A Cautionary Tale of Open Source Social Technologies

eweekhickins writes "The 'country' drop-down menu on one organization's donations pages omits Israel as a country and includes 'Palestine.' Among other things, this means that Israelis can't donate to the organization from these pages; it also presents the risk of a PR nightmare for the organization. This EWeek story cautions that while basic Web 2.0 technologies combined with open source can be incredibly powerful and productive, they can also lead to disastrous results for an organization that isn't paying close enough attention."

Re:Not just Open Source

[masterzora]

If you RTFA, you'll find that the reasoning behind the decision is one you're more likely to find from businesses than from FOSS projects. Israel was among the list of countries from which they were receiving overly many fraudulent donations.

Re:You mean that clicking "Accept Defaults" is ris

[masterzora]

And I am shocked, shocked that you didn't RTFA, which made it pretty clear that this software came attached with a "we don't want fraudulent donations" agenda.

Overreacting

[Anonymous Coward]

If my reading of the article is right, it goes something like this:

There's a Ruby API that lists countries and regions. One of these is "Palestinian Territory -- Occupied". Someone decided to shorten this to "Palestine".

Meanwhile, someone at Facebook decided that a certain list of countries contains high risk of credit card fraud. One of those countries is Israel. So they won't take your credit card if you live there, probably because they've run into fraudsters operating in that country and they don't want to risk it. Just like they won't take a credit card from Nigeria, to name one.

So, someone sees this and concludes the worst. The Facebook application is anti-semitic. Overreact much?

Honestly, I think people are a bit too touchy about Israel/Palestine. Sure, it's a touchy subject, but a simple set of unrelated mistakes and people assume you're part of a vast conspiracy to destroy their nation? I think we as a society owe it to ourselves to be more careful about such accusations, and not simply react.

Nothing new for Proprietary or FOSS

[JoeCommodore]

People leave things out, forget, or usually just plain didn't know better. Similar things were said for some commercial product a few years back (I think it was Windows or Office, but I could not recall). It was either a language or time zone setting that neglected the country.

This is like all the software bug news articles - yes, there are bugs in software, but you know what, people actually FIX them, they don't STAY that way there are new versions, etc. It's all just some techno-political FUD mudslinging to influence the ignorant.

Re:OMG! OSS means people can make a statement

[bky1701]

Actually, no statement was made. The inclusion of Palestine was a glitch, and Israel was not included due to fraud originating from the country. I know this is slashdot, but would it kill maybe 3 or 4 people to actually RTFA before going off on rants? Doing that makes us all look bad. Thank you.

Article shows bias

[nwetters]

From TFA:

I pointed out that this isn't just any omission and addition. When you omit Israel and add Palestine (which is not even recognized as a country by the United Nations) to a country drop-down menu, you seem to be making a very loaded political statement.

Israel was omitted because of fraud from that country, which seems like a good reason. Palestine was probably included in the list because it is recognised by the UN, and is included in ISO 3166-1 [wikipedia.org]. If you were to delete Palestine from the list, it would certainly be a very loaded political statement, but its inclusion is not.

Re:Can't understand where is the problem

[vandan]

Israel doesn't use tanks to fight kids with rocks.

Israel uses tanks and bulldozers to demolish Palestinian houses, often with children inside who are too young to throw rocks.

There is no apartheid in Israel.

Don't be moronic. Israel is THE definition of an apartheid state. Are Palestinians allowed to vote? No. Are they allowed to travel? No ( sure, then can wait for days to go through 'checkpoints', but in effect, no, they can't travel ). Are Palestinian refugees allowed to return home? No. Are Palestinians treated as equals? Most certainly not.

Arab & Muslim citizens of Israel can vote, run for office, say anything they want, print anything they want, follow any religion they choose, work in any profession they choose, serve on the supreme court, and sue the government (and sometimes win). Doesn't sound like apartheid to me.

