[Imc-web] Re: [IMC-Tech] Adding Tags to Articles

[Mike Lehman]

Thanks for confirming that it wasn't you, David.

We need to have whoever did this take responsibility for it.

Then we need to have any such changes to the website approved by 
consensus on list here, at a minimum.

Otherwise, we have a significant security problem that we need to get to 
the bottom of ASAP. This is very inappropriate and if we need to start 
over with a complete review of who has site and server permissions to 
get to the bottom of it, then that's what we'll need to do. It would be 
good to get this resolved, otherwise we're going to need to have all the 
Tech people to the next Steering meeting to make sure that we're all on 
the same page -- or simply turn things off until we get that consensus 
established.

Ever since wayward's (perhaps witting, perhaps unwitting) compromise of 
the website's privacy, I know of a number of registered users who won't 
use their accounts and prefer to remain anonymous, because her 
actions/inactions, whether intentional or not, have compromised what our 
users have come to expect. This is yet another incident that's 
suggestive of less than fully ethical or competent web administration on 
our part and we need to get this sorted out and the bad actors locked 
out before it does further damage.
Mike Lehman

David Gehrig wrote:
> Mike, don't know who put them up, but it's not me.
>
> We've already had a problem with someone deciding to hang
> something on UCIMC that exposed IP addresses to the public.
> We should discuss this on Wednesday. My view is that IP
> addresses shouldn't be exposed outside the site, and they
> should only be exposed to the Web folks to the minimum
> degree possible to fight spammers.
>
> The trade-off, of course, is that we don't want to
> ghetto-ize ourselves either by locking ourselves out of
> major services.
>
> Either way, I've changed a setting to turn off the
> google link and not to display the logos.
>
> On 6/10/07, Mike Lehman <rebelmike at earthlink.net> wrote:
>> Doing a little research, I came across these links:
>> http://digg.com/privacy
>> http://www.bit-tech.net/columns/2006/06/03/web_2_privacy/1
>>
>> del-icio.us is associated with Yahoo, which has long been infamous for
>> its exploitation of user data through web beacons:
>> http://del.icio.us/help/privacy
>>
>> technorati
>> http://technorati.com/about/privacy.html
>>
>> The Google thing seems associated with the Google blog mechanism. Google
>> has some big issues with privacy, too, and providing a direct link from
>> an IMC seems problematic.
>>
>> Interesting comments on the issue as a whole:
>> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/openyou_the_limits_of_privacy.php
>>
>> All in all, this makes the IMC site seem to look like a blog, even
>> though we've got consensus that IMC is NOT a blog. Having these tags on
>> the site will tend to encourage blog-type behavior, something which
>> we've been struggling with  lately, even though we've explicitly
>> rejected blogging as part of the main news site.
>>
>> Note that I do not object to setting up a separate UC IMC blog, if some
>> members feel we need it. But I think that making the IMC news page look
>> like a blog is a mistake.
>> Mike Lehman
>>
>> Mike Lehman wrote:
>> > I see that we suddenly have a variety of Google, Digg, Technorati, etc
>> > tags added to articles on the website. I have a several concerns about
>> > these.
>> >
>> > 1. They all seem to require user registration and this will presumably
>> > compromise the privacy of those who use them on our site.
>> >
>> > 2.Having them on IMC makes us a party to their marketing efforts. This
>> > seems to be a questionable policy for an IMC to engage in.
>> >
>> > 3. Does the software involved in these report or log IPs in any
>> > fashion? I presume they do, given Google record on this.
>> >
>> > Since most internet users can presumably use the regular Google
>> > search, I question the need for these additions, particularly so if
>> > they raise privacy concerns as they seem to.
>> > Mike Lehman
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>> >
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