N.Y. Times irresponsible? Who'd have thought?

I'm upset with the New York Times. Why? Because the information they published today might prejudice the trials of the terror suspects involved with the recent plot to blow-up airliners heading to the United States.

I couldn't care less about the fact that they've used a pseudo-geographic test to stop people in the U.K. from straightforwardly accessing their article. The fact is that such tests are not 100% reliable; for instance, go into any Starbucks coffee shop and you can get connected via T-Mobile, via Germany. Thus anyone in the U.K. who visits Starbucks with a WiFi-equipped device cannot now be a jurer in any of the trials, or worse, if they are picked and don't rule themselves out, some of these people could walk free.

Nor is that the only way to end up using an IP address allocated to a location outside of the U.K.. There are plenty of others—for instance, if you surf the 'Net using an anonymous browsing service, or if the database that the New York Times are using is out of date or incorrect. There are also a few idiots who have posted copies of it in places that aren't geographically censored.

So congratulations, New York Times.

Posted by alastair on August 29, 2006 at 4:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)