HPR3615: I am a troll and I'm trolling HPR, trolling HPR, trolling HPR.

In today's show Dave and I will read out the mail list thread we didn't cover in the Community News.

Before we get to that, I wanted to inform you that we now know that the host in question was deliberately trolling HPR.

I know this because they told me, and when I asked them to stop they went on to explain that they are a gadfly. I had to look that one up.

Whatever they claim to be, the end effect for us is trolling.

Both Josh and Myself have had some unnecessary stressful weeks for someone's idea of a joke.

That said there have been some positives about this as well.

Again we see the HPR community at its best in providing support and reasoned arguments.

We have identified a possible loop hole in governance, that has been addressed by having a special advisory committee aka the auditor team of volunteers.

And when we come up with a way of dealing with troll issues, we also get a mechanism to deal with DMCA take down requests, and other complaints.

So what do we do with a troll ? Easy, just ignore them, or to put it another way "Stay Calm and Go On".

This works well for comments but its not enough when the tactic is deliberate targeting of HPR.

A lot of effort has gone into this attack:

• First they built trust by posting technical shows. This is a similar tactic that we see spammers use.
• Then they submitted a series of shows that would cause HPR legal issues.
• They then did not respond to questions, presumably in the hope that we would delete the shows ourselves.

By moving the shows out to later in the queue we were able to avoid claims of "censorship", and they eventually removed the problem shows of their own accord.

So what attack vector will be used next, and how will we deal with it ?

I have no idea, but how to deal with it is also not so easy. We'll have to cross that bridge when we come to it.

We do however need to tackle the risky situation of having problem content available on the website.

So I suggest that we continue to post the shows as normal, if we get a complaint then the Janitors will contact the host as normal.

Should they be unavailable, uncooperative, or disagree, then the Janitors can either move the show to the backup queue, or hide it depending on the severity of the complaint.

In all cases we'll keep the special advisory committee aka the auditor team of volunteers in the loop to make sure all is above board.

The community can then decide on the best course of action.

So therefore I would like to propose the following changes to our policies.

Both relate to https://hackerpublicradio.org/stuff_you_need_to_know.php#not_moderated

Currently: "We do not vet, edit, moderate or in any way censor any of the audio you submit, we trust you to do that."

Proposed: "We do not vet, edit, moderate or in any way censor any of the audio you submit, we trust you not to upload anything that will harm HPR."

Add the line: "Any material that is reported as harming HPR may be unlisted until such a time as the situation can be resolved."

Comments

More Information...