Off By One

There ought to be a word in the English language which captures the idea of people decrying the provincial bigotry of others in a provincial and bigoted tone.

Walk through caverns of concrete.

That sewer system is cyclopean. Talk about a sense of insignificance, when you realize that the effluent of a megacity like Tokyo requires structures that bring to mind the caves at the gates of hades.

One might be led to wonder whether there is any real expectation of privacy, out in the wilds of the internet. Certainly, it’s clear that people typically act in such a way as to minimize this. An example, and one with more than a few facets to be examined, is the incident provoked (and prodded… and …) by a blogger by the name of Jason Fortuny.

Fortuny, looking at Craigslist, observed this, and made a decision that is — at best — unethical, and at worst actively sociopathic. He posted an explicit ad to a casual encounters section of a Craigslist site (a section devoted to hooking up for no-strings-attached sex) and waited for responses. Those, he got in spades. Having accumulated a fair number of responses from all walks of life, containing personal information such as phone numbers, names, e-mail addresses, and photos — many of which consisted of nude or semi-nude shots — he proceeded to post this information to the web.

At waxy.org, there are at the very least two fairly serious potential legal ramifications to Fortuny’s actions (Sex Baiting Prank on Craigslist), having to do with the exposure of private information, and deliberate attempts to cause distress. These pale, however, beside the ethical and moral ramifications. Fortuny’s stated aim with this was to “push buttons”, and at this he’s succeeded. He’s also succeeded in causing at least one separation (no citation, sadly, except a peripheral mention in the Waxy article) and no small amount of distress to parties involved. Moreover, he’s spawned a copycat already.

So, the question that’s worth asking — and is well asked at the Wired blog that pointed me at this — is, for those who are thinking… “well, they got what they deserved, trolling for sex on the internet”, is this thought experiment:

What if it the Craig’s List posting was about:

• A 25 year-old woman looking for a sugar daddy?
• A depressed woman looking for a fellow depressed guy?
• A dom woman looking for submissive men to humiliate?
• A gay man looking for ‘straight’ guys?
• A ‘straight’ woman looking for a butch lesbian?
• A butch lesbian looking for a ‘straight’ woman?
• A lesbian looking for a lesbian?
• A closeted gay man looking for another closeted, discreet man?
• An overweight, not attractive straight guy looking for a date?
• A 21-year-old hipster looking for another hipster into?
• A goth woman looking for a goth guy into leather and trenchcoats?
• A couple looking for a third person to watch them have sex?
• A Christian woman looking for a Christian man?
• A furry looking for another furry?
• A Cos-Player looking for someone to dress up with them?
• A middle aged woman who doesn’t know she has terrible taste in poetry looking for a man who will buy her flowers, take her for walks on beaches and compose saccharine poems that rhyme?

Which of these do you feel superior enough to that you would want to see their private notes and photos displayed illegally on the internet? And what’s your justification for choosing what kind of people are reprehensible enough to you that their private lives should be splayed on the internet for anyone, from family to friends to co-workers to acquaintances to their bosses, to see?

—from Wired 27B Stroke 6

So, tempest in a teapot? Violation on a par with rape? Just short of? Sadistic action of a man-child? Sociopathic cruelty?

What do you think? There’s a fair number of starting points for thought on Metafilter, where this is presently being hotly debated.

From the net.humour namespace:

A few weeks ago, I purchased a license for OmniWeb 5.5 during its beta phase. I became aware of it a couple of years ago, when it became the darling of the mac-using contingent of the Software Systems group at the U of A, mainly due to its polished user experience and stability.

I have not been so enamoured of it, I have to regretfully confess, and I have — reluctantly, since I paid for it — returned to the arms of Camino.

OmniWeb is pretty decent, with more than a few nice features built in: It’s tabbed browser model includes a thumbnail-sized preview of the page in the tab, so that you can see where you’re going. It uses a modified version of the Apple WebKit, which means that it behaves in ways very similar to Safari, including using true Cocoa widgets for web page input. This is a selling point because much of OSX’s user experience stems from the system-wide integration of applications and services, all of which depend on the builtin behaviour of the UI widgets.

OmniWeb’s flaws, however, made themselves known to me throughout the beta. I was more than willing to wait for them to resolve themselves during the beta process, but at this point, they have released the final version of 5.5, and still they’re not fixed.

One problem was stability. With a great many tabs open, containing images or pages, OmniWeb slows to a crawl. This isn’t too surprising, because RAM ain’t cheap, but it could be smarter about keeping tabs in memory or allowing them to be paged. Add into this mix a high likelihood of crashing when under load, and you have a very irritating situation.

The worst problem, however, seems to be the fault of WebKit, not OmniWeb itself, although their claim that they use a modified version suggests improvements, when I have a sneaking suspicion it means “older version”. If you use Gmail, and who doesn’t these days, then you’ve noticed that when you create a mail message and press ‘tab, enter’ from the edit box it sends the message. Kind of a reflex by now.

That doesn’t work in OmniWeb, not at all.

Now, there’s a tradeoff to be made, here, of course — OmniWeb and Safari have native widgets, which means that — for example — the keystrokes I use in editing text elsewhere on the system work consistently, a bit of polish that does not apply to Camino or Firefox. It’s features are many and fabulous, but it shouldn’t be final with that set of issues.

Although the likelihood of any of my readers directly using the freedoms that they have at present with regards to circumventing digital content management schemes is low-to-nil, it still occurs to me that you might be interested in bill C-60, which would take these silent, but vital, rights from you.

So, well, here’s a very well-spoken law professor’s take on it, by way of 30 days of DRM

In a world of fearmongering media and government, it seems to me that life would be better if we could just fucking count!

Found on the interweb a short time ago, and brought again to my attention today by the good folks at MetaFilter:

Events since Duke Nukem Forever was announced.

This is a bit of a sobering list of things that have happened since DNF was announced nine+ years ago. The truly jarring one is the fact that NASA — amongst the most legendarily ponderous bureaucracies in North America — “proposed, authorized, announced, designed, launched and successfully landed [the two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity] upon Mars where they have been exploring the surface for over 2.5 years.”

Wow.

A friend of my co-worker, call him “A”, is the subject of this post.

On Canada Day, “A” was stabbed.

“A” is a chef, by trade.

Odds are good that “A” will be receiving one of these, delivered to him more-or-less anonymously.

Life is full of the funny, sometimes.

A: Looking forward to a good game of hockey tonight, good hamburgers, and good company.

W: Found a nifty site called Luxist that blogs the things of the rich and famous. I smack my lips in consumerist glee at some of them, and shake my head in vague discomfort at others.

S: Against all odds, my iPod works again!

If you could see me, I couldn’t claim to be dancing a merry jig. Since you can’t, I am.