Archive for the 'Censorship' Category

Hidden CS features: stealthing members

Published
by
littleseed
on October 4, 2008
in Censorship and couchsurfing
. 7 Comments

There is a hidden feature in CS, about what few people know.

No official documentation, except this page:
http://wiki.couchsurfing.com/en/Stealth

When a member get “stealthed” he can’t be found with the CouchSearch but just trough friend links or group links.

If he writes a message, it goes nowehere and it’s never received by its recipient.
Sometimes all his outgoing messages are completely removed.

If someone writes him a message, he doesn’t receive it.

Seems a “nice” way to deactivate an user without deleting it.
Of course the user is not notified at all of the decision taken about him.
It’s always the “polite” American culture, like in facebook, notifying a friend add but not a friend removal.

It doesn’t seem a very transparent feature of CS.
It’s a quite funny feature too, once there were two guys (a guest and a host), both logged in CouchSurfing on two different computers in the host’s house and one was able to find the other’s profile but not vice-versa. :))

Overall, seems that there is not a clear process of who, how and for what should be stealthed.
I doubt it is ruled by “CS safety team” by personal evaluations, prone to prejudices and nepotism.

And, in my opinion, not a good service to the CS community, “hiding” members.

Did anyone know something more about it?

A good day!

littleseed

Couchsurfing Base Camp

Published
by
robino
on October 1, 2008
in Censorship, Collective, Leadership Circle, Matthew Brauer and couchsurfing
. 4 Comments

“I live at the CouchSurfing Base Camp with 14 other people in the heart of downtown Berkeley. It’s close to lot’s of great food, shopping, entertainment, and student life. I’m still just learning about Berkeley myself. Base Camp is busy day and night as the home and office for much of CS’s full-time staff. It’s fun to see how CouchSurfing is run, but not a good place to hang out during the day”, says Matthew Brauer on his CS profile.

The base-camp was already announced in the latest post of the CS Alaska Collective. “Currently, our very talented scout, Pinkfish, who found our dream location in Pai, Thailand, as well as this amazing house in Homer, Alaska, is searching for a living and office space to house fifteen full-time volunteers and staff for the next 12 months in the San Francisco Bay Area, California.”

What a surprise to read though that the Base Camp is already there, while it was clearly communicated on August the 20th that “before we move in, we’ll post the available volunteer roles at Base Camp and at the next Collective that will most likely begin in November. Maybe one of these roles has your name on it!”

- No.

www.BeWelcome.info - the real background!

Published
by
veit
on September 26, 2008
in BeWelcome, Campaigns, Censorship, Donations, Elections, Finances, General Info, Open Source, Participation, Transparency, Volunteer coordinator, cult, history, legal, networks, people and volunteer coordination
. 17 Comments

This blog is mostly run by BW-lovers with a clear agenda (make CS and HC look bad so their “oh-so-moral” alternative looks attractive). For all others, who still have a somewhat open mind and don’t fall so easily for Kasper & Co’s constant propaganda, here a link to our side of the story:

http://www.bewelcome.info

The real background about this “democratic, transparent, legal” (sic) network.

Dictatorship 0 - Pirates 1

Published
by
Callum
on June 19, 2008
in Censorship and Transparency
. 5 Comments

Pirate flag by pioforskyOur Alaska mirror blog has ruffled some feathers. Somebody changed the CouchSurfing blog feed. Instead of the whole post being included in the feed, now only the excerpt is included. So anyone reading the blog in a feed reader has been highly inconvenienced.

I’ll bet some clever bod thought this would stop our mirror blog. Wrong! It’ll take more than a little inconvenience to keep us pirates down. I’m pleased to report, that after a brief outage, the mirror blog is now back in full working order, with full post text.

So if you want to read the blog in your feed reader, subscribe to our feed instead, and get the comments!

We have won the battle, but I suspect this will not be the end of the war. As a Sun Tzu disciple, I have studied the enemy closely. I have anticipated their next seven moves. Fear not, their incompetence will not stand in the way of democracy and freedom. The pirates wil overcome their foolish attempts to quell free speech. Vive la revolucion!

Alaska blog - comments not allowed

Published
by
Callum
on June 2, 2008
in Censorship and Transparency
. 46 Comments

You can see Alaska Collective blog here and subscribe to the feed here.

Unfortunately, comments are not allowed on the blog. To be more precise, you must be logged in to comment. But registration of new users is not allowed. So in effect, only those with permission can comment. Let’s hope this will change soon.

However, as a quick alternative, I propose to create a mirror of the blog content, with the same open-comments policy we use here at OpenCS. It’s fairly trivial to set up, and would allow open debate on each post. What do you think? Please provide a +1 or -1 in your comment if you think it’s a good or bad idea.

