The asshole bar is raised again

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.

Out of limbo

I’m now transferred to a new group within Team IBM. I have lots of real work to do, it’s important and visible (at least within Big Blue), and could be really difficult. I feel more relaxed than I have in months. Perverse, I know, but being somewhat at a loose end makes me tense—whereas impossible deadlines and server crashes relax me. If a vital system goes down for some completely inexplicable reason, generally I’ll be completely calm and methodical as I diagnose and probe and experiment until I establish exactly what’s wrong, and then fix it.