Our Romanian correspondent, ZOMGitsCriss, has posted a timely review of The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas, a collection of short stories, articles and festive tips from a suspiciously meaningful number* of atheists, edited by Ariane Sherine (creator of the Atheist Bus Campaign). Of course, I have something of a soft spot for this video, because our lovely host says some words. Nice words. Nice words about me. Have you bought your copy yet?
* Forty-two, innit!
Recently, two videos were posted to Youtube which are generating some controversy about the League of Reason website. I know what you’re thinking: controversy, the coveted fuel that powers our warp engines! In reality, both videos have almost nothing to do with the site, and are only related by the inclusion of the Leauge logo and some words by Youtuber shanedk. For this reason, I have not embedded the videos into this post, but you can watch the first – by MasterGhostKnight – here, and the response – by shanedk – here.
As an administrator and founder of this website, I wish to set the record straight regarding two allegations made by shanedk during his video. I have no intention of throwing fuel on the fire of internet drama, so I’ll keep this brief and to the point. The accusations to which I am referring can be found in a single quote from shanedk’s video:
“Most extreme of all of them was this idiot, MasterGhostKnight, who posted a pathetic attempt at a rebuttal under the auspices of the completely misnamed ‘League of Reason’.”
(Emphasis mine.)
Let me make it abundantly clear that including the League of Reason logo in your Youtube video does not endow you with automatic help, support or protection from this site or its contributing bloggers. As such, MasterGhostKnight did not post his video under the auspices of the League of Reason. In actuality, he posted a video with the logo attached. And that’s it. Anyone is free to include the logo in their video, as it is intended merely to advertise the site to a wider audience. Indeed, a fundamentalist creationist can freely use the logo, as ultimately, visitors will see that the content provided by the contributors satisfies the site’s mission statement, as it stands on the ‘About Us‘ page:
“Together we endeavour to protect and promote the voice of reason, and we welcome you to join us.”
I maintain that the site’s contributors have done just this. We also protect the free speech of their readers with a commenting system and message board with extensive forum categories. MasterGhostKnight is not a contributor. He is not listed as a contributor. Even if he was, videos made by him would not automatically reflect LoR policy. The fact is, the site does not have an official policy. The closest we come to having such a thing is the collective opinion of the contributors, but as many of them specialise in one field or another, I would likely be best suited to speak for them regarding these two videos (the topics being physics, astronomy and the detection of extra-terrestrial life). As such, I’m dismayed that shanedk did not contact me for an ‘official opinion’ (as he knows I administrate the site) before accusing it – and by proxy me – of supporting MasterGhostKnight’s bogus claims.
In his video, shanedk also accuses the site of being completely misnamed. Once again, I maintain that our contributors are strong proponents of reason. Their readers need not be to participate in the forums. By extension, one could suggest that the Richard Dawkins network message board is completely misnamed if any of the posters disagree with his beliefs and opinions, or to take it further if a single user is not called Richard Dawkins. This is clearly ridiculous. Our forum provides a facility for a wide variety of people with a wide variety of opinions to discuss and debate any topic they like. They are not required to do anything other than obey the forum rules, which permit the most zealous of unreasonable folk to make their case, provided it is not copypasta spam.
I suspect many of our regulars will be aware of what I have said above, and If you are a new visitor, having just left shanedk’s channel, I hope you will see the error of his comments about this site, in what is otherwise an informative and well-made video.
As you all probably know by now, the first public release of TubeGuardian has shaken up the votebotting scene, but is this the final blow in what has been an epic battle of morality and reason versus closed minded bigotry and censorship? Not in the least! In this blog, I will introduce everyone to TubeGuardian, answer a few common questions, and explain why this software is only the first step in many to come in the war against freedom and expression.
TubeGuardian is software designed to determine and counteract votebot attacks. It can be downloaded right here at the League of Reason. Instructions for use will be posted in the forum entry for this blog post. If you do not know what votebots are, please see CosmicSporks excellent series of blog posts on the topic here. There are three main functions that TubeGuardian executes: gathering statistical information on videos, determining whether a video is under attack, and quickly disabling ratings on videos it determines are under attack. Let’s take each of those functions one at a time and dig a little deeper into how they work.
I got DMCA’d for this video (mirrored by AndromedasWake) by homophobic moron Youtuber JiLAdren.
I feel quite special. Votebotted and DMCA’d – I’m apparently a threat, and if I’m a threat then I’m sure as hell doing something right.
However, JiLAdren has managed to get the video he tried to censor seen by (over the next few days) thousands of people. He’s exposed me to a wide audience just begging to denounce him as a homophobic coward.
Which brings me to my main point – dprjones provided swift legal advice, AndromedasWake recorded a new intro and mirrored my original video, and people are already starting to mirror it themselves. It’s immensely gratifying. To everyone who’s already mirrored, and to anyone that does, or might, or even thinks about it – thanks. And that goes double to AW and dpr.
