Pron Prank and Your Image

I have been reading the little episode between the Microsoft RSS Team Blog and Niall Kennedy with some interest, it appears Sean Lyndersay posted an image of Niall’s from Flickr and did not post a link or attribute the photo to anyone. Niall took offense, as he should’ve, and he replaced the image, not with a graphic that said stop stealing my bandwidth or, even better, a Firefox logo, he put up a picture from goatse, a porn image with the Creative Commons logo covering his behind. While, initially funny, it could’ve been handled a lot better than it was.

Kennedy explained via phone that he had offered his ordinary photo (taken at the Gnomedex conference a couple years ago) for use under a Creative Commons license, allowing it to be posted on non-commercial sites, with proper attribution. (Hence the Creative Commons logo censoring out the central part of the pornographic replacement image.) He wasn’t pleased that Microsoft used his photo on a commercial site, without attribution. In addition, he said, the use of the photo violated the Flickr terms of service by not linking back to the site.

“Basically they stole one of my photos and put it on their blog,” Kennedy said. “I decided to make them very aware of that fact.” Source: seattlepi.com

Robert Scoble posted about the incident here, Niall sends Microsoft team a porn message, and he said pretty much the same thing that I thought, he could’ve handled the situation better. Apparently, if I am reading everything correctly, Niall changed the image and then contacted Microsoft, instead of contacting them to ask them what is up first. And he said, someone from the RSS team contacted him and no one there was contacted about the mistake.

Ahh, so someone at Microsoft made a mistake and didn’t correctly use an image from Niall Kennedy’s feed from Flickr (or didn’t pay attention to the Creative Commons license agreement). So, what did Niall do? Did he call up one of his former co-workers at Microsoft and explain that he was pissed and get the problem taken care of nicely and behind closed doors? No.

He replaced the image with a porn image, Todd Bishop at the Seattle PI reports.

I’m sure that gets everyone 16 and under to laugh, but is that really the best way that Niall could have gotten the image taken down? Source: Scobleizer

Nope. And I bet Niall wouldn’t think so if the same thing happened to him, but what do I know. It is kind of funny that someone from Microsoft did this, especially with their big anti-pirating push, and certainly everyone who hates Microsoft has enjoyed this, but it could’ve been handled differently. As Robert was trying to say, stuff on the internet may never go away, and while you may not need anyone or anything else right now, you could find yourself in a worse position one day because of things you do today.

Maybe Niall needed some extra traffic this week…

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Blogging, Microsoft, Mistakes No Comments » December 2006

How to Keep Your Kids Safe Online

Talk to them. It’s that simple, tell them there are bad people in the world who are looking to take advantage of them, tell them you can’t really be 100% safe unless they are at home, let them know they have to watch out for themselves and their friends. Talk to them. Why do I post this now? After reading the umpteenth story on someone being raped after they met someone on MySpace, that’s why.

Girl Accuses MySpace Acquaintances Of Rape Three Teens Formally Charged, One Still Being Sought.

At least three assailants, including a current and former Senn High School student, raped a 14-year-old girl they met through the MySpace.com Web site, then left her passed out in an alley, prosecutors said Monday.

It’s not just MySpace, anywhere they go online and they interact with people, they can get into trouble if they don’t know what to do. Girls, never put yourself in a similar situation, this girl went to one of their houses and drank a lot and passed out. Big mistake. Of course, this doesn’t give anyone the right to take advantage of her, but the big mistake was being there with people she didn’t know to start with.

Talk to your kids, you won’t regret it.

If you need extra protection, install Teen Minder on their computer and you’ll be able to see everything they do online. Talk about making you feel a little safer, if you could play a video of what happened on their computer, wouldn’t that make you feel better? Try it now, it’s some of the best child monitoring software around.

Added: Just spell checked this and realized that the article from the NBC site misspelled acquaintances, it was spelled with an e acquaintences instead of an a acquaintances.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Attacks, Mistakes, MySpace, Social Networks No Comments » August 2006

Spell Checking Gone Wild

From the, who let an intern spell check this department.

From the Mediabistro This is hilarious. I guess this means I have an African-American Dodge Ram and my wife has an African-American Town and Country.

A Yankees Fact of the day that appears on the August 2 page of the team’s desktop calendar, twice substitutes the phrase “African-American” where the word “black” should be.

It says the Yankees during the ’99 season “wore a African-American number 5 on their left sleeve” in memory of Joe DiMaggio, and it also says that they “wore a African-American armband” in memory of “Catfish” Hunter.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Mistakes, Sports No Comments » August 2006