Privatemusings introduces formal BLP Opt-Out proposal at wp:an.

PM needs to get Durova and Doc Glasgow on board to really push it. Doc Glasgow has the zeal, and Durova has a good way of explaining these things. She's also given the WP:NO ORIGINAL BIOGRAPHIES a lot of thought, which is an essential subclause of the WP:OPTOUT policy. It is essential simply because Wikipedians are generally too immature to understand the grey issues, and it provides some kind of bench mark for them to latch on to.

The three biographical guides for this should be Angela Beesley, Seth Finkelstein (now deleted) and Don Murphy. None of them have appeared in "dead-wood" encyclopedias. All of them have had to intervene substantially in their own biographies and have written or spoken about the experience in varying ways. Murphy had to remove one piece of particularly nasty vandalism himself. They should be allowed to opt out and their bios should be salted.

Not bad, but I'm a little concerned about this wording:

...In addition to the fact that it should say "someone who has placed himself or herself," this seems a little ambiguous, if not gameable. Certainly not all "public controversies" are public (or controversial) enough to be included in WP, much less a real encyclopedia, in the first place.

Remember, the point is to give subjects a means of obtaining lasting and effective relief from unwarranted attack articles written and maintained by revenge-obsessed Wikipedians. Somehow they'll have to ensure that they only apply this to legitimate public figures who are not only controversial in their own right, but are involved in high-profile controversies, as opposed to, say, the issue of whether or not Optimus Prime should be mostly blue-colored, as opposed to green or red.

Obviously the No-Original-Biographies condition would be far simpler and more clear-cut to work with, but their biggest concern will always be their ability to go after whoever happens to be getting attention at the moment, particularly if it's over something that challenges one of their sacred cows, whatever they happen to be. (Wikipedia itself comes to mind...)

I haven't heard the latest PrivateMusings radio show (still recovering from hearing the uncut Wikipedia Review appearance spliced by the Wiki Defender) but GTBacchus is on the show. He is an administrator I rate highly so I'd be interested in what he has to say.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:NotTheWikipediaWeekly

UPDATE: Looking down the page, you can see that this will end up like last week's semi-protection debate. The loonies and ethically stunted come out to play, and the arguments start to resemble HAL from 2001 a Space Odyssey.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_tal...oundation_issue


If "neutrality was a guiding principle" how come 1000s of biographies now have NPOV boilerplates all over them?

If "neutrality was a guiding principle" how come so many subjects have complained, and how come so many people have had to complain on their behalf about material that was later hurriedly removed as defamatory?

If "neutrality was a guiding principle" how come we keep finding outrageous pieces of libel in article after article?

Wikipedia has failed to show that it can safeguard people's biographies from serious defamation. It has failed to apply its own much vaulted "guiding principles"

It has failed.

I still think opt-out would be unnecessary if Wikipedia would take steps to make sure that it's protecting BLPs appropriately, but, since the community is manifestly unwilling to do so, I'll support this as a less-preferred alternative. Of course, it has no chance of passing for precisely the reasons that the community won't take the other steps: because the community has its collective head up its collective ass on this issue.

(Not all of the community, in fairness - I was actually pleasantly surprised by the level of support that the semi-protection proposal did receive, including from such WR favourites as SlimVirgin - although Crum375 was against - and Jossi.)

My favourite quote from the semi-protection debate, which I don't think has been mentioned on WR yet, is from Equaczion:

Me: I understand what you're saying. Our fundamental disagreement, I think, is your apparent belief that dealing with material denegrating living people "as it arises" is sufficient. I don't think it is.
Equaczion: Okay, so we'll find a way to protect them better.

Hey, why didn't I think of that?

I don't want to turn this into another discussion about the Don Murphy BLP, but I'll reprint a post I made earlier about that article:

On the OptOut talk page, I found this:



Simple rebuttal is: Newspapers are publishers, and they may be sued by individuals and corporations who are libeled on their pages. Wikipedia is, per law, an interactive computer service and is therefore exempted in large part by Section 230 from the laws that govern publishers.

Until Section 230 changes, please do not ever compare Wikipedia with a newspaper.

Some people are so stupid, it's not even funny.

1. A reporter who writes about a living person is expected to make an effort to locate that person and solicit a comment from that person, or at least from that person's lawyer, and add this comment to the article. Wikipedia makes no such effort.

