Another example: try finding out what your bank charges for overseas ATM use. You’ll get more different answers than the number of people you talk to, and none of them will be right. Bank VPs don’t even know.

Actually I’m glad this was brought up as I had already forgotten about AmazonMP3 and as Joe mentioned, it’s nice to see Amazon (or at least one of their employees or contractors) stepping up to sort things out. Gotta go check it out.

The files were “-rwx——”, so only my user account had read permissions on them. Mpd and mt-daapd run under different accounts, so couldn’t read the files.

A simple “chmod o+r” on all the files added the necessary permissions, at which point the mpd and mt-daapd scans picked them up.

Mscot, I’m not seeing the point of another explanation. The previous ones didn’t make you honest; why should this one do it?

Jeremy, Sae, Naikrovek, Mscot: anyone who’s so stupid that they think “freedom of speech” = “the right to say and do whatever I want on someone else’s website” can’t be much of a loss. The same goes for anyone who thinks that “deprecated and disemvowelled, but still readable” = “censored” — or for that matter, thinks that having Boing Boing decline to publish their remarks means they’ve been censored.

Freedom of speech is, of course, the freedom to say and do what you want on your own website. This website belongs to the boingers, and one of the things they want is for me to keep it civil in spite of jerks like you.

Anyone who’d believe those disemvowellings were done “just for disagreeing with Boing Boing” can’t be much of a loss either. In fact, anyone who hasn’t noticed yet that people disagree with Boing Boing all the time, yet keep their vowels, is at best not paying attention.

What happened:

Previously, Boing Boing posted a completely legitimate story about Amazon’s MP3 downloads having “proprietary” ID3 tags. The original source of this information was one of Amazon’s own service reps. Cory checked. He was well within journalistic standards.

One of Boing Boing’s readers, “AmazonMP3,” realized there had to be an error somewhere along the line. AmazonMP3 worked on their MP3 program, and knew there was nothing proprietary about it. The problem was run to ground, and turned out to be a permissions bug in the user’s system, plus a misinformed customer service rep at Amazon.

Let’s rehearse this:

1. Cory was not at fault for his earlier story. He’d checked his facts. The customer had been unable to play his MP3s, and he had been told by an Amazon service rep that Amazon’s ID3 tagging system is proprietary.

2. Cory was not mindlessly attacking Amazon, much less attacking it just because it’s a corporation. He’s criticized some of their policies, but he likes Amazon just fine. Besides, he and Jeff Bezos are friends.

3. Cory was not obliged to run the follow-up story, explain the odd circumstances that created the appearance of a proprietary ID3 system, or praise the original user and especially AmazonMP3 for taking the trouble to get to the bottom of this mystery.

So what do we get in return?

We get Sae Miller (2) sneering about how nothing was really wrong (not the point), and “must we cry wolf about everything.” Cory is hardly in the habit of crying wolf; he certainly didn’t do so in this case; and he put as much or more effort into finding out the reasons why there was never a wolf in the first place.

Next, Narual (5), with a brazen disregard for the truth (but a real fondness for cliches) accused Cory of taking “any opportunity” (hardly; it was a legit story) “to express self-righteous indignation” (there was not a breath of that in either story) “at the ‘evil corporations’ repressing people” (again, this sentiment isn’t present in either story) “must be exercised to the fullest” (a further fraudulent embellishment that gives Narual the opportunity to trot out another one of his beloved cliches).

Then, with a breathtaking lack of self-consciousness, Narual adds, “Fact checking is less important than generating responses.” Cory did check his facts. Narual barely read the story he was attacking.

I had no qualms whatsoever about disemvowelling Narual’s comment. I would happily disemvowel it four or five more times, if I thought there were any point to it.

Naikrovek (11) was less inventive than Narual and less spiteful than Sae Miller, but went on longer than the two of them multiplied. I’m slightly less angry at Naikrovek, for reasons I won’t detail.

Mscot (14) turned up and disingenuously pretended to be surprised and confused at the sight of disemvowelling.

HLSamples (15) invoked a standard of “professional fact-checking” I’ve never seen used in all my years in publishing, including the ones I spent as a reference editor.

(19): Hi, Nix!

At (20), Mscot appeared again, pretending the disemvowelling was for disagreeing with Boing Boing. See earlier remarks on the credibility of that position.

