did not make my day, but it was understandable.
What was not understandable, or should I say not acceptable, was what Spec the ePlaya moderator was up to at the time. Hughmungus had been riding Spec's back, so when Rockdad's wronngful accusation of sock puppetry got Hughmungus held up to ridicule, this served Spectabillis' purposes. It also got a perfectly innocent user mistreated, but Spec didn't care about that. The words he wrote in a private message to Observer (another of our users) soon came to mind. Hugh "sees everything in black and white", he said, a usage that should set off warning bells. Usually when somebody says "get a little grey into your life", he says that right before he does something he knows he shouldn't be doing.
Spec, in short order, would do exactly that.
Let us say that you are a moderator and you want to shaft somebody on a large board. How do you do it? Do you remember how I mentioned that as a moderator, I couldn't always distinguish between users? This is because most internet service providers use something called "dynamic IP". When a user dials in, he is temporarily assigned an IP that is good only for that session, drawing from a pool of IP addresses common to a great many users. This allows the ISP to take advantage of the fact that most people aren't logged in most of the time.
The bad news for a moderator is that this means that IP addresses can only be used to disprove the guess that two users are one and the same, and then only under certain circumstances. The two people being 2000 miles apart, obviously, would be one of those circumstances. But, unless the user shows signs of using static IP, the only valid conclusion one can draw from the fact that two people draw from a matching pool of IP addresses is that they use the same ISP. However, BBSes tend to be blessed with a bumper crop of idiots, especially ones for events at which there is as much drug use as there is at Burning Man, which brings us to what an unscrupulous moderator can often to do to stick it to a user, with public approval.
In any given metro area, there really aren't that many ISPs, so even if people were choosing their ISPs in a completely independent manner, odds are that on a large board, if there were a large contingent of people from your town, you would end up sharing an ISP with a number of other users. Dustbuddy was from the Chicago area, and as luck would have it, was doing business with Netsource Communications, the only ISP based out of Naperville, Chicago's largest suburb and Illinois' second largest city (pop. 140,000). A metro area the size of Chicago's is going to have a very large contingent on ePlaya, and Netsource is a very popular ISP in this area. The numbers being what they were, Spec would have known that some of Dustbuddy's fellow Netsourcers would almost certainly be on the board.
What an unscrupulous mod can do under such circumstances is go hunting for the other members who use the same ISP, claim that all are the same person and expose "his" sock puppetry to an audience of trolls who will always love to have an excuse to pounce on somebody and indulge their taste for Schadenfreude. It's an idiotic argument for reasons already explained, and one could use it to "expose" almost anybody posting from a major metropolitan area, but once the groupthink gets going, good luck getting anybody to listen to reason.
Spec was off the hook. He had more than slightly hinted that Rockdad's accusation that Dustbuddy was Hughmungus' sock puppet was a truthful one, and Dustbuddy's link to the Googlegroups archives had revealed that to be a lie, or at least gross equivocation. In taking advantage of the gross ignorance of some and the willful ignorance of others, he was able to distract attention away from that embarassing fact as he scapegoated a user who dared to object o having been used as a "stepping stone". All that he had to do was use some more of us as "stepping stones", and he wasn't shy about doing so.
I imagine that he now thinks that some of us see things in "black and white", too, because we definitely objected.
Part of the joy that Rockdad's game playing brought into Dustbuddy's life was that Dustbuddy was put into the position of having to defend Hughmungus' actions as if they were his own - at least, until he had the temerity to disprove the accusation, greatly offending Spec the moderator, who didn't understand why Dustbuddy wouldn't just lie back and enjoy it. But taking a block of just under 1000 IPs, and convincing the willfully gullible that everybody who posted out of that block was Dustbuddy in disguise, magnified the act of harassment thousands of times over. It was a vicious crank's dream come true, because now (Rockdad) could go looking for any fight that anybody from Dustbuddy's pack at Netsource had gotten into, and get Dustbuddy sucked into that fight, and some of us with him.
All of this, because he had challenged somebody's cite of an authority. This is the kind of thing that a moderator is there to crack down on, and instead we had the modstaff backing the effort, as they pursued their own individual agendas. Dustbuddy was morally outraged by what he was seeing, and I can't say that I blame him.
What he did was gather together some publicly available information, posted it to Usenet, and linked to the post, advising anybody who wished to pursue legal action against Rockdad to follow the link and look at the post. That post was deleted by AntiM on the usual basis ("the rules mean whatever I want them to"), after somebody (Kinetic) tried to claim that the post was illegal, but Dustbuddy's rebuttal left no room for doubt on that point.
Indeed so, and so here is a link to that post, which I am placing at the very top of my board.
