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An accusation has been made that a Journal Entry made by a member of the community was deleted.
tl;dr No "smoking gun" has been found so far and no conclusion has been made one way or another. The investigation will continue. I have the next two days (Wed. and Thurs.) off from work and intend to dig further into this, then.
When I first learned of this, I immediately started looking around as I found the accusation to be credible and, if true, unacceptable behavior.
Nothing I found that morning could corroborate the claim. I posted my findings and promised that when I got home from work that I would look into it. And I did exactly that spending several hours looking for data through both the UI tools presented within the site and with ad hoc queries to our DB. I dumped sections of tables of interest and brought them local to my home machine for later investigation.
Of course, as life has a way of doing, I was also in the midst of a crunch period at work and my spare time has been scarce of late (e.g. I had a training class to attend that was over 100 miles away and worked the entire Labor Day weekend). Further, we have two editors who are on a leave of absence and another who is on vacation, leaving a greater burden on the remaining editors to keep stories coming to the community. This has been exacerbated by the Labor Day holiday weekend in the US meaning fewer substantial stories get posted to the web at this time. In a nutshell that left fewer editors having to work even harder to find stories that could be brought to the community.
Do remember, also, that we had a rare site outage a couple weeks ago which necessitated restoring the site DB from backups. This was a manual process. There have been a few hiccups since then that were attributed to an unclean shutdown/restart as well as needing to restart various services besides just the database: the web server, load balancer caches (nginx), slashd (a cron-like daemon which periodically starts still other background processes and services), and ... you get the idea.
Still, in what little free time I had, I continued to look for information that could corroborate or refute the accusation.
It bears mentioning that there may well be no "smoking gun". But whether there is or is not, I firmly believe the community nonetheless deserves an investigation. It is a very different thing to toss one's hands up in the air and not even look as opposed to look deeply and diligently and find nothing.
I have decades' experience testing computer software on a wide range of platforms. I have worked at startups and fortune-100 blue chip companies. I once was brought in to a company to test a compiler when my only prior experience was a single college course. Another place I worked at had an automated test harness written in a language in which my only prior experience was it being one of 4 languages covered in a language-survey course in college. Within a week I had started refactoring the code base and by the time I left 9 months later, had removed and/or isolated hardware-based dependencies and rewritten the test harness to run in parallel. A full test run across several different hardware platforms and OS versions, which used to take 8-9 hours, now completed in just 1 hour. These are meant only to illustrate that I have no difficulties digging into things in which I had limited or no prior experience. When SoylentNews implemented Unicode character support using UTF-8 (Unicode Transfer Format - 8bit), I searched for the relevant RFCs (Request For Comment, aka Internet "standards"). One led to another and that to others and when I was done had found about a half-dozen of those. Further, there were different versions of the Unicode standard published by the Unicode Consortium, so I dug into those, as well. Needing test data, I wrote tools to extract/generate all the NCEs (Named Character Entities) as well as both hex- and decimal- numeric character entities. Oh, and then there was the matter of IDNs (Internationalized Domain Names; like "foo.com" but "foo" could be in any Unicode supported language!) These then were used in all user-facing, text-entry fields that I could discover and the results were reviewed. I am pleased to say that in the subsequent 5 years' time, I am aware of only two bugs that got through.
(Anecdote time. During the Slashcott, I got wind of some "alternate Slashdot" being developed, but could find no announcement of where it was. I did a bunch of searches. They came up empty. Tried a bunch more. No joy. Then I found what looked to be a bug report for this new site with a screen capture of the main page. And, it had this really strange URL in the address bar. Some domain name like "li42-123.com". Strange! But, I tried it and found it was just what I was looking for. Not knowing who was behind this or how to contact them, I was a bit nervous. Still, after enduring several formkey errors that day and into the next morning, I was finally able to create new account. I then kept a low profile until SoylentNews went live. And that, my friends, is how I got a coveted two-digit UID.)
I present the forgoing not to brag, but to give examples of the diligence and thoroughness that I am bringing to this investigation.
Further, I have somehow become the spokesperson for site-related "stuff" be it an annual summary of where we are at, announcements of server outages due to our hosting provider, Linode, providing updated hardware, different virtual hosting software, bug patches for Meltdown and Spectre, etc. When I have made mistakes I have owned them openly and on the front page no less. I cannot persuade you to believe me, and feel free to believe as you wish, but I can only trust that my integrity in all my actions on this site speak more forcefully and firmly than any words I may bring you in support of it.
My investigation is not complete, but given the amount of time that has passed, I felt it important to give an interim summary of what was planned and any results found so far.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Wednesday September 04 2019, @11:49PM (1 child)
Not a problem - I'll leave heve until such time as they come up with a solution ...
However, I DO reserve the right to file a complaint with the police at some future date. Won't be the first time US police have gone after one of my online stalkers ... and that one went very well.
Another wanna-be Delphi programmer who never got a job in the industry, harrassed me online for over a decade, and ended up with their employer having the police do a forensics on all the computers in the department, then firing the asshole.
I was feeling generous at the time, so when they asked me if I wanted to press charges, I said no.
Now I'm older and less willing to overlook such crap.
I have things to take care of over the upcoming months, but I'll probably come after you legally late next year. Remember, I know how the statute of limitations works, and the laws you've broken - and this time I will love to see you squirm.
In the meantime, shitpost all you want - I'm gone, same as I left slashdot for several years. Turns out that D1 works in Links (though D2 doesn't), but it also turns out that I have other assholes I have to go after through the courts first. Enjoy your pitiful life.
The day before slashdot banned anonymous comments, I told you that your bullshit was probably going to turn me into a trans rights activist. Between you and my opthalmologist, who after 7 years continuously misgendered me to a medical student, I've made my decision.
Filed a complaint with the hospital ombudsman, and let them know that this will be settled through the courts. Like I said, older, wiser, no longer willing to suffer fools gladly. And unlike the last two cases, a donation to charity and a published apology won't be enough. I've learned that the only way to get the message through is to hurt them where it counts - the bank account.
In your case, since you don't work, I'll have to settle for criminal charges instead of civil ...
And yes, I'm a leftist. I'm voting Green again next election. And I think having a President who has dementia is just demented. Fortunately in Canada we'd have forced someone like him out really really quickly. Same as we have 1/16 the death rate from firearms per capita (it would be even lower if it weren't for all the guns illegally smuggled in from the US by truckers wanting to make extra money).
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 05 2019, @05:34PM
Hahahahaha. Truth of your mistakes vs. APK now exposed hurts doesn't it? Yes. Embarassing for you obviously. Since you can't prove him wrong but he did you easily dummy. Quite a reaction from you but no matter what crap you spew you blew it on C and C++ buffer overflows that Pascal has no such issue with on stringwork. Especially your bs on calling conventions that have zero to do with C (and even C++ slower STL) buffer overflows in strings. You're a wannabe. A talker. A liar also as APK is a successful doer with verifiable concrete proof of his work's efficacy in speed, security and added anonymity. Spout all the lies you want but you lose no matter what projecting you stalked APK by unidentifiable anonymous posts caught in the act quoted doing so trying to say he started it when it was you. You did all that to yourself transtesticle monster freak loon you clearly are. You can't stand there is no overlooking how you blew it you bs artist weirdo.