2. The person who finds himself in a newspaper article can write to the editor if anything is in dispute. The letter might not get published, but it also won't be used to ridicule the person and make the article worse than it was to begin with. On Wikipedia, by contrast, it's risky to complain if you are the subject of an article. Some anonymous teenager may dig out more stuff you'd rather not see in print, just to teach you a lesson about how you don't have any rights on Wikipedia: "Stuff it, old man, because I edit StarTrek articles on Wikipedia and you don't, and resistance is futile." If the newspaper doesn't publish the letter, at least they won't add a box to their Letters page that says, "This person wrote us a letter but he is BANNED from this newspaper, and has no right to respond to us!"

3. Two days after a newspaper article is published and read by maybe 10,000 people, it is used to wrap fish. Dead fish cannot read. By way of contrast, the longevity of a Wikipedia article that is well-ranked in Google, is much more consequential. Dozens or hundreds of people will read it every day for the rest of your life. Furthermore, many of these readers start out by looking for you in Google, whereas most of the newspaper readers who see your article, happened across that article out of mild interest or random curiousity.

4. Once a newspaper article is published, it's chiseled into stone. A Wikipedia bio keeps on giving with new edits, and the subject has to watch it for the rest of his life.

5. The back-room discussions among newspaper reporters and editors about the character of the subject of a bio are not published. In Wikipedia, the Talk pages are published and indexed in some search search engines.

6. Even biographies that are finally deleted from Wikipedia continue to be available on the Wayback Machine. Wikipedia could ask Wayback to block access to Wikipedia articles, but it hasn't done this. There are also hundreds of scrapers that republish the material constantly. Wikipedia makes no effort to curtail scraping, and nothing can be done about it after the fact.

I could go on with this comparison, but I'm getting depressed already...

Oddly enough, this comment reflects a concern I have about OTRS - it is all very well saying use this system for confidentiality, but it is not a confidential system, it is simply a way of asking without plastering it over very public e-walls, but it ain't private and confidential to a person that has any legal responsibility for maintaining that confidence.

In a nutshell, it boils down to Wikipedia's appalling lack of ethics in journalism.

I added an intelligent and helpful comment to that Talk page and it was deleted and my IP address was blocked. I guess this says it all.

Drama, drama, we need more drama! It's much more fun for Wikipedians to have a bit of drama, than it is to deal with substantive real-world issues that affect real people.

I think of drama as God's default method of education, when all other known methods of education have failed.

Bravo Daniel! They are a bit like the Nazis in that organisation, they blacklist those who are the most intelligent, and the most persuasive. All they want is sheep, sheepishly editing Jimbos encyclopedia, so he can sell it for a big fat sum. That'll happen in the next three years.

And of course if the subject did make a statement, it would not be easy to incorporate without violating WP:NOR and WP:RS.

To be fair, many newspaper articles are available online.

I was perplexed by this assertion as well. And the trend is only increasing that archives going way back have begun to be available.

Well, some of us are going to be on strike. Um ein tadelloses Mitglied einer Schafherde sein zu können, muß man vor allem ein Schaf sein. (Albert Einstein). In that case, the work they get from the people they keep, will be what they deserve.

A second layer of editing will happen on top of what's in Wikipedia now, eventually, eventually. It's shame it won't happen at Wikipedia, but it will surely happen somewhere. If it weren't for the world's penchant to Napster-style try to steal any copyable information for free (going out their way to avoid paying even token sums to writers), we'd have it already.

Look at the Hollywood writers' strike. That never would have happened had the producers and directors been even half-way fair about who should earn residuals for work. The writers said again and again (quite elegantly enough they could not have been misunderstood) that if they didn't put it down HERE, it wouldn't come out of some schmuck's mouth eventually THERE. But they were ignored, because it was assumed they could be used like interchangable labor. Wrong.

There are, however, many places in our society where the writers have no union. And like teachers, writers are endlessly screwed in relationship to the work they do, because the impulse to write seems to be as subset of the impulse to teach. It's in our genes. We do it for free, so why would anybody pay us? It's a bad siituation.

BTW, if there's any group more important to society than writers, which is screwed over even worse, it's probably inventors. Have you compared duration of copyright vs patent lately? Is there any rational reason on this Earth why both should not be the same?

