Randi Harper To File Complaint About Imaginary Robot Shock

It seems that Anti-GamerGate are Quite A Bit Upset. After Atheism Plus ‘Won’ the recent litigation by having both defendants resign, remove the objectionable text and move their ‘bot out of the country, they are now joined by Randi Harper, who has declared war on an entirely imaginary application.

TheBigHat

Randi Harper is on a crusade against an imaginary enemy. Literally, this time.

Yesterday, I registered this Twitter account, for a ‘parody’ robot. In case it was not too obvious, I wrote ‘Parody’ at the top. Unfortunately, words are hard for @FreeBSDGirl .

‘Parody’ being a word of a whole two syllables is clearly too difficult for Randi Harper. ETHICS EDIT 22/03/2015 21:05 GMT KiA CORRECTLY POINT OUT 3 SYLLABLES. So I was interrupted from a happy evening working on my ’emotional triggers’ analysis device by the below spew of targeted tweets.

Not only has Randi attacked me, she appears to have sent me 7 unsolicited tweets whilst blocking me, which I believe is now defined as ‘harassment’ under the new Twitter rules. Feel free to report. The irony is, she says that, I “can’t understand sarcasm”.

ImaginaryRobot

Randi Harper is very, very angry. She is also very, very dumb.

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A Bot for Endangered Sea Lions

TheBigHat

The Big Hat. A community petitions tool.

The Witchfinder has a project on the go. The Big Hat Project was initially intended as a community patrol tool for dealing with anti-social accounts. That idea lacked traction because Conservatives and #GamerGate are pro-free-speech. So the project has been refactored as a community petition tool.

@BigFriendlyHat is a work in progress. The purpose of the project is to enable and facilitate inclusive, community petitions by supporters. People who sign up are giving the project leaders permission to send political tweets on their behalf.

For example, suppose like minded people wanted to support an endangered species like, for example, sea lions and someone was spreading hate speech. This would enable the project leaders to simply hit a button and hey-presto, users would send polite tweets to (say) Greenpeace alerting them of the plight of the poor sea creatures.

The application is in development but alpha access will be made available to the like-minded in due course.

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Working Together – How Conservatives and #GamerGate Can Find Common Ground With Some Feminists

BoodleOops

Academic Becca Reilly-Cooper comments on female reproductive biology being relevant to feminism. Via Twitter/BoodleOops.

All movements have their extremists and their moderates. In light of the ongoing Block Bot debacle, the Witchfinder identifies common ground with some feminists who have been subject to harassment by the same perpetrators.

Unsurprisingly, your author has spent considerable time recently searching online for credible individuals aggrieved with the Block Bot. Whilst trawling I encountered a public spat between a woman called @BoodleOops, (Academic Becca Reilly-Cooper) and some unsavoury SJW types loosely associated with The Block Bot. She was BLOCKED. BLOCKED I tell you. They were calling her a TERF. Your author had no idea what a TERF is but assumed from the lady’s enemies she was probably doing something virtuous. So he looked up the term ‘TERF’.

It is like this … As we all know, SJW (supposedly Social Justice Warrior) may as well stand for ‘Silencing Journalists and Women’. TERF is an acronym invented by SJWs for oppressing women. It stands for ‘Trans-Exclusionary-Radical-Feminists’ and is yet another example of prolixity by the hard left trying to label reasonable behaviour as in some way wrong. TERF is a slur.

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Can Disgraced Ex-Councillor Dean Archer Sue Grant Shapps?

So Dean Archer, a former Labour Councillor your author calls ‘disgraced’ because he was removed from office for non-attendance at council meetings, is upset with Grant Shapps MP. It appears that Mr Archer’s public libel apology to Mr Shapps, drafted by Shapps’ lawyers was in fact misleading. Archer now indicates that he intends to seek compensation from Shapps for stress.

Before continuing, the Witchfinder would like to point out that he still thinks Archer is a ‘constituent’ – only without the ‘onstit’ and the ‘e’. However it is irritating, to say the least, for a loyal Conservative blogger to have to ‘update’ a story due to an error by their own Conservative MP. So I thought it would be a nice legal exercise to speculate as to what causes of action might be arguable and how much Archer might get. This is of course only speculation and no substitute for a Court decision.

There is a legal subtlety here that needs to be highlighted firmly. The law distinguishes between accidental or negligent mistakes on the one hand and lies and malice on the other. The law also makes it very hard to prove lies. A common (and essential) legal tactic is to pick laws where mistake is all that is needed or where the burden of proof is reversed. Grant says it is all an innocent mistake so your author is going to run with that for the purposes of this article.

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Aggravating Ignorance

The Witchfinder points out some potential flaws in the Block Bot team’s reasoning, in light of their claims that hosting data abroad makes them immune from UK Data Protection legislation.

BlockBotUSServer1

The Block Bot thinks being abroad makes them immune.

Your author will be brief. Some members of the Block Bot team advance the idea that holding the data abroad makes them immune from UK Data Protection law. Funnily enough, UK legislators thought of that.

The Data Protection Act 1998, Schedule 1, provides as follows –

“[…] 8 Personal data shall not be transferred to a country or territory outside the European Economic Area unless that country or territory ensures an adequate level of protection for the rights and freedoms of data subjects in relation to the processing of personal data.

Now, Block Bot creator James Billingham and for that matter the blocker who added me are based in the UK (although the latter has now resigned). So if they decide to block someone, where is the data? Well they have to write it down on a computer or similar device such as a mobile phone, based wherever they are.

Q. If someone types data into the Twitter client on a mobile phone in the UK, before they click ‘send’ where is the data?

