Can you hear that? Thats the sound of someone getting fired.

Fixed as of 7pm EST.

Seems to be fixed now.

It’s not a bug, that line there just shows the newest group to be created. A group was made with that name just before you noticed it.

Seems like it’s changing on refresh. Maybe it displays a random registered group? I would assume that groups need to be approved prior to being made available on the site, but maybe the example string is picked from a pool of all submitted groups. Either way, needs a quick fix.

That’s not true, Cyre. It’s text used as an example on how to create a group.

Posted here:
http://blog.scotthurff.com/arc.....-campaign/

Mike, the story headline should read “… Bug AT Barack…”

#6, it’s changed at least twice in the past 10 minutes, so i doubt it’s just a static string.

Thanks Kal, fixed that typo.

Cyre, if they are indeed simply using the most recently created group as an example, that’s pretty dumb.

They are in fact doing that. See here:
http://my.barackobama.com/page/group?show=newest

someone still needs to be fired.

OK, I stand corrected. Thanks Daniel.

My contention: there are several moles working for the Obama campaign that have allegiance to Hillary. They are infiltrating and disrupting his campaign at every chance.

Still, they will likely blame this on Republican hackers, Exxon, Libby, RNC, Diebold, Pfizer, or whoever else is the Democrats’ scapegoat of the day.

Cyre is correct. It’s not a bug, just lack of moderation. Anyone can create a group and be shown as the example at random. GNAA is a troll group that took advantage of it.

Mike,

You said “Either way, not a good start for the Barack Obama social network.”

I disagree.

Although unfortunate and unintelligent racism does exist present day in this country. If anything I say any vociferous racial controversy (which is bound to happen) will only give more attention to this candidate. Any supporter that would shy away from that site because of something like this is not a true supporter at all.

no excuse for an error like that, none whatsoever. these folks want to use the internet to get their word out and become the next president, yet they can’t stop something happening like this? not a good start.

The reason it appeared there was because the most recent group was displayed as the example.

It’s gone now, as is that group, and you’ll see that the example is another of the over 1,000 real grassroots groups that were created in the last 24 hours — which is the real story here.

As with any open platform, some people will abuse the openness. And as with any open community, users flagged down the offenders and moderators took care of it in a timely fashion.

It’s up to folks who support this kind of open approach to politics online to push back on the kind of knee-jerk “look! look! look!” that more traditional or tech-phobic writers are inclined to engage in.

The past few years have taught most people that it’s a non-story when people post crazy/critical/racist/whatever things in the comments on a politician or organization’s site, and that’s what makes it possible for people in jobs like mine to keep these tools open for all. It’s going to take all of us, no matter what candidate you support, to avoid pretending these kind of things are stories to continue to make progress.

In general I would hope that folks concerned about questionable content on the site will turn to the system of flags or some other means of contacting the campaign directly rather than playing “gotcha”. If we want to play that game, there plenty of content in the comments on the blogs of both the Republican and Democratic Party’s web sites to keep us all distracted from the real task of building better technology, engaging more people, and opening up the process.

Joe Rospars
New Media Director
Obama for America

You wrote

“This was done maliciously by one of the developers of the site, or more likely, there is a security hole in the software that has been exploited.”

when I’m sure you meant

This could have been done “maliciously by one of the developers of the site, or more likely, there is a security hole in the software that has been exploited.”

In any case, you appear to be wrong.

Joe - way to reach out to the community. When you fuck up, the best thing to do is not attack the people who alerted you to it. Why in the world you allowed something like this to happen is beyond me. Why didn’t you just hard code the example into the page? It would have been easier and this wouldn’t have happened.

This isn’t Washington DC politics, and you shouldn’t assume I have some racist or other bias against your campaign. We’re a tech blog and I pointed out what looks like a rookie mistake on your site that caused some embarrassment. Most of our readers (me included) are going to be inclined to be on your side. But Obama just lost my vote, because of you.

Joe Rospars, keep up the good work.

FYI: The GNAA is actually a pretty well-known trolling group (and in actuality has very little to do with Gs or Ns).

Michael,

I think he’s a little defensive because it’s his job on the line. Check out his title “Director of New Media”.

Side note: It’s interesting to note that positions like his exist in today’s politcal campaigns.

I think Joe nailed this on the head. Really a non stupid issue to post about. Do we make big issues out of false 9-11 calls or fire alarms????? I’m guessing you were looking to piggy back on the 60 minutes piece and this was the best thing you could come of with???????

Wow, Michael if Obama lost your vote because of this then that is pretty sad. I think Joe raised good points and if you have ever been on a political website you know that there is an unfortunate number of hateful anonymous people out there.