You could even pre-emptively mirror my new video on JiLAdren . . . I’m sure he’ll DMCA it in short order, and in any case then you’d have the full set lying in your videos.
League of Reason AWAAAAAYYYYY!
Well, well, well. What do we have here?
In the war against censorship, one of our forum members and Youtuber joshTheGoods is taking matters into his own hands, and I have to say I feel much safer at night knowing that at least one sensible codemonkey is working on the software weapons we need.
Josh posted the video embedded below on his channel today, demonstrating an early build of TubeGuardian, an innovative background application that monitors your Youtube channel statistics (or anyone else’s, for that matter) and if given access to your account, will sense when videos are targeted by votebots, and automatically react to protect them. This does not involving counterbotting – which would only be stooping to the level of those free speech-hating cowards – but rather the act of defending your videos by disabling ratings. Check out the video for the full lowdown from Josh himself. It’s set to play in HD, so be sure to embiggen it with the fullscreen function for maximum effect.
Since I began writing this post, it appears the above video was itself votebotted! A nice demonstration of the effectiveness of TubeGuardian, which disabled ratings after just five 1-star votes. Note that it is not the number of ratings that triggers TubeGuardian‘s defence programme, but rather a suspiciously high number of ratings when compared to views.
As Josh mentioned in the video, he is open to suggestions as the software is in development, so if you have any, or can offer any help, please send him a PM on Youtube. If anyone can port the software to OS X, I’d certainly appreciate it (and let’s not forget our friends on Linux). Once it reaches a stable release, we will be sure to host the install files officially here at League of Reason.
In the meantime, check out joshTheGoods’ channel and subscribe to him for video updates about TubeGuardian.
Many congratulations to qdragon1337 (q-dragon on the forums) and IceFire9yt (Icefire9atla) for respectively being our first place winner and runner up in the first League of Reason Community Promo Competition. Both of their trailers are embedded in the video below, and you can download this video in high quality to re-upload to your channel here.
As many of you may know, in addition to votebots that rate down videos there are also bots that mark all the comments on a video as spam. Although the comments can still be read when you click the “Show” button, it’s quite annoying and a direct attack against free speech. The problem would be easy to solve by simply clicking the “Not Spam” button above every comment. Unfortunately, as many things on YouTube, the button doesn’t work.
It’s still possible to unmark comments as spam by going through the page source, but that can be rather time consuming. But now there is an easier solution, a program that does this automatically.
[youtube]PAG585_EBh4[/youtube]
There are, however, a few objections to using the program. For one, is it right to use a bot against a bot? Here’s why I don’t think there’s anything wrong about it:
Could the program be used wrong, for example, modified to mark comments as spam in other people’s videos? Here’s what the programmer has to say:
“Only if the user has pretty intimate knowledge of decompiling/editing compiled programs. A malicious programmer could look at the source code as an example of some general principles one might use to create a spam bot, but a programmer with enough knowledge to understand my example would not need it (it’s exceedingly simple).”
What about YouTube’s Terms of Service? Section 4.H. says the following:
“You agree not to use or launch any automated system, including without limitation, “robots,” “spiders,” or “offline readers,” that accesses the Website in a manner that sends more request messages to the YouTube servers in a given period of time than a human can reasonably produce in the same period by using a conventional on-line web browser.”
In the program you can set the time period between actions. In my opinion, 1 second is a reasonable period of time for unmarking comments as spam. Of course, you could set a longer time period if you feel like it.
As long as the “Not Spam” button is non-functional I see no problem in using the program. If I was hit by a creationist spambot, I would certainly use it. But this is just my personal opinion, not necessarily the official position of the League of Reason.
You can download the program here. The program should run on Windows Vista and XP. It won’t yet run on Mac OS X, except via VirtualPC. Downloading and using the program is at your own risk. Neither I nor the League of Reason can be held responsible for any possible damage caused by the program.
Even if you have no need for the program please check out joshTheGoods’s channel. He also has many great videos about evolution, creationism and atheism.
I’m happy to announce the League of Reason Community Promo Competition, launching now! You can find all the info you need in this thread.
I’m looking forward to seeing your submissions!
…for them.
Geocentrists want my blood. See, some time ago, I posted a video calling out a particularly notorious Youtube moron on his geocentric view of the Universe. He failed to respond to my challenge entirely, but in his place, what I can only discern is some small organisation of geocentrists have posted a response. They have further proceeded to post several videos that purport to present scientific proof that the Earth is stationary at the centre of the Universe. Furthermore, they seem to conclude that the theory of evolution is a delusion.
Does it take even the slightest thought to guess their motives? Not really. You don’t have to look far through their videos to see one of them holding a bible. Several individuals have brought all this to my attention, whom I thank. I intend to respond fully to these masters of bunk, however this will mean putting off a new series I was hoping to launch this weekend.
But you don’t mind right? Everyone loves a good debunking!
Incidentally, these chaps are fellow Brits; the first to meet my sciencehammer. That honour might have gone to Marc Surtees, had fellow Leaguer JRChadwick not already done so.