Day: November 19, 2002

refers us to Spinsanity’s fact checking of Michael Moore:
“Moore has apparently altered footage of an ad run by the Bush/Quayle campaign in 1988 to implicate Bush in the Willie Horton scandal. Making a point about the use of racial symbols to scare the American public, he shows the Bush/Quayle ad called “Revolving Doors,” which attacked Michael Dukakis for a Massachusetts prison furlough program by showing prisoners entering and exiting a prison (the original ad can be seen here [Real Player video]). Superimposed over the footage of the prisoners is the text “Willie Horton released. Then kills again.” This caption is displayed as if it is part of the original ad. However, existing footage, media reports and the recollections of several high-level people involved in the campaign indicate that the “Revolving Doors” ad did not explicitly mention Horton…”
Maybe I’m over-using my old Communications Law class knowledge, but couldn’t a legitimate case be made that this is, therefore, a libelous and actionable accusation on Moore’s part against Bush? I would think that demonstrating potential harm would be feasible; and doesn’t Moore altering the tape to make it appear Bush said something he didn’t constitute the kind of “false statement” to which libel law would apply?
Put more generally: does altering and re-broadcasting a statement made by another person in a way which might cause damage to them constitute libel?
Legal eagles of the Blogosphere: little help?
PS – Crap. It’s likely slander, not libel, isn’t it? Too late to change now; I’ll just sit here and wonder how I ever passed that Comm Law course…

Werbach argues in Slate that spam has “doomed” email as we know it:
Or at least it’s about to destroy the e-mail we’re used to: the tool that lets a stranger respond to something you posted on your Web site or that lets a potential client contact you after reading an article you wrote. E-mail is pervasive because it’s simple to use, remarkably flexible, and it reaches everyone. The trouble is that e-mail is too good at that third task. Because e-mail inboxes are open to anyone, longtime Internet users now receive hundreds of spams per day, making e-mail virtually unusable without countermeasures.
This is a problem dear to my heart, and Werbach illuminates the crux of it well. Tools exist to ensure that you are never bothered by spam — but only if you are prepared to abandon filters and opt instead for a “white list” system that requires you identify allowed senders in advance.
For some people, this works just fine; they don’t want anybody they don’t already know sending them email. But for others — those with, say, weblogs — it doesn’t work at all. An email address that requires prior permission to use is useless if what you want is feedback from an unknown reader.
But Werbach overreaches, I think, when he argues that the consequence of this dilemma will inevitably be an abandonment of ‘open’ e-mail. (“E-mail’s openness is doomed when faced with massive traffic and a few bad actors.”)
First, it is important to recognize that openness is not an attribute that all e-mail users require — and in fact, I’d argue that the vast majority care little about. While I can’t offer any hard evidence, my suspicion is that most e-mail addresses are used by people who only use them for communications with specific friends or business associates. They don’t have a need to place their address in a publicly available forum; the only people they need to communicate with can simply ask for it. For these users, then, a white-list solution for spam works just fine; the required sacrifice of openness is not truly a sacrifice at all to them.
An analysis of the future evolution of openness, therefore, should focus on those users who do require it, not the e-mail using population as a whole. And here I suggest that there is an advantage that Werbach overlooks: that the community of users who require openness in e-mail is, almost by definition, a community of individuals who are either technically savvy or have the resources to pay somebody else to be savvy for them.
And this is a key advantage in the fight against the spammers, because solutions do exist to allow the public display of an e-mail address in a form that cannot be read by spam-collecting robots. Dean Peters’ eMail Obfucscator is one example: it applies a simple technique to pack an e-mail address with extraneous characters that confuse a spambot — but are ignored by a browser. The e-mail link displays properly to a user, and can be clicked to automatically send mail as always, but spambots end up with garbage when they try to scan it.
Now, such a solution isn’t foolproof; surely someone will come up with a spambot that can get around Dean’s clever tool eventually (if they haven’t already). But the real battleground is a very narrow one: the question is whether technical solutions can be found to allow a user to click a link to e-mail, while still preventing automatic harvesting by spambots. That’s all. Because we know for certain that, in the worst case, an e-mail address displayed as, for example, a JPG image rather than text, will never be machine readable. (Well, perhaps not never, but no-time soon at a reasonable cost). And the only loss would be the requirement for a user to type in the address themselves (a variant of this approach, listing your address as “somebody – at – something – dot – com” is already in widespread use).
So: solutions exist to minimize the risk of publicly displaying your e-mail address, and it turns out that the community of users who need such solutions are also the very people who have the technical knowledge and/or resources to use them.
As a practical validation of the argument that openness will survive, take the weblog community itself. I performed a quick, admittedly pseudo-scientific survey of the top 25 personal weblogs (blogs that appear to be written by a single individual) on the Myelin Ecosystem. Of those, 21 had e-mail addresses listed. Two — John Robb and Jon Udell — utilize a HTML form to allow users to send feedback, leaving only two others — Adam Curry and Ev Williams — who don’t appear to provide any feedback mechanism or e-mail address.
So, in our community, even for the most heavily-trafficked sites, 84% of users still think e-mail openness is worth the risk of spam — or have found ways to deal with it.
And this should come as no surprise. Because the final, most damning argument against the prophecy of doom for open e-mail is the simplest: open e-mail will continue to exist because there’s just no real alternative. Web publishers and others have a burning need to allow people to contact them — and that means that one way or another, they’ll make their e-mail address available to those who want to find it.
Even if it does mean getting a few messages from relatives of dead Nigerian ministers now and then.

Has anyone noticed the difference in approach to two alleged Middle-East “massacres” of civilians — one Jenin, and one this past weekend in Hebron?
Seven months have passed, and you still hear Palestinians and their supporters arguing civilians were slaughtered en masse at Jenin, despite a complete lack of evidence for this claim. (Even the U.N. couldn’t manage to find any).
Initial reports of the attack in Hebron also called it a “massacre”, implying that unarmed civlilans were the primary target. Within a few days, however, it became clear that those who were killed were mostly IDF soldiers — and the “massacre” language was dropped:
Foreign Ministry spokesman Gideon Meir said the Hebron “massacre” report came from accounts that the attack “happened as people were returning from synagogues, from prayers.
Militants spearheading an uprising that broke out after talks on Palestinian statehood broke down in mid-2000 have also killed scores of Israeli civilians in suicide attacks in Israel…
Asked if the ministry had erred on Hebron, Meir said, “That’s hindsight. We had information we trusted that later was found to be wrong.”
I eagerly await the day when we see a similarly honest statement from the Palestinian Authority correcting one of their earlier inflated claims.
Heck, I’d settle for one from Amnesty International.

So did anybody actually catch a good view of the meteor shower this morning?
I checked for a few minutes around 3:30am, but didn’t see anything. The near-full moon didn’t seem to help. (Neither did my short attention span, I’m sure, but it was chilly out on the old patio in my bathrobe).
I can sort-of see the sky from my office now, and its still dark, but the reflection of my monitor glare probably rules out me seeing anything that isn’t Armageddon-sized…