It's even worse for theoreticians. Theories, ideas, and abstract (e.g. mathematical) methods cannot be patented or copyrighted. For example, the Fast Fourier Transform cannot be patented or copyrighted, although executable code for it can be copyrighted.

A text that presents a theory can be copyrighted, but not the theory itself, which anyone can freely use.

The usual jackassery is taking place on the admins noticeboard. Privatemusings has been dragged forth by the mob of gurning ghouls for summarizing Daniel Brandt's view on the BLP discussion. In other words, editing for a banned user by proxy.

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

I've normally got a strong stomach for this kind of Wiki-nonsense but I'm starting to feel sick from the relentless twattery.

Can someone just put the awful place out its misery and torch it?

Update: That looks like the Wiki Defender in there having some fun and taking the piss. So at least that has cheered me up.

Apparently a banned user's very thoughts are toxic, like the words of ye heretic. No amount of retranscribing, rewriting, and transparent attribution to the original source for reader WARNING will help, when the thoughts themselves are from SATAN, and must be suppressed.

So don't go there. You can retranscribe text for a NPOV representation of NAMBLA, for example (and there is a Wiki on NAMBLA that does) but NOT for a banned user, who is far worse than (wait for it) HITLER (on which there is also a Wiki, with quotes). Instead of making you merely gag, like NAMBLA, a banned user might actually make you THINK. And then the small minds of certain admins would be in danger of overheating and frying like an overclocked Pentium with the coolant run out.

Socrates was notorious for making people think. Some of them took grievous exception to that practice.

Galileo was also notorious for making people think. Among them, Pope Urban took grievous exception to Galileo's temerity and tendentiousness.

Darwin, alas, failed to make people think. He mainly succeeded in making them see red.

It's just not safe to make people think.

"Some people would rather die than think. In fact, they do." Bertrand Russell

"Whoever first coined the phrase "the naked truth" had perceived an important connection. For nakedness is shocking to all right-minded people, and so is truth." (Russell again).

Milt

I'm confused. How did this turn into this ?

All I said was that if the language remains as loose as it is presently in that proposal, and if it becomes policy, then I expect that someone will use that new language as an excuse to bring back my bio. If my bio comes back, then yes, I'll have to fight it again, and if it takes 2.5 years again, you can expect that in the course of that fight, hivemind will most likely double in size.

Is that so unreasonable?

It is customary to demonize one's adversaries. The Hebrew root of Satan literally means adversary. And of course, one is tempted to overcome their adversaries.

Still, it's a start...

But what this version of the proposal really lacks is an awareness of what Wikipedia actually is. Such a proposal won't be acceptable to the majority of Wikipedians because it doesn't attempt to assuage their primary fear, which is that their efforts to punish and "stick it to" the people they disagree with - but who happen to hold some small degree of prominence that allows Wikipedians to write articles about them - won't have been in vain.

There's also a small minority of WP'ers, such as User:Jossi, who write about people they like and respect, but who actually have the administrative authority to maintain those articles in a state they deem personally acceptable. But of course, the number of such cases is so small, it's probably not worth mentioning.

Anyway, for the majority group, you have to come up with something to mollify them. It's probably not enough to state that the number of people who will take advantage of an opt-out policy is likely to be extremely small, maybe even some fraction of one percent... because they'll assume that since their motive for writing the article(s) they wrote was basically revenge, their articles will be more likely to be deleted.

One of my ideas, of course, was to allow WP to replace opted-out articles with "salt pages" that made it very clear that the person had chosen to opt out. Now if that were worded just so, it might make people curious as to why the person had done that, and allow WP'ers to continue to take some small measure of satisfaction for their efforts to smear the person in question.

Perhaps more importantly, nobody ever seems to make the point that the world's villains (criminals, dictators, warmongers, corporate robber-barons) are no more likely to opt out than anyone else, because on Wikipedia, they at least have a chance to go in and edit their articles themselves, in the hopes of being treated better there than on the average newspaper or magazine.

I mean, there are so many reaons for having such a policy - not all of which involve higher moral and ethical standards - and so few reasons not to have one, it's just no wonder that it comes up against so much opposition on WP. They wouldn't know a good idea if it hit them over the head, which is sort of why they're WP contributors in the first place.

Daniel Brandt is exactly the type of person they should be listening to, but because of dogma, people want to silence him and make it more difficult to find his views. This willingness of the community to shoot itself in the foot over and over is one of the most surreal aspects of Wikipedia.

