[Imc-web] Re: [Imc] UCIMC and Anonymity

[David Gehrig]

Gordy is correct. Some menu options I'm pretty sure I did not enable
as part of the original installation in October have since been enabled
without my knowledge. They have now been disabled.

On 5/1/07, Gordy Hulten <gordy at gordyhulten.com> wrote:
>
>  Mike,
>
>  I can verify Wendy's information.  I just re-registered as a UCIMC user,
> and if I clicked on "Recent Hits" I would be able to view IP addresses
> associated with some actions.
>
>  I hope this helps - I'm sure you know much more about Drupal than I do, but
> please let me know if I can help with anything.
>
>  Sincerely,
>
>
> Gordy Hulten
>  Email: gordy at gordyhulten.com
>  Mobile: (217) 369-4716
>  Friends of Tim Johnson
>  15th Congressional District Republican Committee
>  Champaign County Republican Party: Precinct Committeeman, Cunningham 21
>
>
>
>
>  Wendy Edwards wrote:
>  Actually, I was not going to respond to this at all, but Gordy Hulten at
> IlliniPundit convinced me that it would be the right thing to do. There
> are some significant inaccuracies in your information.
>
> You claim that only administrators and editors can look up IP
> information on UCIMC. This is false, and probably has been since
> October. As it happens, the site is configured so that anyone who
> registers as an user (requiring only a valid email address) can see all
> the IP information associated with posts on UCIMC.
>
> It's quite likely that my "editorial privileges" were temporarily
> restored after the crash. But given that any registered user could look
> up all IP address information anyhow, that didn't make much difference.
>
> Yesterday, I saw that the UCIMC editors had hidden a particularly vile
> post about an alleged sexual abuse victim that contained gratuitous
> personal information and a "hos" joke. I appreciated the show of
> respect for her privacy, and decided to respect UCIMC's by redacting the
> IP addresses from the posts on the other blog.
>
> Wendy
>
> On Mon, Apr 30, 2007 at 11:32:58AM -0500, Mike Lehman wrote:
>
>
>  Posters to the IMC network must have the presumption that their
> anonymity will be respected.
>
> The UC-IMC site has been running since October using a content
> management system called Drupal. We moved to Drupal because the previous
> site had become an enormous burden to maintain, owing to non-stop
> spambot attacks that Dada (the previous software) was not able to
> prevent; the editors were having to pull about a thousand spams a day, a
> new one showing up every minute and a half. The spam issue was central
> to the decision to move to a new software platform.
>
> The Drupal software allows for the logging of IP addresses for comments.
> As a group, IMC-Web decided that we will perform a very limited logging
> of IP addresses under the following constraints:
>
> (a) The log entries will only be visible to editors and administrators;
>
> (b) The log entries will be used solely to spot spambots and determine
> the appropriate IP addresses to block, not to determine the identity of
> any anonymous poster;
>
> (c) The log entries will be automatically deleted after 24 hours.
>
> This, we felt, was the best balance between ensuring the anonymity of
> posters on one hand while being able to block spambots -- of which we've
> blocked several already -- before they render the site a nightmare
> to maintain again.
>
> As part of the recent restoration after the hard disk failure last week,
> a former editor who no longer has editorial access had her editorial
> access temporarily returned. She used that access to harvest IP addresses
> of commenters on one particular thread before the log entries were
> auto-deleted in order to identify anonymous posters. She then posted
> what she found on another local blog (!).
>
> We take this sort of thing very seriously. It represents the single most
> serious breach of anonymity policy in UC-IMC history. We apologize to
> those who have had their anonymity even partially violated by this act.
> And we have taken steps to ensure that she no longer has access to this
> data.
>
> /s/
> The IMC-web working group
>
> PS If there are any questions, please address them to IMC-web at ucimc.org.
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