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

[Gordy Hulten]

Mike,

I can verify Wendy's information.  I just re-registered as a UCIMC user, 
and if I clicked on "Recent Hits <http://www.ucimc.org/admin/logs/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 <http://www.gordyhulten.com>
Email: gordy at gordyhulten.com
<mailto:gordy at gordyhulten.com>Mobile: (217) 369-4716
Friends of Tim Johnson
<http://www.timjohnsonforcongress.com/> 15th Congressional District 
Republican Committee
Champaign County Republican Party 
<http://www.champaigncountyrepublicans.org/index.php>: Precinct 
Committeeman <http://www.champaigncountyclerk.com/pcrepublican.pdf>, 
Cunningham 21 
<http://www.champaigncountyclerk.com/precincts/cunningham21.pdf>

IlliniPundit <http://feeds.feedburner.com/Illinipundit>



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.
>> _______________________________________________
>> IMC mailing list
>> IMC at lists.ucimc.org
>> http://lists.chambana.net/cgi-bin/listinfo/imc
>>     
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