Jeneane now has her good named linked to this libelous (IANAL) “hit piece”. Motives aside… it does little good to fight incredibly ugly trolls by attacking people with “six degrees” of association to the ugliness.

Frank Paynter also has some reasonable claims to innocense and Chris Locke as well. The final suspect, Alan Herrell, has claimed that his compurters were hacked and the site compromised. Alan could be misoginistic in his humor but the skippery slope seems to have swept the

whole content into the dust bin at this point and left only an incerdibly detailed blog post repleat with the offensive materials that no one can determine the authorship of… read them carefully… do they meet the standard of a death threat? They are offensive to a great degree but fear seems to be trumping fact.

I hope Kathy recovers as we would wish anyone with a traumatic stress event. But defaming a group of respected web authors as a vicious cabal is to me reprehensible. At some point I would like to see the record set straight for the benefit of civil behavior on the net.

In this whole affair I count close to a dozen victims and one or two trolls who are really enjoying their skills and causing others pain.

There are a lot of people weighing in that should know better… critical thinking should be a valued trait for A-List Bloggers. That for me is a standard we should hold the web to… high traffic for your site is accompanied by the need to avoid crying “Help” and mentioning your assialants in the same blog post and then later finding out your were in error and doing nothing to address the secondary injuries from a hasty accusation.

There maybe criminal charges resulting from the text posted and there could reasonably be civil charges for defamation of character and loss of the ability to find work. Ugliness all around.

Not a proud meme for the net as a whole. Tho’ a few notable people stuck true to reserved judgement and tact: Doc Serles, Dave Winer, Shelley Powers, Rogers Cadenhead and to a degree Tim O’Reilly (but his affection for Kathy Sierra as a friend made him push hard for action without a complete analysis of facts, IMHO).

However, I have to think there are more options than the two most bloggers are proposing: 1) ignore the meanies and delete their comments or 2) out the meanies and set a lynch mob on them.

There’s got to be something a bit more creative and effective at attacking the root cause, hatred of women, than those options. Maybe if we keep thinking about it and talking about it we can come up with something.

‘Honestly until this week I thought this sort of constant harassment was so common and so obvious it wasn’t even worth mentioning. It had gone on for so long and I had gotten so used to it that it hadn’t occurred to me that this is anything other than what it means to be female on the internet.’

That is so sad. I’ve been in the computer business in some form or another for a tad over 45 years, and I’ve had a presence on the Internet since — well, since Gopher and FTP were the main protocols for interfacing with sites, email addresses had complicated chains of routing instructions, and there wasn’t an Internet Explorer! And when I started programming for a living, there were close to equal numbers of men and women, and we treated each other with respect.

There may have been and may still be a glass ceiling, but in the ranks of “middle management”, you were as likely to find a woman or an Asian or an African American as you were to find a white male. That’s the way it was. And until about six months ago, I thought it was still that way. Then, at a Ruby conference, I discovered that a lot has changed.

What happened? When did this happen? How did the “geek culture” become so male-dominated? How did the Internet turn from a university to a shopping mall, and then to a war zone? Who took the industry I’ve devoted my career to and turned it into this? And how did Americans like “Joey” come to practice terrorism on an American high-tech icon like Kathy Sierra?

Ed Borasky

P.S.: If you’re in contact with Kathy, give her my love and support.

I give up. I can’t fight a giant echo chamber that won’t be critical. At least you were and I thank you.

Joey

On a net level, I think that site administrators should not allow or condone more anonymity than is necessary to deliver the content. I’ve spent decades around the pseudoanonymity of Usenet where posters had “handles” that allowed them to create net personae that were not necessarily connected to their “real” lives, but were still known to their local admins who would finger them if they ever violated the ToS in a particularly noteworthy way. I think this is a fine balance that covers the overwhelming majority of online communication. Every once in a while, someone would want to go through an anonymous router to post something, but then you’d be able to process that with whatever grain of salt you thought was appropriate.

It’s a pity that Mr. Locke’s interview doesn’t address (what is to me) the central question: is he so slimy that he is harboring the identity of an online predator, or is he so lame that he created a forum in which he has no authority over the content entered into it? I suppose neither is attractive, and perhaps it is just that he spend the rest of his professional life answering for this event.

At the same time, what on earth is the “blogosphere” and what are our hopes for it to become in the future? Ms. SIerra seems to envision it as a “culture”, which seems overly ambitious to me because I don’t think that bloggers are much more similar to each other than are people who use the telephone. But if the goal is to foster an increased location-neutral interconnectedness between people, shouldn’t we demand that people provide an identity for us to connect to?

The blog entries I saw cross the line.

If Kathy has reported this abuse to her ISP or hosting company that hosts her blog, then the ISP/hoster *should* do something about it. If Kathy were my customer, and I became aware of this abuse, you can damn betcha I would block his sorry ass at the router leve, and have a little talk with my counterpart abuse guy at the source ISP.

It’s part of an ISP’s job, in my view.

In other notes, thanks for the post. Yours and Shelley Powers’ are the only ones I saw that sounded measured and considered. Roughly 99.9% of all the noise about this incident, particularly the noise made by men, was knee-jerk outrage – and yeah, I am completely in agreement with your cynical outlook.

PS.: I momentarily considered making a tongue-in-cheek death threat here in response to your last sentence because that’s typically how I play along with “now watch how X, of all things, happens” suggestions… except it just wouldn’t be funny in this case.

I tend to side with Jef here — that it wouldn’t be a catastrophe if IP packets were generally traceable back to a real person; I say “generally” because I have no doubt that the ${secret police} can already do so if they want to. It’s the rest of us who can’t.

But otherwise, yes: this sort of abuse should not be passed by in silence. It should be posted, because it does shock the rest of the world.

Short answer: yes. Every dictatorship’s dream!

The Republican National Committee investigated (or spied upon, your choice) and compiled dossiers on every potential opposition group for a year before the 2004 convention in NYC. Result: lots of FAST arrests. At one time the current Bush administration was demanding medical records of any third trimester abortions performed in the past few years from doctors known to perform those procedures; this was to determine whether they were truly medically necessary. The government had no evidence of anything illegal, just a feeling that one of those procedures MUST have been illegal. Fortunately, the courts disagreed with the administration.

Anything that can be abused by a government will be. The trick is to give the government as little power or tools to abuse as possible.

Kathy: So glad to see you writing on the Net again!

I guess if we had that, soon afterwards we’d all get anonymous comments on our blogs saying “Die human meatbags. Robots will kill!” But that might be an improvement over the current situation–at least the insane AI computers would probably have better spelling.

For research purposes, here’s a link to info / definition of You Own Your Own WordsKeep in mind when responding to a topic or entering a new one that the other users also have feelings. Please avoid trampling on them. Also, remember that comments entered in hasty reaction to someone else’s posting will be available to be read long after you have entered them. So it is wise to exercise some moderation and good judgement.