Also seeing as how this isn’t wasn’t bug or “maliciously by one of the developers of the site, or more likely, there is a security hole in the software that has been exploited.” your entire point is pretty much mute.

FWIW, i think they have hard coded the example now (Supporters of B.O. 20003 (ZIP for DC)).

Your right Michael, your not working for his campaign. Your out for the news and probably wouldn’t act differently when it would be on any Republican site. Too bad they had to lash out in the comment. (It just might be that it was someone impersonating for him )

Tony,
http://www.wallstreetphoto.com/

Arrington, you bag of wind. You would rule out a legit candidate because of someone who MAY OR MAY NOT be associated directly with the candidate. You are such a fool.

Choose your candidate for the candidate. Not for his supporters.

Hint - the most popular candidate will surely have more dicks supporting him/her than the least popular. Using your logic, you’d rule out the most popular candidate for the supporters. And eventually end up with the least popular candidate just because no dicks (except you) support him/her.

Bill - yeah, but I don’t need the condescension either.

>> But Obama just lost my vote, because of you.

WTF?!

Oh Jesus. This is turning into a political debate. This is why I never read political blogs.

Yeah… this is a great reason not to vote for Obama…

Wow..the way he just handled that lost Obama yet another vote, mine. If this is how he and his campaign handle this small of a problem, I don’t want him handling national ones.

Michael, I’m probably not the only one hoping that your bad-tempered signoff above was just rhetorical. Your vote is too valuable to change for a petty reason like this.

Michael — To the degree it is turning into a political debate, it’s because you said you weren’t going to vote for him for a reason that anyone will tell you is petty and childish.

I agree with you — do whatever you can to keep anything that is personal about you off this site, because it’s consistently repelling. Your tech reviews are good though!

too many anonymous comments on both sides of this.

On a side note: does anyone know about a wordpress plugin that will group comments by IP address? If you could click on an anonymous comment and see all other comments from that IP address, it would show some very interesting data (we’ve found a lot of non-anonymous commenters also comment anonymously all the time).

Michael, a wise man once wrote, “When you fuck up, the best thing to do is not attack the people who alerted you to it.” You mistakenly wrote that Obama’s campaign either had a malicious developer working for it, or had been hacked; both of which are fairly serious things to say about a candidate’s site. When it turned out that you were wrong, you didn’t address Joe’s point that the campaign would rather (admirably) keep the system open and deal with the risks of doing so, you just maintained that they’d “fucked up, and then, childishly, said Obama had lost your vote. Take your own advice on this one.

I agree with david, Mike, I think you should withold your personal convictions about non-tech stuff. The tech reviews are great, but each time you’ve ventured into politics you’ve lost many points with me.

I agree. You guys should report me to the smug police immediately. http://www.techcrunch.com/2007.....mug-thing/

Michael. What does this have to do with new web 2.0 businesses? And if he lost your vote for a technical fuck up then you’re more of a moron than you come across as from your postings on TC.

I promise, I’ll only point out errors like this from republican candidates from now on. Is that ok with everyone?

“I have had my hand slapped by a representative of the Obama campaign, who really should have just said “thanks for notifying us of this, it’s been fixed.”

Mike, on your part, you have to admit, that is a bit childish.

“The past few years have taught most people that it’s a non-story when people post crazy/critical/racist/whatever things in the comments on a politician or organization’s site, and that’s what makes it possible for people in jobs like mine to keep these tools open for all. It’s going to take all of us, no matter what candidate you support, to avoid pretending these kind of things are stories to continue to make progress.”

The representative is completely correct. This isn’t news, infact, has nothing to do with news.

Bad input from users is inevitable part of user generated content. Just the way there are pictures tagged with “flickr sucks” on Flickr, groups about “Facebook sucking” on the Facebook, there will be the people who aren’t supporters of Obama, on an My.Obama network.

I live just outside of Washington, DC and moderate a discussion list for entrepreneurs. We have a simple rule - no political discussions. Politics has the ability to make perfectly smart people into blithering idiots. And political discussions make me think about the South Park episode where “smug” settled in over South Park - most people are convinced they “know” the right answer(s) and don’t need to open their minds to alternate points of view. Compared to the way people around here usually discuss politics, Joe Rospars’ post seemed fairly restrained.

Of course, the bug (feature?) Michael reported on should have been found during testing as the potential for it’s misuse seems fairly obvious.

Ashutosh - I don’t disagree, but the “news” is that they were taking these groups and auto-using them as examples on their site. I thought it was a bug, but it just turned out to be stupidity coupled with condescension.