Post: Rockdad: where to send the process servers
If the boy is going to continue harassing everybody who dares to question something he writes, or doesn't let him use a creative riding board as a springboard for launching attacks upon his enemies (ahem!), let him do so without the protection of anonymity. If he makes enough of a habit of that, he's going to get his sorry backside sued and he's going to lose that house in Tracy, California. That thought may have a salutory effect on what has been a lengthy history of outrageous and genuinely unlawful behavior on Rockdad's part. It's a little thing called "holding people responsible for their actions".
How interesting that so many burners have a problem with that, but like I said, there is a lot of drug use in Black Rock City. Sometimes it shows.
This all began when one of users (Dustbuddy) checked a claim made by one of the regulars on ePlaya (Rockdad), alleging that a Prof. Van Romero of the New Mexico school of mining had spoken in support of an unusually loopy conspiracy theory that Rockdad was fond of - one that had the Bush administration conspiring with Al Quaeda to bring down the World Trade Towers. Dustbuddy did not have to look far to find contradictory evidence, including transcripts of interviews with the aforementioned Prof.Romero. He posted mention of what he found, along with links to relevant resources for documentation purposes. Rockdad had engaged in fraud to support a pet theory, and Dustbuddy called him on it exactly the way he should have.
I won't say that good men can't have bad moments, but there's a difference in the way good men and bad ones respond to those bad moments, and the way Rockdad respond to his own was disgraceful. Based on nothing that any sane man would consider evidence, he accused Dustbuddy of being a sock puppet of a user calling himself .Hughmungus. Hughmungus had gotten himself into a good many fights, and that was the point of the accusation. The idea is that one points to somebody, claims that he is a hated member of the community in disguise, and then counts on the credulity of many of those present, expecting that the one wrongly accused will then be attacked by the enemies of the person he is supposedly a sock puppet of. It's a method for orchestrating a campaign of harassment against the person so accused.
What more darnning truth could I tell about much of the staff of another site, but that they were supportive of this effort. As anybody who has ever run a board can tell you, when one looks at a post on a board one is moderating, the IP of the user appears at the bottom of the post. This doesn't necessarily allow one to distinguish between different users, because two from the same ISP may very easily end up posting from the same block of IP addresses, but in this case there could not have been a problem. Why? Because Dustbuddy was posting from a strictly local ISP based out of Naperville, Illinois and Hughmungus was posting from Reno, Nevada. The two locations are thousands of miles apart. Seeing the IPs, there could not have been any reasonable doubt.
Very reasonably, Dustbuddy asked that the mods vouch for the fact that his IP didn't match that of Hughmungus, and very unreasonably the moderator on hand (Spectabillis) clutched at straws, looking for any excuse to refuse to comply. Finally, Dustbuddy, after days of trying to reason with Spec, gave up and did the only thing he could. He made a Usenet post using his Googlegroups account, linking between the thread on eplaya and the post in the Googlegroups archives. This had the regrettable effect of greatly disrupting eplaya and somewhat disrupting this forum, because predictably this brought a wave of spambots. This did not make my day, but it was understandable.
What was not understandable, or should I say not acceptable, was what Spec the ePlaya moderator was up to at the time. Hughmungus had been riding Spec's back, so when Rockdad's wronngful accusation of sock puppetry got Hughmungus held up to ridicule, this served Spectabillis' purposes. It also got a perfectly innocent user mistreated, but Spec didn't care about that. The words he wrote in a private message to Observer (another of our users) soon came to mind. Hugh "sees everything in black and white", he said, a usage that should set off warning bells. Usually when somebody says "get a little grey into your life", he says that right before he does something he knows he shouldn't be doing.
Spec, in short order, would do exactly that.
Let us say that you are a moderator and you want to shaft somebody on a large board. How do you do it? Do you remember how I mentioned that as a moderator, I couldn't always distinguish between users? This is because most internet service providers use something called "dynamic IP". When a user dials in, he is temporarily assigned an IP that is good only for that session, drawing from a pool of IP addresses common to a great many users. This allows the ISP to take advantage of the fact that most people aren't logged in most of the time.
The bad news for a moderator is that this means that IP addresses can only be used to disprove the guess that two users are one and the same, and then only under certain circumstances. The two people being 2000 miles apart, obviously, would be one of those circumstances. But, unless the user shows signs of using static IP, the only valid conclusion one can draw from the fact that two people draw from a matching pool of IP addresses is that they use the same ISP. However, BBSes tend to be blessed with a bumper crop of idiots, especially ones for events at which there is as much drug use as there is at Burning Man, which brings us to what an unscrupulous moderator can often to do to stick it to a user, with public approval.