A. In the mobile phone’s memory, in the UK.

Q. If someone types data into the Twitter website on a PC in the UK, before they click ‘send’ where is the data?

A. In the PC’s memory, in the UK.

Q. When they click send what happens?

A. The data is transmitted to the Twitter servers in the United States, thereby transferring it outside the EEA.

 What does the ICO Guidance, here say?

“You will be processing personal data in the UK and transferring it even if:

you collect information relating to individuals on paper, which is not ordered or structured in any way; and”

and

“Putting personal data on a website will often result in transfers to countries outside the EEA.”

The Claimant rests. (If someone junior from the Information Commissioner’s Officer went along with the ‘abroad’ argument we would only escalate it and ask them to clarify).

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BlockBot Busted? Front Page Rewrite and a Resignation for a Block Bot Team in Disarray

It has been a busy week for the Block Bot. A front page rewrite, a resignation and more troubles to come … The Witchfinder explains the possible legal consequences of running an enormous public blacklist.

BBCheckerRichardDawkins

These are some utterly false allegations about Richard Dawkins hosted in the database on Sarah Noble’s site. She needs urgent legal advice.

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Suggested Patreon :P – Matthew Hopkins News and The Big Hat

TheBigHat

The Big Hat. This is a proof of concept logo. Yes, I know it is badly drawn – merely a proof of concept. It is a nice, reassuring shade of black though.

The Witchfinder is semi-seriously considering a Patreon and inviting his many kind supporters and fans to support him.

Your Inquisitor has a development project in mind. It is a crowd-sourced neighbourhood watch tool for Twitter. Basically, instead of having a huge Orwellian block list, it would work a bit more like a friendly neighbourhood watch team.

The underlying problem with all the current block list services is that they involve maintaining large lists of blocked persons. This is quite problematic because obviously there are those who may misuse their power to add to the lists. In addition, the Twitter API rate limits blocking so specific blocking software can have insurmountable technical problems. For example, a blocking engine with 10,000 blocked users would take over a week to block them all for a new user.

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Rattled @TheBlockBot Team Issue Statement Clarifying, “I end careers” Tweet as Joke … Just After Excluding Opponent From Equalities Project

The Witchfinder General notes with amusement the increasingly frightened spinning from the owners of the @TheBlockBot project. Recently, James Billingham’s Block Bot has come in for criticism from feminists, Conservatives and trans-people alike for excluding people who have plainly done nothing wrong.

IEndCareers

This tweet is now claimed to be a ‘joke’. But as Sally Bercow found to her cost, just because something is a ‘joke’ does not make it lawful.

In November 2012 Sally Bercow, wife to the Speaker of the House of Commons, tweeted this – “Why is Lord McAlpine trending? *innocent face*”

It was plainly a joke, but in 2013 the High Court ruled it was also a defamatory allegation that Lord McAlpine was a paedophile. The ‘joke’ left Bercow with a bill in the region of £100,000 and forced to make a humiliating public apology, despite having the support of the best libel lawyers in the County, Carter-Ruck. [Personal interest note – Carter-Ruck once provided your author with free legal advice pro-bono, before he began legal training]

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Exposé – #TheBlockBot Creator Featured on BBC is Troll, Claims He Viewed But Did Not Report ‘Kiddy Porn’

In this video the Witchfinder exposes #TheBlockBot creator James Billingham, who claims to be against trolling but admits himself on his own website that he deliberately engaged in the practice. Billingham also claimed that one site he joined contained, to use his words, ‘Kiddy Porn’ and whilst he trolled them about it he did not report it. Even if the material was in fact legal these revelations reveal Billingham as a vile, morally bankrupt hypocrite.

IMPORTANT NOTE – Only the public member information of the Atheism Plus forums has been uploaded. No private street addresses have been retrieved or shared. The lists made available for download below were legally obtained using screen scraping tools as set out in the video and are fully compliant with UK and US law.

The author asserts the journalism exemption under s32 Data Protection Act 1998.

Title music – The Escape – (c) – Machinimasound (Commercial license purchased)

The Atheism Plus Forum Member list as a CSV file

The Battle Against NyanCat
It turns out that www.oolon.co.uk had code that blocked Webcite and Archive.today by replacing the  content with images and the sound of NyanCat. Fortunately, their competitor FreezePage worked and enabled an accurate forensic record of what the page looked like. Thanks FreezePage! A well deserved premium subscription purchased!

Trolling the Slymepit – *  http://www.freezepage.com/1425251697SYXBOYRAQQ  *

(Failed webcite and archive.today citations for interest. Fans of Nyancat will enjoy)

James Billingham. Trolling the Slymepit – Oolon\\\’s Blog. Oolon.co.uk. 2015-03-01. URL:http://www.oolon.co.uk/?p=94. Accessed: 2015-03-01. (Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/6WhhqDKqW)

Archive.today – https://archive.today/lRzKz

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The Block Bot, GG Auto Blocker and Block Together Get Crushed

The Witchfinder releases a rare video. In this video, The Block Bot, Gamer Gate Auto Blocker and Block Together are exposed as tools for excluding a diverse array of people including women and LGBT people. Despicably, the three tools publish their blacklists online. Your Inquisitor uses Matthew Hopkins News’ own vastly superior private and bespoke Twitter tools to harvest their public follower lists in seconds, then uploads them as convenient .CSV files for those who might be interested.

IMPORTANT NOTE – Only the public follower list of the three named Twitter accounts has been uploaded. No private details have been retrieved or shared. The lists made available for download below are fully compliant with UK and US law.

The author asserts the journalism exemption under s32 Data Protection Act 1998.


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