I read this site all the time, and I think this is the first time in a long time where I’ve read the comments, if ever. I’m surprised to see everyone (on both sides) to be so sensitive. Like this place is dripping with machismo and testosterone.

Anyway, I signed up for the site yesterday as soon as I saw it, just because I like to try things out and I like Obama. I can understand why they’d have the most recently updated group show up, because as user, I’d like to know what’s fresh on the site. Not that there was any indication that that was a fresh/new group, but I can see the intent. I can also see Mike’s point that it probably wasn’t handled well, or perhaps they overlooked how it could be exploited (or maybe they already knew but weren’t on it fast enough).

Either way, it’s been fixed and I think the tech world and the political world have lessons to learn from each other here: A. Smear campaigns happen all the time–it’s politics; you adapt and keep it moving. and B. In web tech world, there are better ways to go about responding to those who point out your web/tech shortcomings; this is a very collaborative community. And the lesson that applies to both sides: stop with the overreacting.

This looks like a problem you should have just notified them and should not have posted this to the public. Especially since it has such racist text. Though I generally back you Michael, this is a bit tasteless.

This is dumb, anyone would assume that an example like that would be hardcoded, why in god’s name wouldn’t it be? Someone went to the extra trouble of making it non hardcoded and GNAA (a well known troll group) quickly took advantage.

It’s not a big issue, like Joe says, but I also don’t think Micheal was saying it was, just a bug. The campaign should say, “thanks” and hard-code the example. Problem solved.

As director of New Media I would hope that you quickly learn that your response to TechCrunch shouldn’t be the same as your response to the New York Times. Some audiences might need lectures about the social web, but some don’t, learn the difference and you will offend less people. Every blog post shouldn’t be treated with the gravitas of a front page story in the Times. Some are important sure, but just because Mike posts this little bug doesn’t mean he’s out to get you.

Having said that, you haven’t lost my vote.

Michael,

You can take the screenshot down now, or does having “nigger” up there make you giggle? You’re no better than the guy running ripoffreport.com … public service my ass.

Eric

Mike they are not laying off anytime soon are they! lol

This thread is hilarious. It’s amazing how wrapped up people get in politics. I think Michael perhaps jumped the gun in saying Obama lost his vote, but Jesus Christ people, calm down. Take a deep breath. Relax. There is more to life than this nonsense.

Michael, I think you should lock comments for this one

Michael, it was disappointing to know that you think like that (”Obama just lost my vote, because of you.”). Its just a technical glitch, or maybe even a stupid mistake, but come on give ‘em a break! Your attitude actually reflects the judgmental character of many voters who make a knee-jerk decision on irrelevant things like their name, religion, etc. That’s probably the reason good people like him (Obama) almost never make it all the way.

Mike,

I’m appalled that this actually makes a headline here at TechCrunch. Not only did you decide that it was OK to send an off-topic “story” (and I use the term loosely), but you also decided to further propagate both a racial and sexual orientation slur to your ~200K users. That makes you even more of a prick than the guy who actually posted the original garbage. Perhaps you think it’s ok to use some other person’s ignorance as a license to mention those abrasive words in a public forum — maybe you’re just as politically incorrect as the other idiot but saw this as an opportunity to hide under the fact that you’re just repeating someone else. Well it doesn’t make the phrases less dick-headed just because they didn’t originate from your mouth first. You didn’t point out the insensitivity of someone else, instead you’ve shown us your own.

Well, I hope you feel proud of yourself. You didn’t think about how readers of this filth might feel every time they encounter those words. One might expect that crap from a political campaign, where mus-slinging abounds — but from a tech blog?!

Obama gives nice speeches and that’s about it. Mostly style with little substance which is not what we need in a President after the Idiot-in-Chief

the bottom line out of all this hoopla is for techcrunch to not write about political bs - and stick to purely tech companies, Period.

ughhhhh…hello, TechCrunch; this is not PoliticalCrunch

mike is just purposely throwing fuel on the fire by tossing in who he’d vote for in the democratic party, Word

HEY TECHCRUNCH,

Can you remove this story from your bin? The problem has been resolved and the site does not need this negative publicity to continue. Not many people saw the attack but reports like yours keep it alive.

GET RID OF THIS STORY INSTEAD OF USING IT TO PROMOTE YOUR OWN SITE. THERE ARE BIGGER FISH TO FRY.

Wish the see the 1st black president

OK guys, you’re all being a bit too serious. It’s Mike’s site and he can post whatever he wants, about whatever he wants whether it has anything to do with Web 2.0 or not, tech or not … news or not.