The problem is that all of that is a lie. I don't know why you Zionists bother spreading this BS - anyone actually interested in the conflict already knows the horrors that you are inflicting upon the Palestinians. The only thing you're doing is further entrenching anti-semitic views, by inflaming anger against you.

Re:Interesting story...

[phozz bare]

Dotan, You will find Israel, along with other "erased" countries such as France, Germany and the United States, all hidden under the "Industrial Countries" category. You will also notice that these other countries have a brief "at a glance" page not significantly different from Israel's.

Do you really think Israel's children are in a situation where they require the assistance of UNICEF?

Re:Can't understand where is the problem

[belmolis]

Israel uses tanks and bulldozers to demolish Palestinian houses, often with children inside who are too young to throw rocks.

Israel makes every effort to get the inhabitants out. The claim that Israel often demolishes houses with children inside is a lie.

Arab & Muslim citizens of Israel can vote, run for office, say anything they want, print anything they want, follow any religion they choose, work in any profession they choose, serve on the supreme court, and sue the government (and sometimes win). Doesn't sound like apartheid to me.

The problem is that all of that is a lie. I don't know why you Zionists bother spreading this BS

Uh, that would be because it is true. To begin your research, here's the Wikipedia article on the United Arab List [wikipedia.org], an Israeli Arab political party that currently has three members in the Knesset. There are currently a total of 12 Arab Members of the Knesset [wikipedia.org]. Supreme Court Justice Salim Joubran [wikipedia.org] is an Arab. Elias Nakhleh [rice.edu], an Arab, served four terms in the Knesset, eventually becoming Deputy Speaker. You clearly have no idea what you are talking about.

Re:Possibly.

[blincoln]

It would depend upon how large the closed-source company was.

What, like how Executive Software/Diskeeper refuses to sell their product or provide support to pharmaceutical companies because their CEO is a Scientologist?

That's the Diskeeper which is included in Windows in a reduced form as the defragmentation utility, in case you're not familiar with how big its market is.

Re:Bad, bad title

[Ex-MislTech]

Bah! stop the discrimination, you lofty fscking overlords.

The discrimination will stop after the KH-55's make landfall
across most of the modern world.

But at that point it won't really matter will it ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kh-55 [wikipedia.org]

They are new and improved to with tech from the F117 shot
down during the Bosnian-Serbian War during the Clinton Era.

Makes me want to watch Dr. Strangelove, lol.

Re:Interesting story...

[Haeleth]

However, you will notice that one can click on the European part of the map and on the resulting page appear France and Germany.

And also the United States, and Israel, and Japan, and South Korea. Japan and South Korea do not, however, appear when you click on the link marked "East Asia and the Pacific". OMG! UNICEF is claiming that Japan is in Europe, not East Asia! CONSPIRACY!

Maybe they should reconfigure the image map to have Israel point to the page on which she appears.

Oh, please. Look at the size of the map! There is no way they could make Israel clickable -- it would be, what, a single pixel wide at best?

Seriously, get some perspective here. You are totally overreacting to a non-issue. Information on Israel is easy to find simply by using the alphabetical list of countries that is prominently located directly below the map, and is what most people are likely to use if they are looking for a specific country by name. And, back on UNICEF's front page, you will observe on the far right a block of flags showing countries involved with UNICEF. You will observe the flag of Israel among them, exactly the same size as all the others, in alphabetical order as you'd expect.

There is no global anti-Semitic conspiracy at work in UNICEF.

Re:Not just Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

My clock has been off by an hour for months now.

You could always change it to a different time zone (which would show the right time). It's not an idea solution, but it's better than an incorrect clock.

Re:Fuck em

[pjt33]

They bully people into submission by crying 'anti-semite!'

Neatly glossing over the fact that the Palestinians are also Semites. Isn't it ironic?

Re:Fuck em

[badran]

Search for Palestine on this page:
http://www.iso.org/iso/iso-3166-1_decoding_table [iso.org]