Today's Driver 8 was brought to you by the following referrer:

Daniel Scott's hair salon, Daniel Scott Haircutters, from NYC. Do you remeber the tip one of their stylists gave on potentially unusual or suspicious activity?

News beats porn online
September 25, 2002

Those secretly addicted to the web at work are more likely to be looking at news than a pornography site, a survey suggests.

This is an old piece of news that Andrew had already mentioned:

Wow - times sure have changed. I'm betting porn still takes up more total bandwidth, though - at least when you take spam into account.

As we discussed back then:

Maybe I should read the BBC article first, but they seem to be saying that since people read more news than watching porn at work, news is the winner of the content race on-line. But think about it: with all those corporate firewalls around blocking smut and the chance of being caught red-handed by a manager, do you think someone would actually risk looking at the stuff at work? Methinks porn is still the king of content on-line.

Charly Z • 9/25/02; 10:11:05 AM

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Good point - I didn't bother to read the article myself. I just went straight for the witty repartee...as I think about it, I bet you're right. Damn. =)

Andrew Bayer • 9/25/02; 1:21:42 PM

And indeed, the article does offer a caveat on its third paragraph:

It has to be said, of course, that most companies block access to porn sites.

So people don't watch it at work. Nevertheless, porn rules on-line.

Over at Salon competitor Slate, Mickey Kaus is the only one there who seems to have paid attention to the whole retraction business. Paul Krugman's retraction, that is:

Good David Carr NYT piece on Paul Krugman's latest journalistic triumph, for which he graciously (for him) accepted responsibility here.... Could Carr's article -- which is refreshingly, even eagerly, tough on Krugman -- reflect a new, harder line by the NYT in insisting on accountability from its op-ed columnists? And could this new, harder line have anything to do with ... oh, the possibility that one Steven J. Hatfill will file a whopping-great libel suit against the Times and Times columnist Nicholas Kristof? Or was NYT editorial page editor Gail Collins simply tired of being embarrassed by the columnists on the pages that are allegedly under her control? Note the somewhat tutorial-like tone of her comments:

Gail Collins, the editorial page editor of The Times, described Mr. Krugman's comments as a retraction last night and said, "One of the important things about being a good reporter or columnist is to acknowledge when you failed to connect a dot, and I think that's what Paul is saying."

And I think we've learned something today, Paul, haven't we...!

Though he does have something to say regarding Mr. Krugman's sources: "...even my pathetic B.S. detector tends to start vibrating at the words 'freelancer' and 'Salon.'"

Laughed out loud.

Web Article Is Removed; Flaws Cited
By David Carr
October 4, 2002

The online magazine Salon has removed an article charging Thomas E. White, secretary of the Army, with participating in accounting practices that led to the collapse of Enron.

The thing with the retraction about the article has been noticed by the Gray Lady. As you may recall, the heart of the matter is whether the e-mail from Thomas E. White during his tenure as an Enron top official ordering to hide the company's losses, on which the article is based, is authentic. David Carr mentions the opinion of Jason Leopold, author of the article in question, regarding Salon's move:

Mr. Leopold said yesterday that he stood by the authenticity of the e-mail message and the facts of his article. He said he was "hung out to dry" by Salon. "There is an enormous amount of political pressure on Salon," he said.

But as Mr. Carr points out later, it's not as if this the first time Mr. Leopold's reporting has been put in doubt.

Until April, Mr. Leopold was a Los Angeles correspondent for Dow Jones Newswires. He said he resigned from Dow Jones to write a book about the energy crisis.

His resignation came about a week before Dow Jones published the second of two extensive corrections of a March 18 article by Mr. Leopold and another reporter. The corrections there and in The Wall Street Journal, which also published the article, invalidated virtually all of the major points of the article, which accused Enron of compensating several executives excessively.

Still, he persists:

Mr. Leopold said he believed he was being singled out because of his aggressive reporting.

"I don't think there's any reporter out there who has skirted the edge like I have and really tried to obtain information about Enron," he said.

At the same time, one of the Times' own columnists, Paul Krugman, offered a discreet retraction (so discreet it is just a postcript at the bottom of the day's column) for an article he wrote based on a copy of the now-conspicuous e-mail:

In a column on Sept. 17, I wrote about evidence that Thomas White, the secretary of the Army, was well aware that the Enron division of which he was vice chairman before taking that position, Enron Energy Services, was deliberately and improperly concealing large financial losses. In that column I cited a February 2001 e-mail message that I said was written by Mr. White. Since then Mr. White has said that he does not recall writing such a message, and the authenticity of the message has been questioned. As long as the authenticity of the message remains in doubt, it should be considered unsubstantiated. I erred by citing it in my column.

I'm no longer happy with that "Who are you?" label for the link to the page explaining (as much as stream of thought ramblings can explain) who writes these words: it seems to ask the reader who they are instead of suggesting it will illuminate who the writer is. Maybe something else is needed. Let's see... When I originally seeked for a clever label, I reached for the immortal words of Daffy Duck:

Who's responsible for this! This...! I demand that you show yourself! Who are you! Huh?

Ah, there it is! From this day on, let it read "Who is responsible for this?" And thus it reads, and it is good.

I've updated some stories on this weblog to reflect the new design:

• Who are you? (Linked on the left)
• Listen to the grapevine (Linked on the left)
• "Blog" Deemed A Real Word By William Safire

Something curious happened with the NY Time's search engine: there's an article no longer showing for a search on "blog." The article was about journalists with personal weblogs. How do I now this? It's part of what I do for the "blog" watch. At least I still have that story linked to from there.

At the same time, Wired News' search engine just started showing the story on promiscuous webloggers on searches for "blog," more than a month after they posted it.

Who handles this people's search engines? (In the case of Wired, Lycos.) Such unreliable service...

For the sake of it he put his brain in pause; he parked his butt and watched TV. And watched and watched. On the third day he rose again, ready for a cold one in accordance with the ads; he remembered his weblog and is seated at the keyboard, his deluded mind no longer standing still. He will keep posting (but not on a schedule) whatever his whimsy dictates, and his weblog will keep on giving until the cows come home and the milk is grade A.

Welcome! Welcome all over again to the new Driver 8!