Yepper, so I think that about sums it up.

agree with web2point0critic. at least update your negative words toward it.

Hey Mike,
Seems like you’re getting a lot of crap from people about the article. I just wanted to say keep up the good work. The point of this blog is to talk about the use of new technological advancements and how they affect our lives (or if they will). You gave a good third party review of something and are getting bashed by people who are probably all Obama supporters. That is just bad taste by others. No one is blaming Obama for the foul up. It happens and you’ve helped them fix a bug.

Joe Rospars,
Political interests have no place at Techcrunch. While occasionally they seep their way in please don’t add to that effort. Your comment was really unneccessary. We’re tech junkies that are more interested in applications of technology then anything else. Next time some one points out a flaw, a simple “thanks, we’ll fix it” is all that is needed. Many of us here have built and killed user generated tech platforms so don’t quote us on the drawbacks, we know them already.

P.S. We need a spell checker on comments.

web2point0critic- wants to bury the story since it involves his candidate. What a joke!

He will not be the Dem candidate. Looks at the polls…. LOL…

Sojo,

Too true. And if he wants to make it personal rather than professional his readers may vote not to read.

They lost my vote well before this ever happened… In fact, I probably won’t vote; neither of the major parties are offering anything I want.

I’m not anonymous, BTW… I can be reached at rdewey@otiosoft.com

Hmm… I wonder how many “I’m removing you from my RSS aggregator” notes we’ll see

Mike,

You should check out the site building tool on the McCain site. It goes to the opposite extreme and pretty much approves every piece of content that goes up. I did a post about it on our blog.

http://www.bivingsreport.com/2.....mpaigning/

Todd

Mike I disagree that he would lose your vote just for the Director of New Media doing his job.
You are doing yours and here we go creating a big political debate on techcrunch.
Close discussions on this post, that would help.
Obama still got my Vote.

Mike,

I’m with you - forget Obama now! Let’s go with Hillary - oh wait…she doesn’t have a tag cloud.

Sojo: Actually you are pretty wrong.

For Mike, the site is only as good as it’s readers. If Mike took that egotistical stance, he wouldn’t have got where he has got to now. And he wouldn’t be earning hundreds of thousands on advertising if he had no readership.

To everyone else: I don’t think this needed to be posted BUT I also think people are taking it over board a little bit. It was tech related and it was a follow up to a recent story.

Although I had to laugh at Mike’s immature response

Palak,

For whatever reason Mike chose to sensationalize this in his choice of post title and message. He wasn’t simply reporting a problem. And he is the one that brought politics into this, Joe’s comment actually relates to one of the intents of this blog: Discussion of Web 2.0 applications and the problems we all face in dealing with their openness.

“You are a fucking loser fag”

And you judge others based on what they write? How are you any better?

Great response Robert Dewey.

Honestly, I think that “New Media Director” shouldn’t have made that long post. I, for one, when seeing this post, I only looked from it at a humor point of view. There was nothing political or anything.

Just chill and relax, doesn’t it make you laugh when you see that picture? Who cares which site the bug was from.

By the way, if you continue this path of not admitting your mistakes, you are doomed for failure. Your designer left you for this very same reason, and soon your users will too.

.
.

“You just lost a user because of that”
.
.

@Joe:

Mike didn’t write a “gotcha” post — he simply pointed out a flaw in the design of your “open” software that led to an unfortunate listing of a fake e-hate group. Mike’s post was preceded by a glowing review of the MyObama social networking site — a flawless design which generated many comments about the behind-the-scenes framework. The net result of both posts are very positive — a larger interest in the tech infrastructure behind Obama’s campaign site and concern over the apparent political trolling allowed to appear as a “legitimate group” in a search box, even temporarily.

I believe what Mike is suggesting is that the Obama campaign lost his vote if there is a lack of respect for the messenger, especially if the message was out of concern for the Obama campaign site’s ability to manage malicious posts.

Although TechCrunch remains a politically neutral site, the line between technology and politics is becoming ever-thin as we move into an era of technology-fueled accountability through direct engagement with voters.

For this reason alone, the Obama campaign should be appreciative of Mike’s attentiveness and willingness to call attention to a serious design flaw, which is now resolved.

Onward…

Since this will be the most digitally political election yet and Obama just launched a site that’s trying to leverage some of the more 2.0 community ideas the fact that there was a major screw up with the site day 1 is news that’s likely interesting to most of TC’s readers… same as if this was a screw up day 1 of the Gap’s new site to sell shoes.

