an intentional error?

while looking up email addresses for some faculty in my department, I noticed an interesting anomaly. if I simply click on the faculty member's email address, it opens my email client with a new email properly addressed. however, if I right click, select "Copy Email Address," then paste it in the To field for a new email, there is a leading "%20", the HTML code for a space. I initially thought this might be just a typo, that there was an extra space in the mailto tag, but the character appear on all the email addresses. perhaps this is some sort of counter-spam effort.

looking closer at the HTML source, it does seem to be counter-spam. for example, the link to email Richard Taylor shows up as follows:

<a href="'&#109;&#097;&#105;&#108;&#116;&#111;
&#058;%20taylor&#64;ics&#46;uci&#46;edu'">taylor&
#64;ics&#46;uci&#46;edu</a>

to the average human eye, this looks mostly like a bunch of mumbo-jumbo, but effectively it's encoding the mailto tag using ASCII code points, swapping the letters for numbers. thus, if someone looks directly at the HTML source, as most spam harvesters do, it doesn't look like an email address. even if someone does try to automatically harvest it, there's an extra space in there. however, when the browser renders it, everything looks normal, and you can even click on the address and your email client will automatically remove the extra leading space for you.

what I don't quite understand is how or whether this actually impedes spam harvesters. if a browser can render the above coding into a meaningful email address, why can't a email-harvesting bot do the same? do most harvesting bots just go for low-hanging fruit rather than trying to decode obfuscated email addresses? is it just a matter of adding one more layer of resistance? or is there something intrinsically difficult about having a bot resolve the above HTML to a meaningful email address?

questions about "citizen" journalism and secret journalists

on NPR this morning, someone had written a letter-to-the-editor type comment about a piece on citizen journalism, that is, journalistic-style reporting by non-journalists. I'm really not a fan of the term citizen journalism (or its relative citizen science, for that matter), but that's the subject for another post. here, I want to focus on a comment about the NPR story. one listener said that citizen journalism is potentially problematic when such citizens do not identify themselves as serving a journalist-like function, as people on whom are being reported should be aware that such reporting is taking place. I wonder if that assumption, that the average person off the street is not going to report on your interactions that s/he observes, is really well founded.

I'm not encouraging or endorsing the practice of secret journalism or being intentionally misleading about one's intent to broadly disseminate information. however, I don't think it's reasonable to assume that any act taken in public will not be posted online. I'm thinking in part here of George Allen's macaca debacle. he clearly did not consider, even though he was speaking publicly in front of a largish audience, that his speech and actions would be as public as they became. but I'm also thinking in part about greater trends of watchfulness and sousveillance. it's not necessarily the case that every word you say will show up on the front page of tomorrow's New York Times or Slashdot post, but that possibility definitely exists for your every word.

how do we as a society and as a culture cope with such possibilities? one obvious approach is to assume that pretty much everything you say or do might be available for public consumption. however, I don't think that's really viable, for a number of reasons. normal social interaction depends on a certain degree of deception; plausible deniability is a necessary social gloss in many occasions.

ultimately, I feel like the currently predominant notions of public and private are not really sufficient for talking about or thinking about the ways in which we present and construct our selves, and the ways in which our selves get presented and constructed by others. I'm not quite sure what alternative conceptions might be more useful, but I suspect they would likely focus on identity, how we construct our identity, how others construct our identity for us, and the ways in which we maintain different identities in different contexts.