A special guest editorial by text2cloud’s newest staff member: H. Paunch. Which is it: Presidents Day (no apostrophe) Presidents’ Day (“s” apostrophe) or President’s Day (apostrophe “s”)? Some might argue for Presidents Day (option number one) on the grounds that the day is meant to recognize all the presidents. Others–sticklers for the facts we might call them–will argue for...
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...
So, here’s the challenge. Say you wanted to use your computer to spy on someone else, how would you do it? We saw in the previous post that, if you were trying this circa 2000, the technological challenges would be beyond the reach of your average computer user. ) It turns out that in 2010, the Web 2.0 world makes this a relatively easy task. First, assume possession of an Apple laptop. (Why this assumption is made will be clarified...
Here’s a thought experiment. Say you wanted to use your computer to spy on someone else, how would you do it? Would you have to be a technological genius/super geek to pull off such a feat? Back before the year 2000, in the Web 1.0 world, you’d need to have been pretty clever to do this. Not being particularly gifted in the area of gadgetry, if this thought experiment is taking place circa 2000, I can get about two steps down the...
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...
Screenshot of Tyler Clementi’s Facebook Page I find this image heart wrenching. At the top of New York Post’s cropped screenshot, Clementi’s last known public correspondence: “jumping off the gw bridge sorry” Below this, two comments on Clementi’s wall, time stamped three days after his suicide: a worried friend, telling Clementi to make contact; another friend, perhaps oblivious to the seriousness of...
My Facebook inbox contained a friend request this morning from a young woman who has three profile pix, including this one: Friend Request, Blurring Added I don’t know her and don’t believe I’ve ever seen her. When I received the request, we had no “mutual friends”–meaning none of my 174 friends on Facebook is friends with her (two hours after the request, the young woman and I now have “1 mutual...
Here’s the chronology we have so far based on Dharun Ravi’s twitter account: A caveat about a chronology built using time stamps: despite the apparent specificity of the down-to-the-minute-times, a chronology of this kind should be seen as providing a sense of the relative relationship between a sequence of events. If, for example, Ravi chose a time zone other than Eastern Standard Time, all his time stamps would be off by X number...
