Grim Warning Re: - our messages, public??

[Kier Salmon]

Basically (not a nahuatl specialist, but a heavy geek girl)  if it is on the web there is no privacy.  Really.
Tom MacMaster aka Amina Arraf (the story that broke this week over gaygirlindamascus) was a typical case of somebody who thought that they were anonymous and could play head games.  And will pay, I devotedly hope, a very stiff price academically for it.

I use my own name and am cautious about what I have to say.  But all our messages got through multiple servers and are harvested in multiple places.  Sometimes for backup, and sometimes because somebody wrote the program and was fired, left or died and nobody knows it's there... but it's still searchable and findable.
One thing that *can* be done is for the list owner to talk with the IT people at the institution and have the access privileges (in unix the rw) tweaked.  But it has to be done by somebody who understands the list or we will all lose the ability to see it.

I was involved with the team that found MacMaster; the hand that wore the sock-puppet of Amina Arraf i Omari.  He's not the first I've encountered.  Some years ago a professor of English at a small college in the north east used a handle... a very obvious handle (this is accepted; "Amina" pretended to be real).  She made a few statements that caught the attention of a list member.  Based on an ip address and two little statements the geeky member figured out her name, profession, home, found her bio and emailed her at another address she had.  His purpose was to not embarrass her in front of the whole list with a "Did you really mean????"

She lost it completely over violation of privacy.  It really puzzled the owners of the list as she raved and demanded that the member be banned.

Using a handle is considered in the gray area of ethical and nobody that I've seen on the two Mesoamerican lists seems to do this.  But nobodies privacy is any more secure than if we were using CB radios.  We *are* in public and it's important to remember that.  Think of it as being in a large restaurant booth.

Kier Salmon, Seattle WA

On Jun 15, 2011, at 3:21 AM, Susana Moraleda wrote:

> I was playing with Internet and curiously enough I tried to see how many sites mentioned my name, just to discover that all of my messages posted to this list appeared in Google!!
>  
> I must say I do not like the general public to see what I'm up to - I thought the info we posted here was visible only to us listeros, and was wondering what is Famsi's policy in this, I mean privacy and the like.
>  
> Would very much appreciate any feedback.
>  
> Susana
> 
> 
> 
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> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
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