Impressions of the CS Thailand achievements

Published
by
tgoorden
on May 8, 2008
in 501c3, Board of Directors, Casey Fenton, Censorship, Collective, Donations, Jim Stone and Matthew Brauer
. 25 Comments

To be honest, the list of CSCT achievements confused the hell out of me. Instead of a report on which objectives were achieved through which actions, it’s a huge list of “stuff that we’ve done”. How does all this relate to any kind of overall plan? Was there even a plan?

This is not a report, this is a “shut the fuck up” list. What this list tells me is: “LOOK! We’ve done A LOT! Leave us alone!” Doogies (a CSCT participant) sums it up best in one of his comments on this site:

You wanted to know everything we did in Thailand so you get a document with more than 500 achievements we accomplished there for couchsurfing.

More than 500 achievements! Wow! Unfortunately, I find it clearly symptomatic of a miserable professional result. I’ve seen this approach before: Whenever a large project failure had to be covered up. Been there, done that myself. It’s a sleight of hand technique: By pointing at a huge, unreadable and almost entirely unverifiable list of statements, they are hoping to hoodwink the CS donation base that all that money is serving a purpose and probably to fool themselves in the process. The person responsible for this style of writing is Mandie, showing us again how incompetent she is at what she does. Hold this report up to the standard of any serious non-profit organization and it just becomes sad. This is not a report, it’s a hastily thrown together list of things people could still remember doing.

There is plenty to learn from the report though. In general, it appears that the largest part of the participants has been busy analyzing and communicating. Also, tech has been very busy, probably the most productive team overall (this has always been the case in CS). If anyone seems to have done anything, it’s clearly the programmers. We’ll see how well it all holds up in the summer.

Things that I noticed right away:

  • Jim Stone is a scary control freak, which we already knew from the way he bullied everyone in the CS Wiki. Look at what occupies him:
    • ” A reminder system to let people know they should update any reference that has been identified as violating our terms of use.”
    • “References are no longer completely deleted when removed, just hidden for safety concerns. We also know who deleted it, what the reference said, and when it was deleted.”
    • “Deleted Images: The safety team can easily delete images from accounts that are deemed inappropriate. The member is also emailed to let them know with instructions on what they can do next.”
    • “Refined a tool that more easily identifies real spammers and harmful users and doesn’t temporarily falsely identify members as being spammers as often now.”
    • “Deleted posts: every post that’s been deleted, why it was deleted, who did it, when, and ability to reactivate it with one click.” (I’d love to see this list of “whys” sometime.)
  • Rachel is a one-stop CS police force: “Directly handled several member disputes.” She obviously doesn’t need to report to anyone, because obviously every communication is an achievement and a report of Rachel’s activities simply isn’t listed.
  • Speaking of communication, Mandie thinks this is an achievement: “Email to ambassadors explaining website downtime.” My god. An email. The “report” is full of nonsense entries like that.

But all that is just fun and games. It clearly wasn’t edited anymore than the average OCS post (this says enough), providing hours of entertainment. Meetings are NOT achievements, neither are writing emails, calling people or “Finding a suitable caterer and arranging for daily delivery of food.” (Obviously nobody felt like cooking in a country with such a low wage scale.) Who cares about the “bi-weekly shopping trip”? Or what about ” Administered half-way point evaluation meeting with House Manger.”? That one was from Matthew Brauer, who has a truly sad list of achievements and still can’t spell his name right. (What the hell is it with using nicknames in an “official” report anyway?)

But what is really interesting is what is missing:

