:: Here in the Wadi ::

I fucked up. And for that I'm sorry. But by fucking up, I made the Wadi list into a community, a threat to national security and an institution all at once. Fucking up sure has unintended consequences.

Now the whole account. It might turn out to be a little longer then usual, so be patient or just ignore.

In the past six weeks The Wadi List had been distributed using a new service of Flycast Inc. called eDispatch. Flycast, I must mention was recently acquired by Engage Inc. (NASDAQ: ENGA), a 3 Billion dollar company, not a small fish by any standard. And we were happy.

On Sunday night, I found out Wadi List #0027 wasn't mailed. I waited till Morning and mailed Flycast. No answer. I escalated the problem and got an "I'm out of office replay", but it had an AirTouch Pager I can mail to (nice service if you ask me). Nada.

Well, as the Wadi List is not something people can't do without - I thought - what the heck. And waited.

When the new working week started out there in the west mail poured in. I learnt that "on Friday night, eDispatch newsletter broadcasts were temporarily taken offline". Further more, I learnt "it will remain down at least through this whole week".

Hummm... This means we need to work manually. I downloaded the mail list - re-created the HTML letters, and went mailing. I mailed the missing issue on: 23:41. After I pressed the "Send" button I felt something was wrong. I Went to the Sent Items Box and saw a disaster. A chunk of the list was mailed "TO:" and not "BCC:" (which stands for Blind Carbon Copy if anyone ever wondered). An ICQ message to my fellow writers was sent on 23:48 it said: "Just did the fuck of a life time!!!"

And fuck it was.

Tuesday morning was a mess. The Wadi List mailbox was full, Walla! featured the incident as a news item and most alarming, the exposed recipients started mailing to the whole list. They didn't sound too happy and two people even demanded to be un-subscribed (they are not reading this).

What could I do? I did the only thing I know how to do - I started thinking about the lessons learnt. And I learnt a lot of things (the importance of privacy wasn't one of them - I knew this one already)

I learnt what big problems Application Service Providers (ASP) are about to face before they can overrule Installed Software. I learnt that most people perceive any on-line service as an institution and find it hard to distinguish these days between Funded Ventures and just-fo-sake-of-doing Ventures. And, I learnt we did made a difference in the past six weeks, as though the mailings were harsh, they also followed the list style, so I liked it.

The funny thing arrived this afternoon, from Flycast, and I quote:

"A privacy issue was recently brought to our attention, which led to our decision to temporarily suspend eDispatch newsletter broadcasts."

What can I say?

Bygones?

Wadi Writer #1 (Gray)

WadiList@mail.com

Links:

List Archive: http://www.oocities.org/wadilist

Flycast: http://www.flycast.com

Engage: http://www.engage.com

BCC is: http://www.acronymfinder.com/

Walla! News: http://dailynews.walla.co.il/ts.cgi?tsscript=news∓id=8356∓path=4