The idea of a need for leadership keeps popping into my mind. There does not seem to be a lot of respect for leadership on Wikipedia and some people say that "leaders" are not needed at all on a wiki. When issues like this arise, the blatant lack of leadership always sticks out at me.

It's true! This is so predictable by now that it's not even much fun anymore. Part of the problem is the turnover situation. There are waves upon waves of backup wikipidiots who show up even as you begin to wear down the current gang. Lack of structure, lack of leadership, an ocean of potential wikipidiots == constant digital diarrhea.

Drama, drama, we need more drama! Call up the reserves!

Darwin wasn't exactly treated like Socrates or Galileo. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Yup, amongst all the other monkeys.

No irreverence intended, can blame Darwin for that.

Incidentally, Socrates, Galileo, and Darwin were all redheads (like me and lot of other great apes).

With all the drama over Hive:MBisanz and his complaint about Privatemusing posting for banned user, I am unable to make yet another constructive suggestion for dealing with the BLP problem. I'll make it here instead:

If the subject of a biography requests deletion, then the bio gets deleted. It can be recreated and developed from scratch only by Wikipedia editors who show a verifiable real name and city of location on their user page.

I'm not saying I agree completely with this idea (I think it's a bit too mild and potentially messy), but it could head off some potential legal problems for the Foundation. It would also free me from maintaining hivemind.

I offer it as a suggestion mainly to demonstrate that the current BLP discussions on Wikipedia suffer from too much inbreeding. Part of the reason for this is because I was banned by JoshuaZ for off-site activity last July.

Does anyone fail to see why Wikipedia isn't making much progress on this issue?

I dunno that I could recite all the reasons for this failure.

But neither can I give a coherent account of why various efforts to correct the situation have so far failed.

It's easy to say things like "lack of leadership" or "lack of professional ethics" but how those shortcomings can be remedied is beyond me.

Brandt, are you sure the guy represented in that photo is only 22 years old? He looks 47, and possibly tele-ported from 1962, where he was about to cue the orchestra at a Catskills ballroom.

Greg

That's what Myspace says. Maybe he didn't keep it updated. I didn't find his age on his résumé. You're right that his pic deserves more pixels.

Later: The Myspace link was changed to Google's cache copy because he switched to "private profile" today. And his résumé link is now dead because he wiped his personal Hofstra.edu pages today. He had about a dozen degrees listed on his résumé, complete with GPA info (3.8 to 4.0). Very impressive. I was expecting to see a PhD in Canon Law and another PhD in Theology any day now!

47?, not a great morale booster! When photo is expanded, he does look 25-ish.

What are the qualifications for Hivemind status? Is it any admin?

An admin or former admin, or higher, is grounds for a listing. Even an editor can get in, but it's very difficult for an editor to qualify — he has to be as evil as Chip Berlet or Ned Scott if only a mere editor (Ned is a JoshuaZ lackey).

An admin who deletes a constructive edit on the grounds that the editor is banned, or who argues that this is the proper course of action on Wikipedia, is worthy of about 30 minutes of research.

Anyone who personally gives me trouble by way of edits that are designed to make my name more visible on Wikipedia, has earned 60 minutes of research.

After that, a lot depends on whether the research is more or less successful. I want the real name, city of residence, age, and picture. One of those can be missing and I'll probably promote them anyway. If two are missing, I generally won't bother.

If they already give their real name and location on their user page, I tend not to bother even if they're evil, because it's superfluous. But I might look for their pic and their age just for kicks.

It's possible to get off of hivemind also. You can negotiate with me by proposing to do something that makes the world a better place. Quitting Wikipedia might work, but not if you leave with a swan song by you or your meatpuppets that places all the blame on me.

Daniel Brandt:

I was asked by Mbisanz to forward a message from him to you. Once I have it I will be posting it here for you.

Why should we allow it here?

I'm getting tired of Wikipedians pissing around with peoples posts on their site, and then expecting the red carpet treatment here.

If Mbisanz wants a dialog, then why can't he have it on an appropriate venue like a BLP discussion page?

If Mbisanz wants to piss about reprimanding Privatemusings for "summarizing the points of a banned user", then we should reprimand Lar for proxying for a twat and a nuisance.