  • Where is all this generated material being kept? Things like “plan for Alaska Collective including budget, roles, objective and location”, “desired skills sets for volunteers in team”, “‘Core concepts’ to help uncover and articulate what CouchSurfing is about, not about, what its mission is.”, etc etc. The server team doesn’t mention installing a document repository and the Wiki has been shot down Jim Stone style. So, unless I’m mistaken (no way to verify unless Doogie could come out his tower to enlighten us), all these wonderful documents either don’t exist or are sitting in someones harddrive or mailbox. Either way, that will mean 90% of “work done” will be tossed away again for the next collective, like it has happened 2 times already. Remember the huge “organizational chart” that was created before CSCNZ? Exactly. CS management = the way of the Dodo.
  • There is absolutely NO mention of 501c3 status. None. Let me repeat that: the entire 501c3 process is completely absent from this report, even though it was in quite a few announcements. What happened guys? Didn’t you work on it or is it not an achievement? Or maybe, perhaps, it was a miserable failure?
  • There is not one mention of drafting contracts and exactly one reference to legal work:
    “Phased out one-on-one verification on the advice of our legal team: verification now only available through credit card or a verified PayPal account.”
    Right, so all those expenses towards the CS lawyer(s), 14,234$ in 2007, have only resulted in another way to increase profits? It appears nobody had a contract or even insurance (only travel insurance is mentioned), since none of that is mentioned. (Search for: “legal”, “contract” and “insurance”.)
  • What the hell is going on with Casey Fenton (who also doesn’t need a last name)? Why doesn’t he have his own personal achievements, like his buddies Matthew or Jim? Why is he mentioned in second place of a team twice? My guess is that they are trying to shield Casey from direct comments on his behind-the-scenes style of control. Who are they kidding? Where has the “leadership team” gone? Where are the board meetings? Who is on the board anyway? Of course, it’s also possible Casey couldn’t be bothered to write down his list of “achievements” and/or Mandie didn’t dare to ask him.
  • Did you know CS has a new team in charge? Neither did I. This time, it’s simply called “CouchSurfing Management” and guess who’s in it? Matthew, Casey, Jim and Weston (member since April 15th, 2007). Congratulations guys, you have finally managed to create your little Northern American boys club.

What else do you see missing from the report? What do you think is the funniest “achievement”?

“Happy” birthday.

Published
by
tgoorden
on April 17, 2008
in 501c3, Blogroll, Campaigns, Casey Fenton, Censorship, Collective, Elections, Transparency and history
. 4 Comments

Happy birthday.

Almost exactly a year ago, the OCS initiative was started. Initially, our hope was to entice the LT with concrete ideas and campaigns, to get them to address the various serious issues we had discovered at the heart of CS. Not much has changed however and most of the changes have not been for the better:

  • CS is legally still in very dubious water. Still no 501c3 status, after… 3 (or 4?) years of claiming it?
  • Casey still holds all the legal (and financial) strings and has decided to set up camp in Alaska next, which is essentially his home.
  • Transparancy is down, censorship is waaay up. (Search engines have been blocked and CS has a permanent censorship/security team now, almost like during the cold war!)
  • CSC Thailand can be declared a failure as well now, after the NZ meltdown. I haven’t seen anything positive come out of it, but we’re still waiting for the “memo”.
  • “Not talking to anyone” has become the official communication mode for the entire organisation.

And so, with a heavy heart, I’m renewing the OpenCouchSurfing.org domainname by 2 years. In all honesty, I had serious hopes that it wouldn’t be necessary to have this website for more than a year. I (personally) was perfectly willing to “bury the hatchet” if there was even some semblance of progress. Alas, it is not to be. CS still makes me angry, especially for the obligation I feel towards its wonderful community to speak up about its numerous failure, shortcomings and shady deals.

Maybe now is a good opportunity to start thinking about OCS “2.0″. The way I see it, the signal to noise ratio on the blog could be better and there have been some points of discussion we could re-raise at this point. Anonimity, re-posting and privacy concerns come to mind. More importantly, I believe OCS should refocus its efforts towards a clearly understandable and easy to navigate website. Right now, I can only imagine the confusion of a random surfer on OCS. I still heavily support our “open for all” attitude, even with all the negativity that comes with that, but I think it can be channeled better.

So, in the spirit of transparancy and cooperation: Who would be interested in helping “revamp” and organise OCS? We’ll need to digg through a lot of information and restructure quite a bit, but I also think there is room for new activism. Things on my mind:

  • An open call to ALL ambassadors for transparancy (and perhaps elections)?
  • A good Q&A section, where we try to answer what CS doesn’t answer.
  • Video?
  • …

I also wouldn’t mind separating this “public blog” from a better structured blog with some editorial control that we could move to the front page. We could “rewrite” a lot of the current knowledge into practical, well researched and well written articles that would be aimed at the general public (including new members and press) and not just people with CS background knowledge.

the bad guy on our couches

Published
by
pia
on April 7, 2008
in Censorship, Participation, couchsurfing, legal and people
. 15 Comments

hi guys,
there is this bad guy bouncing around our couches and taking things with him that doesn t belong to him.he is leaving behind empty pockets and broken hearts. I have researched his way around Europe and he has been doing this on CS since spring 2006. I will write a story on him and how the CS is handling his case. There is a self-defensive system going: people warn each other, start threads, etc., which is fine. I just have the impression, that the leadership is slowing this down. Anyone who wants to give me his opinion about it or speak up for the contrary I would appreciate to get to know your arguments. Please send me a Mail via CS:
HIER+DORT
Thanks,
Pia

Security through lies

Published
by
midsch
on March 21, 2008
in 501c3, Casey Fenton, Censorship, Corpganization, Transparency and couchsurfing
. 1 Comment

Most readers here know that the famous MDST (Member Dementing & Sensorship Team) deletes threads for “security reasons”. No, there are no security problems at CS. Never heard about thieves, molesters and similar stuff. Of course it’s a stupid way to “clean” the community, but at least it helps to sell out the company if the application for “non-profit”/”charity”-stuff in New Hampshire fails. (Or Casey just get bored of CS.) But that’s not the issue here.

