Blogging

Some changes made to the blog layout (Lacus~~~), including the new Google Adsense ads… I’m poor alright! According to Google’s terms and conditions, I’m not supposed to draw any unwanted unattention to the ads by telling people to support this site or something… *cough* Anyway, I figured that with an average of 400k hits a month (not including subdomains and file downloads), I should be doing something with it to help fuel my anime purchases.

Anyway, on to my main topic of rantage for today: blogging. A development that took place in school today really got me worked up for some overdue ranting. The back story: A student from my school “hacked” into a teacher’s online “learning” portal account and posted some rude but nevertheless humourous messages for the entire school to see. Of course like the ending of all short-lived bravados, he was caught and was caned in front of the entire school today. I have no qualms with any of these so far. He gained illegal access to a server contracted by the school, a criminal act, and he was caned for it (and only once too). Fair enough (although the teachers should come to realize that a single stroke of cane has proven to be a totally ineffective deterrance). I can’t care less and that would have been that.

If not for the school’s newfound interest in our blogs.

During the course of this incidence, not only did the people directly involved in the original act got into trouble, so did the ones who posted about the incident on their blogs (with added comments of course). In one of the cases, a student was forced to post an apology on his blog for simply quoting the message that the original prankster had posted onto the online “learning” portal. He was forced to apologize for words that he posted on his personal blog.

I salute the school for attempting to censor the internet. You have an uphill battle ahead of you.

It’s the internet, hello? Intruding into a private server and effectively commiting vandalism is one thing, but the internet itself is free game. If I post on my blog that Bush is an incompetent idiot who can’t correctly pronounce the word “nuclear” to save his life, then it’s my opinion. If the person in question sees my blog, so be it. If he wants me to withdraw my words or to be punished for them, then good luck to him. It’s like posting on a forum: If the moderators don’t like it, too bad you are banned. If the moderators are fine with it, but the service provider hosting the forum doesn’t like it, too bad the forum gets closed down. If the moderators and service provider are fine with it, then nothing else matters, since it’s their servers and their forums, and in this case our blogs. The only exception is when a law has been broken, but throwing childish personal insults over the internet in what is basically a public forum is hardly against the law, or else 99.99% of the internet should be in jail by now.

Oh how ironic it would be if I were to get into trouble for this rant…

Anyway, enough with the serious stuff. Back to our regular scheduled programs…