JoshuaZ looks at Section 230, and gives me an idea... Options

In regards to suing individual editors, is it any coincidence that Checkuser expires in 30 days?

Gee, I wonder how long a supoena would take to clear?

And actually, "outing" the proper street address of the WMF office would be a valuable service in case someone wanted to file suit. There is no right to privacy of physical locations in business, nor the expectation of the same.

This should be a new top priority project.

Willful destruction of evidence is a crime and Jimbo and company could be charged with
contempt if unable to produce evidence required in a lawful motion of discovery.

Exactly one of the reasons (hypothetically!) that public revelation of the street address is important.

Note we've already found the Wikia address here:

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showt...aded&show=&st=&

The WMF has virtually no money and no assets.; albeit Jimmy has offered to "donate" money if there is, indeed, something missing, which I am pretty sure is not the case.

I feel terrible for people that have the kind of troubles that their COO has and I do pray that she gets some serious help while incarcerated and soon thereafter.

The liability that I see at Wikipedia is in the area of "outing" the officers and real people that are claiming so much power and influence there, in fact, at their own peril.

NewYorkBrad is a case in point. If he is a real live attorney, I suspect he does not want to be involved in anything that could and would effect his licence to practice law in New York or anywhere.

The "good samaritan" while all fine and dandy in theory can be without a job. We all take a pretty strong oath and the circumstances that I have seen there in my own case were fairly scary.

I never wanted in and I never will. Everything becomes a reality show as we have seen with the research being done here. No secrets and no way out. Hi Angela! You ok with that?

Wait, I thought *ALL* Foundation officers had to be 'outed' by United States and Florida law. Are they not? And that all Arbiters on en had to be known internally?

In regards to suing individual editors, is it any coincidence that Checkuser expires in 30 days?
82&mode=threaded&show=&st=&]http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showt...aded&show=&st=&[/url]

If checkuser expires, then they re in contravention of French law that requires them (as a so-called ISP) to keep one year's worth of records to qualify to meet French Law on Everyday Security (LSQ) which was rushed through parliament on 15 November 2001 with virtually no discussion and approved almost unanimously, extended to a year the minimum period ISPs must keep a record of their customers’ Internet activity and e-mail messages.

Nevertheless, this cannot be anymore considered as good news since we don’t know what are exactly how the “traffic data”, the “identification data”, and the “communication data” are defined. These data should not reveal the content of communication, be it e-mail content or the content of the visited web site. The penalty for ISPs who don’t comply whit these provisions are high : one year jail and 75,000 Euros fine.(link discussing "loi sur la sécurité quotidienne" (LSQ,) 2001)

Beef. It's what's for dinner.

That address in San Mateo belongs to the Porterhouse Restaurant.

What is it with Jimbo and restaurants that serve cuts of beef?

In regards to suing individual editors, is it any coincidence that Checkuser expires in 30 days?
82&mode=threaded&show=&st=&]http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showt...aded&show=&st=&[/url]

If checkuser expires, then they re in contravention of French law that requires them (as a so-called ISP) to keep one year's worth of records to qualify to meet French Law on Everyday Security (LSQ) which was rushed through parliament on 15 November 2001 with virtually no discussion and approved almost unanimously, extended to a year the minimum period ISPs must keep a record of their customers’ Internet activity and e-mail messages.

Nevertheless, this cannot be anymore considered as good news since we don’t know what are exactly how the “traffic data”, the “identification data”, and the “communication data” are defined. These data should not reveal the content of communication, be it e-mail content or the content of the visited web site. The penalty for ISPs who don’t comply whit these provisions are high : one year jail and 75,000 Euros fine.(link discussing "loi sur la sécurité quotidienne" (LSQ,) 2001)

Checkuser most certainly does expire after either 30 or 31 days, and always has. It's the worst-kept secret out there. Does this French law apply to the WMF?

Checkuser most certainly does expire after either 30 or 31 days, and always has. It's the worst-kept secret out there. Does this French law apply to the WMF?

Guh - uh - yeah. That was only half my post.

YES.

Can you provide evidence - tangible evidence - that it only lasts 30 days?
Please do.

French law applies to Wikipedia and Wikimedia in the US. The fact that they have servers in France makes it easier to enforce, but French law would apply in any event. [/b] I've told you guys a billion times this, but you haven't paid much mind....

In the recent French case, where Wikipedia won, they won mostly because the plantiffs screwed up and only communicated by email, and didn't allow time for response. But nonetheless.
Wikimedia claimed in this case that they could provide this per statutes of the law (which requires one year of data retention - which is not true.).

How do we know it is not true? Anyone know specifically with a link?

Here is the court decision they won with, Ordonnance de référé du Tribunal de grande instance de Paris, 29 octobre 2007

Page 6, para 1: mentions this law (law of June 21 2004, article 6.1.8), where the judicial decision asserts that Wikimedia can produce the IP addresses of anyone that edits Wikipedia for one year after they do. Wikipedia reassured the court of this, and it is in the judgement. I don't think this is correct. Again - can someone tell me if Wikimedia keeps checkuser accessability for all logins (not just IPs) for one year? If not, they fibbed. This is important - or will be.


Page four, para 1, tells how they lost the case, because the aggrieved parties sent an email to the Foundation, not a registered letter, which is the legally recognized means of communication in France - they don't accept faxes either for legal documents. There is mention of how difficult it is to reach the staff members, when the President doesn't work in the office, and the legal counsel doesn't work in the Foundation office either - but they didnt' seem to do more than mention it - the main point was that the guys who held the case made an error, and therefore lost the case.

This post has been edited by Disillusioned Lackey: Mon 17th December 2007, 12:55am

Beef. It's what's for dinner.

