Flutterby™! : the Kathy Sierra incident

I first became aware of Death threats against bloggers are NOT "protected speech" (why I cancelled my ETech presentations) through Tom Negrino's post yesterday. Since then I've also seen Lyn's sidebar, RC3 linking to Laura LeMay, and Bill Humphries's entry on the topic, which points to Min Jung Kim: It’s Awful. Yes., which points out that:

It’s just the first time it’s happened to someone that you know.

It sounds like there's some password theft and extreme trolling going on, and I'm not sure what all the backstory is, although if Dori and Tom vouch for someone I'm gonna take their side.

But I do want to say that there's an awful lot of the vibe of a web site that can be determined through social means. Sometimes that requires keeping a lower profile (as Flutterby's robots.txt attests). It also means that "you own your own words" isn't a defense: It's incumbent on all of us to "frown at racism" (as one historical example), and to make sure that while we have open discussion, we don't let certain attitudes get out of hand at our parties. Even in the most charitable interpretation for everyone involved, we each get to determine whether or not we get trolled by how we react to the trolling.

Now if y'all will excuse me, I'm thinking I should probably be a little more careful about certain security issues.