Yesterday the news at CS announces:

Buggin’ Out!

Fixes to the “location bug” brings back functionality better than ever!
20. March 2008 Once again, the shining stars on our tech team have successfully tackled an error in the system to get things back to normal on the site for you.

You may have noticed the site was offline for a short while today. This downtime was scheduled so the tech team could fix the recent issues experienced with correctly reflecting members’ locations.

Check out what features are back for you!

* Nearby travelers on members’ home page will now actually be nearby!
* When you search for a couch in a city, you can now effectively search for members within a chosen radius of that city. Let’s say you want to CouchSurf in Gdansk, Poland but there are only a handful of CouchSurfers there. You can once again search for a couch within, say, 20 km of Gdansk. Hurray!
* Location map on member’s profiles will reflect the correct location. Members will no longer randomly be placed in Africa… unless you live in Africa!
* Recent member login location will reflect correct location as accurately as possible. (Click here for information on why it may not always be right) If you were logged in during the downtime, you may need to log out and log back in to show the proper location.

A round of applause for the tech team volunteers- job well done!

First of all: Great, they finally not only do something with the code they also announce it. I’ve also noticed, some minor bug fixes have been done (months after reporting) and some small improvement are online, most of them asked for again and again in the last years. But nothing really impressing. And here the good news already stop.

So let’s “check out what features are back” for us: All the four points mentioned in the news are based on one single topic: IP adresses and their localisation. As even CS explains at the linked page it’s not accurate. There are several reasons for that, like wrong settings from your ISP, using of company firewalls etc. This caused a lot of CUQs and cockroach posts when I was doing this kind of stuff. And it’s simply not to fix, the whole idea is a mistake.

If it works properly IP localisation is a serious threat against privacy. Your company sees where and when you login (during work time? from somewhere else when you call in sick?), so you may loose your job. Your stalking Ex is able to track you. At some places the nearby couchsurfer feature is widely used to annoy females with inapprobiate mails. Exact localisation while travelling is a useful information for criminals interested in your unguarded flat (this is especially useful if you’ve got a verified adress and CS places the the google marker in search exactly at your home).

But the main point is: IPs can easy be faked/changed. There are several services in the internet who offer anonymous access to webpages, there is software like Tor to hide your IP and makes it very, very difficult to trace you. At the moment CS tries very hard to block IPs from those services/networks but it’s a ridiculous attempt and doesn’t work if you accept some reloads while using the software. If someone does the work to setup a profile for abusing CS, hiding the real IP is no big deal. And still CS calls this a security feature. As at least the techno crowd must know that’s not true, so insisting on IP-Localisation as security feature must be called what it is: a lie.

When you know an organisation is lying to you about a serious issue, how trustworthy it is at all?

PS - There is a lot to do about security at CS:
- encrypted login (SSL), especially because a lot of couchsurfers use the page from unsecure, public computers/connections while travelling
- really delete information, not only hide it (mails, profiles, …) but don’t hide useful information (profiles from thieves)
- don’t say it’s privacy VERSUS security,  it’s privacy AND security

A simple way to undo censorship and thread deletions on CS

Published
by
tgoorden
on March 20, 2008
in Censorship, Transparency, history and legal
. 14 Comments

I think there are quite a number of people that will agree with me that the way threads and posts are deleted from various CS groups, security is not increased in any way and in fact: it may have the opposite effect.

Deleting posts from troublesome members or even about dangerous incidents is simply ridiciulous. It only creates an illusion of safety and this is especially dangerous for new members.

But, it is also easily undone. Here is what you do:

  • Create a fake profile with an new, untraceable email address. (Plenty of fake profiles anyway.)
  • Register for the groups that might be interesting and check “receive all mail”.
  • Register the email address on the CS-uncensored group.
  • Set up the email address so it forwards ALL mail to CS-uncensored.

Extra added bonus? A fully searchable, unlimited (in time) archive of all interesting CS group posts. It would be even funnier if we could get into Private Amb somehow.

Disclaimer: Of course, this post is just an idea that I wanted to float around. I can take no responsibility for anyone actually doing this. You might be breaking some CS rule, but I didn’t check that. ;-)