That address in San Mateo belongs to the Porterhouse Restaurant.

What is it with Jimbo and restaurants that serve cuts of beef?

I dunno - you ask him.

Me, Im afraid he'll bite.

This post has been edited by Disillusioned Lackey: Mon 17th December 2007, 12:49am

Checkuser data is explicitly only stored "for a short time", which would seem to preclude the time being a full year. However, it seems odd that checkuser data would expire over the exact same timespan as the login cookies, and checkusers may very well be pushing misleading information to help them function better.

Checkuser data is explicitly only stored "for a short time", which would seem to preclude the time being a full year. However, it seems odd that checkuser data would expire over the exact same timespan as the login cookies, and checkusers may very well be pushing misleading information to help them function better.

No, it's perfectly plausible. The Checkuser retention is a simple flag, and to be honest, I've never understood why they don't save it longer. Unless Wikipedia is using a different/proprietary version of Checkuser, which would be a tremendous no-no and people would flip out over, it's a simple setting to change this duration in the stock Mediawiki version. But I have it on good authority that its either 30 or 31 days.

If your registered agent is in, say, Delaware (quite common - I believe Wikia's is there), and you're in California or Florida or DC, that really just adds an extra layer of liability protection to your organization, because any legal decision against you is going to have to go through a lot of extra inter-state bureaucracy before it results in any kind of forfeiture of assets. And you have to assume that the registered agent will be located in whatever state provides the most friendly venue for a liability case.

So many companies are headquartered in Delaware for two main reasons -- friendly tax-accounting procedures and business-friendly legal system.

Indeed, in Delaware at the old Motiva plant, a technician (Jeffrey Davis) working on top of a dilapidated chemical storage tank was pretty much eaten alive by sulfuric acid when the tank ruptured, and the company only had to pay up about $16 million, chicken feed for a company that posted $24 billion in revenue in 2004. Damages of one-fifteen-hundredth of annual sales, for dissolving a man with acid. That's why companies headquarter in Delaware.

Greg

Damages of one-fifteen-hundredth of annual sales, for dissolving a man with acid. That's why companies headquarter in Delaware.

Indeed... The sad thing is, when Wikipedia finally does that to the entire Internet, they probably won't have to even cough up a dime.

Beef. It's what's for dinner.

That address in San Mateo belongs to the Porterhouse Restaurant.

What is it with Jimbo and restaurants that serve cuts of beef?

It's the address of something called "Third Avenue Center". Probably has a bunch of different places in it. Here's the Google Street View.

Checkuser most certainly does expire after either 30 or 31 days, and always has. It's the worst-kept secret out there. Does this French law apply to the WMF?

Page 6, para 1: mentions this law (law of June 21 2004, article 6.1.8), where the judicial decision asserts that Wikimedia can produce the IP addresses of anyone that edits Wikipedia for one year after they do. Wikipedia reassured the court of this, and it is in the judgement. I don't think this is correct. Again - can someone tell me if Wikimedia keeps checkuser accessability for all logins (not just IPs) for one year? If not, they fibbed. This is important - or will be.

It's perfectly possible that both are true - that checkuser only lasts 30 or 31 days but the raw server logs are kept for one year.

Of course, that means they lie in their privacy policy, which says that server logs are "normally discarded after about two weeks".

The second floor looks like professional office space above the street level shops.

Probably office space there for half a dozen desks isn't all that much more expensive than St. Pete.

It's perfectly possible that both are true - that checkuser only lasts 30 or 31 days but the raw server logs are kept for one year.

Of course, that means they lie in their privacy policy, which says that server logs are "normally discarded after about two weeks".

Scroll down to the bottom of the page listing all the different database dumps. The private dumps include "Data for blocks of IP addresses, ranges, and users."

You could always meet some of these people in person (New York), and have a nice friendly chat.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=178649313

Ryulong has started a discussion on this. It's not clear how it's going to turn out, but at least someone's questioning it...

Good! And of all people, User:Thatcher131 comes up with the single best on-wiki summary of the situation yet (boldface mine):

I simply do not understand the purpose of restoring the history of the article. Keeping it as a redirect to Public Information Research is a rational decision, even if some disagree, and was the decision at Wikipedia:DRV#9_December_2007. However what is the purpose of restoring all the article history? That perpetuates the problematic material that was the subject of the June AfD and DRV that resulted in the merge in the first place. GFDL? Redirects don't need a complicated history for GFDL purposes. Joshua also cites Previous breaks many links to by people linking to difs of this article in the archive and makes it hard to find. Well, shit, every deletion breaks a link somewhere, let's never delete anything! If someone has a link to Daniel Brandt and we have chosen to delete it (for whatever reason) then the link should be broken. This latest restoration is completely unexplicable to me.

Bravo, Thatcher! Though I suspect it isn't so inexplicable once everyone understands the psychology of the person who did it.

Okay, so "it's not clear what will happen" turns out to mean "everyone so far has agreed that the history shouldn't be there". I suspect some, at least, have seen the threat to make this forum indexed...

The Spaghetti Ballad

When a noodle meets a noodle,
Coming through the rye...

Okay, so "it's not clear what will happen" turns out to mean "everyone so far has agreed that the history shouldn't be there". I suspect some, at least, have seen the threat to make this forum indexed...

The threat was on Friday - it's now a reality. A LOT of people who had done Google searches to find background information on Wikipedians they were in conflict with, only to be somewhat frustrated due to our bot policy, are going to find it much easier in a couple of days, if not already. I expect both page views and new-member registrations to increase significantly. They're not going to realize how significant this is until it's too late, I'm afraid.

Who knows, maybe we'll even get some new VIP's coming in! Those are always fun...