Flutterby™! : the Kathy Sierra incident

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the Kathy Sierra incident

2007-03-28 23:48:19.602182+00 by Dan Lyke 2 comments

I first became aware of Death threats against bloggers are NOT "protected speech" (why I cancelled my ETech presentations) through Tom Negrino's post yesterday. Since then I've also seen Lyn's sidebar, RC3 linking to Laura LeMay, and Bill Humphries's entry on the topic, which points to Min Jung Kim: It’s Awful. Yes., which points out that:

It’s just the first time it’s happened to someone that you know.

It sounds like there's some password theft and extreme trolling going on, and I'm not sure what all the backstory is, although if Dori and Tom vouch for someone I'm gonna take their side.

But I do want to say that there's an awful lot of the vibe of a web site that can be determined through social means. Sometimes that requires keeping a lower profile (as Flutterby's robots.txt attests). It also means that "you own your own words" isn't a defense: It's incumbent on all of us to "frown at racism" (as one historical example), and to make sure that while we have open discussion, we don't let certain attitudes get out of hand at our parties. Even in the most charitable interpretation for everyone involved, we each get to determine whether or not we get trolled by how we react to the trolling.

Now if y'all will excuse me, I'm thinking I should probably be a little more careful about certain security issues.

[ related topics: Weblogs Net Culture Community Race ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: made: 2007-03-29 00:56:38.93481+00 by: Dan Lyke

If any of y'all are out there trying to run this to ground, here's the thread in which the phrase "Mean Kids" apparently first came up.

But now I'm regretting making the posting because I've got this annoying feeling that, one way or the other, I've been trolled.

#Comment Re: made: 2007-03-29 10:58:44.005226+00 by: meuon

My theory is that there are people that live for "soap opera drama", and one of my hard core rules has become that when I run into people whose life sounds like it could be on a Jerry Springer show, Soap Opera, or a "made for Lifetime TV movie", I get as far away as I can as fast as I can.

Or you get "sucked in". It's like a Fido362 (old-school pre-internet sysops forum) with amateur's and much less access control.

What you say on a blog can incite some real response, this telemarketer "stock broker" scum post elicited phone calls and vague, but real, verbal threats. I've also got the 'create a login' feature temporarily disabled because of them.