When anonymous attackers went after two Yale law students, they struck back

Re:When anonymous attackers went after two Yale law students... by madmanslitany on Wednesday February 18, 2009 @08:02PM (#486496)

I mostly agree--many of the posters do deserve to be punished for what they said, but I think incidents like this one (and other somewhat similar stories like the fuss over JuicyCampus last year) point to a more fundamental societal problem than a dozen trolls trolling away; the only reason why sites like AutoAdmit are able to become headline news is because too many people take garbage gossip seriously that they should rationally be dismissing.

This has always been a problem for human society, but the ease with which information spreads on the internet has heavily increased the amount of damage that it can do.

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Re:When anonymous attackers went after two Yale law students... by prospero on Wednesday February 18, 2009 @08:13PM (#486512)

Just to be clear, I don't really take issue with anything they said. Everything quoted in the article was the same locker room bullshit and wishful thinking that's been around since forever, and I don't buy that moving it to a permanent medium necessarily makes it a scourge on society.

But it's just plain dumb to give self-important law students a chance to flex their legal muscles. I don't think the fallout was warranted, but it was obviously coming.

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Re:When anonymous attackers went after two Yale law students... by madmanslitany on Wednesday February 18, 2009 @08:54PM (#486564)

I don't think it's the permanence that changes things, it's the visibility. Gossip about you from high school isn't that likely to turn up when you move out of your hometown to the big city, for instance.

I don't really think that most of what they said is anything special, no--you're right, it's bullshit. But I think you're underestimating how many people take this kind of bullshit seriously, and I think that's a problem in and of itself.

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Re:When anonymous attackers went after two Yale law students... by jcl on Thursday February 19, 2009 @02:22PM (#487689)

I don't think it's the permanence that changes things, it's the visibility.

This is what confused me most about the whole case. As the article says: "Many other websites control extremely salacious material either by using special coding to keep it to themselves (so that Google doesn’t pick it up)..."

The major issue wasn't merely that there were false statements being issued, but that they were high on the Google results for the laywers' names. Why didn't the website merely turn off Google indexing for the problem forums?

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