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Grex > Coop7 > #31: How should staff respond to requests that offense .plan files be changed? | |
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| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 74 responses total. |
remmers
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response 25 of 74:
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Apr 13 09:49 UTC 1995 |
Mary's right though: We have no direct knowledge of what the message
says, only the complainant's characterization of it. Maybe his
characterization was accurate, but another possibility is that he was
over-reacting to something much milder. People *have* been known to
do the latter, as any regular user of conferencing systems can attest.
We generally try to exercise our own independent judgement before
taking action on someone's complaint, but didn't do so in this case
because of the language barrier. In retrospect, perhaps we should
have made an effort to get the message translated. Shouldn't be that
hard to do -- Chinese speakers aren't that rare in these parts.
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rcurl
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response 26 of 74:
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Apr 13 14:30 UTC 1995 |
Or, a hoax. We seem to be vulnerable to being diddled if a user just
plays a game like this. The think it would be reasonable to request
that the complainant "prove" that the message is abusive (let them
find the translators - that we can trust, of course).
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ajax
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response 27 of 74:
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Apr 13 15:35 UTC 1995 |
Re #23, zapping anything that breaches "our netiquette statement"
isn't official Grex policy, is it? If it were, I find the idea of
zapping anything that has "objectionable language in either private
or public messages" quite objectionable! Please zap it!!
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danr
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response 28 of 74:
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Apr 13 15:40 UTC 1995 |
Can't we get someone who we know and trust--and who knows Chinese--and
who knows Chinese to translate it for us? We can then judge if it's
abusive or not, and kill it or leave it.
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rcurl
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response 29 of 74:
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Apr 13 16:33 UTC 1995 |
The Netiquette is not "official Grex policy", in the sense of being\
adopted by the board. However it is the policy propagated on the
internet, by those that write such things. In a sense, there is no
"official internet policy" either. All these things are guidelines, to
promote civilized communication. A lot of people seem to have a problem
with the concept of there being "rules of civilized discourse", which are
not laws enforced with draconian measures. The very fact that this is
up to response 29 (if no one slips in ;->) shows that there are no
rigid rules. Yet, there is Netiquette, and it can be applied, and even
"enforced", when deemed necessary.
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mdw
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response 30 of 74:
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Apr 13 22:05 UTC 1995 |
It should be possible to find out what it means by either
(a) finding somebody at the UofM and asking them to translate it.
(b) finding somebody at a local chinese restaurant/store/whatever,
and asking if they would mind translating it.
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ajax
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response 31 of 74:
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Apr 14 02:45 UTC 1995 |
I could fax it to a friend of mine who's a native speaker, but if
the .plan uses the two-byte ascii encryption of Chinese characters,
we'd also need decoding software. I used to have such a program to
convert Japanese two-byte encodings, but I don't know if Chinese uses
the same system.
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jep
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response 32 of 74:
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Apr 14 04:10 UTC 1995 |
Why not ask Jemmie Wang (rogue) to translate it?
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srw
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response 33 of 74:
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Apr 14 07:25 UTC 1995 |
The first problem is to know the encoding system. We have no clue.
It's whatever they use in alt.chinese.text.
The offending text can be found in /u/abcdef/.plan.save
If this was a hoax, I'd like to know.
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tsty
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response 34 of 74:
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Apr 14 09:47 UTC 1995 |
I will have this decoded for us asap. Idid notice that
in teh /u/blahblah account ... everything has a time/date
of Mar 31 22:00, everything, no exceptions. Usually there
is a minute or two difference between files ...... even if ther
are only 5 of them. Any comments?
I can also, probably, make a Chinese character print in both
complex and simple characters - which is dot-matrix-printable, and
therefore printable.
More later.
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tsty
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response 35 of 74:
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Apr 14 09:50 UTC 1995 |
Hmmmm, leaping bfore looking does have it's hazards ... This
decoding might be more difficult than at first anticipated.
