Michael Gracie

I had a fair inkling that the Colorado-based political blog thing would continue to raise ire, but I didn’t suspect it would come from the inside out.

The word came down from Gov. Bill Owens that state employees can no longer post comments at ColorodoPols.com from state-run computers. The clue-in came from a commenter who was using state machine(s) to do their dirty work, which included a bit of bashing. State officials claim they can’t figure out who did it.

Where do we go from here?
Read more »

The big political threat last week was that a local blog’s owners were covertly stealing useless IP information on its commenters, in the hopes that they could glean who these people really were. It was a vast conspiracy of the ultra-left wing.

Turns out, Republican party folk were the ones doing the digging. Please, please, please get some technical guidance in your camp! You found someone who knew how to use a spreadsheet; why couldn’t you find someone who knew a lick about network addressing?

You wasted a good bit of time, and made yourselves look silly (as well as a bit disorganized on the PR front, if I may add). I doubt you can afford many more flubs like this.

I would really like to know how a politically oriented website is “surreptitiously collecting information about individuals who post” on it. With the exception of gathering a pile of IP addresses, which in this case will likely all point to Colorado (and either Comcast or Qwest), I just have to wonder what information Hans Gullickson really thinks ColoradoPols can actually obtain.

Political parties have proven they can’t get technology use right, and I doubt they are going to get any decent advice anytime soon. It is therefore wishful thinking to expect these types of claims will end before our sun runs cold.