Comments on: Commenting On Comments

By: Bryan

Bryan — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 18:49:42 +0000

Steve, my constant worry as these things keep getting rolled out is a number of people I’ve encountered over the years who have the skill set to turn the Internet into a living hell if they get really annoyed. There are a lot of bitter people with time on their hands and knowledge, who could make the “script kiddie” attacks look like pale ale if they decided to “take action”.

I delete spam and commercial junk, Ellroon, but I’ll let almost anything through that’s not a personal attack on someone other than me. It costs no money to start a blog, so they can burn their own bandwidth if they want to attack.

By: ellroon

ellroon — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 16:09:16 +0000

I’ve had only one troll, the one from Toronto who is a real mental case. He’s been stalking a few bloggers who comment at Eschaton. Obsessively collects personal information. So I’ve deleted him several times. People clean up after their dogs, so I clean up my blog.

“There aren’t any short cuts. Discover the crime, investigate it, determine the suspect, and prosecute. That’s what works – always.” Bryan, well said! Politicians pretend they have quick fixes and talk a blue streak about how they will transform our society but they can never deliver.

Have commandeered your quote. (It’s hard work running a blog on these here tubal internets and stealing from all over.)

By: Steve Bates

Steve Bates — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 06:46:10 +0000

McCain seems to have forgotten how much his prospects for (s)election as president depend on the proper functioning of the tubes of the internets. Perhaps he’s also forgotten that, in addition to Democrats and other liberals, there are vast armies of technical professionals with a (small-l) libertarian outlook who will not tolerate this kind of nonsense… and don’t have to, given their skills. If this law were to pass… unlikely, I think… I’d hate to be McCain’s ISP or webmaster in the run-up to the 2008 elections.

Faced with such a law, I will personally engage in civil disobedience, refusing to file any sort of reports on my commenters, let alone censoring them. (Full disclosure: I do censor trolls. It’s my bandwidth, and blogs are free if they want a soapbox.) If even a quarter of the approximately 50 million bloggers out there (I read that figure somewhere this week) were to refuse to comply, it would render the law unenforceable. That’s fine with me, as it is already unconstitutional.