Robin D. Laws doing an AMA on Reddit, for you Redditers.

I got tipped off about this via email: legendary (that should disconcert him) game designer Robin D. Laws is doing one of Reddit’s Ask Me Anything threads.  This is one of the ones that apparently goes on for an entire week, so if you wanted to, ah, ask Robin anything about the seemingly-endless stream of groundbreaking games that he keeps insisting on making, now would be the time.  He’ll be popping in and out of that thread on a regular basis.

Moe Lane

PS: My suspicions that there will be a The Yellow King RPG announcement soon have not been quieted by this event.

Man goes on Reddit to complain about losing a “It’s the cat or me!” fight.

What follows is one of the most uniform displays of “So would I, dude” that I have ever seen on the Internet.  Goodness gracious, but it’s nice to know that there are still things that unite us.  Admittedly, I would have hoped that it’d have been something more weighty than “If you’ve been with a woman for three years, and you knew you disliked her cat all along, and you told her after you got engaged that the cat had to go or you did, don’t start crying when she picks the cat,” but I’ll take what I can get.

(Oops: forgot where I saw it, first.  Note that I will apparently rave now about Claritin at any excuse, or none.)

Moe Lane Continue reading Man goes on Reddit to complain about losing a “It’s the cat or me!” fight.

Reddit CEO to have an AMA tomorrow.

This should be… interesting: “CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman will be conducting a Reddit AMA — short for “Ask Me Anything” — tomorrow at 1pm PST, giving a space for Redditors to dialogue with him about the site’s present and future.”  ….In other news, expect a deafening cacophony of sounds and rage to saturate the Internet at about – hey! 1 PM, Pacific Time!  What an extraordinary coincidence.

Moe Lane

PS: Still haven’t really got into this Reddit thing.  So what I’ve decided to do is, see, is to take this Megan McArdle article and just more or less agree with it: it seems reasonably sound, and if there’s anything really awful in there somewhere I can always change my position. Which, really, is how it generally works for most people; only we rarely publicly admit to resorting to such shortcuts.  But, hey, why lie?

The New York Times goes insane in its ‘edit’ of the Ellen Pao Reddit resignation story.

(H/T: Instapundit) If you’ve ever wondered why the New York Times doesn’t have the same reputation that it used to, well, this is why.

https://twitter.com/KevinWGlass/status/619902870805213184/photo/1

Continue reading The New York Times goes insane in its ‘edit’ of the Ellen Pao Reddit resignation story.

#rsrh So, why DOES Conde Nast own Reddit? And Barack Obama patronize* it?

I will readily enough admit: from my point of view the conflict between the odiously liberal Reddit and the odiously odious Gawker** has all of the charms of the Iraq-Iran war, with the added bonus that there are no actual innocents in the way to make me feel bad about watching both sides savage each other.  So normally I’d just look upon this latest escalation, and snicker – only, @amandacarpenter raises an excellent point:

Continue reading #rsrh So, why DOES Conde Nast own Reddit? And Barack Obama patronize* it?

Telecommie* Aaron Swartz’s federal indictment (and unpersoning by Larry Lessig).

The formal indictment of PCCC/Reddit** co-founder (and Demand Progress Executive Director) Aaron Swartz is available [link fixed], and you will find it compelling reading, if only because it shows the level of stubborn disregard for other people’s property and needs that can be exhibited by a telecommie geek who is simultaneously convinced of the rightness of his cause, and not especially overburdened with a sense of conventional ethics.  Essentially, if this indictment is correct, then Swartz physically broke into MIT’s computer network, inserted a virgin laptop into that system, deliberately spoofed the network into believing that the laptop represented a legitimate (guest***) user of MIT’s JSTOR online journal database account, immediately began massive downloads of JSTOR data in flagrant violation of JSTOR and MIT policies, spent several months playing steadily-increasing games of digital cat-and-mouse with MIT’s anti-piracy forces, then attempted to retrieve the physical evidence for all of this while trying to disguise his identity.  The indictment lists several occasions where Swartz’s behavior hindered the ability of legitimate MIT users to access JSTOR, and at least one where MIT users were outright prohibited from accessing JSTOR at all.

Lastly, please note this passage from a Boston Globe article on the crime.

Swartz allies claim the prosecution was launched over the objections of JSTOR.

“That is not the case,’’ said Heide McGregor, vice president of marketing and communications for JSTOR. “We were interested always in making sure the data was secure and the data was not disseminated. So we were happy we got to that result.”

Continue reading Telecommie* Aaron Swartz’s federal indictment (and unpersoning by Larry Lessig).

PCCC/Reddit cofounder Aaron Swartz indicted for mail fraud.

PCCC stands for “Progressive Change Campaign Committee,” which was a group that rose to fame last year for its stellar record in taking progressive campaign cash and turning it into mocking, pathetically broken dreams; Reddit is of course the popular news source that none of you use because the liberals on it will downvote you to death if you try; Aaron Swartz is a co-founder of both, as well as the Executive Director of Demand Progress*; and ‘mail fraud’ is a shorter way of saying “A Harvard University fellow studying ethics has been accused of using the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s computer network to steal nearly 5 million academic articles.” Specifically, Swartz is being charged with hacking into and stealing from JSTOR – which is pretty much the source for online academic journal articles.

The AP says that said articles were physically hacked, apparently involving wiring closets being broken into and so forth. How much of that is the AP just wishing that life was more like Mission: Impossible is unclear; but what is clear is that Aaron Swartz – who has one of those resumes that may not be amenable to a standard unpersoning – has been indicted for allegedly ripping off JSTOR and allegedly planning to redistribute them to filesharers. Or, as Demand Progress is currently calling it, “allegedly downloading too many scholarly journal articles from the Web.”

How funny is this? It’s so funny that I’m going to break a rule and link to all of these sites – and Huffington Post, for reasons that are about to be obvious. You see, Reddit is already pushing back on the New York Time’s reporting that Aaron Swartz is a cofounder of their website… which is interesting, because they didn’t seem to care when Swartz claimed that status on both HuffPo and Demand Progress. Oh, and look. Here’s the Wayback Machine, faithfully reproducing an article from 2006 where Alexis Ohanian embraces Swartz as a cofounder! But that was before the mail fraud, of course. Continue reading PCCC/Reddit cofounder Aaron Swartz indicted for mail fraud.