Parry Aftab: The Fox Guarding the Henhouse

[giza]

This is a copy of a letter I sent to the editor of westchester.com a few minutes ago.

Dear Sir,

This letter is response to an article in on your website about
Westchester County's upcoming "Summit on Cyberbullying", which will be
held on February 8th:

http://westchester.com/Westchester_News/Westchester_Government_and_Politics/County_To_Hold_Summit_On_Cyberbullying_200501124667.html


Specifically, I would like to comment on their choice of a guest
speaker, Parry Aftab.

Parry certainly is qualified to speak on the subject of
"cyberbullying", since she has been guilty of it it before. This past
July, she threatened the owner of the website www.katie.com and tried
to make her give up her legally acquired domain for some project that
Parry was involved in. She told the domain owner that if she did not
hand over the domain without compensation (Parry called this
"donating"), that "things would only get worse".

You can read about it on Katie's website at:

http://www.katie.com/archives/cat_general.html#000757

And there has been some media coverage of this:

http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/04/08/06/155251.shtml
http://grep.law.harvard.edu/article.pl?sid=04/08/06/033216
http://www.theregister.com/2004/08/04/penguin_katie_hijack/

I think that having Parry, a woman who is guilty of trying to
strong-arm someone else into giving up their domain name (and
therefore their web presence), is an extremely poor choice for
Westchester County.

Sincerely,

Douglas T. Muth
Philadelphia, PA

Comments

[plonq.livejournal.com]

Does this count as irony, or just plain stupid?

Obviously somebody missed the boat when they researched their keynote speaker.

[giza.livejournal.com]

Eh, it's an understandable mistake. Parry used to be involved with The Cyberangels (http://www.cyberangels.org/) and has a pretty long history of being involved with cyber-bullying issues. Searching for her name on Google will bring up lots of hits confirming this. It's easy to miss the smaller amount of articles that deal with the katie.com fiasco.

Too bad that she doesn't seem to practice what she preaches. :-\

[plonq.livejournal.com]

Then I'll go with irony, rather than stupid.

"Cyber-bullying" seems to be the hot new catch phrase. Two months ago I'd never heard of it, and now it almost seems that I can't turn on the news without hearing it mentioned at least once during the broadcast.

[khakiwolf.livejournal.com]

"And now for our special guest speaker at World Peace Convention 2005, President George W. Bush!"

[netcrimes.livejournal.com]

She's notorious for doing stuff like this. She also doesn't like to be interviewed with other experts.

[tgeller.livejournal.com]

Weird... I grew up in Westchester County, you know. And didn't I ride around Philadelphia with Parry back when I was running SpamCon Foundation? Didn't she have dinner with us at some point? If that's who I'm thinking of, the one word I'd use to describe her is "driven". Nothing ever came of the meeting, though. *shrug*

The "Real Katie" (of Katie.com) is missing a HUGE opportunity on her site. The very top should, in 25 words or fewer, summarize the conflict. In bold, +4 type.

[giza.livejournal.com]

I don't know about riding around Philly with her, but I recall that you, her, and myself had lunch with Ted, Seth Breidbart, Jules @ Doubleclick, and a few others in NYC. I think that was in late December of 2001.

[tgeller.livejournal.com]

Oh, right, it was NYC! Thanks.

BTW, I tried sending you an email from my Yahoo Mail account, and it was rejected. I just wanted to get the server / username information we talked about by phone. I could also use the first letter of the password -- I'll know it from that. Please send it to tom_geller at Yahoo. Thanks!

[giza.livejournal.com]

>BTW, I tried sending you an email from my Yahoo Mail account, and it was rejected.

What sort of rejection?

What address did you send it to? If it was dca.net or gmail.com, try the other address?

[tgeller.livejournal.com]

It was a claws-and-paws.com address... I think I tried both dmuth and doug. I can look up the rejection notice if you really want, but I think I threw it away.

[giza.livejournal.com]

That would be a standard bounce. :-)

I killed those addresses off ages ago because of all the spam they've gotten.

When in doubt of my current e-mail addresses, see either my user info page on LJ or my contact page on my website (http://www.claws-and-paws.com/) for the e-mail addresses.