By Stephen “larocque” Pate, NJN Network, Charlottetown, PEI, Canada December 12, 2008

Fridays seem to be the witching day at the Charlottetown Guardian. They printed our November 30th letter about the Council of the Disabled being useless.. I’m not renewing my disability permit this year. I’ll link to our site because it’s not posted on the Guardian yet.

That was nice.

Then we posted the second comment on Teresa Wright’s story about OpenCorporations.org, Web developer leaving corporate search tool online. Two other comments were printed afterwards. That was about 7 AM.

They took down the comment an hour or so later. What’s the burr under their saddle? The comments were reasonable and well within the kind of comments tolerated on the Guardian. That site gets pretty rowdy from time to time. I guess nicely put doesn’t cut it with the Guardian.

I don’t remember the first comment but ours was about the possible conflict of interest when Peter Rukavina used a bot like Google to mine data from the Province of PEI. I had published several articles and letters in support of Rukavina since access to information is important in a democracy.

However, yesterday Rukavina disclosed again that he was part of the team of programmers who built the site. Professional ethics, in my opinion and other programmers I talked to, say he should never go back and hack a client’s site, ever…for any reason. Frankly he knows too much and any protests that anyone could do it fall on deaf ears.

If anyone could hack the government site, let someone who doesn’t have the keys to the safe do it.

In the Guardian comment I pointed to discussions on the topic at CEO Blues and Liberal Millionaires Club, without using HTML links.

Guess I’m in the jailhouse now. May as well ROCK.

Hint -- turn it up real loud or use headphones.