AntiSocial Media, Slideshow Presentation by Judd Bagley Options

[Kato]

Here's Judd Bagley's slideshow presentation for anyone who might have missed it. The early part of his lecture covers the Naked Short Selling Financial Issue, gradually moving onto blogging problems, and finally detailing his experiences with Wikipedia.

The Wikipedia stuff is a must see.

You can cut in at any point of the presentation / lecture using the sidebar.

http://antisocialmedia.net/lecture1/player.html

*Update: Blog post about the lecture is here:

http://antisocialmedia.net/?p=158

LECTURE ON ABUSE OF SOCIAL MEDIA BY STOCK MANIPULATORS

I recently had the honor of lecturing a group of business students at the University of Texas, on the topic of abuse of social media by stock manipulators. I’ve merged the recording of the lecture with my slide presentation and make it available for you here.

I should also note that I found this experience to be a very positive one, and would welcome similar opportunities in the future. Please contact me via email at: antisocialmedia@gmail.com

[dtobias]

I see both Judd and Slim as rather sneaky, underhanded, manipulative types more interested in promoting their own agendas than in openly and straightforwardly exploring the facts. Both can get highly indignant (and sometimes schoolmarmish) over parts of the other's behavior that they can pick apart and ruthlessly skewer, but will clam up when it comes to responding to uneasy questions about their own behavior. But at least they're finally now actually participating in a frank discussion in a venue without clique buddies to censor anything they don't like.

WordBomb: Wasn't it a dirty trick to put links in your e-mails that purport to go to Wikipedia user pages but actually go to pages in your own site or blog?

Slim: Wasn't it an extreme overreaction on your part to get WordBomb summarily banned and then highly demonized for the next few years, with all of the points he was trying to make declared to be "Bagley attack memes" and vigorously suppressed on-wiki, including via the BADSITES concept?

[WordBomb]

I see both Judd and Slim as rather sneaky, underhanded, manipulative types more interested in promoting their own agendas than in openly and straightforwardly exploring the facts. Both can get highly indignant (and sometimes schoolmarmish) over parts of the other's behavior that they can pick apart and ruthlessly skewer, but will clam up when it comes to responding to uneasy questions about their own behavior.

Everything above is opinion -- and thus not worth arguing over -- until the part about my clamming up when it comes to responding to uneasy questions. That's just not true. I'll talk about all of this all day long. That said, I do tend to get minimalist when discussing it here on WR, since it's all been said so many times and I hate to subject everybody to the minutiae over and over again.

But at least they're finally now actually participating in a frank discussion in a venue without clique buddies to censor anything they don't like.

That's very true. I should not have attacked SV last night as I did. At least she's willing to talk about it. That's very admirable, particularly given the mostly hostile crowd here. Slim, I apologize for that.

WordBomb: Wasn't it a dirty trick to put links in your e-mails that purport to go to Wikipedia user pages but actually go to pages in your own site or blog?

No, it was not a dirty trick, in my opinion. To understand why I did it, it might help to understand the prevailing circumstances: I knew with certainty that email sent to SlimVirgin was opened by Gary Weiss. I was fairly certain I knew what that meant -- SlimVirgin forwarded it to Weiss. But Occam's Razor, which I referenced earlier, would suggest that the simplest solution was that SlimVirgin was Gary Weiss. In fact, that seemed to explain a lot of things in those earliest days, particularly the way SlimVirgin appeared out of nowhere to ban me, and the way she said over and over that all the evidence I'd amassed and sent to her proving what's now completely obvious "didn't amount to much" (or something like that). The disguised link was my way of ruling out the possibility that SV was actually Gary Weiss. I didn't give a fig for Slim's IP address...as long as it wasn't 151.202.102.139.

Dirty trick? No.

Resourceful? Yes.

[Random832]

WordBomb: Wasn't it a dirty trick to put links in your e-mails that purport to go to Wikipedia user pages but actually go to pages in your own site or blog?

No, it was not a dirty trick, in my opinion. To understand why I did it, it might help to understand the prevailing circumstances: I knew with certainty that email sent to SlimVirgin was opened by Gary Weiss. I was fairly certain I knew what that meant -- SlimVirgin forwarded it to Weiss. But Occam's Razor, which I referenced earlier, would suggest that the simplest solution was that SlimVirgin was Gary Weiss. In fact, that seemed to explain a lot of things in those earliest days, particularly the way SlimVirgin appeared out of nowhere to ban me, and the way she said over and over that all the evidence I'd amassed and sent to her proving what's now completely obvious "didn't amount to much" (or something like that). The disguised link was my way of ruling out the possibility that SV was actually Gary Weiss. I didn't give a fig for Slim's IP address...as long as it wasn't 151.202.102.139.

Hold it.

On WikBack, you said that you didn't care about her IP address at all, did not suspect she was Weiss, and only included the link to see if she read the documents at all (vs discarding them unopened).

Not being able to get your story straight doesn't help your credibility.

[WordBomb]

On WikBack, you said that you didn't care about her IP address at all, did not suspect she was Weiss, and only included the link to see if she read the documents at all (vs discarding them unopened).

Not being able to get your story straight doesn't help your credibility.

You're confusing two events: the pixel and the link.
The pixel (embedded in a document hosted on a file sharing site, which was linked to via email) was sent after it became apparent that SV wasn't reading what I was sending her. I wanted to know whether or not that was true. All I wanted to see was a ping verifying that it was opened. I got my ping, but from an IP address I happened to know, without a doubt, belonged to Gary Weiss.

At that point, before I could draw conclusions about what the results of the first test meant, I had to rule out the possibility that SlimVirgin was Gary Weiss. The challenge was figuring out how to do that given her apparent unwillingness to read attachments I sent her.

About that same time, she asked me to identify any other accounts I'd used. Of course, there were none, but this presented me with an opportunity. So I sent what appeared to be a link to a Wikipedia userpage, but was actually a link to a site with server logs I could access. By the way, that kind of link spoofing is not easy in Gmail.

At that point, all I wanted to know was whether the click came from Weiss's IP or another.

[Hell Freezes Over]

On WikBack, you said that you didn't care about her IP address at all, did not suspect she was Weiss, and only included the link to see if she read the documents at all (vs discarding them unopened).

Not being able to get your story straight doesn't help your credibility.

You're confusing two events: the pixel and the link.
The pixel (embedded in a document hosted on a file sharing site, which was linked to via email) was sent after it became apparent that SV wasn't reading what I was sending her. I wanted to know whether or not that was true. All I wanted to see was a ping verifying that it was opened. I got my ping, but from an IP address I happened to know, without a doubt, belonged to Gary Weiss.

I'm not sure that makes much sense. I think I told you at the time that I wasn't reading your attachments, and that I didn't want to go to offwiki sites to see your evidence, so what made you think you'd get a ping from me by embedding something in a document on another website?