(22): Sae Miller achieved a saturation-level sulk, and announced his departure from this vale of tears. Like all demi-trolls, he believes that he’s been mistreated because we can’t cope with the vast swoop and awesomeness of his opinions. It is impossible for him to imagine that his behavior was curbed because he was being a jerk.

At a point we’ll call 22.5, a nameless poster showed up and posted an unsuccessfully sanctimonious anonymous message that began, “The censoring really makes it a lot harder for me to support BoingBoing and recommend it to my friends.” I figured that anyone who’s genuinely that big on “supporting Boing Boing” would have registered by now, and likely would have found something to comment on before this. The comment remains in the “pending” queue.

(23): I observed that Mscot was being disingenuous about disemvowelling.

(24): Naikrovek, sounding remarkably like Sae Miller, announced his departure. He professed himself unable to comprehend how a weblog that is “all about freedoms” could think it’s entitled to exercise those freedoms on its own behalf, on its own website.

(26): The anonymous poster from (22.5) reappeared as “Jason A,” and posted a restated and somewhat weaker version of the still-pending anonymous comment.

(27): Mscot turned up one last time, sounding much like Sae Miller, Naikrovek, and Jeremy, and claimed to never have had disemvowelling explained. Mscot is perhaps unaware of how easy it is for me to call up a poster’s complete history. In a pinch, I will point out that the whole thing’s explained in the Wikipedia entry on the subject. A lot of material has gone missing from the entry since appalling Wikipedia troll Will Beback noticed its existence; but Mscot could still have learned everything necessary.

(28): Korpo materialized to sing the demi-troll national anthem about how all this repression is being done to people for disagreeing with the moderator. Don’t I wish.

…

Why did I first come down on top of Sae, Naikrovek, and Narual? Because other people hit the Lookitthat button to tell me this thread was rapidly turning nasty.

Because that lot were trying to put the boot into Cory for things he didn’t do.

Because they were doing it in language that had little or nothing to do with the actual events.

Because they were trying to collect on alleged debts no one owes them, least of all Cory.

It was mean-spirited and nasty, meant not to illuminate or to defend a principle, but to draw blood. I’m never sure how readily other people recognize bullying and verbal abuse. I’ll call it that and defend the label.

Finally, they pretended the principle they were defending was freedom of speech. I was disgusted. I am still disgusted. I don’t think they actually give much of a damn about freedom of speech. But if they cared as much as they pretended to, they should have known that the rights they were implicitly demanding Boing Boing give them had nothing whatsoever to do with that ideal.

Th cl ws n th dd’s wn ml: “Th wrd thng s, lcl clnts lk Rhythmbx nd mrk (s wll s my D3 tg dtr) hv n prblm sng th tgs.” snds lk t fckn’ wrks t m!

Th prprtry stff th rp ws spkng f ws prbbly rltd t th mthd n whch thy dd th D3 tgs t th fl tslf. Srly thy dn’t hv ppl ctlly ntrng tht dt mnlly fr vry fl thy ffr. Tht mks sns, nd s prbbly prprtry, nd dsn’t mk th spprt-crttr ncssrly nnfrmd r ncrrct.

Dn’t bt p n th spprt dd; ths gys gt thr fc pnchd vr phn nd ml ll dy nywy, lt’s nt dd t t.

Nthng gnst Cry, thgh! Th dd s smrt, n dbt bt t; jst cn’t tk ny mr “dsk-pnchngly fnny” psts r ny mr “mlk-spryngly fnny” psts, nd spclly n mr “dfnd yrslvs, ntzns!!!”

d3l3t3 f33d. th3 g00d l1nks sh0w L|p 3v3rywh3r3 3ls3 @nyw@ys.

I’m sorry if I ruffled your feathers. My indignation was truly out of surprise, nothing disingenuous about it. As I said, I’ve been a visitor to the site for several years and didn’t expect such a thing. Call me naive but don’t call me a liar.

“What does DRM-free mean? Digital Rights Management or “DRM” commonly refers to software that is designed to control or limit how a file can be played, copied, downloaded, shared, or accessed. DRM-free means that the MP3 files you purchase from Amazon.com do not contain any software that will restrict your use of the file.”

Note the weasel-wording about DRM software.