I can't envisage anything interesting this clown Mbisanz has to add to the debate having seen his lunatic performance so far.

I have no objection to Lar's shuttle diplomacy.

Settle down. I don't think your characterization of matters is at all helpful.

I'll post the message, and if a mod here thinks it is inappropriate, they can remove it. If it's highly inappropriate, I suppose I can be censured by the Powers that Be (including yourself) for doing it.(1) But I am led to believe that the forwarding is for good reason, and that the post will be of general interest and germane to this thread.

----
1 - this, I suspect, will actually help my standing with those that think I'm a big bad anti WP person for participating here... So go ahead, Brer Fox, throw me in the briar patch!




Here it is:

----
Mr. Brandt, my apologies for offending you.

As you may have noticed, I attempt to be a moderate individual on-wiki. For instance, I !voted to keep deleted your redirect in the most recent DRV. And in both the image and BLP debates, I have attempted to chart a middle course of staying true to the goals of the project, while respecting the rights of outside individuals and copyright holders. In the most recent instance, I was mistaken in my belief that WP:DENY was a policy, and therefore was wrong in citing it to you as a reason that I thought your comments should be removed. While I was aware you were banned, I was uncertain as to the leeway given BLPs subjects, which is why I expressed the opinion that I thought it should be refactored, but I wouldn't do it myself.

When Privatemusings reposted it, my primary concern was that he was going against what I thought and what another editor had done. Additionally, I interpreted, probably wrongly, the reference to doubling hivemind to mean that you would begin targeting other editors if our BLP policy did not conform to your wishes. I still believe that banned editors should not play a role on-wiki in discussing items, but as is obvious from the Jon Awbery renaming debate, I am willing to take into consideration requests made off-wiki in crafting my own opinion, something I believe is in compliance with our blocking policy and the best interests of all parties.

I am aware that you value your privacy and do not like it appearing on search results. If you notice, in all my on-wiki references to you, I refer to you as "Mr. Brandt". I do this for the reason that I don't want to increase the occurrence of the search string "Daniel Brandt".

So I guess I now need to begin "proposing to do something that makes the world a better place" to get me off hivemind, you won't take me planting a tree in my yard and taking a picture of it? no, I didn't think so. Now, I can't break policy and I don't want to leave Wikipedia, so I'll try offering some alternatives, and you can tell me which one(s) you'd like to see me take.

1. Since you believe I made "edits that are designed to make my name more visible on Wikipedia", an accusation that could be interpreted as violating our BLP policy, I will submit an RFAR on my behavior.

2. You mention that you believe editors should disclose their identities. On my user page, I currently say my first name is Matt, and my user name is MBisanz. I maintain this page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:MBisanz/COI which I thought was a good step in being open with conflicts that may inhibit me from editing in an unbiased manner. Additionally, in my time on-wiki, I have claimed an advanced level of knowledge in 2 fields. Accounting and court structure. In your 90 minutes of checking me, I'm sure you found http://www.uncw.edu/csurf/program2007.pdf and http://www.deltapibap.com/board.html which do confirm I have the experience I claim. To expand on it, I am willing to create a permanent box on my userpage, that will include my legal name, age, a photo of me (yours I'm not sure I own the rights to anymore, and its 2 years old), my current location (different than myspace, but you'll see its highly plausible why) and a link to the above COI page.

As Lar can confirm, my primary email is from a provider whom this forum will not permit to register. So I am asking him to post this by proxy.

Thanks you for your time.

Matt Bisanz (MBisanz)
----

I (Lar) would like to add:

----
I confirm that Matt's primary email is from a provider whom this forum will not permit to register. (without manual intervention) However I think that if Matt contacts Somey or another admin here, that can be worked through, if he wishes. I know Somey has been very helpful in the past with matters of this sort, and I have encouraged Matt to contact him.
----

Implement The OPT-OUT POLICY for Original Biography Victims as the most responsible, ethical and practical answer to the myriad of problems and the deluge of defamation that belches out of Wikipedia at a frightening rate. Quit obscuring this with meaningless drama, absurd arguments and pointless nonsense.

How about that for characterizing matters "in a helpful way, eh?"

