JoNova (Australia)
What bad news for The
University of Queensland. Their entire legal staff were on holiday at
the same time and this eminent university was protected only by a Law
& Society 101 student who staffed the overnight service of
FreeLegalAidOnline. A mockfest is ensuing across the Internet. It is so
unfair.
A year ago John Cook published another 97% study (the magic number that all consensuses must find). It was published under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license (see Anthony Watts view). Cook’s work is obviously impeccable (except for the part about 97% being really 0.3%),
but evidently it uses a special new kind of “open data”. The exact date
and time each anonymized reviewer reviewed a sacred scientific abstract
is commercial and must be kept secret. These volunteer reviewers
allegedly stand to, er … lose a lot of money if that data is
revealed (they won’t be employed again for no money?). Such is the
importance of this that the University of Queensland left the data on secret-secret forum protected by no passwords and then put urls to it on secret forums that were publicly accessible. Brandon Shollenberger
had the genius idea of changing the numbers in the url +1, +1, and +1,
and voila! For the crime of finding unhidden non-secret data Brandon received a threatening legal letter, and expects the Feds to arrive any minute. You can’t just type any old numbers into a url.
UPDATE: After I wrote this Brandon published the letter in full and raised some provocative questions. (See below) .......
No comments:
Post a Comment