Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

Earlier today Robert Scoble wrote a post slamming for being a spammer:

Hey, Google AdSense team: Elliott Back is breaking your rules. He is reprinting my content (and, I’ve come to learn, other people’s content) without permission. He is spamming everyone’s trackbacks (to have my content show up in people’s blogs I link to, which drives traffic over to his Web site). He is causing damage to the Internet. Please remove Google’s ads from his page and remove the incentive to do this kind of stuff. I have NOT given him permission to reprint my stuff in whole. You’ll notice that this is a splog written by Elliott Back and you’re just helping him profit off of this kind of behavior.

You’re causing your advertisers brand damage by including your advertisements on this guy’s page. Thanks for listening!

Please let me know how you are going to handle this guy. A reputable company that says “do no evil” should immediately stop doing business with a slimeball like this. Thanks!

Unfortunately, the blog in question is using a syndication plugin I wrote for Wordpress, which as a side-effect includes attribution to my blog under the heading “software by Elliott Back.” It’s unreasonable to believe that someone would be confused as to the authorship by that, or that an internet-guru like Scoble would forget to do a WHOIS lookup. As a result of Scoble’s post, Adsense disabled my ads for part of the day, resulting in lost revenue and who knows what else. You would think they had measures in place to prevent this, but it appears not.

If anything, the lesson to be learned here is twofold: think and do your research before making severe moral or criminal accusations, and that the blogosphere A-list is too powerful. One person shouldn’t be able to bring down someone else’s revenue streams with a wave of their finger.

If you use linux, you undoubtably have encountered the command cp for copy sometime. Looking at its man page, it seems simple and easy to use:

CP(1)    User Commands

NAME
       cp - copy files and directories

SYNOPSIS
       cp [OPTION]... SOURCE DEST
       cp [OPTION]... SOURCE... DIRECTORY
       cp [OPTION]... --target-directory=DIRECTORY SOURCE...

Generally this works well, except if you accidentally include a directory in the file list. Let’s set up a test environment:

-bash-3.00$ touch a b d e
-bash-3.00$ mkdir c
-bash-3.00$ mkdir ../dest

Now, what would you expect if I ran the command to copy all files in the current directory to the ../dest folder? Yes, failure, because c is a directory and not a file–it must be copied recursively or not at all. However, the cp command will simply skip over c and continue copying:

-bash-3.00$ cp * ../dest
cp: omitting directory `c'
-bash-3.00$ ls ../dest
a  b  d  e

This behavior is counterintuitive for me. I would expect it to first validate all of its input arguments, making sure that either a file is being copied to a new file name, a bunch of files to a directory, or some directories recursively to another directory. If these conditions were not met, I would not copy anything! A command which returns a non-zero value (error) should not perform actions on its input, unless it absolutely has to! Clearly cp could check its arguments for errors before processing them–so why doesn’t it, except historical reasons?

In a recent brief news story about the resignation of Austin HS teacher Tamara Hoover I included a 200px wide thumbnail of Ms. Hoover taken and rescaled from her partner Celesta Danger’s flickr stream. Today, I’ve received the following emails from her:

[1] i take the unauthorized use of another’s intellectual property right very seriously. since, you did not ask permission nor recieve it to use my image, you need to remove it so that further action is not necessary.

[2] to all images of tamara hoover on your blog. thats infringement, since the intellectual property is mine and use of that property is unauthorized. please take them down so that further action is not necessary.

[3] you do not have authorization to swipe images of mine and re-post them where you see fit. my images do not fall into fair use guidelines b/c the public does not benefit from you posting my image next to you blog. if fairuse applied in this case, people like cnn.com would have used an image. take image down, do not use my images without permission again. if you want people to see them , then set up a link to my website.

Rather than continue this, I decided to point her to Chilling Effects’ FAQ on “fair use.” The section of interest begins, “The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently held in Kelly v. Arriba Soft that displaying the copyrighed images of another as thumbnails on a search engine was a fair use because the thumbnails served a completely different purpose than the original images.” I also removed the image hosted on my server from the post, and simply hotlinked it to Flickr’s thumbnail, thus absolving me of responsibility.

My question to you–is the image as it appears in that post fair use or not? I derive no financial benefit from including that particular image, and I am not disrupting her business as a photographer and artist, because I simply use the post to direct readers to her Flickr stream and other external resources.

I was happily riding the NYC MTA transit today home from work. I got on the N train to Queens Astoria/Ditmars at 49th and 7th, planning to get off the subway at the end of the line and continue on home. Unfortunately for me, I was mugged/pick-pocketed on the way back!

It happened just after I got down the platform stairs to the street level. It was raining heavily, and I walked north on the sidewalk briskly. After I’d gone about halfway to the next street, I noticed my corporate ID was missing from the clear hanger clipped to my pocket, so I frantically retraced my steps. I asked the MTA cleaners, the MTA guide, and searched the platform itself, to no avail. Finally, I was walking back up the street to go home when I saw my ID cards on the ground. It seems the pickpocketer was only interested in MTA metro pass with about $20 on it.

I didn’t get a good look at the people standing there so I have nothing to go on. There were two older, homeless or poor looking black men standing at that spot earlier, but I wasn’t paying attention and don’t remember their faces.

In one way, it’s good I didn’t lose my corporate ID. Getting new ones would be quite difficult and time consuming, and professionally embarrassing. On the other hand, who can help getting mugged? It’s not like I asked for it.

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