The Frienditto saga
Mar. 5th, 2005 10:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livI made the mistake of posting a couple of sentences about the Frienditto site in the middle of a post about something else. I assumed it was sufficient to say, yeah, obvious scam, let's move on. However, the issue has been blown way out of proportion and there's all kinds of rumours flying around.
I'm aware that I'm possibly fanning the flames by making another post on the subject, but I want to spell things out clearly. The thing is, the Frienditto site has no legitimate purpose. Let me say that again: it is facilitating nothing that any decent, honest person would want to do.
To break it down: how does this self-described "archive" site work? You provide the URL of a LiveJournal post, and the site copies all the HTML of the post and comments and displays it on the Frienditto site. Now, why would anyone want to do this? If you see a cool post that you like, you might want to draw attention to it. The sensible way to do that would be to post a link in your own journal, or post it to del.icio.us.
If it's a really cool post, you might want to archive it for posterity. Now, why on earth would any sensible person choose to archive a post from LJ, with its established infrastructure and serious, large-scale commercial presence, to some random fly-by-night website? You may doubt the security and durability of LJ, but it's pretty obvious that Frienditto is going to do worse on any of these parameters. It makes no sense for archives to be vastly less secure than the originals. The sensible thing to do would be to copy the post to your computer, if you were really concerned about archiving it.
More likely than LJ disappearing is the possibility that the post's author might decide to delete their post. Why would someone delete their post? The most likely reason is that they regret publishing it for some reason, perhaps because it's generated a really negative response, attracted trolls, caused drama, whatever. In this situation, the only purpose that is served by having a publicly available "archive" copy is to make it possible to continue trolling or harassing or creating drama related to the original post.
So Frienditto makes it possible to use someone's words against them after they've chosen to delete them. But there's a more serious problem. Frienditto also "lets" you archive Friends Only posts. The way it does this is by asking for your username and password so that the site can see posts that you have access to. This makes it possible for the site to archive, or in other words, make a publicly viewable copy of a post that was meant to be private.
Now, clearly there are ways to do this without needing to use Frienditto. If I am an untrustworthy person with access to your Friends Only entries, I can if I wish copy the entry and republish it somewhere online. It's a little trickier to do so anonymously than Frienditto makes it, but it's possible. But just look at that hypothetical scenario again: the whole point is that only if I were an untrustworthy person would I want to do such a thing.
Then there's the whole issue of giving your password to random strangers. It's possible that Frienditto could use your password to post unwanted material in your name, or to read other Friends Only entries apart from the one you decided (for some reason) to "archive", or to lock you out of your account and delete your entries and generally cause problems. I have no reason to believe Frienditto plan to do any of these things with the passwords they harvest; there are plenty of silly LJ toys that ask for a password to get access to protected information, and their creators are harmless fools who reason that, well, I'm a decent person and I wouldn't do that, so obviously everybody should trust me when I say I wouldn't.
But the point is that even if Frienditto are completely scrupulous with the passwords, they are using them for an intrinsically bad purpose in the first place. On the other hand, even if you believe (because all I can do is present my own opinion) that making other people's Friends Only entries public is a legitimate thing to do, as a general principle you should never reveal your passwords. Surely this is obvious?
I have the impression that the people involved in Frienditto are in fact not at all trustworthy. I'm not sufficiently certain of this to defame them though. It is possible that some of the moronic trolls claiming to be involved are actually not, but they just like having their names associated with anything that people are stressed about. It is possible that although they may have done cruel things and abused personal and private information and attempted to cause LiveJournal trouble in the past, they are not planning to do so in this case. This is not the point; I repeat, the site has no legitimate purpose, so even if they only do exactly what they have claimed they are going to do, that is still a bad thing to be doing, and the fact that they are attempting to do it on its own makes them untrustworthy.
Conclusion: Frienditto is a very bad thing. But at the same time, let's not blow things out of proportion. I really doubt that the site is going to do any serious damage to LiveJournal; LiveJournal has survived much more serious attacks before and will do so again long after Frienditto is forgotten. The world is not going to come to an end either, because a few foolish or naive or petty people have provided their passwords to a dodgy site.