Kato:

Not much better, really. If you're concerned about "meaningless drama, absurd arguments and pointless nonsense" I suggest you talk to Daniel Brandt. (did making it size 7 help matters? Talk about pointless nonsense.) Your recent contributions to this thread have been zero value add, really. And that's being charitable. Did you actually read what MB had to say? He's not at all how you characterize him, I don't think... talk about closed minded, stereotyped, knee jerk reactionary thinking.

Most of the time you're pretty cogent but when you get foamy like that you're not helping matters at all. You may not have noticed but there are a number of folk trying to push for some change in BLP policy... I like opt out but I'm willing to see semi protection, BLP-Lock, or any of a number of other proposals tried, to see if they help. I'm not blind to the problem so yelling at me really really misses the mark.

As for further communication between MB and DB, I leave it to them to decide how to carry on, I was just trying to help matters.

Moulton: Thanks.

We have no policy to prohibit established contributors from quoting non-members. Nor should we.

Oh good grief....

You know how you guys were talking about not understanding nuances of communication online?


Ever heard someone make a point of principle? You weren't expected to take that at face value.... No one is going to remove that post -- I was making a point.

OK. Can people please get back to discussing this essential opt-out policy?

If it helps people understand the urgency of this BLP OPT-OUT issue and stops them being distracted by some business involving an editor who pointlessly removes comments, then yes, it is helpful.


Well watching Wikipedia trash this proposal, just as they trashed the semi-protection proposal, indicating that they will not budge an inch on their defamation issues and look unlikely to ever move, does make one a little agitated...


Not really, no. I haven't noticed. I've seen a tiny minority of people like PM push and get no support whatsover and the thing die. And I've seen this vital thread be sidetracked by some tedious proxy statement from an unrelated Wikipedia admin.


I wasn't yelling at you. I was addressing Wikipedians reading the thread and demanding that they quit the nonsense and get serious with the policy.

I do not support the proposal. The criteria are far too subjective and would be twisted by the extreme inclusionists enough that it would not make a significant difference.

I had a proposal of my own here based on SirFozzie's original, but despite posting at all the major noticeboards I got very little response (although there is some discussion here).

Article subjects who wish to opt-out should be able to do so if they are not deemed "Strictly Notable". On DocGlasgow's BLP page, someone defines this here. It probably needs a lot of revision by here it is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Doc...s_of_notability

If I can make a point here: this has turned into a discussion of the people discussing an important subject. Could we all perhaps make an effort to discuss the subject rather than the people making the points? Obviously, there are going to be diametrically opposed positions and no progress can be made if all sides do not understand the actual ideas that both are discussing.

Kato has made some extremely valid points that merit examination. Discuss those, not him.

It really depends on the source. If a living person has an article in Encyclopaedia Britannica, he or she is notable, no questions. If someone's in one of those fake Who's Whos that lets anyone in for payment - or even half a dozen such books - it proves nothing.

And what about books like Crockford's Clerical Directory or Who's Who of Cricketers with biographies of everyone who meets certain very low standards? Surely it cannot be that every Church of England clergyman or everyone who played one game of cricket for Oxford or Cambridge University is half-way to being notable (and every Church of England clergyman who played one game of cricket for Oxford or Cambridge University is notable).

Ho-hum, talk is cheap. Kato is right — nothing is happening on the opt-out issue except talk.

I listened to Durova's "dead tree" BLP proposal on Privatemusing's talk show, and that sounds like a good idea. It's simple and sweet. I'll wager hivemind against it.

1. Someone set up a page on Wikipedia that describes Durova's proposal.

2. State on that page that the undersigned will leave Wikipedia if the proposal does not become policy by a specific date, six months hence.

All Wikipedians who sign onto that page will instantly be removed from hivemind, and/or will enjoy immunity from hivemind until such time that the deadline arrives. If "dead tree" does not become policy, and they go back on their pledge by editing Wikipedia after that date, they could find themselves on hivemind once again.

If "dead tree" does become policy, all of hivemind will come down, and the IRC hostmask search engine on that page, currently with 33,000 hostmasks, will come down as well.

Talk is cheap. I want to see some action.

Agree, the Durova = FBI thing needs its own thread. And, I know I'm not obeying the request to stay on topic, but I really, really want to know the real age of the guy with the receding hairline in the tuxedo, at the time the photo was taken. There's no way that guy is either 22 or 25. I don't even care if it's MBisanz or not. As a hair-challenged individual myself, I just need to know the age of the guy with that hairline!