O.K. Why did this cause me such trouble, you ask? How hard could it be to convert Greenwich Mean Time +1 to Eastern Standard Time (which is GMT -4, unless it is during Daylight Savings Time, when it is GMT -5). If you’re focused on the wrong thing, then you add +1 and -4 and get -3. Which is what I did originally. So, I took all the justusboys time stamps and subtracted three hours, which provided times for the events somewhere out in the...

A 2.0 moment: a reader writes me directly last night to say that the justusboys time stamps are at GMT +1. “I was wondering if you took this into consideration?” Although I wrote about the problems with time stamps early on in this meditation, I didn’t think to check this. So, tip o’ the hat to Mike for this. Then, I thought I’d got it right, revised, and reposted. But Steve and Patrick wrote me to point out that I...

So, here’s where we are on the timeline: it’s 6:44pm (1:44PM, EST)*, the day before Tyler Clementi commits suicide and Clementi has just posted to the “college roommate spying” thread on Just Us Boys that he will speak to the dorm RA that night. cit2mo’s next post is Wednesday, September 22nd, 4:38AM (Tuesday, September 21st, 11:38PM). It’s fair to say that it is full of surprises. Although there have been...

The following entry is the “SFW” (i.e., PG-13) version of: This Blog Entry Has Been Rated NSFW What is “age appropriate” viewing? Who determines when you can see what? Let’s begin with some representative vignettes. The first from the print-centric paradigm of my youth. When I was a teenager in the seventies, growing up in the South, there were visible, physical boundaries marking what was fit for consumption by...

What is “age appropriate” viewing? Who determines when you can see what? Let’s begin with some representative vignettes. The first from the print-centric paradigm of my youth. When I was a teenager in the seventies, growing up in the South, there were visible, physical boundaries marking what was fit for consumption by those who were “under aged.” At the back of the local used paperback bookstore, a curtain...

If we fold together the timelines that I have been piecing together over the most recent posts, something confounding emerges: cit2mo knows that he has been spied on by his roommate. He has filled out a form requesting a roommate change. And then he contacts Ravi asking to have the room again that night? This is virtually inexplicable. Unless, of course, you understood, as Clementi certainly did, how the spying took place in the first...

On December 21st, 2010, the Home News reported that Tyler Clementi’s parents filed notice of their intent to sue Rutgers University. In the notice, the Clementi family’s lawyer contends that the university failed to protect Clementi from the “unlawful or otherwise improper acts perpetrated against” him. The notice goes on to say: it appears Rutgers University failed to act, failed to put in place and/or failed to implement, and...

So, where are we now that we’ve reached this eighth post in my ongoing meditation on the end of privacy in the Web 2.0 world? A brief recap is in order: I began by using the tweets of Dharun Ravi to establish a preliminary timeline of the events that immediately preceded Tyler Clementi’s suicide. I then revised and updated that timeline based on what are assumed to be Clementi’s posts, as “cit2mo,” to a forum on...

At this point in the discussion, it should come as no surprise to learn that an account has surfaced on the free online dating service, OKcupid, that appears to have belonged to Julian Assange back in 2006-2007. There’s nothing particularly startling in the profile of the person who self-identifies as Harry Harrison–it’s a dating site after all, so the convention is braggadocio. The profile pictures are definitely...

At the end of my last post, I asked the question, “Is nothing sacred?” Here are some responses to that question, via the world of Web 2.0: After a day of denial, Gawker acknowledges that it has been hacked and that the private data of its 1.3M users have been posted to an open site for downloading by others.Meaning?If you have a Gawker account, your password is available to anyone who visits the bit-torrent site. (If you’re...