My prediction is that the site will fall over in a few days because it doesn't have the infrastructure to support the volume of use it will be getting with all the fuss. (The site is in fact down at the time of writing.) Or if they manage to get it back up again, it will piss someone off enough to find itself attacked either digitally or legally. I doubt the trolls care enough to put serious money or effort into keeping the site going.
Final note: people (claiming to be) connected to Frienditto have been trolling journals with posts critical of the site. As a result of this, I have screened non-friends comments to this post, because I can't be bothered to deal with a potential troll-fest. Legitimate comments may be unscreened at my discretion.
I'm aware that I'm possibly fanning the flames by making another post on the subject, but I want to spell things out clearly. The thing is, the Frienditto site has no legitimate purpose. Let me say that again: it is facilitating nothing that any decent, honest person would want to do.
To break it down: how does this self-described "archive" site work? You provide the URL of a LiveJournal post, and the site copies all the HTML of the post and comments and displays it on the Frienditto site. Now, why would anyone want to do this? If you see a cool post that you like, you might want to draw attention to it. The sensible way to do that would be to post a link in your own journal, or post it to del.icio.us.
If it's a really cool post, you might want to archive it for posterity. Now, why on earth would any sensible person choose to archive a post from LJ, with its established infrastructure and serious, large-scale commercial presence, to some random fly-by-night website? You may doubt the security and durability of LJ, but it's pretty obvious that Frienditto is going to do worse on any of these parameters. It makes no sense for archives to be vastly less secure than the originals. The sensible thing to do would be to copy the post to your computer, if you were really concerned about archiving it.
More likely than LJ disappearing is the possibility that the post's author might decide to delete their post. Why would someone delete their post? The most likely reason is that they regret publishing it for some reason, perhaps because it's generated a really negative response, attracted trolls, caused drama, whatever. In this situation, the only purpose that is served by having a publicly available "archive" copy is to make it possible to continue trolling or harassing or creating drama related to the original post.
So Frienditto makes it possible to use someone's words against them after they've chosen to delete them. But there's a more serious problem. Frienditto also "lets" you archive Friends Only posts. The way it does this is by asking for your username and password so that the site can see posts that you have access to. This makes it possible for the site to archive, or in other words, make a publicly viewable copy of a post that was meant to be private.
Now, clearly there are ways to do this without needing to use Frienditto. If I am an untrustworthy person with access to your Friends Only entries, I can if I wish copy the entry and republish it somewhere online. It's a little trickier to do so anonymously than Frienditto makes it, but it's possible. But just look at that hypothetical scenario again: the whole point is that only if I were an untrustworthy person would I want to do such a thing.
Then there's the whole issue of giving your password to random strangers. It's possible that Frienditto could use your password to post unwanted material in your name, or to read other Friends Only entries apart from the one you decided (for some reason) to "archive", or to lock you out of your account and delete your entries and generally cause problems. I have no reason to believe Frienditto plan to do any of these things with the passwords they harvest; there are plenty of silly LJ toys that ask for a password to get access to protected information, and their creators are harmless fools who reason that, well, I'm a decent person and I wouldn't do that, so obviously everybody should trust me when I say I wouldn't.
But the point is that even if Frienditto are completely scrupulous with the passwords, they are using them for an intrinsically bad purpose in the first place. On the other hand, even if you believe (because all I can do is present my own opinion) that making other people's Friends Only entries public is a legitimate thing to do, as a general principle you should never reveal your passwords. Surely this is obvious?
I have the impression that the people involved in Frienditto are in fact not at all trustworthy. I'm not sufficiently certain of this to defame them though. It is possible that some of the moronic trolls claiming to be involved are actually not, but they just like having their names associated with anything that people are stressed about. It is possible that although they may have done cruel things and abused personal and private information and attempted to cause LiveJournal trouble in the past, they are not planning to do so in this case. This is not the point; I repeat, the site has no legitimate purpose, so even if they only do exactly what they have claimed they are going to do, that is still a bad thing to be doing, and the fact that they are attempting to do it on its own makes them untrustworthy.