Was the /u/abcdef/.plan.save file "twisted" in some particular
manner that is known to anyone here, like a rotX of some sort?
I was anticipating phonetics, which would be considerably easy, actually.
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steve
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response 36 of 74:
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Apr 14 19:15 UTC 1995 |
Maybe I didn't state this well enough back up there somewhere,
but this is an *ongoing* problem, at several Universities on the
east coast and elsewhere. I got a write from a person here who told
me of the abcdef account, and what it said. This persons English
was farily bad; he said he was from gwu.edu and the wtmp records were
consistent with that.
I guess the real question is, how much verification of a problem
is enough? I've been hearing of problems between participants of
the various alt.chinese groups for a while now and this was completely
consistent with those other incidents.
But yes, it *could* be a fake, I grant that. Steve's description
of this person as a hit-and-run use of Grex is perfectly right.
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lilmo
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response 37 of 74:
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Apr 14 19:32 UTC 1995 |
Re #34: Somebody appears to have tinkered with the timestamps, which
to me would be evidence in complainants favor. With such obvious efforts
to deceive, perhaps we needn't give this "person" an opportunity to
reactivate the .plan.
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srw
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response 38 of 74:
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Apr 15 06:41 UTC 1995 |
Actually we are encouraging the author to contact us. We made no promise
that we would reinstate it. We might under the right circumstances, though.
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popcorn
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response 39 of 74:
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Apr 15 12:41 UTC 1995 |
(I just looked at the abcd and abcdef accounts. The abcd account looks
like it was created by newuser, with no later modifications to its files.
The timestamps on it are quite normal if that's true. The other account,
abcdef, is the one where the problem occurred. It has a variety of time
stamps on the files in it. In other words, neither account looks tampered
with.)
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lilmo
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response 40 of 74:
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Apr 15 20:31 UTC 1995 |
Re #39: Then to what was TS in #34 referring?
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srw
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response 41 of 74:
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Apr 16 06:39 UTC 1995 |
Dunno. It seems perfectly reasonable to me to have a lot of files
wqith the same time stamp. It's only to the nearest minute.
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tsty
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response 42 of 74:
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Apr 16 16:39 UTC 1995 |
hmmm, it is the abcd account that has identical timestamps, not
the abcdef account. Maybe creating a subdirectory and three
files can be done by newuser, automatically, within one minute.
Maybe it takes takes some automation to do it that fast.
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remmers
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response 43 of 74:
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Apr 16 17:28 UTC 1995 |
It could be done by newuser in just a few seconds.
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davel
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response 44 of 74:
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Apr 16 21:10 UTC 1995 |
... *if* the system isn't too slow. In general, I'd expect the timestamps
on an otherwise unused account to be all the same, or *very* close.
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lilmo
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response 45 of 74:
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Apr 19 04:51 UTC 1995 |
OK, I'm used to DOS, where even seconds are specified in the time stamp, and
to have several files with exactly the same timestamp means they were SET to
those values. Being accurate to the minute makes it more likely, but the fact
that they were all EXACTLY on the hour still raises an eyebrow over here.
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davel
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response 46 of 74:
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Apr 19 10:45 UTC 1995 |
Hm. Even with DOS, a whole bunch of files can be created within a second.
And FWIW, seconds are stored in the timestamp - just not displayed by the
ls program. You could write a little C program to investigate, if you
were so minded.
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popcorn
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response 47 of 74:
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Apr 19 13:06 UTC 1995 |
Um... actually, all of the files for user "abcd" were created at
12:04, and not right exactly on the hour.
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lilmo
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response 48 of 74:
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Apr 19 19:16 UTC 1995 |
Okay, well, I got ALL my info from tsty's #34, so just diregard anything
I've said for the past ten posts or so, I guess... *SIGH*
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tsty
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response 49 of 74:
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Apr 19 19:56 UTC 1995 |
#34 was about the /u/blahblah account .... does that help?
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