Whether Mike’s assesment was right or wrong the fact remains that not thinking this feature flaw would be manipulated was a strategic error. In politics (and the blogosphere) these kind of errors get magnified pretty quickly. What ends up defining the errors is usually how you deal with the fallout.

You Americans need to calm down. Wow.. two parties to choose from… It`s not like you can flip a coin or anything.

This “racial slur” is so stupid it becomes comedy. It´s similar to the (making shit up) Terrorist Communist Nazis who implant brain control devices in random rednecks in South Dakota in an effort to brainwash Americans into using the metric system.

Anyway.. I think Michael and Joe just pulled a “Boston”.

I read TC all the time, for almost a year now I would guess, and this is the first comment I will have made, and I’m sure I will take shit for it unfortunately — but jeez, cut Mike some slack here. You can say this isn’t news all you want, but this is news — an amateur mistake on a what-should-be professional site is news to the tech world, like it or not. Sure, it didn’t happen on Google’s homepage (which I’m sure none of you would have had a problem with from a posting relevancy perspective) but nonetheless, I was interested to hear about it from a tech and non-tech perspective. With that in mind, the Obama people should be thanking Mike for the heads up, tucking their tails between their legs in shame, and cordially asking for an update; Joe Rospars shouldn’t be commenting on the post coming off as a of condescending douchebag, even though he most likely is. Is he not a politician, after all? Mike, good post.

GNAA is an online meme. There used to be a wiki entry but that disappeared. I think this is funny more so than offensive.

I though the “New Media Director’s” response was interesting insight into cutting edge spin. How political campaigns will take advantage of the new tools and communities – what they’ll learn from Howard Dean’s campaign last time around – will be interesting to watch.

Is it a bug or is it a feature?

Honestly though, I would expect the text in that message box to be hard coded according to standard coding practices.

I don’t see any sensationalization of this at all. I agree with Mike that a simple ‘Thank you’ would have sufficed.

How can anyone claim that this isn’t worth TechChrunch reporting? MyBarackObama was the biggest Web 2.0 launch of the week, and there was a big exploit for it discovered. It’s absolutely blog-worthy. It isn’t a huge deal by any means, but it’s absolutely worth the write-up/summary that Mike gave.

I’m very sure if this bug appeared on some other Web 2.0 site like digg, Mike would report it as well. This bug just happened to be on the Barack Obama’s Web 2.0 campaign site.

Al Gore invented the Internets … I think he’s behind all of this.

I’m simply curious why everyone thinks blogs should be totally neutral. They’d be quite boring (ie reading the snooze news from the AP) if they were always completely neutral and fair. It’s news as presented with a bias, of the person who’s writing it. Seems pretty simple to me. They can express their opinions all they want and I can choose whether to read them.

in conclusion: to drop this subject already - TC needs to post a new lead tech article to put this clown of an article behind us

any substance is getting diluted by all the petty rants and raves

If you don’t like Michael’s articles, then don’t read them. I happened to find this article very interesting and it’s unfortunate they allowed for a thing like that to happen. If you’re going to show the last group that joined, perhaps they should have said this up front and it would be a non-issue.

I still don’t see why it should have anything to do with why or why not you should vote for Obama. I don’t feel that Joe was that harsh.

Mike, go grab a beer bro, this is just crazy. I cannot believe such a smug comment was left from someone at Obama’s campaign. This is the typical stupid ass “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature” defense. A “thank you” and a request for interview as a followup post would have been the right way to go, not jumping on you. Oy.

He he, too hilarious! This is the most fun I’ve had reading blog comments, in… well, I think ever! The smugness of the so many of the posts reminds me of Paul Graham’s recent quote:

“I think there’s a general principle at work here: the less energy people expend on performance, the more they expend on appearances to compensate. More often than not the energy they expend on seeming impressive makes their actual performance worse.”

and also this one by Tara Ploughman:

“The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act.”

Isn’t that sooo true!

Great post Mike - great entertainment

so GNAA is backing obama?

First time commenting.

Interesting post. Thanks for showing us the glitch.

Just accept it that some of the most intelligent people are stubborn and refuse to admit when they are wrong about an action or comment. It is just a negative quality that often comes along with brilliance.

Oh wow. I was blown away by Michael’s response. It didn’t seem like the New Media Director was attacking this site at all, he is just concerned with getting bad press on the release of their campaign social network. The way Tech Crunch reported on the issue was very sleazy. Of course Mike didn’t point out the blatant vandalism, he only questioned the developers and then continued by calling them stupid… Wow.

Read/Write is now my new Tech News source. Forget all this childish behavior.

‘I have had my hand slapped by a representative of the Obama campaign’

A legitimate story to report. Michael could have emailed the p