Conclusion: Frienditto is a very bad thing. But at the same time, let's not blow things out of proportion. I really doubt that the site is going to do any serious damage to LiveJournal; LiveJournal has survived much more serious attacks before and will do so again long after Frienditto is forgotten. The world is not going to come to an end either, because a few foolish or naive or petty people have provided their passwords to a dodgy site.
My prediction is that the site will fall over in a few days because it doesn't have the infrastructure to support the volume of use it will be getting with all the fuss. (The site is in fact down at the time of writing.) Or if they manage to get it back up again, it will piss someone off enough to find itself attacked either digitally or legally. I doubt the trolls care enough to put serious money or effort into keeping the site going.
Final note: people (claiming to be) connected to Frienditto have been trolling journals with posts critical of the site. As a result of this, I have screened non-friends comments to this post, because I can't be bothered to deal with a potential troll-fest. Legitimate comments may be unscreened at my discretion.
Addendum 6.3.05:_hypatia_ has a really wonderful critique of my arguments in the comments. I suggest everyone should read her views because wow, I've learnt such a lot. (She doesn't disagree with me about this particular site, but does have some very interesting counters to the more general principles I was arguing from!)
Note 7.3.05: Various people seem to have been finding this through links and Google, which is great. I'm almost sorry I ended up screening comments because instead of attracting trolls I've attracted loads of people with interesting contributions and information! I hope to reply to everyone who's contributed individually, but just as a general statement, thank you all for your thoughtful remarks.
If anyone wants to link to this post they are absolutely welcome. My position against Frienditto has no bearing on my attitude towards legitimate links. And if people are finding this piece helpful, I'm happy to disseminate it.
I have left a couple of comments screened, not because they're deliberately trolling but because they're drawing attention to artificially created drama and unsubstantiated rumours. Part of the point of this post is that you don't have to believe that Frienditto is the spawn of the devil and eats babies to see why it's a bad thing. So I don't want the comments of this to degenerate into wild rumour-mongering; all that does is give Frienditto supporters a case because they can say, look, people are spreading false information about us! We are poor innocent victims!
Also word up to
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comment part 1
Date: 2005-03-06 01:16 pm (UTC)Then to be blunt they should not have posted it on a public forum. Everytime we post in public we should be aware that it can be stored by anyone. That is already true - in that sense Frienditto are doing nothing that isn't already happening. I certainly have personal copies of posts on blogs which were of particular interest to me. If they are public domain I'd have no issue with passing on something of particular interest to another friend (usual caveats apply - credits go with the piece, no profit can be made, mustn't be misrepresented etc etc). I don't see that as very different from sending them the URL and not everyone has easy online access even these days.
Frienditto also "lets" you archive Friends Only posts. The way it does this is by asking for your username and password so that the site can see posts that you have access to. This makes it possible for the site to archive, or in other words, make a pubically viewable copy of a post that was meant to be private.
And initially at least they stated that they would not honour requests from the poster to withdraw their content. I agree entirely this is not acceptable from an ethical point of view. From a pragmatic point of view the previous point still applies - this is already possible and we should take care that those we allow to see private content share our view of respecting privacy.
Then there's the whole issue of giving your password to random strangers.
Which is a salutary lesson in taking care how you give out users and passwords for all the reasons you give.
Frienditto - their previous acts and likeley motivations
This is not the point; I repeat, the site has no legitimate purpose, so even if they only do exactly what they have claimed they are going to do, that is still a bad thing to be doing, and the fact that they are attempting to do it on its own makes them untrustworthy.
Here I disagree - the concept of a public archive of public material per se is one which has many plus points.
None of these issues are new. All of them had to be addressed before and whilst blogging wasn't around the concepts map onto the Netiquette codes.
So - public post equals public content which if reproduced should be done so identifiably and not taken out of context, for profit etc. That would hold for blog postings, web forums etc just as much as Usenet.
Email - is private. Period. This maps onto friendlocked posts. Private mail lists need the same care as choosing to whom you open up your friendslocked posts.
Additionally most major archives honour requests from the original poster to take down their posts if they wish, also they honour Noarchive options.
