Live from Austin!

A few days ago a web developer in Seattle called Jason Fortuny posted a personal ad to the Seattle Craigslist. He apparently lifted the text from a personal posted to another city’s Craigslist.

The ad was a sexually explicit one, from a submissive woman seeking BDSM sex. Fortuny posted it using the Craigslist e-mail anonymizing option. He then collected the responses—178 or more, with at least 145 photos.

Then he published everything on the web. Every single response, unedited, including all the personal information and photographs that people had sent him.

You’ll find threads about it all over the place if you do a few searches. I’m not going to link to any of it, and I’m not going to give any clues to where the personal information was posted. Go search if you really feel you must know; I don’t feel the need to make the victims’ problems even worse by increasing Fortuny’s pagerank scores.

There are a few things I find interesting about the reaction I’ve seen.

Continue reading »

Do what I say, not what I do:

I first gave the “information wants to be free” speech 12 years ago. And I actually gave it because Patrick Spain and I had started to talk. […] This was 12 years ago, and I gave this speech and everybody said no, no, no. You’re crazy, content is king and if you have it you’re blah, blah, blah.

Well, we all know that they were wrong, that I was right, or if not me then Patrick was right, and I was his instrument. Over that period of time we have seen the fall of the price of information become significantly more dramatic. It’s been astounding, which prompts the question: “Why are you still here?”

[…]

It used to be that if you were an information provider you had control. Now you have no control. Control has absolutely passed to the consumer.

—Michael Wolff, Vanity Fair media columnist, 2005-02-15

Then:

We recently became aware that some of our member’s material is being made available at http://www.cryptome.org/wolff1.html on your Internet service in violation of Federal copyright law, Title 17 of the United States Code. Specifically, Michael Wolff’s Information Industry Summit Keynote Address, which is owned by Michael Wolff is being distributed or offered for distribution without proper licenses and/or authorization from our member within Verio, Inc.’s pages. These works are copyrighted works owned by the member above. Federal copyright law provides substantial protection against the unauthorized copying and distribution of copyrighted works. Anyone who copies or distributes these works without authorization of the copyright owner may be subjected to the remedies provided under the copyright law.

—Michael Wolff’s DMCA takedown notice for reproducing the speech cited above, 2005-03-01

Download and save your copy now before the hypocrite gets it yanked from more web sites.