Further down the same page, there’s the following phrasing:

“Are there any restrictions on how I use the music I purchase? When you make a purchase from the Amazon MP3 Music Downloads store, you are also accepting and bound by the Amazon MP3 Music Downloads Terms of Use. The albums and songs you purchase from AmazonMP3 Music Downloads are free of Digital Rights Management software so that you have the flexibility to play them on any of your media players, PC or burn them to CD.”

Clicking through to the “AmazonMP3 Downloads Terms of Use” link in the middle of that, http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200154280
you get (among a LOT of other lawyerese) the following:

“2.1 License. Upon your payment of our fees for Digital Content, we grant you a non-exclusive, non-transferable license to use the Digital Content for your personal, non-commercial, entertainment use, subject to and in accordance with the terms of this Agreement. You may copy, store, transfer and burn the Digital Content only for your personal, non-commercial, entertainment use.

“2.2 Restrictions. You represent, warrant and agree that you will use the Service only for your personal, non-commercial, entertainment use and not for any redistribution of the Digital Content or other use restricted in this Section 2.2. You agree not to infringe the rights of the Digital Content’s copyright owners and to comply with all applicable laws in your use of the Digital Content. Except as set forth in Section 2.1 above, you agree that you will not redistribute, transmit, assign, sell, broadcast, rent, share, lend, modify, adapt, edit, sub-license or otherwise transfer or use the Digital Content. You are not granted any synchronization, public performance, promotional use, commercial sale, resale, reproduction or distribution rights for the Digital Content. You acknowledge that the Digital Content embodies the intellectual property of a third party and is protected by law.”

Hrm. No remix. No backup. None of the other rights you have with CD’s. Just “for personal entertainment”.

Now, IANAL. Get proper expensive legal advice before acting on this, I make no claims for it being right – but I do claim that it is wrong.

-John

(I don’t mean to imply anything untoward or unprofessional occurred in these posts. Fact-checking is unglamorous, often tedious work–which is why checkers can get, well, pedantic about what we do.)

If you’re honest, you’ll take the explanation of disemvowelling onboard, read up on moderation issues (including sock-puppets), accept that when you’re rude your comments will get disemvowelled if not deleted, and try not to be rude again. I acknowledge that the last might be the most difficult, but disemvowellment isn’t a permanent condition; you’ll have plenty of opportunity to try and get it right.

Targetted dribblings are not — quite — rendered unreadable. Anyone who really cares what you wrote can still read them: but the rest of us don’t have to.

But as to why the moderator didn’t like your #2 post is really a mystery, unless disagreeing with BoingBoing is enough to get ‘disemvoweled’.

And TNH comes up with *another* aphorism for our time.

(I must start collecting a file of these.)

The more I think about it, the more I like the way YouTube deals with trolling. Marking something as spam and hiding it, but still allowing you to click “reveal” if you really want to read it, seems like a very effective solution to me. Offending posts aren’t allowed to obstruct the flow of conversation, but they can still be easily read if one so desires. If you were also able to apply a brief label explaining your decision (“Hateful,” “Irrelevant,” etc.), that would be even better. I would happily live with a system like that. It would even take up less space than the current approach.

I know you’ve got a tough and largely thankless job here. I do think you do very well overall. BoingBoing comments are much more interesting and informative on average than anywhere else I’ve been and I know that a lot of that is because of your efforts. I still think that there is some room for improvement though, and I hope you consider this idea and any others that may come along in the future.

I’m glad to be here and thanks for letting me stay. : )

gd by bngrs, ‘v md thr cmmnts nd ‘m lrdy trd f ths st.

I finally went HD. I had only watched 1 HD movie on it and I put in the first disc of Heroes HD DVD.

I got a read error. My thoughts, in approximate order:
* I should have went Blu-Ray.
* This technology isn’t well fleshed out.
* There’s something wrong with this new, fancy-schmancy player.
* Maybe I need to plug it into the network, since the Heroes DVD has some kind of web features on it, which this player is supposed to support.

After doing some research on the web, I ejected the DVD, held it to my eyeball, beheld a smudge on the edge, wiped it off on my shirt, put it back in the drive and watched Heroes with no further problems whatsoever.

.

Lesson learned:
Don’t get so caught up in the hype and the politics and the panic of a thing that we jump to the political conspiracy theory right away, forgetting to check for the little, simple, common, basic problems first…