All of this is of course subject to the caveat that not everyone thinks the same, some are not honourable, some simply don't agree. Once you post something it is public domain by default (in practical terms) at least and its never safe to assume you can remove it from all archives or remove all reference to it.
Part 3 cometh...
Re: comment part 1
Date: 2005-03-07 06:05 am (UTC)That's one of those statements - like "life's not fair" - that's completely true but shouldn't be true. Problem is, if everyone has to worry about the potential ramifications of every little bit they post on a public forum, nothing would ever get posted on public forums. People need to believe that their words really don't matter that much, otherwise everything becomes too damned important to say.
I got my first computer because I was absolutely, completely unwilling to commit anything to paper. Made it very difficult to do my homework. But I was terrified at setting something down in tangible, immutable form. The computer's a huge step forward, because it lets you change things. Remember the line in With Honors (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111732/), where Joe Pesci the homeless bum gets up in front of a bunch of Harvard students and says, basically, "No, dumbass, the best thing about the Constitution is that it can be changed."
Yes, archiving has its place. But I don't want to think about the whole weight of history whenever I put something down on the screen. I think a lot of the furor over Frienditto is that it breaks down the barrier between personal and political writing. People want to know the audience they're writing for - I'm ostensibly writing this for you, a complete stranger, but I know that
And rereading your comment, I guess you don't really disagree, and we're somewhat talking past each other. But I think that LJ's (and Xanga's) position as a "journalling" site instead of a "blogging" site complicates things. Blogging is typically political writing (in the sense of "being written for a wide audience", not necessarily "politics" in the everyday sense). Journalling is usually personal writing, even if it's in a public post. I usually cut "journal" entries a lot more slack than a typical blog post, because I understand that it's largely a way of venting one's feelings, and that we wouldn't be privy to those feelings at all if people couldn't trust that they're not going to get slammed or otherwise harmed by posting them. With blogs, I assume that people write them with full awareness that it's being read by a public audience, and hold them to a public-writing standard. Hence I have no problem with critiquing their position to shreds.
The idea of a "public journal" is really new, and I'm trying to think of a historical parallel and failing. Maybe graffiti, but that's anonymous. I think this could potentially be a big cultural shift, but the problem with big cultural shifts is that nobody knows what to do with them. So I'm not sure that dragging in e-mail/Usenet/blog practices is a good analogy - there's something fundamentally different about the typical LJ entry, and it's used for a different purpose.
Curiously, both LJ and Wiki have the idea of a "public personal" space, both rely on the idea that most people are basically good, and both have worked great until they were discovered by the assholes. I wonder if this is a general feature of human nature and both of these will fail as social software, or if these communities will figure out how to deal with the trolls and flourish.
Re: comment part 1
Date: 2005-03-07 09:10 pm (UTC)with the internet, you can always erase/correct the foolish words of yesterday... right...?
errr,no. sometimes. some places. (hey even after i click 'post comment' i can still grab this back. unless - )
with the internet, there's often an 'is anyone reading this?' thing. i mean like maybe really no-one is paying attention to what i say so it doesnt matter if i sound stupid. i'm lost amongst the millions of slightly pointless internet addresses, like a needle in a haystack. and you know what the best thing is - even if my mum/partner/teacher/boss does happen across it - they wouldn't even know it was me. safety in anonymity. you wont get none of that when someone picks up your diary in your handwriting...
and it just seems less pretentious typing away in a stream of consciousness with manner of speech and spelling mistakes than actually, y'know, writing stuff down.
all of which encourages just about anyone who cares to share a thought to, well, share it. (wish i hadnt started sharing now)
honesty with strangers. afterall who are they to judge you? and what do you care if they do?
and what you can never ever get from a paper journal (unless your journal is a weekly column of a newspaper or something like that) is interaction. how nice it is to hear from people. how stimulating. y'know all those (paper)diaries that get started at new year and get dumped within days - just the same proportion of virtual ones would also shrivel up, if it wasnt for the others. commenting, encouraging, arguing, intruiging...
blimey i'm tired. this much commenting is out of character. there were other thoughts. not very well concluded, sorry, but tired.
Re: comment part 1
Date: 2005-03-07 09:12 pm (UTC)