In any given metro area, there really aren't that many ISPs, so even if people were choosing their ISPs in a completely independent manner, odds are that on a large board, if there were a large contingent of people from your town, you would end up sharing an ISP with a number of other users. Dustbuddy was from the Chicago area, and as luck would have it, was doing business with Netsource Communications, the only ISP based out of Naperville, Chicago's largest suburb and Illinois' second largest city (pop. 140,000). A metro area the size of Chicago's is going to have a very large contingent on ePlaya, and Netsource is a very popular ISP in this area. The numbers being what they were, Spec would have known that some of Dustbuddy's fellow Netsourcers would almost certainly be on the board.
What an unscrupulous mod can do under such circumstances is go hunting for the other members who use the same ISP, claim that all are the same person and expose "his" sock puppetry to an audience of trolls who will always love to have an excuse to pounce on somebody and indulge their taste for Schadenfreude. It's an idiotic argument for reasons already explained, and one could use it to "expose" almost anybody posting from a major metropolitan area, but once the groupthink gets going, good luck getting anybody to listen to reason.
Spec was off the hook. He had more than slightly hinted that Rockdad's accusation that Dustbuddy was Hughmungus' sock puppet was a truthful one, and Dustbuddy's link to the Googlegroups archives had revealed that to be a lie, or at least gross equivocation. In taking advantage of the gross ignorance of some and the willful ignorance of others, he was able to distract attention away from that embarassing fact as he scapegoated a user who dared to object o having been used as a "stepping stone". All that he had to do was use some more of us as "stepping stones", and he wasn't shy about doing so.
I imagine that he now thinks that some of us see things in "black and white", too, because we definitely objected.
Part of the joy that Rockdad's game playing brought into Dustbuddy's life was that Dustbuddy was put into the position of having to defend Hughmungus' actions as if they were his own - at least, until he had the temerity to disprove the accusation, greatly offending Spec the moderator, who didn't understand why Dustbuddy wouldn't just lie back and enjoy it. But taking a block of just under 1000 IPs, and convincing the willfully gullible that everybody who posted out of that block was Dustbuddy in disguise, magnified the act of harassment thousands of times over. It was a vicious crank's dream come true, because now (Rockdad) could go looking for any fight that anybody from Dustbuddy's pack at Netsource had gotten into, and get Dustbuddy sucked into that fight, and some of us with him.
All of this, because he had challenged somebody's cite of an authority. This is the kind of thing that a moderator is there to crack down on, and instead we had the modstaff backing the effort, as they pursued their own individual agendas. Dustbuddy was morally outraged by what he was seeing, and I can't say that I blame him.
What he did was gather together some publicly available information, posted it to Usenet, and linked to the post, advising anybody who wished to pursue legal action against Rockdad to follow the link and look at the post. That post was deleted by AntiM on the usual basis ("the rules mean whatever I want them to"), after somebody (Kinetic) tried to claim that the post was illegal, but Dustbuddy's rebuttal left no room for doubt on that point.
This is an exercise in futility, Kinetic. The "personal information" you refer to was posted to Googlegroups, so the mods on ePlaya are quite incapable of removing it. Nor can they keep the Burning Man community from having access to a link to that post, because I made sure to post a copy to Travel to Burning Man, where AntiM, Spectabillis et al. have no authority. For good measure, I've already taken to contacting a number of ePlaya's very angry and public critics, asking if I could post to their forums if my posts are censored on ePlaya. You might be surprised at how many of those critics there are, and some of their pages are doing very well in the search engine rankings. The responses I've been getting have been supportive.
Every piece of information I posted was publicly available, obtained through well known sources available for use by the general public, so regardless of what kind of trouble Rockdad manages to foolishly get himself into, there won't even be so much as a cause for civil action much less criminal prosecution. Public information is public and this has been tested out in the courts, so deal with it. Get as overwrought as you want, and I'm sure you will, but you can't change the fact that your complaint is without legal merit.
Every piece of information I posted was publicly available, obtained through well known sources available for use by the general public, so regardless of what kind of trouble Rockdad manages to foolishly get himself into, there won't even be so much as a cause for civil action much less criminal prosecution. Public information is public and this has been tested out in the courts, so deal with it. Get as overwrought as you want, and I'm sure you will, but you can't change the fact that your complaint is without legal merit.
Indeed so, and so here is a link to that post, which I am placing at the very top of my board.
Post: Rockdad: where to send the process servers
If the boy is going to continue harassing everybody who dares to question something he writes, or doesn't let him use a creative riding board as a springboard for launching attacks upon his enemies (ahem!), let him do so without the protection of anonymity. If he makes enough of a habit of that, he's going to get his sorry backside sued and he's going to lose that house in Tracy, California. That thought may have a salutory effect on what has been a lengthy history of outrageous and genuinely unlawful behavior on Rockdad's part. It's a little thing called "holding people responsible for their actions".
How interesting that so many burners have a problem with that, but like I said, there is a lot of drug use in Black Rock City. Sometimes it shows.